Gibside Estate

The Ruins of Gibside Hall

In my last blog post about the community garden at Whickham I mentioned that the former coal mines there had once been owned by the wealthy Bowes family who had their family home at Gibside Hall. Well last Sunday Paul and I decided to take advantage of the lovely autumn sunshine and join our son Matthew in a country walk and what better place to do this than Gibside in the Derwent Valley. The estate is now owned by the National Trust and although the Hall itself is now in ruins there are still some lovely buildings including the chapel which was built as a mausoleum by the architect James Paine.

Gibside's Palladian style Chapel

Interior of the chapel showing the dome

The lady inside was lovely and gave us a potted history of the Bowes family which was just as exciting as plot from a soap opera today. In the 18th century a wealthy landowner called George Bowes owned the Gibside estate and in 1760, when he died, his daughter Mary Eleanor inherited it making her one of the richest women in Europe at that time. She later married John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore & Kinghorne, from Glamis Castle in Scotland and they became known as the Bowes-Lyon family (from whom the late Queen Mother was a descendant).

Part of the Bowes-Lyon family tree

After the death of John, Mary Eleanor married Andrew Robinson Stoney and this was a disastrous union. Stoney, a fortune hunter, virtually imprisoned her and squandered their money but she did eventually divorce him and he spent the rest of his life in prison for debt.
The 10th Earl, her son John Bowes, fell in love with his housekeeper and together they had a son, also called John,. In order for him to inherit his father married the boy's mother the day before he died. This was not well received by the rest of the family who fought to have the title removed from him but they were unable to prevent him inheriting his father's fortune.

Bowes Museum

The son later did the Grand Tour and, while in Paris, fell in love with Josephine, an actress,and married her. On returning to England they built a home in the French style at Barnard Castle which is now Bowes Museum.
So as you see the family was not without drama and intrigue!

The "Long Walk" looking towards The Column of Liberty



 

After a leisurely stroll down the "Long Walk" taking in the views across to the orangery, ruined hall and the stable block we climbed up the hill to the base of the Column of Liberty and had a well earned rest in the autumn sunshine.

There are miles of tranquil walks and the estate is a haven for wildlife with red kites often circling in the skies above. It also has a wildlife hide to view and photograph visitors such as cold tits, great tits and nuthatches so Matthew got in a bit of practise here before visiting the Potting Shed cafe.

It was a lovely experience and well worth a visit if you are in the area.

A Secret Garden

Last weekend, along with my husband Paul and grandson Lucas, I headed off north to Whickham (near Newcastle) to see for myself the wonders of Whickham Community Garden that I had heard lots of good things about from our son Matthew and daughter in law Lynsey.

Before I tell you about this garden I want to tell you about Whickham itself. It is a lovely village on the outskirts of Gateshead, quite high up on a ridge above the Tyne, with amazing views across to Newcastle. Both Bronze Age and Iron Age remains have been found and aerial photographs of the area taken in 1970, revealed crop markings in the shape of a playing card showing that there was a Roman Fort there in the fields of Washingwells Farm. I find this particularly interesting because in the 70's Paul and I used to dig at another Roman fort, Vinovium, in Co Durham at Piercebridge, where Dere Street crossed the River Tees, and no doubt some of the same soldiers who passed through that fort went on to Whickham. The fort at Whickham is thought to have been part of the Stangate Frontier (cA.D.105) built when Roman soldiers were withdrawing from Scotland and is a possible explanation to why the forts of this period stretched from Carlisle to Corbridge but not eastwards to the coast. [Hadrian's Wall wasn't built until c 130 A.D.]
Amazingly this site is on the same farm that a very close friend of ours, Joan (1911 - 2011), spent many happy years. Her father farmed this land in the first half of the 20th century. The discovery of the fort was only made after the family had moved on to another farm at Wolviston and so they were totally unaware of its' importance as a Roman site.
Whickham was a rich agricultural area even in Anglo-Saxon times and still has the remnants of a village green, around the church of St Mary the Virgin, which would have been much more extensive then to accommodate the villagers' livestock. It was however coal that became the chief commodity and records as far back as 1356 show the Bishop of Durham granting a lease to mine the coal. There was a massive expansion in mining here in the 16th century with coal being carted down to the River Tyne. These coal wains were horse drawn on wooden railways and the oldest railway bridge in the world, built in 1727, can be found 3 miles from Whickham at Causey Arch. One wealthy mine owning family from that time were the Bowes whose family mansion was at nearby Gibside.

Causey Arch

Gibside Hall

A wealthy Tyne keel owner, and owner of brewery at Swalwell, built his home, the Hermitage, in 1790 in Whickham. By the early 19th century it had a lavishly laid out garden including a watchtower that overlooked the Tyne Valley, a lake with a boathouse and bridge of a "willow pattern design", a pagoda and tennis courts adjacent to the lake. It is part of this that now forms the Whickham Community Garden.

 

Part of the garden was acquired by Gateshead Council but became neglected. In 2002 Dave Peacock formed a committee to try to gain planning permission to restore the gardens to their former glory.He was successful and work started in 2004, retaining many original features but the lake was reduced in size and is now a wildlife pond and bog garden. It also has an accessible vegetable garden with raised beds so that local children can gain hands on experience of gardening.
I hope this selection of photographs speak for themselves and give credit to Dave, Gateshead Probation and Payback scheme and all the other volunteers who have made this project such a success.

Lucas had a lovely time as children were very well catered for and we enjoyed a nice cuppa in the newly opened Orangery Cafe where we were served by my lovely daughter in law Lynsey and son Matthew who acted as a guide.

The Orangery Cafe and Lucas

Inside the cafe

Lynsey behind the counter

Next time you are up at the Metro Centre why not take a look for yourself. It is open daily between 10am and 4pm and well worth a visit.

Middlesbrough's Artistic Legacy

Yesterday I met up with a group of good friends Jackie, Bev, Joy and Colleen to spend a very enjoyable day of catching up on what we have been up to since our last get together. We first met 7 years ago when we enrolled on our Textile and Surface Design degree course at Cleveland College of Art and Design and still keep in regular touch just over a year since graduating.
This time we met up at Colleen's house and, after lots of tea and chatting, we set off for a visit behind the scenes at mima. Colleen had organised with the archivist, Helen Welford, for us to take a look at their collection of paintings and ceramics that included many pieces from the old Middlesbrough Art Gallery that I fondly remember visiting in my younger days.

The Old Town Hall and St Hilda's Church
by L S Lowry 1959

Helen pulled out a painting of Middlesbrough by LS Lowry, which I had seen previously in an exhibition earlier this year at MIMA, and then allowed us to just pull out our own and browse at our leisure through the carefully, chronologically organised collections.
There were many outstanding paintings e.g. two studies of nudes in pastel by Anthony Eaton, a dramatic oil painting by one of The Glasgow Boys but my favourite by far was a modest sized oil painting, in the 1940s section, that Joy and I stumbled upon, entitled Scullerry Sink by a local Boro artist Glynn Porteous.

Scullery Sink by Glynn Porteous

Preparatory sketch

These pictures don't really do justice to this little gem of an oil painting so I recommend that you go and see for yourself.
Another favourite artist of mine is Tom McGuiness, who is one of the Pitmen Painters who were a group of working miners from the North East, and my husband and I are proud owners of a small but precious  limited edidition a lithograph of his, entitled Miners Going In Bye, which we bought in 1977.

Miners Going In Bye 1976 by Tom McGuiness

MIMA however have a magnificent oil painting entitled Early Morning Shift  as well as 3 beautiful lithographs and etchings similar to ours and the one below.

The A Team by Tom McGuiness



Early Morning Shift  1959 by Tom McGuiness. A large oil
painting purchased by Middlesbrough Art Gallery in 1964

 After the excitment of the archives we paid a visit to one of the current exhibitions Metadomestic which includes ceramics, furniture, jewellery and film. The two pieces of work that caught my imagination were Martin Arnold's Passage a l'acte which was a visual equivalent of "scratching" using images from To Kill a Mockingbird and Veronica Schubert's 800 knitted black and white film frames. I really don't know how these artists come up with such concepts.

Temenos by Anish Kapoor



Good Friends at Temenos

 After yet another cuppa we happily went off to show Bev and Joy another part of Middlesbrough's artistic legacy situated at Middlehaven Dock. Temenos by Anish Kapoor, currently in the news for having designed the sculpting Orbit Tower for the Olympic Park, is a 110m long 50m high steel structure situated between the Riverside Stadium and the Transporter Bridge. I think they were quite taken with the sculpture and the industrial landscape that it is set in.

Orbit by Anish Kapoor at the Olympic Park

To complete our trip we took the Transporter Bridge to carry us across the river in its moving cage proving, despite what Auf Wiedersehen Pet claimed, it was not sent to Arizona!

View from the moving car deck.

Saltburn Arts Fair

Today my friend  Bev (fellow alumni of CCAD) and I took ourselves off for a sunny Sunday morning trip to the Victorian sea-side town of Saltburn to visit their inaugural Saltburn Arts Fair. Firstly we called in at The Salburn School which has been saved from developers as a community venue by Saltburn Community & Arts Association and was being used as a gallery to display local artists work. We then walked a little further into the centre where there was a real buzz as people browsed the outdoor stalls bulging with paintings, pottery and textiles created by North East artists.

A crazy peddle powered mobile tea room blasting
out tunes helped set a carnival atmosphere

Colleen, Bev and Lauren

The first person we met was Lauren, also from CCAD, who was visiting from that other Yorshire beauty spot of Bridlington, and together we went off to find the stalls of two other ex-CCAD students who were exhibiting.

Colleen's Stall

Colleen had brought lots of work that we recognised from college plus a host of new products that she had been very busy screen printing from her home studio. These included cushions, lampshades and some retro chairs that she had upholstered herself. Check out her web site Created toDesign.

Helen's Stall

Helen Stevens was also a former student and part-time lecturer at CCAD but is now the creative genius behind an interiors company called Surfacephelia as well as the organiser of Designers' Marketplace. She had brought her recently launched range of cushions along with her matching crockery and gift card ranges.

One of Sarah's beautiful sreen prints

A very nice surprise was to see Sarah Heseltine from college, who graduated a few years ahead of Bev, Colleen and I. She too has set up a studio at her parents' farm and is producing some stunning gift products.You can see her work here

And what better way to round it all off than with coffee and cake in a vintage inspired cafe in Station Precinct called The Sitting Room.