DARLINGTON council announced this week that it had bought the former Department of Domestic Science, latterly a Japanese buffet restaurant, in Northgate using Towns Fund money. Memories readers knew this already as in Memories 629 we told how the building was cleared months ago as part of the council acquisition.

The Northern Echo: The Northgate house, which until recently was a restaurant, which was the home of the Darlington Queen's Nurses Association

The Robson family of botanists built this house around 1800 in Northgate, Darlington. The Queen's Nurses and the ARP used it, although it was later known as the Department for Domestic Science, and has recently been bought by Darlington council

READ MORE: HISTORIC BUILDING BOUGHT BY COUNCIL

An interesting set of panels, about three metres long, were rescued, with permission, from the skip outside the building and now sit in the Mr Chippy fish and chip shop in Eldon Street awaiting the next chapter of their lives.

READ MORE: PANELS SAVED FROM SKIP OUTSIDE THE FORMER DEPARTMENT OF DOMESTIC SCIENCE 

The Northern Echo: The panels from the house in Northgate

But what do the designs on the panels mean? We thought they were initials – PS on the outside with AM in the middle – but Terry Trotter may have unlocked something more profound.

“Are not that the "initials" A and M in fact the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, Alpha, which is represented by an uppercase A, and Omega, represented by Ω,” he asks, “with the design incorporating a cross in the centre. This is a reference to God being as the beginning and end.”

If you look at it like that, he is clearly onto something. But what does “PS” stand for, and why would such religious panels be in a former nurses’ home that became a college catering department?

The Northern Echo: The panels from the house in Northgate

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