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.

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?

This is Newcastle’s Sandman Signature hotel, which is Sandman’s first hotel outside of its native Canada.

It occupies the former headquarters of Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, which was by far the UK’s biggest brewer for much of the nineties and noughties. It made everything from Foster’s and Kronenbourg to John Smith’s and Kingfisher – plus, of course, local favourite Newcastle Brown Ale. In 2008, it was taken over by Carlsberg and Heineken, and within a couple of years the company was rebranded as Heineken UK Ltd, closing the book on a company heritage that dates back to 1749.

The hotel is part of the Downing Plaza development that is using striking architecture to create a gateway from the city centre to Newcastle’s nascent Science Central development. This development, on the former site of the Newcastle Brewery itself, will host Newcastle University’s sustainability research institute and other established science-related businesses alongside space dedicated to hosting and aiding science-related start-ups. There will, of course, be the typical retail and leisure sites mixed in there too.

It’s a bold two-decade plan supported by a shopping-list of different organisations, and with ownership of the site shared between the city council and the university. It will be great to see it come to fruition!

This picture of the Queen has been stuck on this black box on Gosforth High Street for months now. I’ve no idea where it came from. Is it a random bit of graffiti? Is it street art? Is it a leftover from some jubilee event? Who knows?

It’s Christmas! Or, at least, John Lewis’s window leads one to believe that it is. It’s only 29th September, for goodness sake!

I know moaning about Christmas getting earlier every year is a little tedious, but really… a Christmas window in a major department store in September?!

Earlier this month, I said that I didn’t think local glazier Wadds used their distinctive stencil anymore… but here’s a local Subway, proving me wrong!

This is a drum clock manufactured by Potts for the concourse at Newcastle Station, where it still hangs today. It’s about 120 years old or thereabouts. For a long time after I first moved to Newcastle, this clock had no hands. I don’t know whether it was broken and later repaired, or whether the hands were removed for restoration. But after what seemed like years of it being a broken clock, I remember being somewhat surprised to find it in full working order one day.

One of the more widely circulated pictures from the large storms that have battered Tyneside in the last few months is this shot of the very same clock, in which the roof of the station is leaking to such a degree that it looks like it’s raining inside!

Another arch today: this impressive 11m tall Chinese arch marks the northern entrance to Newcastle’s Chinatown. It was constructed in 2004 by engineers from mainland China at a cost of £475,000, and has a pair of guardian Shishi statues. In 2008, the street lighting in Chinatown was replaced by pretty Chinese lanterns, which I might well feature another day!

I was surprised to discover that England has only five “official” Chinatowns. As well as the one in Newcastle, there are Chinatowns in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.