When I went to give blood earlier this week, a nurse asked me to confirm my date of birth. I did so, and she commented on how I shared my birthday with the late Queen. She wasn’t wrong, but it was a slightly peculiar moment.

Wandering down Stockton High Street, I discovered via his memorial fountain that I also share a birthday with John Dodshon, a 19th-century Quaker philanthropist. And then I thought: surely I would have noticed such a prominent fountain with my birthday on it when I lived in Stockton?

And so I descended a watery rabbit hole.

Dodshon’s memorial drinking fountain was unveiled on Monday 26 August 1878. The Stockton Examiner described it as ‘a massive structure of stone’ with ‘a rather commanding appearance.’

But what did he do to deserve such a memorial? The newspaper considered it ‘unnecessary to say much here’, save that he ‘distinguished himself, and the many qualities of his nature fitted him for the different walks of life in which it was his delight to treat, and helped to make him a useful and esteemed townsman.’

But an anonymous letter to the Stockton Examiner a few weeks before the unveiling took a rather different, and rather more intemperate, view:

I have for some days been wondering what was about to be done in the middle of our much-boasted High-street, and now I learn that the site has been fixed upon to erect a memorial fountain in perpetuation of the memory of the late Mr John Dodshon. I confess I was astonished at this, and upon making inquiries I was informed it was a public monument! Really, what next, I wonder? Public monument! I pretend to know something about Stockton and what is going on, but I never heard of a public fountain to John Dodshon before.

What has Mr John Dodshon done for the town? Let’s know that first, and act when the question is answered. Verily, it seems our Town Council will allow Tom, Dick, and Harry, to erect monuments to their deceased chums if they only take it into their heads to do so. If those who are the prime movers in this scheme had only looked round, they might easily have found some more useful purpose for spending money—even to glorify the uneventful life of John Dodshon.

I have every respect and admiration for the late Mr Dodshon, but I cannot see that there is anything wise in sticking up a privately-provided fountain, the design of which has not been submitted to the public,m and of which everybody seems to be in ignorance about, in one of the finest streets of Great Britain. I hope the Town Council will reconsider this matter at their next meeting and come to some other conclusion upon it before the fountain is knocked down in disgust as a street obstruction.

‘Uneventful life’? ‘Street obstruction’? Blimey!

Clearly, there was something of a chorus of disapproval—so much, in fact, that it was mentioned in the local MP’s speech at the unveiling:

We regret to hear that some objections have been made to this monument occupying as it now does a portion of this magnificent High-street. No doubt it occupies a certain portion of space, and I am free to confess that I am one of those who hope that the time will come—and I must say I think it is not far distant—when all these hideous structures in our midst will be swept away, and this market place will be devoted to its more legitimate purpose—the accommodation of those who frequent our lively, rising, and increasing market.

When the time comes to which I have just referred, I am sure the Corporation will be as liberal as at present, and if we have to find a substitute site for this fountain that it will be really afforded.

‘Hideous structures?’ Crikey!

Over the next few weeks, there was also a bit of a spat in the letters column about the functioning of the horse troughs which were part of the fountain, with the architect himself writing in at one point. It has very 19th-century Facebook vibes.

Its fate didn’t improve: perhaps out of convenience, or perhaps out of protest, the local fishmongers started to store and clean their wares in the fountain, leaving it in a right state—and making the water rather unpalatable. Within 15 years, it had been shifted away from the High Street and down to Ropner Park.

But in 1995, the Council decided to restore it to the High Street, albeit in a different position, more or less outside M&S. I used to pop into M&S when I lived in Stockton—so absolutely nothing in this tale answers the question of why I never noticed a fountain with my birthday on it.

Since I left Stockton, it’s been moved again: in 2014, the Council relocated the fountain back to its original position in the High Street, completing a round trip that’s lasted more than a century. It no longer works as a drinking fountain, of course, and a great many of the original features such as the bronze lion heads that used to spout the water have long since been lost.

It’s strange to think that a monument which was so controversial in its day has become so beloved a century later as to be worthy of several expensive relocations despite becoming relatively dilapidated. I wonder if it will still be there a hundred years hence?

This is one of the 1,000 cast iron Millennium Mileposts placed along the National Cycle Network. In 2020, about a quarter of the National Cycle Network was axed, which means that many of the mileposts no longer tally up with routes, which seems a bit of a shame.

This one was designed by the Scottish sculptor Iain McColl. Like most of the mileposts, it used to be black and had a circular disk attached with a coded message. The disk is long-gone, but the remaining post got a bit of jazzy re-painting in June 2023.

Yesterday, I posted a picture of the boating lake at Newcastle’s Leazes Park, a 150-year-old construction that was once one of two lakes in Tyneside’s first public park.

I’m sure you gazed at the photo and wondered to yourself: where did all that water come from? And thereby hangs a tale.

I talk far too much on this blog about the Ouseburn, which is only one of Newcastle’s notable ‘burns’. ‘Burn’ is an Old English word for a small river, still retained in Scottish and Geordie, but also evident in place names elsewhere in the country (think Bournemouth or Holborn, for example).

One such burn flowed through the centre of Newcastle and, much like the Thames, was converted by human activity into an open sewer. It therefore became ‘the poo burn’—but Geordies are a polite bunch who borrowed the Old Norse word for poo, ‘lortr’, naming it Lort Burn.

As the recent General Election results testify, people generally disapprove of rivers of poo flowing through their local communities, so in 1696, the Lort Burn began to be buried underground. By 1784, it was fully covered. Over the next century or so, the path of the burn became some of Newcastle’s most famous streets, including the much-celebrated Grey Street.

As it happens, the Lort Burn rises in what later became Leazes Park, and the boating lake is fed by its water. Given the history, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this wasn’t celebrated when the park opened.

In 2003, a project was launched to mark the hidden burns of Newcastle with artworks. The Lort Burn was to be marked with an artwork in Leazes Park, and a grand competition was held. More than 200 artists submitted proposals. Bob Budd wanted to put giant soup cans in the lake, which could have been fun, while Sophy King suggested some metal spheres engraved with maps.

But it was Tom Grimsey’s proposal which won out and was constructed within a couple of years: a bizarre series of blue concrete slabs inlaid with metal flowers, tracing the path of the Lort Burn through the park. It’s known as ‘The Flowering of the Lort Burn’, and the Council called it ‘a playful demonstration of human expression’—which feels like a quotation that could be attached to almost anything.

The site where the Lort Burn rises is marked by these sculptures, frequently and optimistically described as ‘seats’.

I’ve never seen anyone sitting on/in them—but perhaps one day someone will, and they’ll ponder the open sewer while they do.

My Spotify algorithm often serves up the version of Smile sung by Judy Garland (partly because of this) and Morecambe and Wise’s Positive Thinking.

I have long assumed that the latter was riffing on the former, but when I’ve looked into it, I’ve been unable to find any evidence to substantiate that. Superficially, the lyrics of both are about projecting and sharing happiness in a vaguely mindless way. Yet, the minor key underscores the melancholy of life. The combination of the two, along with clever word choices, highlights the desperation and necessity of maintaining a positive outlook at the worst of times. They are songs which are desperately bleak yet necessarily uplifting, a combination that’s common to the work of Charlie Chaplain and Morecambe and Wise. These layered emotions are no less common in the modern world than they have been in the past, but they’re less visible in the modern world.

The emotion the songs portray isn’t quite melancholy: it’s something a bit more cutting and urgent. Nevertheless, given my long-standing theory about the under-appreciation of melancholy, hearing these songs often leads me to reflect on the emotional infantalisation of society. Human emotion is as complex as ever, yet it seems to be that we’re increasingly encouraged to express it in marketable primary colours: Christmas is ‘brilliant’, riots are ‘terrible’, and politicians are ‘useless’. Nuance is discouraged.

Wendy and I were reflecting on this while watching the Olympics: there is undoubtedly a profound sadness to winning a gold medal. That’s not hard to understand: heck, it’s the combination of emotions portrayed in Disney’s The Jungle Book, in the song I Wan’na Be Like You: ‘I’ve reached the top and had to stop and that’s what’s botherin’ me’. In 1967, the Sherman brothers could communicate that complex and layered motivation to young children: in 2024, we rarely entertain the idea that a gold medal win is anything other than a happy occasion. Medalists may only perform that single emotion. They face the wrath of the press if they don’t comply.

Yet, if we all lived with primary-coloured emotions, there would be no good novels and certainly no opera. Jukebox musicals might be okay, tabloid newspapers would thrive, and there’d be no visible change to Loose Women or Good Morning Britain, but wither art and poetry.

It strikes me that the world would be a better, more understanding place if we acknowledged that we are all bundles of strange and conflicting emotions. To pretend that we experience only one thing at a time misses the essence of what it is to be human.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I walk past these lovely gates outside Charlotte’s Butchery fairly often, and every time, I’m reminded of this video which I first posted eighteen years ago (with the image quality you’d expect):

It’s twelve years since I last visited the transporter bridge: the longest extant transporter bridge in the world. It remains an astonishing sight, although in one crucial respect, it has changed beyond recognition.

For five years now, the Transporter has been out of service, becoming a monument more to modern underinvestment in infrastructure than early 20th century engineering. It looks like it might take investment of £30m to press it back into service.

Waiting for me dad, a sculpture by Mackenzie Thorpe, commemorates families waiting for the return of the workers across the bridge at the end of their shifts on the industrial sites beyond. As events transpired, it was unveiled about twelve weeks before the bridge ‘temporarily’ closed, which lends it a melancholic air to expectation it depicts: the figures will be waiting for far longer than they expected for anyone to return over the Tees.

The wall text at the start of this exhibition reads, in part;

Belonging takes different forms. Humans can share an affinity for a specific place, familial bonds and friendship, or spiritual connections based on religion or stories. Geography can also underpin local, national, and international connections. Hobbies and traditions in both real and imagined space can inspire a sense of camaraderie.

I’ve previously mentioned Wendy’s propensity to respond to wall texts by saying ‘I don’t have the bandwidth for that’. On this occasion, it was me perhaps imperceptibly rolling my eyes. Belonging does take different forms, but it’s hard to see how you can successfully curate a coherent exhibition around a feeling you’re choosing to define so expansively.

And, to be honest, I didn’t get it. But there were some nice pictures.

Here’s Mary Cantrill’s 1941 watercolour of a local landmark, Leazes Park Lake in the Snow of 1941. The label said that the park ‘offers tranquil escape in the bustling city’, which is probably true, but my overriding association with Leazes Park is of being asked to find patients who had absconded there from the RVI, which is just over the road.

This is JW Carmichael’s 1839 lithograph of The Ouse Burn Viaduct, looking like it is crossing an impossibly rural setting. It’s only a few weeks since I featured a photograph of the viaduct on this very blog.

This is Beryl Davies’s 1940s watercolour of The Haymarket, a part of Newcastle that has changed surprisingly little despite huge changes outside of the frame. This was painted as part of a project run the The Laing. After the council approved major redevelopment work in the city centre, the gallery’s committee sent forth artists to document the city as it existed before the work started, which feels somehow inspired and a little eccentric at the same time.

There’s something about the lighting in this picture which, along with all of the arches, that sort of feels like the kind of art that AI generators often spit out. It is, in fact, an 1813 painting by Thomas Miles Richardson, show a View of the Ruins of Tynemouth Monastery. For some reason, I had always thought that the the monastery had been damaged in the war, so to find out that it was in fact already a ruin over two centuries ago was a bit of a surprise!

And lastly, here’s that other local home of brilliant art, the Baltic, captured in watercolour here by an unknown artist at some point when it was clearly still a flour mill rather than a centre for contemporary art.

Belonging continues at The Laing until 30 November.