I’d never gone up to the site on two consecutive days before, but I was curious to see what was happening with the roof.  The removal of the old tiles had to be part of the renovation work but they’d looked fine to me.  However, when I turned into Tankerville on Thursday lunchtime, all became clear.  The roof was now very green!

Although I couldn’t resist a wry smile, they were obviously renewing the felt underlay and working on only one section of roof at a time.  This made sense.  As I’ve said before, they really are ‘future-proofing’ the building and the existing felt would not only be old but perhaps also not up to present day technical standards.  From the ground, I couldn’t quite work out the wording on the green felt, but from Giuseppe’s Clerk of Works photographs taken that same day, I learned it was Roofshield, that it lies under the roof batons and is an air and vapour permeable, highly water-resistant roofing underlay.

However, other than the change in roof colour, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a case of Groundhog Day (one of my favourite films) because, on the old build at least, everything happening was exactly the same as the day before.  The high pressure water jet was being used at virtually the exact same point as yesterday, the only difference being this time it was ‘Bob the Builder’ who was using it.

As we all know and the film’s tag-line tells us, ‘Life has a habit of repeating itself’ but further along the front wall there was at least something different happening.  Some repointing was being done.

On my way along to the new build site I could see to my left through a gap in the fence that the new north doorway was coming on well.

An obvious new addition to the new build site that day was a very large red crane.  From just inside the gateway, I couldn’t see what it was being used for but it was clear everyone was very busy and that something was being lifted onto the new build’s rooftop terrace.  Peter said it was the roof garden though I couldn’t quite visualise that.

Thanks to Giuseppe.cam I can now show you what exactly was happening up on the roof that day.  Large metal planters were being put into place along the western edge of the terrace overlooking St Mary’s Court and in the next few days a watering system followed.

I can inform you that the rooftop garden will flourish because it will be looked after by Green-tech irrigation, the  Mona Plant System.  I’m sure this will be a big weight off the Science Department’s mind!

The roof terrace garden is going to be a fantastic feature of the NHSG new building.  I’m all for anything which brings more green onto the site and it will be very relaxing to sit in the sun up there. I found myself starting to feel really positive about the future.  Spring is my favourite time of year.  Having a May birthday probably helps.  It’s lovely to see nature returning to green in the bright Spring sun.  Giuseppe’s photos taken from the old building roof that day were really stunning.  Quoting ‘Groundhog Day’, “Am I right? Or am I right?”

“May the 4th be with you!”  Sorry. Couldn’t resist that greeting.  But it really did feel like the forces of nature were sweeping over the site at the start of May.  The weather was really beautiful, the trees were all starting to blossom and a lot of progress was visibly being made.  Mother Nature was the main focus of my ‘real-time’ post of May 9th which contained images of glass and metal panels on the new build on May 4th, but, once again, more things were going on that day.  Not least that when I turned the corner into Tankerville Terrace, the Main Building roof was in the process of being removed bit by bit.

I was a little puzzled as I stood and watched, wondering why things were being stripped off at this point rather than being put back on.  It was fascinating to watch roofers at work though.  Some of my very first ‘artistic’ photographs with an SLR camera as a young woman were close-ups from an attic window of a view very similar to this.  With each slate removed, the visual pattern shifts just a little bit.

     Down below on the pavement, a similar process of ‘edging along’ was occurring.  Yet again I could hardly have timed my visit better.

Now the new paving stones have been laid and the cones removed, a cleaning firm are hard at work on site sprucing up the brickwork.  The high pressure water jet was very impressive to watch.  It made good photos too.  Nothing beats a ‘before and after’ progress shot and it was amazing just how orangey/red the clean brickwork was.

As I walked past the main entrance on my way to the new build, I took one last photograph of the ‘Old Girl’ with her ‘lived-in’ look .

The new building also looked good in the bright spring sun, which was lucky.  With the site being so busy that day I had a long wait.

I was enjoying photographing the trees when a van pulled up behind.

The UK Mail delivery man – who I now know by name, Ji Carr – got out and we passed the time of day for a while as we waited.  And then for a bit longer.  He couldn’t get on site either and his time was limited.  All of a sudden a flash of yellow zoomed past inside the enclosure and a voice boomed out, ‘Will you sign for that Christine!’  I don’t know who found it funnier, me or the delivery man, but I did.  The compliment wasn’t lost on me though.  I felt like one of the team.

When I eventually got inside the gates, as I reported in the real-time post, I was keen to see how much of the bronze cladding delivered the previous week had been put in place and what it would look like.  Just as the slates were being taken off the old building bit by bit, so the panels of cladding were being winched into place piece by piece.

A further development that day was that the new build now had its entrance doors.  Glass, even more than metal cladding, will be the trademark of the new building.  Glass is also the architectural design feature which links the new and old buildings together.  Don’t forget, it was the 1998 extension which first introduced a glass walkway.

Giuseppe was out and about taking photographs on May 4th too.

I’m always really pleased with my photos until I see some of his.  As I’ve said before, to slightly misquote the famous Heineken advert, Giuseppe reaches parts of the building Christine just cannot reach.  But, if you put our shots together, we’re a good ‘story-telling’ team.

 

Now that the new build’s panels are all boxed in ready to receive the bronze cladding, it rather brings to mind a wooden picket fence.  I have actually already documented the main event happening on site on Wednesday April 27th.  It was in a ‘real time’ post written on May 1st.   The day I discovered that the metal cladding had arrived.

On a drizzly day, the first panels shone like shiny new pennies.  Even spattered with raindrops, they brought a new dimension to the site.

The tennis courts – now without their astro-turf, of course – are basically serving as a builder’s yard at the moment.  This is where all the large sheets of window glass have been stacked.  And now the expensive cladding too.  Another addition there that day was yet more scaffolding.  The Sports Hall roof is badly in need of cleaning.

As I left the site, I looked up at the trees.  It would soon be blossom time.  The big tree obscured my view of the extension, but it looked like most of the glass was in place.  The refIections were beautiful.

These are the only things I photographed that day, but an image of Giuseppe’s, taken from a better angle, fully completes the record.

However, a chance conversation with ‘Bob the Builder’ the following week alerted me to the fact that something on a much smaller scale, but actually more interesting to me, had been happening elsewhere on site.  I was reminded of this when looking through Giuseppe’s photos for April 27th, which brings me to the main point of this post.

‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,/That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,/And spills the upper boulders in the sun;’ wrote the poet Robert Frost in ‘Mending Wall’.  Well that ‘something’ isn’t me.  I have always loved stone walls.  Particularly the dry-stone walls that criss-cross the green in North Yorkshire and The Lake District.  Luckily for me, Giuseppe seems to like stone walls too. This is doubly lucky on our site because of all the ancient wall boundaries.  You may not have been aware of them, but they have always been there.

The modern Church High site boundaries are defined by The Northern Counties School/Percy Hedley College to the north, Tankerville Terrace to the east, Jesmond United Reformed Church to the south and the Nuffield Unit/St Mary’s Court to the west.  ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ is a key line towards the end of ‘Mending Wall’ and it was the north boundary wall Wates were ‘mending’ that day.

The story of ivy and Me is rather like the old chicken and egg tale.  It’s impossible to say for sure which came first: whether my love of dark green twining ivy tendrils forged my strong connection with the Church High building, or whether the 29 happy years I spent in that building spawned a love of the ivy that grew over my window?  One of the old regional names for ivy in this country is ‘Lovestone’.  Both ivy and I have that in common too.  However, ivy invading your neighbour’s property is not necessarily a good thing.  This is what the workers were doing along the north boundary wall that day.  Personally, I find ivy-covered stone really beautiful, but if you are renovating a property properly, I can see why it is being removed.  And as the image below shows, the ivy in question was ‘invading’ us.

As the 1890 map shows, this wall once separated two of the big Victorian public institutions built on Moor Edge: the Northern Counties Orphanage and the Northern Counties Deaf & Dumb Institution.

The Northern Counties Deaf & Dumb Institution opened at Moor Edge in 1861 to accommodate 60 residential pupils, catering for deaf, dumb as well as blind children from Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland and Westmorland (P.38, ‘Jesmond from mines to mansions’).  The premises were specially created and arms manufacturer Sir W.G. Armstrong contributed generously to the building costs.

The building, much extended and altered since 1861, later became  Northern Counties School and College, catering for all types of disabled children.  In 1988 HRH Diana Princess of Wales visited the school to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its foundation.  In 2004, the school joined forces with the Percy Hedley Foundation.

However beautiful ivy may be, Hedera helix is still, in essence, a rampant, clinging evergreen vine and the aerial rootlets which allow it to climb so successfully can be extremely invasive on masonry.  I have already mentioned the attention to detail being lavished on the building as it is being renovated.  As Bob had been keen to tell me, this even extended to the perimeter walls.  Where the mortar had deteriorated, it was being painstakingly replaced by traditional lime mortar.  This is one of the oldest known types of mortar and is much better for stone walls than cement allowing moisture to evaporate through the mortar joints rather than through the stone itself.  The area being worked on was right in the corner of the old staff carpark.

First the stone was brushed down, then any loose mortar chiselled out before the top part of the wall was repointed with lime mortar.

Perhaps it’s just me, but under the canopy of trees in the dappled spring sunlight in possibly the quietest corner of the old Church High site, this old stone wall looks even more beautiful than metal which shines like a bright shiny penny.  And I do like bright shiny pennies.  But this is nature.  More natural.  For as Frost wrily observes in ‘Mending Wall’:‘The gaps I mean,/No one has seen them made or heard them made,/But at spring mending-time we find them there.’

‘The truth of the story lies in the details,’ wrote American writer Paul Auster.  I’ve only actually met Giuseppe Ferrara twice, the first time being in Westward House on Wednesday 4th May where he was talking to Hayley Temple.  In the course of a conversation about the history of the building, he said he had photographs I might find interesting.  Most particularly of the Hall ceiling.  Of course I was interested and was thrilled to bits to hear on May 12th that Paul Hunter, the Contract Administrator, had given the ‘ok’ for any of Giuseppe’s photos taken while acting as Clerk of Works to be used in HighTimes.  Because of this, I can now fill in gaps in the story regarding things happening to the building in areas beyond my reach.

Quite literally, anything up on the roof is clearly beyond the reach of me and my camera and it has been entrancing to see shots that have been taken up there.  I will share more of them in the future, but it was at about this time that Giuseppe photographed what I have always called the ‘Little Bell Tower’ on the south gable.  I now know its real purpose, but I’ll save that story for a later historical post.  Up close, the distinctive, vented ‘Little Tower’ looks simply fantastic.

As you can see, the structure is a combination of lead and wood.  Its ‘roof’ is certainly a lot more sculpted than I’d realised.  The dome of the main Bell Tower seems to have been an octagonal cupola, but this one is four-sided.  In architectural terms, a cupola is a structure that sits on a larger rooftop or dome.  They can range in size from very basic and small, to extremely large and ornate.  The small ones can be as simple as the vented boxes you often see on barns which are constructed with no access from inside.  This is the category ours falls into – though with far greater ‘kerb-appeal’, clearly.  According to the Architectural History of the Cupola, a cupola’s main function is to provide ventilation, removing moist air from the main building.  The wooden vents on ours suggests it was designed to do this too.

I’ve always thought the structure rather reminiscent of a dove-cote and from Giuseppe’s close-up shots it appears that birds have indeed used it for nesting purposes at some time.  Lovely to see.  Nature has its own very natural way of filling up the gaps in things.

You may remember from an earlier post that the third floor of the north extension was added after the rest.  Because of this, a 1950s flat-roof had to be joined to the gabled main building at roof level.  To do this, a connecting section was created at the top of the north staircase, a heavy-duty clear plastic fanlight.  Unless you looked up, you may not have been aware of it, but you certainly benefited from the light it let in, as did my favourite picture at the top of the stairs.

I also have other less pleasant memories of that same fanlight.  Do you remember June 28th 2012, ‘Thunder Thursday’?  I certainly do.  My house flooded that evening and things would have been a lot, lot worse if I hadn’t seen the dark, lurid greenness of the sky through that very fanlight, heard the first heavy drops and headed for home.  Nonetheless, I ultimately had to move out of the house for 3 months while it was repaired and had only been back in properly a month when the merger was announced.  So I had first hand experience of the strip-out and reinstatement process long before I started to document this journey.  Consequently, it’s been a tough four years.

Wates had been in possession of the building for two months when Giuseppe took the photograph above on October 8th.  The internal strip-out was already well underway by then and the photograph below must have been one of the last images taken of the staircase.

By October 29th, the beautiful old wood north staircase was sadly no-more – which still hurts a lot – though the fanlight was still in situ.

On November 29th, Giuseppe photographed the fanlight from the roof.  Although in my time at Church High the plastic never let in water, from this perspective the structure appears a lot more flimsy.  It isn’t really surprising that it was eventually completely removed.

Whilst I probably loved the Church High old building, in all its magnificent quirkiness, more than most, I have to admit the painstaking attention to detail of the renovation is admirable.  Christine Sillis, EWA and Wates really are ‘future-proofing’ her.  As Giuseppe’s photographs show, a sturdier glass fanlight has now been put in place.

I’ve observed this same attention to detail in the brickwork too.  Where the building has been re-shaped in the past, the evidence was still there for all to see in the different colouring of the red bricks.  A good example of this was in the side of the 1920s extension which used to be visible from the staffroom.  The lighter brickwork clearly showed where extra windows once were and also a back doorway which could be exited via a small flight of stairs on the kitchen roof.

Wates are taking great pains to match up any new brickwork as close as possible, whichever part of the site they are working on and whatever the age of the adjoining bricks.  I have seen good examples of this in the back courtyard and also the new Sports Hall entrance.

The area of brickwork needing building up again on April 21st was the edging of the new doorway which has been recently created in the north wall of the old building to provide access to the new build.  As Clerk of Works, Giuseppe’s job is to keep a close eye on things like this on a day-to-day basis as the project progresses.  From a personal point of view, it is good to know the building is in safe hands.