John North: Now here's a sobering thought

Howard - now in Newton Aycliffe but Witton Park lad and very proud of it - encloses a list of the pubs in and around Bishop Auckland town centre in 1894.

There were 64. The Court and the Crown, the Eagle and the Edinburgh Castle, the Lather Brush, Live and Let Live and Locomotive Engine, the Talbot, the Turf and the Tile Sheds.

Now there are nine. "Even since 1963, my official legal drinking age, half of the main street drinking dens have disappeared," says Howard. When a complete smoking ban is introduced, he forecasts, yet more will disappear.

While it may not be his particular cup of tea, he's also been counting the cafes and coffee shops in and around Newgate Street, Bishop's main thoroughfare. There are 21, he supposes, and still he may be under-estimating.

Any thought that our correspondent may (as it were) be making a meal of it, is discounted by Derek Toon, Bishop Auckland's town centre manager.

"An awful lot of cafes and similar places have opened since I came here two and a half years ago," he says.

"I keep thinking that they can't all survive, but they seem to be thriving and I know of planning applications for at least two more."

It's a bit like Coronation Street, where half the daily round appears to be conducted in Roy's Rolls (and the other half in the Rovers.) "In the day time at least," says Derek, "the cafes always seem a great deal fuller than the pubs."

LIKE almost every other town centre, Newgate Street is much changed since the days when it was dominated by Doggarts store, the Grace Brothers of North-East England.

There's a shop called Dream Weaver - Mind, Body, Spirit says the fantastical fascia - another called Bojangles which sells buddhas and crystals and tarot cards and things, a third called Belly Nelly.

Whatever Belly Nelly dealt in, it appears to have gone bottoms up.

There are discount shoe shops for those on their uppers, fireplace shops for those with money to burn, phone shops for the young and upwardly mobile, tanning parlours for the seriously browned off.

There's a place called Chips, but that's something to do with computers, another offering two digital hearing aids for the price of the one - and that's the optician's.

Derek Toon reckons there are 440 business premises within his tight-knit domain, more shops than the MetroCentre, occasionally takes a mental tour of the high street to see how many he can remember.

It's an awfully high proportion of cafes. Some are part of slot machine arcades, others have names like Red Square - run by a Russian lass who married a lad from Coundon - Expressos, Taste and the Chocolate Caf, so-called because of the colour of the paintwork.

At 11.30am about 50 are in Kelly Ann's, a pleasant coffee shop ("and patisserie") next to Woolworths. Fewer than five are in the Tut and Shive, a pub a few doors up.

Outside the 16th century Bay Horse in Bondgate, reckoned Co Durham's oldest pub, they're advertising Gray's Bitter at £1.25 a pint. Some of us can remember when Gray's was a pop factory in Spennymoor and made nothing stronger than dandelion and burdock.

Whether Gray's Bitter is stronger than Gray's dandelion and burdock is something we have yet to discover.

DEREK Toon's a Ferryhill lad, his father a Mainsforth miner, his granddad one of umpteen. Having spent most of his life in information technology - "When I began with computers, you could walk around inside them" - he's now charged with restoring Bishop Auckland town centre to the days when it had more bustle than a Victorian dowager.

It's beginning to work, he believes. "When I came here there were 64 empty premises, now there are around 30.

"The whole place has been smartened up, brightened up. Only this week the council was round cleaning the chewing gum off the pavements. You can feel the buzz coming back to Bishop."

Among his biggest successes has been the exhibition of Doggarts' history, proposed both by his wife and by one or other of these columns. "With you and her ganging up, I had no chance," he says.

His office is in the Four Clocks Centre, an impressively converted former Methodist church.

A large picture of Sydney, Australia, hangs on the wall. Whether the town centre manager in Sydney has a reciprocal arrangement is a matter of doubt.

There used to be a caf in the Four Clocks, too. Its closure may not have been a sign of the times.

Derek loves the old town, takes a walk down the street twice a day - "I wear out a pair of shoes every three months" - adjourns to a very civilised cafe called Bertie's, above a clothes shop of the same name.

"It's one of the few places I don't get pestered," he says, though happily we bump into local property developer Charlie Clarey, whose firm knocked down the Angel, in the Market Place.

"The glasses were still on the bar as we went in," he recalls.

"I told the lads they could keep anything they found and there were a load of farthings and ha'pennies beneath the floorboards where they'd always played dominoes. If I'd kept them, I could have been worth a fortune."

The column's off for the bus, Derek's planning another stroll around

"The centre's changing all the time," he says.

"By the time I get down the other end, someone else may have opened a caf."

Hague was on the right track

THIRTEEN days ago - the timing is important - William Hague addressed a do aimed at raising funds for the restoration of the former Richmond railway station. They called it Hague, Hog and Honky Tonk, the later references to the roast pork supper and to the Tees Valley Jazzmen.

The former Conservative leader, though it is not the point of the story, chipped in £5,000 from his own admittedly capacious pocket.

The evening was appreciatively reported in last week's Spectator column in the Darlington & Stockton Times. "Just how many John Prescott jokes does Hague have?" the column asked.

Since it was both spoken and written before the Hull-and-back revelations of last Wednesday, we have sought Spectator's view on the most memorable of the prescient Hague's anecdotes.

It concerned Remembrance Day, when Hague was on Cenotaph duty as leader of the Opposition and Prescott as stand-in for the Prime Minister but with no idea of the required protocol.

Hague advised simply to do as he did. Prescott followed like a well-trained Pom. "If I'd told him to throw the Queen's wreath half way down the Mall he'd have done it," he said.

The deputy PM was duly grateful. "It's terrible having to depend upon the Tories," he said. Terrible, indeed.

PLAYING hunt the bus in Darlington - a game rendered yet more fiendish by the latest rip-your-heart-out "improvements" - we bump into Stella Robinson, the exemplary mayor, and Frank Robson, her consort.

The mayoral year ends on May 18, after which they plan an annual holiday on the Scilly Islands - much loved by Harold Wilson, that totem of old Labour, and where his widow Mary still lives at what the Geordies call a canny age.

"It's a wonderful place," enthuses the mayor. "No crime, no one locks their doors."

Every year they visit Lord Wilson's grave, Ray Gunter - the former MP, Minister of Labour and railway union president - buried alongside him. "Not many people know that," says Frank.

A LITTLE sadness in his voice, Peter Warrand rings to report that it was five years last weekend since Dressers, a landmark on Darlington High Row, shut up shop for the last time.

"There's not a day goes by without someone telling me how much they miss it. I must say I can't pass without a few pangs," says Peter, now 78, who'd supposed on retirement that he might spend part of his time "looking lost" around Darlington.

It was a stationers' and booksellers' - "so old fashioned in a state-of-the-art sort of way that they probably called it Messrs Dressers," the column once observed.

For years they wouldn't sell lined notepaper, or a pad with the price on the front. To the end, staff members addressed one another formally.

Peter, West Hartlepool lad and former apprentice journalist, had begun there in 1953, became general manager and in 1974 managing director. There'd also been shops in Stockton and Northallerton.

Now it's a Waterstones' book shop, Ottakars across the road. "I've been in and they're very nice, but it's somehow not the same," says Peter.

Now Waterstones are in take-over talks with Ottakars, or possibly vice-versa. To columns like this one, alas, such things remain a closed book.

...and finally, an e-mail headed "eau-de-nil desperandum" - as opposed, presumably, to eau-de-nil by mouth - disputes the column's contention that Arriva turquoise is the colour of a sanatorium netty. "I spent six months in a sanatorium," writes the gentleman from Darlington. The colour was much closer eau-de-nil."