Rather than peer into the past, this week Echo Memories looks into the future to see how it is being shaped by history

In a profitable dream

Edward Pease, the Dad of Steam,

mover, Quaker, Captain Clean,

spent his cash from coal and wool

upon an engine that could pull

six hundred people on its spool.

Locomotion Number One

invented by George Stephenson

towed Skipper Pease and everyone -

a nation dragged by this pent fury

into a dingy century

of empire, greed and penury.

Ned's carriage was called 'Experiment':

"Full steam ahead!" - and off we went.

THE North-East is becoming renowned for its eccentric artworks: from the Angel of the North to the Brick Train; from the National Glass Centre to the Baltic Centre.

Now, taking shape on the north-west fringe of Darlington, is a housing development with an artistic difference.

Secreted among the 700 homes and throughout the new park in the centre are going to be stones carved with poetry. The poetry will celebrate the wildlife of the area - notably the dingy skipper butterfly, the little ringed plover and the watervole - and the history of the town.

In the centre of the park - the first to be built in Darlington for a century - will be an amphitheatre which will have its own little poem running around it:

"This is LOCOMOTIONTOWN, where the railways first ran;

this is QUAKERTOWN, where sharing took root;

this is the DARLINGTOWN, that wears its heart within its name."

The poems have been written by Bill Herbert, a Scot exiled in the North-East, whose fourth book of poems, The Big Bumper Book of Troy, was published last year. Bill comes from Dundee, but now lives in a lighthouse at the mouth of the River Tyne.

"I'd been to Darlington two or three times," he says. "People know that Darlington's something to do with the railways and is somehow responsible for Middlesbrough, and I knew that the local football supporters were very patient gentlemen, because I once came up from London on the train with a bunch of them after they had just been hammered and they were very philosophical."

He was commissioned via Northern Arts a couple of years ago to write for the development.

"I came here, talked to people, read some books - reading is looking, searching, hunting for something that will spark something - and I wandered around a lot," he says.

"It's a funny business what gets you going and I find that local history is something that really gets me going."

So he discovered how Darlington was responsible for Middlesbrough:

Joseph Pease stood in a furrow

in the parish of Middlesbrough

and saw a town in his tomorrow

take flight. So "Ironopolis",

furnace that fed on its populace,

was once as pastoral as this is -

a park now rescued from the flood

of profits Joseph dreamed did good

and handed back to bird and wood.

The Peases' symbol was that dove, a

peapod in its beak, that hovered

over waters like the plover

that now is nesting in this park:

a prophet for a limestone ark.

West Park was once, on its south side, bordered by one of the Peases' railway lines - the Darlington to Barnard Castle line - and the stone on which Bill's words are to be carved is coming from Cat Castle Quarry, near Lartington, which was opened in 1896 beside the same railway line.

But West Park is best known as the former site of the Darlington Chemical Company (Darchem), and the new parkland is on its former tip.

Tony Cooper, of developers Bussey and Armstrong, explains: "When we first started looking at the site in 1999, various developers, including Tesco, were looking at it, but no one knew what to do with the tip and that frightened everyone away.

"We knew the tip contained around a million tons of carbonate, a chalky residue left from Darchem's pill-making process, which would cost millions of pounds to remove. Records also showed that there could be other by-products which, if exposed, could cost tens of millions to remove, but which are harmless when buried at depth."

"Then we stood on top of the tip and there was the vision of what it could become. With panoramic views over the town and beyond into the dales, the obvious solution was to carefully landscape the area, preserving these new views and creating a new home for some of the species which have colonised the site since Darchem closed.

"Specialist engineers spent months proving that it would be safe, and other specialists are monitoring the landscape and watercourses which sustain the wildlife."

Through Bill Herbert's words, a virtue is being made of the site's industrial past:

The Dingy Skipper dares to colonise

three landscapes concentrated here

into one new-found home: chalk downlands,

limestone districts, disused rail-lines.

We've made its ark from our former works:

the Locomotion's track took coal to Stockton,

Darchem made pill-coats from limestone,

left calcium behind in hills where now

caterpillars feed on Birdsfoot-trefoil.

William Bussey and Alfred Banting Armstrong formed their business in 1902 in Darlington. One of their early contracts was building many homes in Cockerton, where Darchem workers lived. Now the company is building homes where the workers once worked.

Art has increasingly been a feature of the company's projects - perhaps most successfully in the development in Woodlands, near Darlington's centre, where the executive homes are finished with metalwork finials representing trees - but nothing as ambitious as West Park.

"Art is integrated in the architecture to make sure you don't just have boring houses," says Tony Cooper. "The big risk for this development isn't the tip or the perception problems people may have with it, it is the potential for kids to damage it.

"I know what I was like when a kid. I grew up very close to here and went to Alderman Leach School. I saw trees as a challenge and yet we are planting 70,000 of them in the park."

Which is why the art is important. It is bizarre pieces of street furniture - the statues, the eccentric drainpipes, the curious bits of stonework above the shopfronts - in an otherwise homogenous high street that differentiate a home town from every other high street which is populated by the same chain stores.

And so it is with housing developments.

"It is the little things that make a place seem like home," says Bill the poet.

His poems will sit on stones in little vistas around the park, which has West Beck running around it, enticing walkers to wander from one poem to the next as their journey takes them through the area's local and natural history.

"You'll see these things on the landscape and you'll go up to have a look," says Bill. "There'll be something to read, and views to the other stones so you'll have something to think about as you walk there."

He has written four books of poetry, but has enjoyed writing words destined for stone not paper.

"It has really interested me to write a poem where its proper form is not in a book, but in a landscape," he says.

The possibilities do not end here.

"Next we could structure the street names so that they form a poem on the map," he says, "although that's just an idea at the moment ."

King James of Scotland called this place

"Dirtytown" right to its face

because its streets had not been paved.

That was back when the woollen trade

was where your fortune could be made -

those holy Peases soon displayed

a lamb upon their nouveau crest

and bought and built the very best -

Darlo folk were unimpressed.

But Henry Pease paid for a cure

for dirt and illness in the poor:

good drains, a cleaner reservoir.

His "Water for the Thirsty" tells

us: wish for more than drinking wells.

* The Big Bumper Book of Troy, by WN Herbert (Bloodaxe Books, £8.95)