Page 23 - High Row News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

The branch in Newton Aycliffe Picture: GOOGLE BARCLAYS has responded after facing calls to reconsider the closure of a branch in County Durham later this year. The branch on Beveridge Way in Newton Aycliffe town centre is set to close its doors for the last time on June 23. Blaming a "sustained fall" in branch visits, Barclays has said that more than four fifths of its customers in Newton Aycliffe now use "different ways" to bank. Barclays has this week faced calls from residents, including Durham County Council's Councillor Carl Marshall, to "urgently review" its plans for clos...

BOWLS looks such a genteel game but in Darlington it had an explosive start. Part of the town centre blew up, killing a lad and reducing a yard to rubble and dust, but out of those ashes, exactly 125 years ago this week, the first bowls club was formed. And today that club is exploding again, only this time in a pleasant way with scores of new members raring for a roll up when the green reopens next month. The South Park Bowling Club was formed on March 11, 1896, at a meeting in the Mechanics Institute which may still have been surrounded by the rubble caused by the explosion on October...

RUMOURS had been rife among the civil servants in London for weeks: they were going to be relocated somewhere up north, to a place beginning with D, as part of the Government’s plans to boost the economy of provincial towns. When the news was confirmed, they didn’t learn about it through Twitter, as the Treasury officials learned on Wednesday from the Chancellor that their new “economic campus” was going to be in Darlington. It was brought to the civil servants of the pensions and salaries departments of the Department of Education and Science, based in Canons Park in north Lond...

THE 1881 census found William Askew Jackson living in 39, Victoria Road, Darlington, on the north side of the street looking over to where the church hall would be built in 1897. No 39 is now a web designer’s office, but Mr Jackson lived there with his wife, Elizabeth, and children, plus a domestic servant. He had been the landlord of the Queen’s Head in Tubwell Row and The Three Bluebells Hotel in Blackwellgate, but he had become a wine and spirit merchant, with a shop on High Row. He was also the area’s travelling salesman for Ind, Coope, the Burton-on-Trent brewer.

SHILDON is not renowned for its glamour or for its exotic luxury. If it has fame, it is for being the cradle of the railways, the crib of heavy industry, so if it were to be associated with an item of clothing, it would surely be the miner's overall or the railwayman's donkey jacket, made dirty through the sweat of years of honest labouring. Yet until 30 years ago, Shildon was famed throughout the Eastern Bloc for producing the finest, most luxurious, fur coats. Whenever a Communist was cold, he reached for his Shildon fake fur coat, made from "bri-nylon furleen", and promoted by Lionel B...