I’m sure when you think of the first floor of the old Church High building, it will be the Hall that comes to mind straightaway.  It’s certainly that way for me.  For the last 131 years, there has been a timeless quality about this space that has been very reassuring.  Things can’t stay the same forever though.  As the saying goes, ‘The only thing that is constant is change’ and, sadly, that goes for rooms too.

To continue our little game of ‘I Spy’, how many of you noticed the first stage of structural changes to the Hall from the pictures above?  And I don’t just mean the removal of the old Honours Boards which are at present being kept in storage.  The architects want the Hall to be a much lighter space so two square vents have been opened up near the apex of the north and south walls.  As this room will now be the Sixth Form Common Room and include a kitchen area, a smaller square has also been cut into the south wall for an air extractor unit.  At the north end, the stage entrance and exit doors have now gone.  The door stage-left has always provided access to the platform for the Headmistress, as one of the earliest pictures of the Hall in the 1910 Newcastle High School prospectus shows.  The performance door stage-right was cut into the Honours Boards at a later date.

The addition of light sources in the roof space just shows everything comes full-circle eventually.  When the Tankerville building first opened, new electric lighting was not installed; instead the Hall was lit by gas-lights.  Natural light would have flooded in through dormer windows in the roof, however, a trade-mark Oliver & Lesson design.

Many such ‘modern’ features of the original building’s design were heralded in a fascinating little article published in The Newcastle Courant in the late 1880s reporting on the plans for the new school.

It refers to the first floor of Newcastle High School as follows: ‘The whole of the teaching departments, including the assembly hall, class rooms, art rooms, and science laboratory, are placed upon the first floor, with a view to obtain better light and air….. The Assembly Hall will be a handsome room, with panelled dado and open timbered hammer-beam roof … There are three separate entrances shown upon the plans, and two main staircases for approach to the first floor.’  The article goes on to record another ‘modern’ feature: ‘The whole of the rooms are intended to be warmed by open fireplaces, with the addition of hot water pipes and coils, the latter being so arranged in each classroom as to warm a large volume of incoming fresh air.  Each room has a separate system of pipes provided with a valve, so that the heating power will be entirely under the control of the teacher.’ Which leads neatly back to ‘I Spy’ again.

At the very centre of the lovely image above of Home Economics teacher Lynn Batchelor signing autographs for girls on the last day of Church High, you will spy something grey.  Get used to this colour.  There will be a lot of it in the refurbished building.  Here it is the painted mantel of an old fireplace I must have put my mug of water on countless times without thinking about it over the years.  All the teaching rooms on the main corridor had a slanted wall which clearly marked old chimney pieces and I remember many a lesson in the ‘old days’ when girls’ heads would turn uneasily in lessons because of scratching sounds behind them.  Mice they said; pigeons most likely.

Certainly the oblique chimney breast wall in my classroom, Room 5, always served me very well as an English display board.  As we found out when Tolent started the preparation work for the strip out, what actually lay behind the plaster was something like this.

I prefer to think of these covered over hearths and fire places, all clearly integral to a state-of-the-art Victorian heating system, as they would have appeared in their prime.  As this photograph from the very first prospectus makes clear, each teaching room had one.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (24th February), Hayley Temple, one of the EWA architects who was instrumental in displaying the High Times and Heritage website links on the NHSG Project page of the company website, incorporated the three surviving fireplaces revealed during the renovation work into the new design.  The fireplace I photographed then was positioned in the corner of Room 7.

However, the one I saw for the first time on 12th March was even more beautiful.  The tiles on this one, very appropriately for the new school, were teal coloured.  And it was my ‘old friend’ from Room 2.

Along the main corridor now, Wates were in the process of installing the most up-to-date modern radiators (white of course) into rooms.

I’m sure they will do their job excellently, but there’s a part of me which will always fondly remember the solid, Victorian, sky blue ‘monster’ in Room 5.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it matched perfectly The Newcastle Courant’s description of ‘hot water pipes and coils, the latter being so arranged in each classroom as to warm a large volume of incoming fresh air.’  Indeed it did its job so well, I invariably had to have all the windows wide open, as my pupils will recall!

But this blog is meant to be looking forward to the future as well as reflecting back on happy memories of the past, so I shall end this post with an image of the newest addition to the first floor teaching rooms within the old building.  This area of the new extension fills the space where the fire-escape adjoining the old social staffroom used to be.  There’ll be plenty of scope to play ‘I Spy’ from here!

Enjoy your tour of the first floor of the old building beginning here and ending at Rooms 7 & 8 at the opposite end of the main corridor.

You may remember Nick White, Wates’ Project Manager, from an earlier blog post for November 11th.  That Wednesday wasn’t just memorable because it was a particularly rainy day – which it was; we did suffer rather a lot of rain last Winter, you may recall.  No, for me it stands out because it was the first time since 2014, thanks to a kind workman taking photos for me, I saw inside Church High once again.  At the time, I was so grateful for – and excited to have – those six images.  I didn’t know then I would get inside myself and certainly couldn’t have imagined only four months later spending a sunny Saturday morning  being guided around the building by Nick himself.

I knew from my tour with Conal on February 24th that the stripping back of the old building had recently revealed some fascinating original features and I badly wanted to document them properly on camera.  Peter, the Gateman, suggested a Saturday morning when the site would be free of workmen and Nick offered to conduct the tour.  I was accompanied by sculptress Zoe Robinson (Art Teacher at both Church High and NHSG) who was keen to gain inspiration from the bare bones of the old Victorian building for a piece of original art work.  Zoe is a talented and very successful commercial artist, who is regularly represented by The Biscuit Factory Art Gallery.  I felt that Zoe’s preferred medium of metal and wire would lend itself very well to the scaffolded, skeletal school interiors and Nick, who was in finishing off paperwork prior to a holiday break, was happy to oblige.

As Nick talked Zoe through specialist details of the metal work involved in various stages of the site renovation work, I was more than happy just to tag along and take my photographs.  I know now that this was the ideal time to undertake a tour.  Not only was it a bright, sunny morning, but the work was also at an interim stage.  The strip out and restructuring work was now all complete and plastering had recently begun.  Most importantly, the stripped back internal spaces were not yet cluttered by the multitudinous building materials which would be needed for the fitting out stage of the process.  What luck!  I took over 250 photographs that morning, enough to make video slideshows for three blog posts: outside spaces and Ground Floor, First Floor and Second Floor of the building.  As we moved from room to room, it felt like a game of ‘I Spy’ as I hunted out old architectural features standing out more now in stark relief.

I thought I knew the building very well indeed but was startled to be told that the bright white squares which immediately caught my eye, shining in the sunlight high up on the west wall of the 1984 Science Wing, were not newly installed.  Apparently there were always two bat boxes tucked away near the eaves while I was at Church High!

Along similar lines, if I asked you where the Holocaust memorial plaque was at Church High, would you be able to tell me?  I knew there was one, having featured it in the 2011 School Magazine.  I also knew it was destined for the courtyard but exactly where?  I don’t know.  However, approaching the courtyard from the rear on March 12th, eyes searching for quirky features, there it was, all of a sudden, shining in the sunlight.  How had I managed to miss that?

On the opposite side of the courtyard, an architectural feature I didn’t need a game of I Spy to locate thankfully still remained in situ.  I’d always thought the shaped bronze plaque dated the building work on the extension but zooming in to photograph it, the date seems to mark the school’s Centenary.  It’s always looked very beautiful to me against the rich red brick.  Did you know it was there too, I wonder?

Inside the building at ground floor level on March 12th two more features worthy of note caught my eye.  When the building opens as Newcastle High School for Girls on September 6th, I’m sure the feature which will cause the most excitement is the lift.  At present, the site of the lift shaft is marked by a wooden box on the ground floor.

The other thing which caught my eye at ground floor level that day was an empty wall where the Tankerville Terrace mosaic used to be.

My first tour of the old building took place on January 13th; my second one on February 24th if you want to compare the changes. Your third site tour with me of the old Church High building ground floor starts here starting on the Chemistry floor of the Science Block and ending up in Home Economics and History in the Barbour Wing.

Although not visible from the western hemisphere, March 9th saw a total solar eclipse occur.  In Jesmond, it certainly felt as if we were sitting in the moon’s umbral shadow.  It was cold, dull and very wet.  With the passing of winter, I thought I’d got away from having to make do with shots of grey steelwork, even greyer skies and heavy rain.  But clearly not.  Despite progressing fast, even the intricate steelwork of the Church High old building circulation extension appeared dreary in poor light behind bare, skeletal tree branches.  And once inside the new-build structure, it was even duller again.

I believe that the plans for both buildings have changed slightly since their launch, but no updated images have been produced yet.  The original new build plans of June 2014 which were on display at Church High for Heritage Open Day were certainly very colourful and showed the ground floor as containing an open plan dining area, the Main School Hall, a Fitness Suite, the kitchen and two stairways.  The kitchen I know was originally intended to be at the very back of the building, which makes sense aesthetically, but it was moved to the front in an attempt to lessen disturbance to St Mary’s Court residents behind us by the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ of food delivery vehicles.

The Hall will sit in the centre of the new building’s ground floor; it is designed to extend up into the first floor too to allow more height.  The new build’s interior is fast taking shape now and, despite steel girders piled everywhere, the double-height Hall’s footprint is clear.

The very back wall of the building, the side furthest away from Tankerville Terrace,  will be largely made up of glass.  Because of this, moving towards that area today my images were a lot brighter.

As can be seen from the Ground Floor plan, the Dining Area will be L-shaped.  Its spacious open plan design will no doubt prove a popular recreation space for the girls at break times too.  For this purpose, a glass doorway will be installed to lead out onto an area of hard landscaping forming a social space between the two buildings.

The hard landscaped social areas around the site will be created using pale grey paving stones as Nick White showed myself and Zoya Zaman (Head Girl) at the Topping Out ceremony on February 23rd.

Whilst the prospect of such high-spec modern design features on the Church High site is intriguing, for me at least, the excitement is invariably counter-balanced by sadness at the loss of other things.  A good example of this is the large, colourful ceramic tile collage of Tankerville Terrace & the Church High building, made by the girls to brighten up the yellow breeze block walls of the back staircase in the 1998 Barbour Wing extension which housed the new art rooms.

Because it had survived the strip-out and was still present when I was given a tour of the old building on February 24th, I rather foolishly dared to hope that the mosaic collage was going to be retained.  That would have been a really nice touch and very fitting too, as it was of Tankerville Terrace after all.  But it was sadly not to be.  I had asked Wates that if it ultimately was still destined ‘to go’, it could be bagged up and passed over to me for safe-keeping.  Unfortunately, as with the old staircase, it turned out I didn’t ask the right person.

When I arrived on site today, I was greeted by a smiling Peter the Gateman who said he had a present for me.  Entering his cabin I was presented with 7 ceramic tiles from the collage – a couple a little chipped – which the guys, knowing I valued the mosaic, had saved for me.  Although I was very grateful and thanked them profusely – it turned out they had rummaged through a skip to salvage the only tiles which had remained intact – my emotions were mixed.  It wasn’t the first time I had felt upset and frustrated in my quest to preserve Church High’s heritage – and it pains me to know it won’t be the last time either.  Peter’s  kind nature led him to enthuse about the aptness of the random tiles which had survived – none of which were of Church High, I sadly noted.  Variously depicting a section of a tree, sky, a male face and a female face, in an attempt to soften my disappointment Peter enthused that they could make up a little story of The Garden of Eden.  It’s nice to know there are at least some people on site who understand the importance of old stories.

 

March 2nd is the 61st day of the year (or the 62nd of this one since we are in a leap year).  From this point, there are 304 days remaining before we reach the end of the year and, by my calculations, 163 days until the Tankerville site renovation is due to be completed.  According to Wikipedia, March 2nd is a propitious day for technological invention: in 1791, long-distance communication speeded up with the unveiling of a semaphore machine in Paris; in 1949, the first automatic  street light was installed in New Milford, Connecticut; and in1983 compact discs and players were released for the first time in the United States and other markets.  So there you go!  And in 2016, our project is moving forward well on all three fronts too.

The renovation work on the Church High old building has now moved on to the Boiler Room beneath the old Dining Hall.  For a while, I had thought activity in this area of the building was owing to the fact there were problems with the foundations (Heaven forbid!).  However, a conversation with Eddie, Site Supervisor, today made things a lot clearer.  The excavation is for under-pinning work, but only because a new concrete staircase down to the Boiler Room is due to be installed.  Because of this, the wall needs strengthening.

The new build construction work in the old Junior School grounds is also moving on apace now.  Little has changed on the outside; the lengths of concrete-board cladding still boast striking red stripes.

However, once inside the gate and moving towards the structure, tantalising glimpses of changes to the interior became visible through the spaces between the cladding where windows are to go.

The metal ‘doughnuts’, as they are now called on site, are certainly a distinctive modern architectural feature of the new build design.  As far as I can discern, they are intended to be visible through the glass.  In this particular area of the building, they seem to be marking the site of an internal flight of stairs now in the process of being fitted.

From the plans, I seem to remember toilets are to be sited on the stairwells in the new building.  The doorways are now all in place.

At ground level, the new building is yet to be partitioned off into individual spaces.  As when they took walls down in the old building, the guys must be working from the top floor downwards.  Surveying the ground floor from where the main entrance will eventually be, to the left, only a week further on, the beam which was the focus of the Topping Out ceremony is already being absorbed into the structure.

The lack of dividing walls at present is not the only reason why the ground floor appears to be such an airy space at the moment.  The lack of concrete-board cladding on the south side and back of the building now makes it clear there is going to be a lot of glass here.

I left Tankerville this lunchtime to return to Eskdale feeling there was a great deal of progress to report today, which was pleasing.  However, at the end of the school day when I left NHSG heading for Jesmond Metro, I wasn’t expecting a further strand of the narrative of March 2nd 2016 to have quietly unfolded while I was teaching.  Outside of Hiley House, a blue and white ‘For Sale’ sign had gone up.

The following day it became clear a sign had been erected in front of all four of the old Central High buildings deemed to be redundant once NHSG moved to its permanent home on Tankerville Terrace.

The signs outside of Hiley House, Russell House and Eslington Tower opposite Jesmond Metro station were identical.  Only the sign placed in front of the Main School Building displayed the full story: ‘FOR SALE:  Due to Relocation of Newcastle High School for Girls.’