A Son of the Rock

Newcastle’s Northumberland Street does still have a couple of deco frontages. This is a Peacock’s now. Was it once a Woolies? Again the photo is a stitch.

I had thought this one might have been a Burton’s:-

I think now, due to the clock, it was once a Marks and Spencer but it may have been something else. In any case I searched flickr and the picture below is what came up for Burton’s. It looked like one of the art deco buildings I had seen in the book of old Newcastle (see first link in this post):-

I saw no sign of this building on present day Northumberland Street. The Marks and Spencer’s shop is now located in the Eldon Square shopping centre. We went in and browsed but there was nothing worth buying.

The photograph below (from flickr via a postcard) was exactly the same as the other art deco building I had seen in the book of old Newcastle:-

I did notice a newer Bhs further along Northumberland Street. The building in the postcard was apparently demolished to make Monument Mall. I doubt that’s as aesthetically pleasing as the former Bhs was.

Right at the end of Northumberland Street we came upon this very tall monument.

It was erected in memory of the dead of the “South African War” as the inscription has it. This is more often known as the Boer War but more accurately was the Second Boer War.

There are quite a few such memorials around. One is on the parapet of Edinburgh’s North Bridge. I have a piece of crested china which is a reproduction of the memorial in Hull to the dead of the same war and I have seen another similarly patterned piece with a different town’s crest. The next day (in Durham) we encountered another tall memorial to the South African War.

On the way back to the car we passed Newcastle’s civic centre. It’s a much more modern building with a tower surmounted by a circular top with horses’ heads and a finial showing the three castle symbol that also appears on silver objects assayed in Newcastle when the city still had an assay office.

The castle motif also appeared on the railings surrounding the civic centre.

*Edited to add:- for some idea of the memorial’s scale see this link. Its surroundings have changed somewhat since the postcard photos in the link were taken.