Side of the Angel

DON’T the streets of Durham seem to have an awful lot of prison officers these days? Can’t stir for them. Mind, Durham also seems to have an awful lot of prisons.

Two officers, female and well-spoken, are having lunch at the Fallen Angel. On another table a couple are discussing visiting times, perhaps in the expectation of a redemptive hour with their own little Lucifer.

On a third table, just about the only other one occupied, sits a lone gentleman.

You’d bet a BAFTA to a bag of popcorn that he’s an actor, perhaps seeking a captive audience.

That I’m also eating alone isn’t because of some advanced anti-socialness but because amid the eavesdropping and the eggs Benedict there’s a church column to be written. They teach you to multi-skill these days; you get bonus points for it.

The Fallen Angel, opened a year ago, is in Old Elvet, directly opposite the oldest and most iconic of the city’s penal institutions. If a North-East wifie says her old feller’s in Durham, none supposes that he’s gone for a dander round the cathedral.

Fashionably described as “restaurant with rooms”, it was once the Angel pub, later student accommodation, transformed at a cost of around £2m by the entrepreneurial John Marshall, the man who grew Durham Pine.

A gentleman simultaneously engrossing, extravagant and immodest, Marshall grew up in a Durham pit village, remembers seeing the Queen drive past and being given a Dinky model Rolls Royce as a memento. One day, he vowed, he’d own the real thing.

He spent three years at Houghall Agricultural College, worked as a shepherd and as a gardener, became a vacuum cleaner salesman and, seeing nothing in vacuums, began restoring furniture.

The menu rubric takes up the story.

Durham Pine became Britain’s tenth biggest furniture retailer, 80 shops from Ilfracombe to Inverness, £60m estimated value.

The Fallen Angel is equally idiosyncratic, extravagantly opulent, decidedly different. Ten themed bedrooms range from sci-fi to Cruella de Ville, from cruise liner to Russian bride.

The foyer is Edwardian elegant, the restaurant watched over by an effigy so fearful and so manifestly felonious that, vivified, it should play Magwich when next they cast Great Expectations.

In the garden, beyond the terrace, sits John Marshall’s Rolls, or perhaps one of them. That story’s in the menu, too. High Roller, indeed.

Eight or nine tables have inlaid old maps of the world. Chairs are transparent, with little bows on the back. I sit in a corner, next to an old crone – Mrs Magwich, probably – and to one of those pianos where the keys move automatically, mesmerically, like special effects in a silent movie.

Food’s served from breakfast onwards, afternoon tea £20 for two or an extra £50 for a bottle of champagne, for those feeling light-headed. Snacks, too.

Lunch might be from the “express” menu or a list – £14.95 for two courses, £19.95 for three – that’s also available in the evening. The emphasis is on local sourcing.

I ask about bottle conditioned beers, always a good test. The waiter, who isn’t English, not only immediately offers a bottle of Magus from the excellent Durham brewery in Bowburn but advises about the sediment which forms naturally at the bottom. Real thing, full marks.

Creamy chicken soup, a relative rarity, was clearly home made, full of meat and came with good, crisp bread. A nicely tender rump of lamb – “Durham” lamb – was offered with Mediterranean cous-cous and salsa verdi.

I asked also for chips, served separately in a paper cone, but neither manna nor mamma from heaven.

Pity.

Puddings include vanilla panna cotta with pears poached in red wine, chocolate torte with “indulgent” chocolate sauce and a pistachio nut creme brulee with rasps and homemade shortbread. If not necessarily ambrosial, not an Angel from the realms of glory, it’s a very pleasant lunch.

A second bottle of Magus, an amen to the At Your Service column and, about 2pm, the next table in an empty restaurant becomes occupied by a simply stunning blonde.

She looks around, weighs up the only other customer and retires to the garden to admire the boss’s Rolls. The angel fallen once again.

■ The Fallen Angel, 34 Old Elvet, Durham, 0191-384-1037. Dinner not served on Sunday and Monday evenings. fallenangelhotel.com

LAST week’s note on ambitious plans for the celebrated Black Bull at Moulton noted that Moulton station, on the Darlington- Richmond branch, was actually three miles away at North Cowton – part of the great British tradition of having stations many a mile from the places they nominally served. Ask them at Dent, or Heighington.

The reason, supposes Steve Riddle, is that there was already a Cowton station – at East Cowton, between Darlington and Northallerton on the East Coast Main Line.

It’s confirmed by a 1922 edition of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, Cowton – the station between Croft Spa and Danby Wiske – one of 12 between Darlington and York. Thus encumbered, the slow train took an hour and 47 minutes to complete the 44-mile journey.

Steve was himself a North Cowton lad. “We used the railway to travel to George Dent nursery school in Darlington, where my mother worked, and then to school in Richmond.

Happy days.”

REVIEWING the Kings Arms at Sandhutton, between Northallerton and Thirsk, last week’s column also wondered why the pub wall photograph of Sandhutton home guard showed such a large body of men for so small a village.

The likely reason, suggests Ron Young in Stockton, was the existence nearby of RAF Skipton-on-Swale, a bomber base where memorials are still held.

“The platoon,” says Ron, “would probably have been used to supplement the ground defences of this most important airfield.”

DARLINGTON has a new – well, sort-of-new – pub. The Hoskins, opposite Binns, was formerly the County, Humphry’s, Barracuda and possibly one or two other things long forgotten.

The latest incarnation is described as “traditional” and in the sense that only one of the two hand pumps was operational, that the barmaid was counting napkins instead of serving ale and that the near-tasteless chips were par-fried for the course, then probably it is. There are those who would suppose that half a dozen television screens, stereophonic sound and a message that the digi-box was full were traditional, too.

George Hoskins, it transpires, was the Victorian architect who designed many of Darlington’s more interesting buildings, including the Kings Head and what is now the Sixth Form College. Middlesbrough Town Hall is one of his, too. The waitress, full marks, knew that. “The chap who did this thinks he’s George Hoskins,” she added.

Among other plus points may be a “Diamond Club” which after 2pm offers Over 60s a meal and a cup of tea or soft drink for £3.99. We didn’t qualify: it wasn’t two o’clock.

Mr Briggs thought his chicken parmo pretty good. The “hand-battered”

cod – you batter it with a Drott?

– was considerably better than the chips. A pint of Bombardier, the only real option, should have been put on a fizzer.

Still, it’s very early. As Mr George Hoskins might have observed, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

ONE who was at the £60-a-head St Teresa’s Hospice charity ball at the Hardwick Hall Hotel in Sedgefield reports that a fellow guest, allergic to onions, brought his own tin of Heinz tomato soup and asked the staff to warm it up. They did so, we’re assured, most cheerfully.

THE Builders Arms in Newton Aycliffe wasn’t a pub, it was a town centre café run by local church folk. The name was taken from Psalm 27 – “Except the Lord build the house, their labour is but lost that build it.”

It became the Builders Coffee House, enthusiastically noted – “corned beef pie the size of a brick” – a year ago.

Now, we’re told, it has closed. Since Newton Aycliffe needs somewhere for shoppers to rest their feet, St Clare’s church has started a cafe – hot drinks, home-made scones and toasted teacakes – between 10am and noon every Tuesday.

…and finally, the bairns wondered if we knew what a caterpillar does on New Year’s Day.

Turns over a new leaf, of course.