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In the picture - sort of - but not where you think it is! The houses off to the left in the middle distance are the Doctor Pit houses. And I think you can probably see Telephone Row nearest the pit head. That was the first row to be demolished, as my newly reclaimed memory now tells me! No, where you are looking for Double Row is in the misty distance to the right of the large chimney. I'm not totally sure if you can see the Barrington Colliery houses extending from the right border just below the horizon, or if they are somewhere in the mist a bit nearer the chimney. But that's the general direction of Double Row, as this was obviously taken from the top of the Church Tower looking out a tiny bit West of North. BTW that large chimney was demolished some time in the very early 1950's, as I can remember being asked to look North from behind the Market Place and say what was missing. Such is youth I had to be told; I simply couldn't see anything different about the view! Any more pictures from this viewpoint? Difficult to date from this one alone - no vehicles, no close ups - but the 1920's seems a candidate.

What modest Andy isn't saying is that he wrote - and is continuing to develop - the software that powers the new classified section. He's been working on it for months, and has lost count of the hours expended. There's already a number of other websites worldwide lined-up to deploy this feature themselves, but Bedlington gets first crack of the whip. So come on Bedlingtonians and get your chattels listed for free! Shame on us if other communities make more use of OUR software than we do ourselves! There's been a bit of a discontinuity converting from the old classifieds, as the old software (not written by Andy) lacks - amongst other things - a proper tie-in with your Bedlington.co.uk membership. So some of the member names on some of the current ads are guesswork, and so you may need to either repost your advert, or ask a moderator to do a correction. This tiny problem will work itself through before too long. What you currently see is only the start of a regional advertising network. By supporting this free service with a little of your time, not only will you move your surplus goodies at zero cost (and far less hassle than auction sites), you'll be in at the very start of what will eventually become a feature of countless other people's lives. ------------------ REMEMBER THAT PICTURES SELL THINGS! There's no charge to post as many pictures as are reasonable. So get that phone or digital camera snapping. If you have problems uploading pictures then we want to know AND WANT TO HELP YOU. PM us; post on the board; use the contact form; send a message by carrier pigeon, or open your bedroom window and shout! We need to know how things can be further simplified, we need to know about any problems you are having, and you need those pictures in your ads!

Did you put it on the Town Calendar? Remember to post pictures, and maybe write a follow-on news article. For maximum exposure events should be posted in the Announcements Forum. That way you get home page exposure, and it goes out on the RSS feeds to other websites too.

Did you put it on the Town Calendar? Remember to post pictures, and maybe write a follow-on news article. For maximum exposure events should be posted in the Announcements Forum. That way you get home page exposure, and it goes out on the RSS feeds to other websites too.

£200bn doesn't buy you very much time when you insist on throwing it at all the wrong things. Makes all previous "cynically engineered pre-election booms" look magnificent value! http://www.bedlingto...ant-you-to-see/ Hopefully Joe Public will wake up to the fact that "the recovery" is another hoax before 6th May. But part of me wants GB to scrape home on our badly skewed voting system, usual minority vote, and tide of Mandelsonian BS. Out of the resulting complete disaster might just come the social revolution we need. Whichever party wins the next election is going to rapidly become the most unpopular government in history. The honeymoon period won't last past the Summer. Why David Cameron, or any other sane person would want to lead this is beyond me. That's a question you probably don't need to ask about Gordon though as I don't believe he qualifies! We are already in that depression Malc - but it's a "repressed depression". The only thing which will realistically get us out of this is years of roaring inflation with all the terrible damage that will do to people on fixed incomes. Exactly what our amateur economist told us he'd ended! As you say, he was spending when he should have been saving, and when the smoke turned to flames he threw fuel on the fire. The best course now is a ten year slog, with a lot of pain to re-build a sustainable economy. But does any politician have the guts to spell this out and come clean with the electorate? I fear not, and that we are in for a very rough and very long ride.

http://www.propertys...e/postcode/ne22 And the Halifax - not exactly the most impartial observer - says national prices fell 1.5% in February. So imagine what's going to happen after the election if current predictions of a million public sector redundancies are even half right!

http://www.guardian....chael-foot-dies No stranger to our Town, he walked down the Front Street and spoke in the Picnic Field many times. June 1960. Michael Foot (left of center) makes a point while Ernest Jones, Vice President of the NUM (right of center) listens, as they walk down the Front Street toward the Picnic Field. Although sunny the raincoats proved a very wise move!

Just trying to prepare her for the inevitable disillusion Malc. As she's already worked out let's all hold hands and make the world a better place isn't a viable strategy, but neither is writing to a "big-party" politician in the run-up to a general election! You've identified one positive thing an individual can do. Why not take this further and prepare a checklist of things a caring Bedlingtonian can do that will make a difference? BTW for those "big-party politicians" reading this I'd like to add that I'm not against them and their efforts. What I'm against is their putting party politics before community. Not having the guts to debate the real issues with the community - an ever-increasing number of whom are not as dumb as their party bosses suppose. That's not true of all local politicians of course, and I don't need to elaborate on this. Times they are a changin, and those that keep their heads down and don't directly engage and take to the new electronic hustings are going to go the way of the dinosaurs. They'd actualy get a much easier ride - and probably pick up quite a lot of votes - if they came clean and explained their own frustrations earlier rather than later.

http://www.bedlingto...id=1&m=5&y=2010 After Things can only get worse Thursday - whoever gets in, we'll probably need to start a campaign to keep the street lights on! Any reply you get before then will be pure electioneering and not worth the paper it's written on. Any reply after will likely cite the (Tory?) cuts. Neither reply will mention who's incompetence got us into the worst economic mess of all time - the real reason why even the status quo here is no longer an option. Every Labour Government in history has ended in an economic disaster; this time they've surpassed themselves! In an area where one third of the workforce works for HM Government the cuts will be harder felt than elsewhere. Sorry to be so negative, but that's the hard reality. Save yourself and your own family, and our town will muddle through - as it always has.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8543906.stm

So... the BBC has decided that it can't do everything! Thing is, how does a 25% cut in staff working on the Internet equate to halving the number of web pages available? Sounds like a poor deal for the licence payer to me. Don't think our Town is going to miss 6 Music and The Asian Network though. Pity just a tiny tiny bit of that £600M couldn't go to real community broadcasting. But, the Beeb it running hard to preserve its empire and not to dissipate it.

Well, as I remember, it's in my historical atlas on a couple of distant dates (at least once as Belintun ?) but there definitely is a distinctive force-field shown around the place too - an ecclesiastical one! Maybe yours say Printed in Assintun?

Was this before or after the Martians placed their homing beacon in it? Are you complaining that we've been passed over for taxation? Think we are about to play catch-up here!

That's about what "the books" say Andy. But in the end it's speculation; there's no real evidence anywhere anyone seems to be aware of. Bit like William Shakespeare really; but don't let the S on A tourist trade hear you say that! The Michael Longridge history is far better documented, and more socially relevant. But, guess what happened to the heritage he left the town?

Lost in the mists of time. The Nail is almost as far as it goes in the "history books". It has been moved (twice?) though. All in the spirit of civic vandalism which always seems to have permeated the place. "List" what's of no particular historic interest, and destroy the actual heritage in the name of progress - which in the end never happens - has long been the game. Unsurprising when you note the sort of people that have formerly been put in charge! Planning Department! The Third Reich would have done a better job, and destroyed far less! So, I suppose we just have to be thankful that it's still there at all. I seem to remember Mrs Potts (Independent Councillor, and then Post Mistress) had a lot to do with it being saved from "the planners". I never understood why Trotter's Memorial had to be sidelined. It's not as if the Front Street at that point wasn't more than wide enough. And, it was a very distinctive symbol of the Town; you knew you'd arrived in Bedlington. But the world needed another large roundabout - presumably to cope with the huge volume of traffic routing to our prosperous shops? Then another change in policy and the bypass. Or was it that someone who could, woke up one morning and did? Certainly I'm not aware of anyone who had to live with this being consulted!

Yeah, I fell for the Tobin Tax idea too. But since listening to a few people in-the-know (and one of them is Unswervin' Mervin) it's sadly not going to work. A classic case of too good to be true; somewhere the books have to balance, and someone has to pay the bill. I still remain to be persuaded that a straight levy on liquidity the banks create is not a bad idea. It seems crazy to me that licencing them to print money - and thus make huge profits with it - is not something the public purse shouldn't derive some large benefit from. Apparently revenue producing licences for semi-monopolistic activities are only for things like struggling community radio stations. Steven still seems to think that this problem is one of a few bad banks. It's not, it's systemic! Lehman sailed only very slightly closer to the wind than many, and the banks were only doing what banks do. If you are going to regulate them at all then you have at least to understand what you are regulating. It was a failure to understand what was going on, and a delusion that the economy could walk on water. Both in the failure and in the delusion our own Mr B had a rather big hand. Remember "an end to boom and bust"? Remember Mr Toast of the City, and how we were all in this together at the Lord Mayor's bean-feast? Our future was in financial services and the new globalnomics meant we could leave the getting-hands-dirty stuff to the minions in the Far East. Global problem? Certainly not from where the guardians of China's countless billions stand! But hopefully, to them, we're too big (customers) to let fail! I dunno about the fat-cat stuff. I think good old socialist envy comes into this argument at some point. On the other hand where is real capitalism and healthy competition in all this when failure is so generously rewarded? Brown/Darling must go, the quicker the better; the FSA is a joke and needs scrapping, put the light-touch regulation back in the hands of the B of E - the only one of the three institutions that seems to have the slightest grasp of what is really going on. Greece is a basket case; they (both major parties) are apparently demanding that the Germans get them out of the mess by paying war reparations. Now that's a way of persuading your only friend that has a thick enough wallet, that you've come to your senses, and will not over indulge in future! Especially when it seems that Germany did pay them quite substantial reparations way back when. Turkey in the EU? Didn't WE invade them at one point?

New Labour promises us "A future fair for all" if they win the election. Where should this "fair" be held? Nominations here: .....

I challenge anyone local to get a perfect score in this "Level: Easy" BBC quiz to teach foreigners correct English pronunciation. http://www.bbc.co.uk...ron/quiz/quiz1/ Toffee-nosed gits!!

I'm not sure I know what you mean by " the market always acts in ways to enhance its own validity, be that up or down." The fact is there were countless billions in "toxic debt" swilling around. That means that it had been through so many hands and so many transformations (all on margin) that no one knew where it actually came from, and at what point a default would ensue. When people finally woke up to the fact that a lot of the stuff was tied to people who had been mis-sold houses they couldn't afford, and worse fraudulent mortgage applications, the whole pack of cards started to collapse. This was a massive failure of regulation, both by our FSA and the Fed in the US. The banks were only doing what they'd always done - making money by moving bits of paper around. It is not and never has been a global problem. Not even a European problem; theirs is tied to other factors touched on in the SocGen bit above; though we have undoubtedly contaminated them. If you are arguing that no bank should ever be allowed to fail, then by all means nationalise them, because there's no point in them being limited companies. You've removed the moral hazard that makes capitalism work - and work well - for the benefit of everyone. But that's no guarantee that the same thing won't happen under state ownership, and it practically guarantees inefficiency and waste. If a problem of this scale were to happen under state ownership it would take the country down with it. And, through Brown/Darling's mismanagement it may yet do so to the UK. Certainly one thing is clear - you can't increase the money supply on the scale that has already been done without roaring inflation breaking out. That's a very strange thing to say at a time of record low interest rates; it sounds counter intuitive. But this *is* going to happen before too long. Pity is that it looks like it's going to happen on another watch to that of the people who caused it!

Lehman didn't implode the market Malc - the market did it for Lehman. As I explained earlier something had to go. All the merchant banks were under the same strain of circulating dodgy debt. A decision was taken to support other banks but not support Lehman Bros. But we had pre-warning over here and it was ignored. Letting NR go would have provided the requisite bloodletting and moral hazard; it would also have done it earlier, and today's taxpayer debt mountain would not be quite so high. As the crack slowly progressed and much bigger RBS failed, Darling did not act in the public interest as claimed. In publishing the then exchange of memos (why do these things always have to be leaked) between him and the BoE this week, the FT has done a public service. In these it is made very clear that the mandarins at the BoE foresaw major problems and risk in stepping in, and were effectively warning him not to. His reply illustrates that he didn't really understand what was going on. To me it also says that he put politics before prudence, and isn't a fit person to be in charge of our finances. Gordon Brown's single still-standing claim to anything pretending to be economic competence is that he gave control of interest rates to the BoE to stop them being used as the former political lever. Yet here - when it really counted - the BoE's prudence has been undermined for political gain in a much more fundamental way.