The Hawks reached the apogee of their power during the Victorian period, when they employed over 2000 persons, when their reputation for engineering and bridge-building was worldwide.

The company built the High Level Bridge across the River Tyne that was opened by Queen Victoria in 1849; and numerous bridges including in Constantinople and India; and lighthouses in France; and ironclad warships and materials for the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars; and large contracts for the East India Company.

The job was obtained for Skipsey by the James Thomas Clephan, who was the editor of the Whig sympathetic Gateshead Observer.

[3] In the 1780s, a forge at Lumley, in County Durham, and slitting and rolling mills, on the River Blyth in Northumberland, were acquired by the company.

[3]By 1790, the works at Gateshead consisted of a substantial industrial complex that produced steel, anchors, heavy chains, steam-engine components, and a diversity of iron wares, that were supplied to the Board of Admiralty and were transported by the Gordon and Stanley families, the latter of whom were associated with the ordnance industry of the Weald and with the dockyards of the River Thames and of the Medway.

The job was obtained for Skipsey by the James Thomas Clephan, who was the editor of the Whig sympathetic Gateshead Observer.

The Hawks company during about 1842 erected a cast-iron bridge at York, which spans the river Ouse in one arch of 172 feet in width.

The company also reconstructed the Rowland Burdon iron bridge at Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, which consists of a single arch of a width of 237 feet.

[14] The company built the High Level Bridge over the Tyne, which consisted of 5050 tons of iron, of which George Hawks drove in the last key on 7 June 1849,[15] and which Queen Victoria opened later that year.

[32][33][34][35] Joseph's daughter, Mary Susannah Hawks, married Major-General Richard Clement Moody, who was the founder of British Columbia, by whom her children included Josephine 'Zeffie' Moody, who married Arthur Newall,[36] who was the son of Robert Stirling Newall, who was a business associate of the Hawks family.

[39][40] Colonel Richard Stanley Hawks Moody CB was a distinguished British Army officer, and historian, and Military Knight of Windsor.

[41] Hannah, Lady Hawks (d. 1863), who was the widow of Sir Robert Shafto Hawks, and her two sons, sold their shares, in 1840, to George Crawshay, who was a member of a prominent iron-making family of south Wales, who had been bought out of his family's iron business in London by his brother William Crawshay II.

The Bedlington works were subsequently inherited by a cousin of the Hawks, Michael Longridge (1785 – 1853), who was a pioneer of railway technology, and who was an associate of Robert Stephenson, under whose superintendence they trained a generation of engineers including Sir Daniel Gooch, 1st Baronet.