I’ve featured the Millennium Bridge a few times: once with bollards, once during the removal of the bollards, and once without them. But today is the first time I’ve featured it tilted!

It cost £22m to build, and tilted for the first time in 2001. It’s so energy efficient that it costs just £3.60 in electricity to open. One thing that many people don’t realise is that the tilting of the bridge has a secondary function, beyond letting ships pass: it tips any litter dropped on the bridge into special traps, making the bridge uniquely self-tidying!

I know lots of councils put stickers not dissimilar to these on their lampposts, but the personality of these ones in Gateshead never fails to make me smile!

Located just behind The Sage, this is the CoMusica Legal Wall, a space for graffiti artists to legally share their work. The designs on the wall change frequently, but always seem to be high quality.

Check out this section based around Romeo and Juliet, which ties in with a couple of things The Sage is currently hosting with the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the World Shakespeare festival:

This is the ruin of Holy Trinity Church, which stands in Trinity Green in Stockton. I used to walk past this every day when I lived in Stockton and walked into uni.

Holy Trinity Church was an Anglican church consecrated in 1835. In the 20th century, it suffered a series of unfortunate events.

Those of superstitious mind might date the start of the troubles to 1955, when the church decided to remove all of the headstones from its churchyard, and convert it into an open space for fun and frolics. Perhaps eerily, one of the final headstones to be removed carried the prophetic inscription

Death to me little warning gave,
And quickly called me to my grave

Just a year later – 1956 – stone began to fall from the church’s steeple, and it was soon found to be structurally unsound. The congregation failed raise the £20k needed to repair it, and so, in 1958, the steeple was dismantled.

A decade on, the Anglican congregation dwindled here as elsewhere. The vicar launched a “getting to know you” campaign in which he went door-knocking in the local area, which did enough to keep the church going for a while.

But 1979 brought another huge blow to the church after its organ – worth some £100k – failed. The church could not afford to repair it, and over time, the congregation and the collection plate shrank to an unsustainable level. The church was forced to close in 1982.

Respite in prospect appeared in 1985, as the Greek Orthodox Church took over the building and spent £30k on overhauling the organ. But not long afterwards, the church was ransacked by vandals who stole candlesticks and communion wine – and destroyed the newly repaired organ.

In 1991 – just six years after its reopening – the church was burned down in a fire, the cause of which was never discovered.

Since then, the church has stood as a landmark ruin. The ex-churchyard, now known as Trinity Green, is used for all manner of cultural events. But with its grim history, how long can it be until another disaster befalls the Holy Trinity Church?

You’ll need a sharp pair of eyes to spot the figure on the end of this bungee rope, right in the centre of the photo.

You can see rather more easily the Sage, the Tyne Bridge (complete with Olympic rings), the Castle Keep, and St Nicholas’s and St Mary’s cathedrals, all of which I’ve featured previously!

You can also see the quayside’s Sunday market in full flow; a bit of the 136 year old Swing Bridge, whose predecessors date back some 1,800 years or so to the Roman Pons Aelius; a smidgen of Robert Stephenson’s High Level Bridge, from which hundreds of people watched the Great Fire of Newcastle and Gateshead in 1854; and the roof of HMS Calliope, the stone frigate on the Gateshead bank of the Tyne.

You can’t see the talented young musicians performing in the North East Youth Steel Pan Festival, part of ¡Vamos! 2012. This festival was actually my reason for visiting the quayside this afternoon, but inclement weather moved it indoors, which would’ve made a fairly dull photo. So you’ve got a bungee jumping nutcase from outside instead!

Is there anything summerier than a bit of lemonade? There are, admittedly, plenty of things summerier than Asda’s Diet Cloudy Lemonade (“Made with real lemons”) – I’d love a bit of fresh ice cold still Sicilian lemonade, but this is the nearest thing I can find in the house! It’s 4% comminuted lemon from concentrate and 1% lemon juice…!

Hartlepool’s Middleton Grange Shopping Centre used to be home to a Co-op department store, but the shop closed in October last year. However, in a somewhat bizarre state of affairs, the coffee shop it contained remains open. To access the coffee shop, one must walk through the empty department store.

This surely makes Eugene’s one of the strangest coffee shops in Hartlepool, if not the UK. As coffee shop locations go, the back of an empty department store is hardly the most obvious or everyday choice! Despite this, it did appear to be pulling in customers – certainly far more so than the almost deserted Esquires in a more conventional mall spot!

Quite what will happen to Eugene’s when the Co-op store is ultimately let to new tenants remains to be seen.

Abandoned buildings always pique my interest: I always wonder what’s inside, and quite often find myself looking, with fascination, at the blogs and forums of urban explorers.

This gym is just round the corner from the halls I lived in during my first year at uni. Back then (2003), this gym seemed popular, and the car park was often busy. Clearly, somewhere along the line, something went wrong: it’s now an abandoned and increasingly dilapidated site. This seems bizarre given that it’s part of the thriving Teesside Retail Park, where new buildings are being added all the time. Why hasn’t this one been refurbished? Why hasn’t it been flattened and some much-needed car park spaces added? What went wrong? And what’s left inside?

All interesting questions… though the answers are no doubt prosaic!

I’ve had what’s now called the Kindle Keyboard since the day of its UK release – that is, just under two years. I’d never bothered following any of the hundreds of online guides on changing the screensavers until yesterday.

Now I have a pretty collection of all sorts of pictures, including this favourite of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner!

Some of the attractions of The Hoppings just poking above the trees. The Hoppings is the world’s biggest fair of travelling attractions, and it congregates annually on the Town Moor here in Newcastle each June. This is its 130th year.

I’m sure I’ll get along at some point this week for a closer look!