ONE of Newcastle’s most distinctive buildings is undergoing a £5.8m redevelopment and its new owners would like to hear from anyone who has memories or mementoes of it as it used to be.

For 100 years, the Old Post Office in St Nicholas Street handled the city’s letters, parcels and packets, but now it is the home of NBS, a division of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which is currently doing the restoration.

This is appropriate because the architect who designed the Newcastle Post Office also has other, equally impressive, post offices looking down on our streets.

He was James Williams, who was the Government’s Office of Works post office designer during the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. He was based in London, and must just have sat at his desk knocking out post office plans for distant towns. He is known to have designed more than 30 post offices from Exeter in the south to Carlisle in the north.

Probably his first in our nick of the woods was Darlington’s first purpose-built PO on Northgate – currently Top Man. There’s no proof it was a Williams, but when the £3,500 building opened in 1865, he was the man with the brief, and it looks like one of his.

(Darlington’s Northgate PO ceased to be the main post office in 1912 when the larger Crown Street opened, and it closed completely in 1985.)

Next up was the Newcastle building, which opened in 1874, followed by Stockton Post Office, in Dovecote Street, in May 1879. When it was being built, the Middlesbrough Daily Gazette claimed it would be “one of the sights of Stockton”, which is going a little far, but it is grand little building with exactly the same balustrade around its first floor as Darlington. It is now a community-interest café.

Four months later, another Williams creation opened on Teesside: Middlesbrough PO in Exchange Square. This area of the Boro has some of the most marvellous late Victorian commercial buildings, even though the A66 flyover has been blasted through it at roof-height, and Williams’ creation is now the Teesside Archive, at the end of the square, its upper floor peering onto the dual carriageway tarmac.

Williams’ final contribution to the North-East streetscape was Durham City PO, which opened on Saddler Street on December 21, 1880, just down from the Shakespeare pub.

All of Williams’ works in our area are Grade II listed.

So if you had any connection with the Newcastle PO before its closure in 1975 – the large sorting office behind Williams’ façade employed hundreds of people, with men and women entering through separate doorways – the architects would like to hear from you.

You can either go to their website thenbs.com/memorybox, or email MemoryBox@theNBS.com or, most appropriately, post them at a special box installed at The Old Post Office.

LAST week, you may recall, we were sipping “Taddy Ales” at the Colpitts Hotel, which we said was on Alexandria Crescent, in Durham City.

“Just a quick correction,” emails Ian Welch. “The pub is actually on Hawthorn Terrace although the front of it could be classed as being in Colpitts Terrace. Alexandria Crescent is further up towards the St Margaret’s traffic lights.”

He is, of course, right.

The pub stands on a V-shaped piece of land, with Hawthorn Terrace on one side and the A690, which comprises both Colpitts Terrace and Alexandria Crescent, on the other.

The Colpitts terrace and inn were built by the Colpitts family, who were well known publicans in the city, in the 1850s. Their surname derives from their connection with coal pits – they either owned them or lived near them.

Ian concludes: “I should let you know that the pub’s still thriving with a very diverse cross section of society frequenting it and drinking its fine drink.” The landlord owes Ian a pint.