Designed and built entirely on Teesside, and opened in 1934 by the Duke and Duchess of York (later the Queen Mother), this is the Tees Newport Bridge. It has a span of 82m, and two 55m lifting towers with counterweights of nearly 7,000 metric tonnes.

The little hut perched on the middle of the bridge is the winch-house, from where the up-and-down movement of the bridge was controlled. I say “little hut”, but I understand that it’s actually a quite beautiful oak-pannelled control room, modelled on the bridge of a ship. The bridge was winched by electric motors, though did have petrol backups. The third-line backup was to winch by hand, but it’s said that this would have taken twelve men eight hours.

22 years ago, after a final ceremonial raising and lowering (which is actually on YouTube), the road bridge was bolted in place: there was really very little point in continuing to maintain the lifting mechanism given that the innavigable (at least to big ships) Tees Barrage was just about to be constructed a little upstream. There was initially some speculation that the massive steel counterweights could therefore be detached and sold as scrap, until some bright spark realised that they were still actually supporting the weight of the road bridge, even though movement was prevented by the bolting process.

The bridge remains busy with traffic, as it’s part of the A1032.

As Olympic preparations continue apace, the country’s biggest metal Olympic rings have been clamped to the Tyne Bridge to celebrate Newcastle’s status as one of the host cities. They look really quite smart. They are the correct colours, of course, though the contrast with the bright sky in this photo makes that hard to see.

At first glance, from a distance, they didn’t look much different in size to the ones at St Pancras. But closer up, it’s clear that they really are quite huge: 25m wide, in fact, 50% bigger than the ones on The Mound in Edinburgh!

Hall One is acoustically astounding, and also looks gorgeous. Unfortunately, a photo can’t really show acoustics, and my bad photography makes the hall look pretty dull (though the decision to drape a black curtain in front of the rear of the rear of the stage doesn’t help).

Nevertheless, Wendy and I really enjoyed seeing Ramin this evening, and as we left the Sage, we saw the Tyne Bridge looking twinkly and pretty.

It may be an apocryphal tale, but I understand that the Vermont Hotel, in response to Council cuts, paid the electricity bill for the lighting of the Tyne Bridge for to benefit its guests’ views. If it is true, the owners will no doubt have celebrated when the current LED lighting system was installed, as I’m sure it cut the bill substantially…

Though, having said that, the hotel recently went into administration. It’s since been sold, and is now anticipating a £3m makeover. Hurrah!

This is the “restaurant directory” outside the flagship store of the Fenwick chain on Newcastle’s Northumberland Street. Listed are the ten restaurants in the store: the Northside Diner; the Terrace Restaurant; Café 21; Johann’s Coffee Shop; the Majorca Café; Tivoli; Pret a Manger; Yo! Sushi; Caffé Nero; and the Patio Restaurant.

I reckon that ten restaurants within a single department store must be close to a record. I know that Harrods famously has 25 restaurants – not that I’ve counted and independently verified the claim – but I can’t think of any UK department store other than Harrods or Fenwick with anywhere near ten. Can anyone else think of any?

Local legend has it that this branch of Fenwick is the most profitable branch of any department store chain in the UK. The Sunday Times Rich List is often the cited source of this information, but I can’t see it under the Fenwick family’s entry in any of the Rich Lists in the Times’s archive, so I’m not absolutely convinced.

The flagship M&S virtually next door – which houses five restaurants of its own (an M&S Cafe, Kitchen, Restaurant, Deli and Food on the Go) – has a food hall which is frequently authoritatively cited as the chain’s most profitable, so the claim about Fenwick isn’t as outlandish as it might first appear.

Anyway, as interesting as all that is, I thought the picture was a bit rubbish. So here’s a bonus one of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge now that the ugly bollards have been removed.

This is the Infinity Bridge across the Tees in Stockton, so called because it looks a bit like a ∞ when reflected in the water. I first wrote about this bridge when its design was still being decided and I was studying at the University of Durham’s Queen’s Campus, eight-and-a-half years ago:

The new design for the bridge in Stockton has been decided. Five designs were drawn up for the bridge (which will go from the university campus to the other side of the river, where there is currently – well, nothing, actually). These designs were then put to a public vote, via post, phone and online. The overwhelming winner of the vote was design ‘D’. So they’re building design ‘C’. No, I didn’t understand either.

Here’s a BBC Tees article from the time, which shows all five proposed designs. It’s interesting to see that the artist’s render in this case stands up very well to comparison with the finished product. But I’m still quite fond of the design the public voted for.

It’s also worth noting that, all this time on, there’s still very little on the far side of the bridge!

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the bollards around the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (or the “Vessel Collision Protection System”, to use the proper name) were to be removed. As I walked past this evening, the Forth Sentinel was beavering away at that very task.

The Gateshead Millennium Bridge has always struck me as slightly oddly named: it is named not for the river it crosses, but for the smaller of the two conurbations it connects; and opened some time into the new Millennium. Incidentally, the ugly bollards in the river beneath are due to start being removed any day now.