FOR much of last year, Echo Memories was poking its nose into Bakehouse Hill, in Darlington's Market Place.

At the start of this year we found ourselves poking around in the undergrowth of the forbidding Harewood Grove.

The two areas, naturally, are related.

Just down from the Grove is South Villa. As you drive out of Darlington on Grange Road towards the Reg Vardy roundabout, South Villa is the last house on the left before South Park.

You can see very little of the villa from the road because of its high hedges, but one look at its curiously carved gateposts and you can tell that it is old.

It was built getting on for 200 years ago on the very edge of the Backhouse family's Polam Hall estate. It had a long garden stretching down to the Skerne.

One of its earliest residents, if not its earliest, was Thomas Pease.

Thomas was a nephew of Joseph, whose statue stands on High Row and who lived just up the road in Southend.

In 1808 he announced to his strict Quaker family that he was stopping being a chemist and opening up as a wine merchant.

Legend has it that the teetotal Peases were so dismayed that they forced him to renounce his Quaker faith although, happily for him, he was quickly accepted into the Church of England.

Thomas died in South Villa in 1848. His son, Edward Thomas, got to keep the business; his daughter, the wondrously-named Margaretta Selfe, got to keep the house.

Margaretta never married. In 1890, she moved to Victoria Square, Newcastle, where she died in 1907, aged 78.

South Villa was sold in about 1900, when it was renamed Neasham House.

The connection between South Villa and Bakehouse Hill is, of course, that it was Thomas' grandson, Frank, who built the distinctive brick and terracotta shop on the corner of the Hill.

T Pease and Son moved into the shop in 1899.