THERE can rarely have been more opportune timing for an Echo Memories series on a village than our on-going articles about Middleton St George.

The village is changing rapidly. Every time you blink, another housing estate appears. Even while we have been visiting, contracts have been signed and businesses closed as several more acres of industrial land are turned into homes.

Over the past couple of weeks, Echo Memories has been chronicling the rise of Middleton Ironworks. It opened in 1864, and the village sprang up around it to house the ironworkers.

The Ironworks closed in 1931 and most of its blast furnaces and brickwork were demolished in 1947. Only two of its buildings remain, and, as 2003 draws to a close, both of them have only a few weeks left.

The biggest of these buildings is what was once a furnace engine shed. It is a great hulk of a draughty thing, 80ft tall and empty. In its heyday more than 100 years ago, it seems to have housed a stationery steam engine that somehow pumped air into the four blast furnaces - a kind of bellows. Indeed, inside the building there are one-and-a-half huge brick arches that were added at a later date, as if to support a new, bigger stationery engine when it was installed.

Since 1960, this building - and much of the Middleton Ironworks' site - has been occupied by CN Hadley and Son, a firm of engineers and flange-makers which, in just the past fortnight, has paid up its employees and auctioned off its machinery.

This company was formed by Cyril Noel Hadley. He was born on Christmas Day in 1929, in Harris Street, on Darlington's Freeholders Estate, off Yarm Road.

Originally Mr Harris was a motor mechanic and carburettor specialist, but he gradually moved into making car parts.

When the Second World War broke out, Hadley's went into 24-hour-a-day emergency production, turning out 2,000 mortar bombs a week as well as parts for anti-tank guns.

After the war, Hadley's moved into general engineering, and came to specialise in flanges - "a method of joining two pieces of pipe together", explains the founder's grandson, John.

By 1960, with its flanges going around the world, Hadley's was too big for Harris Street and moved to Middleton St George, next to British Rail's welding depot. Through the growth of Teesside's ICI and then the offshore industry, Hadley's prospered.

The company was taken over by Cyril's children, Brian and Mavis, and then by his grandchildren: John, Stephen, Linda and David.

Brian Hadley was particularly well-known in Darlington. He was part of a consortium of local businessmen who took over Darlington Football Club from George Tait in 1976. He stayed on the board as vice-chairman until the spring of 1991. He was a Quaker through and through, even known to shin up the floodlights to change the bulbs.

It is the third generation of Hadleys who have made the hugely emotional decision, faced by a severely declining manufacturing market, to close the business and sell the land to Wimpey.

Which spells the end for the large hulk of a brick building.

Going with it will be the old locomotive repair shed that George Bell has used as a garage since 1960. It is a ramshackle building that may date from the late 1880s. Once it had a dramatic arched entrance, but now a square door has been slapped across it and an unsympathetic extension has been added to the side.

But inside, George has the most distinctive of inspection pits. On the two long edges of the pit run the rails of a narrow gauge railway. It was into here in late Victorian times that the engines that shunted the slag around the site came for repair.

After Christmas, Wimpey, the housebuilder which has planning permission to build more than 100 homes on the site, will begin demolition of the last visible remains of the ironworks.

The company will also have to remove the last invisible remains of the ironworks: beneath the feet are an estimated 16ft of slag which must go before human habitation begins.