TODAY'S query comes from a lady who has been searching for information about Thornbeck House in Darlington which into the 1920s was a private school. As it is off Carmel Road and near Thornbeck Hill, she wonders if were built by Echo Memories' architect hero, GG Hoskins.

By wonderful chance, on my desk there just happens to be a photocopy of a 1904 map of Darlo which Jean Jones kindly dropped off a week or so ago thinking I would be interested. I've just taken a photo of the relevant section to illustrate where Thornbeck House is. On the map, we're looking almost due north up Carmel Road to its junction with Staindrop Road and Woodland Road.

I reckon this area of town has been known historically as Thornbeck Hill (there is actually a culverted beck that runs beneath the house that is called Thornbeck Hill).

I think Thornbeck House was built near the corner of Carmel Road and Woodland Road in the early 1860s for (or by) a TC Shepherd. I don't know anything about him. If that date is right, it would be too early to be a Hoskins because he didn't win his first contracts until 1864 in Hurworth and 1865 in Darlington.

According to an article I did ages ago, Thornbeck House became a Collegiate School for Young Ladies in 1870.

There were several such schools in this nick of the woods. In Boyes Hill at the Carmel Road end of Milbank, there was Cleveland College built in 1869 "for scholastic purposes" by principal Henry Brooks. Although it closed in 1887 and then became a Catholic orphanage (St Joseph's, as it is called on the map) until it was demolished in 1972, it is famous as the school Arthur Wharton came from Ghana to attend. This led to his discovery as the fastest man in the country and the first professional black footballer.

On this blog I've also posted a picture of what readers identified a few years ago as a building Pierremont Crescent, Darlington. In 1893, it became the St Cuthbert's Home for Waifs and Strays - a church home for young girls who had usually been disowned for falling pregnant. I reckon this uncaptioned picture from Darlington library was taken before 1893 when the building was used as a school, but I might be wrong. Nevertheless, it is still a great picture. The building itself still stands as private housing, opposite Pierremont Post Office.

I had presumed that Thornbeck House had disappeared when Patons and Baldwins came to town in 1946 because Thornbury Rise was built across its back garden with homes for managers for the new factory - P and B was coming to Darlington from Halifax and bringing many of its key workers with it.

However, I accidentally found myself driving around the roundabout at the entrance to Cockerton village this morning, and I reckon it is still there, inbetween an alleyway on the town centre side and what is possibly the blandest grey brick 1960s house ever constructed on the Cockerton side (I am sure, though, whoever lives in it absolutely loves it but I always scratch my head when I see it. As Prince Charles nearly said, one man's architecture is another man's carbuncle). Thornbeck House now appears to be divided into at least three substantial properties, but I didn't have time for too long a nosey as the driver behind was, quite rightly, getting impatient.

Meanwhile, Hoskins built Thornbeck Hill in 1883 for himself. It's a great looking building, now divided into three (although on the 1904 map, it is only two with South Carmel View looking east) and surrounded by the circular road Thornfield Road.

Can anyone add anything, or correct my mistakes?