Tuesday commenced with waking early and writing until nine am when I decided that I would take the bus to Chester Le Street to try and replace the vacuum flask bought the previous day and found to be without its stopper and pouring unit. Because the weather continued to be warm and sunny I also decided to then take a bus to Durham for a visit to the Cathedral and Castle, and to the University sports fields which had been used as the County Cricket ground during the first years as a First Class Championship Team. I had visited Durham City and its Cathedral several times before 1992 but it was only though the temporary use of the University facilities that I came to know and love the city which I came to regard as special along with Oxford, Cambridge, York and Chester, all with great riversides, Durham and York with great Cathedrals, with the exception of Chester, all University Towns and all with ancient and attractive architecture. I lived in Oxford for five years in a period of six years and in Chester for under a year, working in the city for three years, and stayed for short periods in Cambridge and York.
The city would not have existed had it not been for the love of the monks of Holy Island- Lindisfarne (close to the Scottish border in Northumbria), for their former Bishop who became canonised, Saint Cuthbert. When the religious community became threatened by invading Norsemen they left in search of a safer heaven, taking the body of St Cuthbert with them as they travelled from coast to coast and back, arriving after eight years of seeking safety, at the former Roman town of Chester Le Street thirteen miles to the West of Sunderland on the river Wear which also passes close to the town from its journey from where is now known as Cumbria and through the city also now know as Durham. They remained at Chester Le Street between 883 and 995 when it was decided that a hill surrounded on three sides by the river Wear would make an ideal safe location to build a church and a final resting place for their Saint. It was however only after the successful Invasion of 1066 by William the Conqueror, that the Normans through the Benedictines' built what remains one of the great architectural feats of Western Europe, spectacular, grand, wondrous, beautiful and within its walls a place of infinite spirituality and peace.
There was sufficient space on the flattened hill to create a large quadrangle of buildings with the Cathedral surrounded by the river and a great Castle at the open end leading to the rest of the adjoining land. The Castle became the Bishop's Palace and because the Bishop was given authority over the area they became known as the Prince Bishops. When the church decided to create a new Palace at Auckland, now Bishop Auckland the Castle was given over to the new University and University College. Alongside the Castle on one side of the green there is now the university Library and on the side among the buildings is the impressive home of the Dean of Durham, the effective second in command in Diocese and effectively head of the team responsible for the running of Cathedral, including the choir school. Thus the city grew first below hill down to the riverside embankments then spread to the surrounding hills and beyond to its present day location. Such was the power of the church that it had its own jail, separate to that created for civil jurisdiction.
Durham is therefore only secondly an important University Town with fourteen of the sixteen colleges which provide a residential community for the students but who are not teaching bodies, provided by "schools" many of whose administrative offices are located in Old Elvet adjacent to the University Office building on a road which leads to the University sports fields and to the maximum high security prison of Durham Jail which has housed some of the most evil and notorious of murderer in Britain.
Apart from University College located on Cathedral Hill, the colleges and schools are grouped in a wide area south of the Hill and to the North East across one of the river embankments, and therefore there is a constant movement of students throughout the town, day and night as they do in at Oxford and Cambridge, while at York there is a large self contained campus with is a feature of many universities with students only returning to their lodgings in other parts of the city to work and sleep. Although the individual colleges also provide for a total way of life with St Hild and St Bede for example having its own Chapel, Cinema/Theatre, gymnasium in sixteen acres of park like grounds down to the river bank and looking across to the university sports fields. But there is also participation in competitive events and boat crews of both sexes were out practicing on the river over the afternoon for the competitive regatta which takes places at the weekend.
There is also an interaction between Church, the Universities, the County and town at a variety of levels. I arrived on Palace Green hurrying for the toilets within the Cathedral grounds too late to attend the one and half hour concert given by student members of the music department and which was open to the public for a small fee of two powers. Friends of the Cathedral and arranged a major orchestral concert for this Friday evening which will be attend by those in the University, the Town, from throughout Durham and from Sunderland and Newcastle. There were a few small parties of students, some supporting the visiting team at the Durham 20.20 cricket match on Wednesday evening, while students and tourists and visitors queue to takes boats on the river, or walked the pathway beside the river bank and the universities playing fields with views of Durham Jail in one direction and the Cathedral and Castle in another. While the restaurants and Inns are used by tourists visiting Durham for the day to who had come in from surrounding town and villages to shop or for some special purpose, or just to eat out, they are also used by the students.
These day through the dramatic enlargement of further and adult education there are increasingly a cross section of society at University and this is reflected in the style of dress and the host of regional accents including an increasing large number of students who they or their government pay the full cost of fees to attend, and with every university having colonies of students from mainland China and having offices in China as a consequences. However Oxford, Cambridge and Durham in England have tended to attracted those educated at independent residential schools with strong links to land, church, state, the army and the navy. This continues to be evident at Durham in terms of the level of dress and accents. It amused me that the Oxfam Charity Shop is a posh Boutique and that a second shop specialised in Music and Books.
I decided to use the quickest route to Sunderland which passes through the village of Cleadon and the Sunderland Football Stadium complex and International standard swimming pool, avoiding the coast road using new gold coloured buses designed for those with disability or mothers with children in prams and with TV like screens showing and presumably recording what is happening inside the bus. It was fortunate that on arrival there was a bus waiting to go Chester Le Street, the route 71 which is a different route from the 78 which I had taken home from previous trip outside the boundaries of the former Tyne and Wear concessionary travel scheme. The bus visited the town of Haughton Le Spring and several village communities before coming down from Old Lumley, passed the Lumley Castle Hotel, looking over the Riverside Cricket ground before entering the town centre. This route lengthens the journey by a good fifteen to twenty minutes and set my approach for a day which as to comprised a lot of walking about in the afternoon followed by a long meandering bus ride in the early evening.
Replacing the flask took only a few minutes and I quickly found the stop where a bus to Durham and Bishop Auckland was waiting to depart, and consequently full with some passengers standing although I was able to get a seat at the back. It was also a posh bus and externally coloured bright pink. I had left home just before 10.30 and I reached my destination before 12.30 about three times that it would have taken by car. There was a short walk to the new Gate shopping complex passing the Australian bar and night club and then across the river on a pedestrianised bridge to where there are restaurants overlooking the river below and the Cathedral Hill above. I have eaten at the Café Rouge and Bella Pasta which share the same building, one above the other. Over the bridge it is possible to see the weir below which the river continues to Chester le Street, Sunderland and the Sea. On the other side there are some pleasure boats do venture from a trip round the Cathedral and Castle hill.
The walk continued to the Market Square with the Guildhall and Town Hall to one side where there are also two entrances to a traditional indoor market with fishmongers and butchers and green grocers, and book seller, to musical instruments and cloth and clothing and nick knacks. I stopped in square where there is well used seating to drink some coffee, finish a sandwich, and admire a statue of Neptune and of the Marquis of Londonderry, Lord Lieutenant of Durham and founder of Seaham Harbour. It was then time to commence the walk up the hill to reach the entrance to the Cathedral Peninsular. If cars wish to use this narrow way they have to pay a congestion charge although the council now operates and constant bus service ferrying those who wish to avoid the walking up the hill. There are places to eat and drink and to shop in what feels and looks to be a student world.
There were students sitting on the green some working, some playing croquet while others prepared to participate in music department concert, wafts of which I could hear from a seating bench while I drank the rest of the coffee watching three crocodiles, two of primary school children and one of French teenage students as they made their in or out of the Cathedral.
In part because of is location, Durham Cathedral has an extraordinary presence within and without as a spiritual place. There are the two Normal Towers at the Southern end and the central tower with over 300 steps which was open to the public except or who have a disability. Below the twin towers there is a large chapel area, the Galilee or Lady Chapel, because this is where during monastic times women could worship in the building. While there is medieval glass in the windows, two are recent, one given by Friends from the USA in 1993 in honour of the Virgin Mary while the other created in 1973 honours St Bede. Here there is a moving figure carved in polished wood by Joseph Pyrz, the Annunciation, and a Colin Milbourn's artwork also in wood, The Last Supper. I liked its simplicity suggesting a meal of bread and wine (a plague on the highlife banqueting of the rich, the famous, of politicians and monarchs). The main function to day of the Chapel is to house the remains of St Bede of St Paul's Jarrow, who was also raised at the earlier Monastic site of St Peters' at Wearmouth Sunderland. It was through the man who was the first British historian that we were given the history of the British Catholic Church and it is a nice touch that he was ;aid to rest at one end while the shrine St Cuthbert whose life led to the creation of the Cathedral is at the other. Here in the Chapel of nine altars there are also more works of contemporary art with fro me the most affecting the Pieta carved of rough tree wood with metal enhancement, and similarly the sarcophagus, a fallen carved tree trunk but a face and hands of inserted bronze, (by Fenwick Lawson).
Close to the entrance to the tower there is the separate enclosed chapel of the Durham Light Infantry and I noted a young man looking as if he well have been or about to have been a regiment, perhaps with service in Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps contemplating such service, or just paying respects to fallen comrades through the ages. On this side of the Cathedral there is also the memorial to all the Durham Miners who lost their lives with a book nearby where a page turned to a new list of those who died. On this opposite the door from the Palace Green is the way to the cloisters which in turn to the main Cathedral activity centres which from part of the extended building. The dormitory is a vast hall foe example where once 100 monks could sleep at a time and now houses part of the library of 30000 books, with the majority in the separate Library building. There are also buildings now used for the Friends of the Cathedral, to house the Treasures, very popular restaurant which is also a meeting place, a shop, an audio visual exhibition and offices and meeting rooms. Including the area where the clergy and choristers dress and assemble. The length of the church interior is over 469 feet- 143 metres with a maximum walking width of 59 feet-15 metres and a maximum height of 217 feet-66metres. Used the audio visual programme for the first time and bought the latest picture book guide, with that bought thirty years before to compare. I have met two of Durham's Bishops during this time. In the 1970's I was summoned to tea by the Bishop John Hapgood at his Palace at Bishop Auckland to discuss the future of the Durham Diocesan Adoption Society which ahd provided services for Durham County and to South Tyneside and Sunderland and Gateshead, but where the newly reorganised local authorities had also become registered Adoption agencies, and where some of the Councillors questioned the need to make substantial grants to an organisation which they felt duplicated a Local Authority service. His successor David Jenkins who also served for ten years was a very different style of man, political and controversial he came along one Sunday to the John Wright centre for disabled people in South Shields to conduct a service in its Chapel and thought it was a great idea that he could afterwards walk straight into the bar for a pint where I was the official licensee and which enabled the disabled and their able bodied friends and families to socialise if they wishes, and which in turn also raised some income for other social activities for users. This was the idea of the officer in charge who issued him an invitation which he accepted. In contrast it may be still possible to make a bid on E Bay to spend a day with the Dean of Durham Cathedral, for you and your friends to be given a private tour and in the evening have a banquet with him in the private residence.
It was then time to make a different pilgrimage back down towards the Market Square but across a second pedestrianised bridge across the other side of the Wear where underneath student queues formed to take to the river around the castle or to board a pleasure boat offering one hour trips, or the rowing crews ended their practice runs. Across the bridge their more restaurants and across the road on the corner there is the famous County Hotel and nearby the Three Tuns Hotels, used by the great and the good for stays within the city. I have a number of memories of the County Hotel because it is of the same chain at the hotel in Sunderland within yards of my home where for more than a decade I was a member of the Leisure club and which meant I could use facilities in other hotels in the chain wherever they were located. I could therefore spend a day at cricket and then have a swim in Romanesque surroundings or if the weather was poor have a sauna. I also once met a BBC journalist for the morning News programme here and also with others attend a private meeting with a Secretary of State for Health. Often as I walked up the meandering hill to the entrance to the cricket ground, I would pass the relatives gathering outside the prison visitor's centre.
It is possible to reach the University cricket ground, known as the racecourse from he river bank close to the County Hotel when there is also the old public swimming baths, or from across a bridge where these is public parking below the college of St Hilds where the campus also includes the Education centre where I once met the former Professor of Education who I had known from the days when we walked from Coast to Coast with the Youth CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was an extraordinary coincidence that we would both hold positions for decades in this previously unknown area of England to us. There is no trace now that then race course University Cricket ground was the home of Durham County Cricket for several years in the early 1990s. The small Pavilion and adjacent sports club is as before, similarly the same single scoreboards but the temporary stands have long since departed. Here at the Pavilion end on backing on to the riverside you could look across to the Cathedral and the Castle. I have a large framed limited edition print of this view in my day room. Backing on to the cricket ground and also adjacent to the river is the ruby field and further along the bank is Maiden Castle Wood, and the agricultural college, for as is customary in such university towns there are also specialist learning establishments and schools.
The race course was also the venue for what used to be the great Miner's Gala at which leading political figures would address a great crowd of miner's and their families, who would parade through town with their banners and attend a service in the Cathedral before partying by the river. You can reach the river from the boat house end of riverside and walk to wear there is now a giant sculpture of a bull before reaching the bandstand. I was able to sit for while on a vacant bench and remember. There were other elders, visitors and a few mother's with their children, but the majority were students running the riverside path shouting encouragement to their rowing teams, or pretending to study. It can be lonely sitting in a room concentrating on work on a warm sunny afternoon while you know others are engaged in sporting activities, boating the river, chatting with friends or holding hands with a close friend. I was able to do most of that while at Ruskin but in two years there was one party in the lodgings of an unknown groups of students, we picnicked in the grounds of a country house once and went on the river in punts once, and visited the village pub in Old Headington a few times during the year spent in the converted stable block which was our residence, but most of the time we worked in our rooms or in libraries alone, as is the situation now. if we were not attending lectures and tutorials. On the day of my visit there were probably one or two hundred of the tens of thousands who were just enjoying the outside and each other's company than engaged in concentrated learning and work. It would have easy to have taken photographs giving a very misleading impression of university life.
Around 4pm I decided that my walking was done and I made my own mistake of the day which was treat myself to carton of diet coke which proved to be warm. On the way back to the bus station I remembered that I had forgotten to look out for he new lap dancing club about which there had been great fuss by local residents because it was located near the bus station. I do have a photograph of a night club sign although the building is discretely located below the roadway near the first pedestrianised bridge into the city centre. If his is the club in question it is difficult to see however anyone could object except in principle as I only realised the facility was there because I like to explore the nooks and crannies of places.
My original intention at this point was to take the quickest bus to towards Newcastle getting off at Gateshead fro the Metro train to Shields which although meant going Northwards and retracing steps would be quicker than repeating the journey around Washington which made the journey from Durham to South Shields at least one hour and a half. However on arrival there was a bus ready to leave showing that it would meander into the Durham Countryside so I thought why not and so enjoyed a two hour jaunt to places where I had never been or was likely to do so discovering some magnificent English countryside in the evening sunshine as a consequence, Sacriston and Stanley, Tantobie and Craghead, Whickham and Rowlands Gill. We also arrived at the Metro Shopping complex, the largest indoor centre in Europe and where there is also a vast area of other shopping stores, including every known furniture and furnishing chain stores. We then went into the Newcastle city central bus station where I forgot to check on the where the bus to Scarborough left on Sundays and weekdays in Summer before making my way to the Haymarket Metro station where a £20 million development is taking place building a offices and restaurants above around the station in addition to morning the station itself. The project is taking two years and the station closed early evening Monday to Thursday to enable the work to continue overnight. By the time I got home, made a stir fry watched the Big Brother House review and the news, and uploaded 101 photographs, I was ready for bed although it was an hour or so later before I did bringing to an end a memorable day.
The city would not have existed had it not been for the love of the monks of Holy Island- Lindisfarne (close to the Scottish border in Northumbria), for their former Bishop who became canonised, Saint Cuthbert. When the religious community became threatened by invading Norsemen they left in search of a safer heaven, taking the body of St Cuthbert with them as they travelled from coast to coast and back, arriving after eight years of seeking safety, at the former Roman town of Chester Le Street thirteen miles to the West of Sunderland on the river Wear which also passes close to the town from its journey from where is now known as Cumbria and through the city also now know as Durham. They remained at Chester Le Street between 883 and 995 when it was decided that a hill surrounded on three sides by the river Wear would make an ideal safe location to build a church and a final resting place for their Saint. It was however only after the successful Invasion of 1066 by William the Conqueror, that the Normans through the Benedictines' built what remains one of the great architectural feats of Western Europe, spectacular, grand, wondrous, beautiful and within its walls a place of infinite spirituality and peace.
There was sufficient space on the flattened hill to create a large quadrangle of buildings with the Cathedral surrounded by the river and a great Castle at the open end leading to the rest of the adjoining land. The Castle became the Bishop's Palace and because the Bishop was given authority over the area they became known as the Prince Bishops. When the church decided to create a new Palace at Auckland, now Bishop Auckland the Castle was given over to the new University and University College. Alongside the Castle on one side of the green there is now the university Library and on the side among the buildings is the impressive home of the Dean of Durham, the effective second in command in Diocese and effectively head of the team responsible for the running of Cathedral, including the choir school. Thus the city grew first below hill down to the riverside embankments then spread to the surrounding hills and beyond to its present day location. Such was the power of the church that it had its own jail, separate to that created for civil jurisdiction.
Durham is therefore only secondly an important University Town with fourteen of the sixteen colleges which provide a residential community for the students but who are not teaching bodies, provided by "schools" many of whose administrative offices are located in Old Elvet adjacent to the University Office building on a road which leads to the University sports fields and to the maximum high security prison of Durham Jail which has housed some of the most evil and notorious of murderer in Britain.
Apart from University College located on Cathedral Hill, the colleges and schools are grouped in a wide area south of the Hill and to the North East across one of the river embankments, and therefore there is a constant movement of students throughout the town, day and night as they do in at Oxford and Cambridge, while at York there is a large self contained campus with is a feature of many universities with students only returning to their lodgings in other parts of the city to work and sleep. Although the individual colleges also provide for a total way of life with St Hild and St Bede for example having its own Chapel, Cinema/Theatre, gymnasium in sixteen acres of park like grounds down to the river bank and looking across to the university sports fields. But there is also participation in competitive events and boat crews of both sexes were out practicing on the river over the afternoon for the competitive regatta which takes places at the weekend.
There is also an interaction between Church, the Universities, the County and town at a variety of levels. I arrived on Palace Green hurrying for the toilets within the Cathedral grounds too late to attend the one and half hour concert given by student members of the music department and which was open to the public for a small fee of two powers. Friends of the Cathedral and arranged a major orchestral concert for this Friday evening which will be attend by those in the University, the Town, from throughout Durham and from Sunderland and Newcastle. There were a few small parties of students, some supporting the visiting team at the Durham 20.20 cricket match on Wednesday evening, while students and tourists and visitors queue to takes boats on the river, or walked the pathway beside the river bank and the universities playing fields with views of Durham Jail in one direction and the Cathedral and Castle in another. While the restaurants and Inns are used by tourists visiting Durham for the day to who had come in from surrounding town and villages to shop or for some special purpose, or just to eat out, they are also used by the students.
These day through the dramatic enlargement of further and adult education there are increasingly a cross section of society at University and this is reflected in the style of dress and the host of regional accents including an increasing large number of students who they or their government pay the full cost of fees to attend, and with every university having colonies of students from mainland China and having offices in China as a consequences. However Oxford, Cambridge and Durham in England have tended to attracted those educated at independent residential schools with strong links to land, church, state, the army and the navy. This continues to be evident at Durham in terms of the level of dress and accents. It amused me that the Oxfam Charity Shop is a posh Boutique and that a second shop specialised in Music and Books.
I decided to use the quickest route to Sunderland which passes through the village of Cleadon and the Sunderland Football Stadium complex and International standard swimming pool, avoiding the coast road using new gold coloured buses designed for those with disability or mothers with children in prams and with TV like screens showing and presumably recording what is happening inside the bus. It was fortunate that on arrival there was a bus waiting to go Chester Le Street, the route 71 which is a different route from the 78 which I had taken home from previous trip outside the boundaries of the former Tyne and Wear concessionary travel scheme. The bus visited the town of Haughton Le Spring and several village communities before coming down from Old Lumley, passed the Lumley Castle Hotel, looking over the Riverside Cricket ground before entering the town centre. This route lengthens the journey by a good fifteen to twenty minutes and set my approach for a day which as to comprised a lot of walking about in the afternoon followed by a long meandering bus ride in the early evening.
Replacing the flask took only a few minutes and I quickly found the stop where a bus to Durham and Bishop Auckland was waiting to depart, and consequently full with some passengers standing although I was able to get a seat at the back. It was also a posh bus and externally coloured bright pink. I had left home just before 10.30 and I reached my destination before 12.30 about three times that it would have taken by car. There was a short walk to the new Gate shopping complex passing the Australian bar and night club and then across the river on a pedestrianised bridge to where there are restaurants overlooking the river below and the Cathedral Hill above. I have eaten at the Café Rouge and Bella Pasta which share the same building, one above the other. Over the bridge it is possible to see the weir below which the river continues to Chester le Street, Sunderland and the Sea. On the other side there are some pleasure boats do venture from a trip round the Cathedral and Castle hill.
The walk continued to the Market Square with the Guildhall and Town Hall to one side where there are also two entrances to a traditional indoor market with fishmongers and butchers and green grocers, and book seller, to musical instruments and cloth and clothing and nick knacks. I stopped in square where there is well used seating to drink some coffee, finish a sandwich, and admire a statue of Neptune and of the Marquis of Londonderry, Lord Lieutenant of Durham and founder of Seaham Harbour. It was then time to commence the walk up the hill to reach the entrance to the Cathedral Peninsular. If cars wish to use this narrow way they have to pay a congestion charge although the council now operates and constant bus service ferrying those who wish to avoid the walking up the hill. There are places to eat and drink and to shop in what feels and looks to be a student world.
There were students sitting on the green some working, some playing croquet while others prepared to participate in music department concert, wafts of which I could hear from a seating bench while I drank the rest of the coffee watching three crocodiles, two of primary school children and one of French teenage students as they made their in or out of the Cathedral.
In part because of is location, Durham Cathedral has an extraordinary presence within and without as a spiritual place. There are the two Normal Towers at the Southern end and the central tower with over 300 steps which was open to the public except or who have a disability. Below the twin towers there is a large chapel area, the Galilee or Lady Chapel, because this is where during monastic times women could worship in the building. While there is medieval glass in the windows, two are recent, one given by Friends from the USA in 1993 in honour of the Virgin Mary while the other created in 1973 honours St Bede. Here there is a moving figure carved in polished wood by Joseph Pyrz, the Annunciation, and a Colin Milbourn's artwork also in wood, The Last Supper. I liked its simplicity suggesting a meal of bread and wine (a plague on the highlife banqueting of the rich, the famous, of politicians and monarchs). The main function to day of the Chapel is to house the remains of St Bede of St Paul's Jarrow, who was also raised at the earlier Monastic site of St Peters' at Wearmouth Sunderland. It was through the man who was the first British historian that we were given the history of the British Catholic Church and it is a nice touch that he was ;aid to rest at one end while the shrine St Cuthbert whose life led to the creation of the Cathedral is at the other. Here in the Chapel of nine altars there are also more works of contemporary art with fro me the most affecting the Pieta carved of rough tree wood with metal enhancement, and similarly the sarcophagus, a fallen carved tree trunk but a face and hands of inserted bronze, (by Fenwick Lawson).
Close to the entrance to the tower there is the separate enclosed chapel of the Durham Light Infantry and I noted a young man looking as if he well have been or about to have been a regiment, perhaps with service in Iraq or Afghanistan, perhaps contemplating such service, or just paying respects to fallen comrades through the ages. On this side of the Cathedral there is also the memorial to all the Durham Miners who lost their lives with a book nearby where a page turned to a new list of those who died. On this opposite the door from the Palace Green is the way to the cloisters which in turn to the main Cathedral activity centres which from part of the extended building. The dormitory is a vast hall foe example where once 100 monks could sleep at a time and now houses part of the library of 30000 books, with the majority in the separate Library building. There are also buildings now used for the Friends of the Cathedral, to house the Treasures, very popular restaurant which is also a meeting place, a shop, an audio visual exhibition and offices and meeting rooms. Including the area where the clergy and choristers dress and assemble. The length of the church interior is over 469 feet- 143 metres with a maximum walking width of 59 feet-15 metres and a maximum height of 217 feet-66metres. Used the audio visual programme for the first time and bought the latest picture book guide, with that bought thirty years before to compare. I have met two of Durham's Bishops during this time. In the 1970's I was summoned to tea by the Bishop John Hapgood at his Palace at Bishop Auckland to discuss the future of the Durham Diocesan Adoption Society which ahd provided services for Durham County and to South Tyneside and Sunderland and Gateshead, but where the newly reorganised local authorities had also become registered Adoption agencies, and where some of the Councillors questioned the need to make substantial grants to an organisation which they felt duplicated a Local Authority service. His successor David Jenkins who also served for ten years was a very different style of man, political and controversial he came along one Sunday to the John Wright centre for disabled people in South Shields to conduct a service in its Chapel and thought it was a great idea that he could afterwards walk straight into the bar for a pint where I was the official licensee and which enabled the disabled and their able bodied friends and families to socialise if they wishes, and which in turn also raised some income for other social activities for users. This was the idea of the officer in charge who issued him an invitation which he accepted. In contrast it may be still possible to make a bid on E Bay to spend a day with the Dean of Durham Cathedral, for you and your friends to be given a private tour and in the evening have a banquet with him in the private residence.
It was then time to make a different pilgrimage back down towards the Market Square but across a second pedestrianised bridge across the other side of the Wear where underneath student queues formed to take to the river around the castle or to board a pleasure boat offering one hour trips, or the rowing crews ended their practice runs. Across the bridge their more restaurants and across the road on the corner there is the famous County Hotel and nearby the Three Tuns Hotels, used by the great and the good for stays within the city. I have a number of memories of the County Hotel because it is of the same chain at the hotel in Sunderland within yards of my home where for more than a decade I was a member of the Leisure club and which meant I could use facilities in other hotels in the chain wherever they were located. I could therefore spend a day at cricket and then have a swim in Romanesque surroundings or if the weather was poor have a sauna. I also once met a BBC journalist for the morning News programme here and also with others attend a private meeting with a Secretary of State for Health. Often as I walked up the meandering hill to the entrance to the cricket ground, I would pass the relatives gathering outside the prison visitor's centre.
It is possible to reach the University cricket ground, known as the racecourse from he river bank close to the County Hotel when there is also the old public swimming baths, or from across a bridge where these is public parking below the college of St Hilds where the campus also includes the Education centre where I once met the former Professor of Education who I had known from the days when we walked from Coast to Coast with the Youth CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was an extraordinary coincidence that we would both hold positions for decades in this previously unknown area of England to us. There is no trace now that then race course University Cricket ground was the home of Durham County Cricket for several years in the early 1990s. The small Pavilion and adjacent sports club is as before, similarly the same single scoreboards but the temporary stands have long since departed. Here at the Pavilion end on backing on to the riverside you could look across to the Cathedral and the Castle. I have a large framed limited edition print of this view in my day room. Backing on to the cricket ground and also adjacent to the river is the ruby field and further along the bank is Maiden Castle Wood, and the agricultural college, for as is customary in such university towns there are also specialist learning establishments and schools.
The race course was also the venue for what used to be the great Miner's Gala at which leading political figures would address a great crowd of miner's and their families, who would parade through town with their banners and attend a service in the Cathedral before partying by the river. You can reach the river from the boat house end of riverside and walk to wear there is now a giant sculpture of a bull before reaching the bandstand. I was able to sit for while on a vacant bench and remember. There were other elders, visitors and a few mother's with their children, but the majority were students running the riverside path shouting encouragement to their rowing teams, or pretending to study. It can be lonely sitting in a room concentrating on work on a warm sunny afternoon while you know others are engaged in sporting activities, boating the river, chatting with friends or holding hands with a close friend. I was able to do most of that while at Ruskin but in two years there was one party in the lodgings of an unknown groups of students, we picnicked in the grounds of a country house once and went on the river in punts once, and visited the village pub in Old Headington a few times during the year spent in the converted stable block which was our residence, but most of the time we worked in our rooms or in libraries alone, as is the situation now. if we were not attending lectures and tutorials. On the day of my visit there were probably one or two hundred of the tens of thousands who were just enjoying the outside and each other's company than engaged in concentrated learning and work. It would have easy to have taken photographs giving a very misleading impression of university life.
Around 4pm I decided that my walking was done and I made my own mistake of the day which was treat myself to carton of diet coke which proved to be warm. On the way back to the bus station I remembered that I had forgotten to look out for he new lap dancing club about which there had been great fuss by local residents because it was located near the bus station. I do have a photograph of a night club sign although the building is discretely located below the roadway near the first pedestrianised bridge into the city centre. If his is the club in question it is difficult to see however anyone could object except in principle as I only realised the facility was there because I like to explore the nooks and crannies of places.
My original intention at this point was to take the quickest bus to towards Newcastle getting off at Gateshead fro the Metro train to Shields which although meant going Northwards and retracing steps would be quicker than repeating the journey around Washington which made the journey from Durham to South Shields at least one hour and a half. However on arrival there was a bus ready to leave showing that it would meander into the Durham Countryside so I thought why not and so enjoyed a two hour jaunt to places where I had never been or was likely to do so discovering some magnificent English countryside in the evening sunshine as a consequence, Sacriston and Stanley, Tantobie and Craghead, Whickham and Rowlands Gill. We also arrived at the Metro Shopping complex, the largest indoor centre in Europe and where there is also a vast area of other shopping stores, including every known furniture and furnishing chain stores. We then went into the Newcastle city central bus station where I forgot to check on the where the bus to Scarborough left on Sundays and weekdays in Summer before making my way to the Haymarket Metro station where a £20 million development is taking place building a offices and restaurants above around the station in addition to morning the station itself. The project is taking two years and the station closed early evening Monday to Thursday to enable the work to continue overnight. By the time I got home, made a stir fry watched the Big Brother House review and the news, and uploaded 101 photographs, I was ready for bed although it was an hour or so later before I did bringing to an end a memorable day.
No comments:
Post a Comment