Salut! North

Greetings from Salut! North - alive if only just

Salut! North does not want to be left out of the merriment and wishes readers a happy, peaceful Christmas and a wonderful new year. Greetings extend to anyone who has strayed here from Salut! Sunderland, Salut! or Salut! Live. Enjoy the eccentric choice of a gallery of photos from the Royal Library of Denmark and feel free to explore the archive. If the North East of England interests you, you may like some of what you find on these pages ...

The silence of angels, and the dignity of labour on strike

Even without occasional reminders from friends who have posted little messages, here and at Salut!, I am aware that a little time has elapsed since my last posting.

This is inevitable given the pressure on time created by involvement in a newspaper launch in Abu Dhabi and also by the small matter of moving into a new flat.

Normal service will be resumed before long. In the meantime, feel free to explore the mass of material available at the other Salut! sites and at The National site - see the links in the sidebars.

And be patient: there is more to come on Angels of the North, the dignity of labour and more - whether you like it or not.

A small world getting bigger

Salut! North may not quite be a week or so old, but its fame is growing.

My thanks to those at the outstanding site Shildon.net* who have already offered words of encouragement. Salut! North is not exclusively about Shildon - hence my choice of an image of Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland (above) - but that is where I grew up so do not be surprised to find the place mentioned rather a lot here.

In particular, may I mention one fellow Shildonian, who signs his messages Catweasle, for alerting me to an item about Salut! North in the Northern Echo, for which I worked hundreds of years ago?

One request I would make is for access to photographs of Shildon and south-west Durham for use with future postings here.

My immediate needs are for images of Old Shildon workingmen's club, the Dolphin Milk Bar or any other George Reynolds related photos, the recreation ground path, Dean St football ground, Busty Bank, Shildon station and tunnel top, the railway works and crossings, the No 1 bus servce, the Hippodrome and Essoldo, the industrial estate........I could continue this for ever.

Any help would be greatly appreciated (and acknowledged at Salut! North). I am not looking for photos taken by professionals unless it is known that they would grant permission for their reproduction on a modest blog.

For the image published at the top of this posting, I must offer gratitude to Ken, one of the brains behind Shildon.net, who has kindly agreed that I may reproduce any of his photographs. He needed to say so only once, and first results can be seen here and in my previous posting about wasted schooldays.

* The idea for my posting about my Bad Pupil days came from Shildon.net. Having chanced upon the site while trawling for local references, I found numerous mentions of King James I. Curious outsiders may not know that this was Stan Laurel's school, though the gap in their knowledge Hardy matters. I took the spellings of names from there, and tested them as best I could against memory and on the internet, having no relevant files or books from home out here in the Middle East. If you spot a howler, let me know.