Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a bus stop being delivered and installed! Even the giant red kite in the background looks a little surprised at the sight!

This is a bit of the pretty escalators in Newcastle’s Monument Mall, whose workings are shown as a result of tge sides of them being glass. I guess these escalators are not long for this world as the mall is being in-filled to provide a series of bigger restaurant and shopping units accessed from the street. It seems a shame, because they’re certainly attractive and unusual!

With so many leaves underfoot, and so many central heating systems being turned on, there’s no denying that autumn is here.

This plan, the Grainger Town Sculptural Map, can be found just across the road from Newcastle Station. It was designed by Tod Hanson and Simon Watkinson, and put in place in 2003.

The idea is that the buildings have been reduced to their “essential forms” – no Earl Grey atop the Monument, for example – to provide an enjoyable spotting challenge to locals and tourists alike. When I first saw it, though, I didn’t realise it was meant to be a representation of the local area, so it didn’t really challenge me at all. Whether that’s a comment on the artwork or my own dimness, I’m not sure.

Here’s another angle that shows the pretty lights within:

After telling you about one interesting Killingworth building earlier, here’s another: the White Swan Centre.

This building too originally dates back to Killingworth Township’s day. It was originally a mammoth 1960s office building, but – like most of the Township buildings – was disused by the 1990s. By the late 1990s, plans were afoot to reduce it in height, give it a makeover, and move into this building all of the services – like the GP surgery and library – that were previously housed in the Township’s high-level shopping precinct.

Local schoolchildren were given the task of naming the new improved building, and took inspiration from the hundreds of residents of Killingworth Lake:

To make up the numbers following my failure to post a picture on Sunday, here’s one taken today of the former British Gas Engineering Research Centre and Mechanical Engineering Firm in Killingworth. The arch on the right of the photo adds a touch of drama to a small entrance bridge, while the roof exhibits three water storage tanks and three Venturi formed ventilation tubes.

The building dates back to the days of Killingworth Township, which is an interesting example of a planned town. This intriguing old leaflet describes the Township, which connected residential towers to a carefully planned town centre via raised walkways, so that traffic and people never had to mix. Unfortunately, this also made life a bit claustrophobic, as well as generating a high-risk area for attacks and muggings: on high-rise walkways, there’s nowhere to run or hide if confronted. As a result of their damning unpopularity, the whole lot has now been flattened.

But the impossibly futuristic Engineering Research Centre, attracted to the Township shortly after it was built, remains.

It seems hard to believe that here in the 21st century, I still apply for study leave by posting a carbon-copy quadruplet A3 sized form… It’s almost difficult to believe that the deanery can find a printer that still makes carbon copy forms, let alone that printing thousands of them is a cost-effective way of administering a process. And that’s before the cost of posting them back and forth is included!

As I post this, I note that I missed posting a photo yesterday. Sunday seems to be the day I forget most frequently… I’m not sure why! I’ll post another later to make up the numbers!

There’s not a lot I can add about this plaque… other than that it’s in an odd place, on Platform 4, rather than near the entrance or in a prominent location!

Newcastle has a history of pioneering leadership in the field of paediatrics. In fact, one of the UK’s first paediatric hospitals, the Fleming Memorial Hospital for Sick Children, opened here in the 1860s.

By the late 1890s, we had a second paediatric hospital, the Sanderson Children’s Hospital, where some of the first groundbreaking work in paediatric orthopaedics was carried out.

And, in the last century, Sir James Spence – the UK’s first full-time paediatrician – founded the social paediatrics subspecialty, and revolutionised our understanding of child mortality (and much more besides) through the Newcastle Thousand Families Study.

The Great North Children’s Hospital – of which this is a particularly bad photo – is a £100m development opened in 2010. It is but the next step in this illustrious journey. It’s designed to be as un-hospital like as possible, even including a teenage “penthouse” on the top floor, with a pool table, massive flat screen TV, and some of the best views in the city. It also has unrivalled medical facilities, of course, including a genuinely world-leading “bubble unit” for kids with severe immunity problems.

Who knows what the next step will be?

John Simpson Kirkpatrick was a man from South Shields who deserted the merchant navy, and then enlisted with the Australian army at the outbreak of the First World War. He landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915, and found Duffy the donkey within hours of his arrival.

Over the following weeks, John and Duffy ferried wounded soldiers back from the front line and no man’s land while under Turkish fire. It’s said that he sang and whistled while rescuing his comrades, ignoring the rifle fire and flying shrapnel all around him.

Unfortunately, this was to prove his downfall, as he was killed by machine gun fire on his 24th day of ferrying the wounded, aged just 22. His actions saved the lives of over 300 soldiers, and he was recommended for the Victoria Cross, though this wasn’t awarded – a decision that remains contentious in Australia (and South Tyneside) to this day.

Duffy the donkey survived the attack, and continued to ferry wounded soldiers after Kirkpatrick’s death, under the guidance of Richard Henderson. As the soldiers couldn’t bear to leave him behind, Duffy was evacuated to Greece when the army retreated from Gallipoli. He then disappeared, much to the disappointment of the soldiers who wanted to parade him as a war hero in Australia. Reports differ as to whether the Greeks stole Duffy and sold him (donkeys were worth a lot of money), or whether he broke free and ran into the sunset to live out his days in the wild.

This statue of Kirkpatrick and Duffy by local miner-turned-artist Robert Olley stands on Ocean Road in South Shields town centre.