ARCHITECT John Middleton was only connected to south Durham for a decade, but he left a string of railway stations that have recently been revived in Weardale and a pair of buildings that still dominate Darlington.

Middleton was born in August 1820, the son of a flour dealer. He was orphaned at the age of 14.

Yet the poor boy was extremely well-connected. He became a pupil of local architect James Pigott Pritchett (1789 to 1868), not only learning a trade but also winning a wife. In July 1844, he married Pritchett's daughter, Maria.

With Maria came brother-in-law Richard, who since 1840 had been the minister at the Bethel Chapel, in Union Street, Darlington, (behind Boots in Northgate).

Richard spotted that this distant town of Darlington did not have its own architect, and within months of marriage John and Maria moved northwards.

Other connections also dragged them to Darlington. The executor of his father's will had been Caleb Wilson, a York Quaker.

In those days, the strictest Quakers insisted that a member be drummed out of their sect if he, or she, married a non-Quaker. The children of these mixed marriages were then lost to the Quakers and, as a consequence, their numbers were dwindling desperately.

Jonathan Backhouse, the Darlington banker, wanted to return such lost children to the fold by starting a school for them.

Other Quakers formed a committee to investigate: another Backhouse and a couple of Peases were involved, as well as Caleb Wilson, from York.

Initially, they thought about Howlish Hall, near Coundon, overlooking the Dene Valley, would be an ideal venue - partly because it was owned by the Backhouses (see Echo Memories 1999).

But then Thomas Richardson offered £5,000 to buy an estate in Great Ayton. The deal was done, and in 1841 the Friends' School was founded on the green at Ayton.

Richardson was a Darlington Quaker, related via marriage to the ubiquitous Peases. He had made his fortune in London as a Lombard Street banker. In 1830 he retired to the North to see how the Peases were handling his colliery and railway investments.

His wife, Martha, was also poorly and he hoped that the fresh air would aid her recovery.

Sadly, in 1841, while staying in Great Ayton, she died.

Richardson remained in Ayton. He had founded his school (which closed in 1997), and he wanted a grand mansion. Now the Quaker connections took hold. Via the school committee, he learned that Caleb Wilson had known the father of an orphan boy from York who had just set up an architect's practice in Darlington and was looking for work.

So, despite John Middleton being only 24, in August 1844 Richardson asked him to design Cleveland Lodge, an impressive mansion that sits directly beneath Roseberry Topping.

It was Middleton's first big contract. After that, the Quaker network embraced him as its own.

He became a retained architect for the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR), and was set to work on the Wear and Derwent Junction Railway (1845), the Middlesbrough and Redcar Railway (1846) and finally the recently re-opened Weardale Railway (1847).

Very little, if anything, survives of Middleton's work on the Wear and Derwent Junction Railway, which connected Crook with Waskerley via Tow Law. Only a pair of cottages at Kirkleatham remain of his work on the Middlesbrough and Redcar Railway.

But three of his four stations on the Weardale Railway remain - and steam has just re-connected two of them.

Middleton built the stations at Witton-le-Wear, Harperley, Wolsingham and Frosterley. Harperley has gone, demolished in 1964, but Wolsingham and Frosterley are happily reconnected by the Weardale Railway.

In his History of North Eastern Railway Architecture, Bill Fawcett describes the stations as "built of yellow brick, from one of the colliery brickworks, and sandstone; a particularly attractive feature is the use of the local roofing material".

In fact, Mr Fawcett is very keen on them, saying they have "a Gothic feel which sits well amid the scenic beauty of the dale".

Partly because of Weardale's financial demands, and partly because of the national recession, the S&DR hit the buffers. The first to be laid off was its retained architect.

Middleton, though, had non-railway work (he also had a one-seventeenth share of the North Bitchburn Colliery Company, with the Hopkinses and the Stobarts).

Richardson got him to build a large extension behind Great Ayton school in 1846. In the same year, he created Central Hall in Darlington - or "the celestial hall" as townspeople knew it for its grandeur (this great hulk is now part of the Dolphin Centre).

In 1847 came St John's Church, high on Bank Top, paid for largely by George Hudson, the Railway King, as a place of worship for his workers on the new York, Newcastle and Berwick main line.

Middleton's drawings for this £4,400 building include a 160ft spire which was never added - some say because Hudson went bankrupt before paying the bills; others say because the foundations proved inadequate.

Central Hall and St John's Church still dominate central Darlington, but Middleton's final creation is a delicate bank that often gets overlooked. It is the National Provincial Bank (1850) in High Row, a couple of doors south of the domineering Backhouses' Bank. Splendidly slender, it is now NatWest.

In 1852, another brother-in-law, James Pigott Pritchett (1830 to 1911), joined the Middleton practice, and in 1855 Middleton left him to it (this Pritchett went on to build 100 churches in the North-East).

Just ten years after his arrival in Darlington, John Middleton packed up his belongings and, with his wife and son, toured Italy for five years studying architecture.

When they arrived back, son John Henry became a Roman museum curator in London.

His father retired to Cheltenham. There he accidentally fell into more architecture, designing five churches before his death in 1885.

He is still well-remembered in Gloucestershire, but in south Durham, which he touched to great effect for a decade, he is largely forgotten.

Published: 11/08/2004

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.