A look at the changing face of Bishop Auckland gives the lie to talk of a burgeoning drink culture in the North-East's towns.

In 1894, there were 64 hostelries in and around the town centre. Now, there are just nine WHILE worthies wail that the North-East is drowning in a great abyss of alcohol, a letter from Howard Chadwick suggests - with sober supporting evidence - that we may be becoming a cafe society instead.

Howard - now in Newton Aycliffe but Witton Park lad and very proud of it - encloses a list of the pubs in and around Bishop Auckland town centre in 1894.

There were 64. The Court and the Crown, the Eagle and the Edinburgh Castle, the Lather Brush, Live and Let Live and Locomotive Engine, the Talbot, the Turf and the Tile Sheds.

Now there are nine. "Even since 1963, my official legal drinking age, half of the main street drinking dens have disappeared, " says Howard. When a complete smoking ban is introduced, he forecasts, yet more will disappear.

While it may not be his particular cup of tea, he's also been counting the cafes and coffee shops in and around Newgate Street, Bishop's main thoroughfare.

There are 21, he supposes, and still he may be under-estimating.

Any thought that our correspondent may (as it were) be making a meal of it, is discounted by Derek Toon, Bishop Auckland's town centre manager.

"An awful lot of cafes and similar places have opened since I came here two and a half years ago, " he says.

"I keep thinking that they can't all survive, but they seem to be thriving and I know of planning applications for at least two more."

It's a bit like Coronation Street, where half the daily round appears to be conducted in Roy's Rolls (and the other half in the Rovers. ) "In the day time at least, " says Derek, "the cafes always seem a great deal fuller than the pubs."

LIKE almost every other town centre, Newgate Street is much changed since the days when it was dominated by Doggarts store, the Grace Brothers of North-East England.

There's a shop called Dream Weaver - Mind, Body, Spirit says the fantastical fascia - another called Bojangles which sells buddhas and crystals and tarot cards and things, a third called Belly Nelly.

Whatever Belly Nelly dealt in, it appears to have gone bottoms up.

There are discount shoe shops for those on their uppers, fireplace shops for those with money to burn, phone shops for the young and upwardly mobile, tanning parlours for the seriously browned off.

There's a place called Chips, but that's something to do with computers, another offering two digital hearing aids for the price of the one - and that's the optician's.

Derek Toon reckons there are 440 business premises within his tight-knit domain, more shops than the MetroCentre, occasionally takes a mental tour of the high street to see how many he can remember.

It's an awfully high proportion of cafes. Some are part of slot machine arcades, others have names like Red Square - run by a Russian lass who married a lad from Coundon - Expressos, Taste and the Chocolate Cafe, socalled because of the colour of the paintwork.

At 11.30am about 50 are in Kelly Ann's, a pleasant coffee shop ("and patisserie") next to Woolworths. Fewer than five are in the Tut and Shive, a pub a few doors up.

Outside the 16th century Bay Horse in Bondgate, reckoned Co Durham's oldest pub, they're advertising Gray's Bitter at £1.25 a pint. Some of us can remember when Gray's was a pop factory in Spennymoor and made nothing stronger than dandelion and burdock.

Whether Gray's Bitter is stronger than Gray's dandelion and burdock is something we have yet to discover.

DEREK Toon's a Ferryhill lad, his father a Mainsforth miner, his granddad one of umpteen. Having spent most of his life in information technology - "When I began with computers, you could walk around inside them" - he's now charged with restoring Bishop Auckland town centre to the days when it had more bustle than a Victorian dowager.

It's beginning to work, he believes.

"When I came here there were 64 empty premises, now there are around 30.

"The whole place has been smartened up, brightened up. Only this week the council was round cleaning the chewing gum off the pavements. You can feel the buzz coming back to Bishop."

Among his biggest successes has been the exhibition of Doggarts' history, proposed both by his wife and by one or other of these columns. "With you and her ganging up, I had no chance, " he says.

His office is in the Four Clocks Centre, an impressively converted former Methodist church.

A large picture of Sydney, Australia, hangs on the wall. Whether the town centre manager in Sydney has a reciprocal arrangement is a matter of doubt.

There used to be a cafe in the Four Clocks, too. Its closure may not have been a sign of the times.

Derek loves the old town, takes a walk down the street twice a day - "I wear out a pair of shoes every three months" - adjourns to a very civilised cafe called Bertie's, above a clothes shop of the same name.

"It's one of the few places I don't get pestered, " he says, though happily we bump into local property developer Charlie Clarey, whose firm knocked down the Angel, in the Market Place.

"The glasses were still on the bar as we went in, " he recalls.

"I told the lads they could keep anything they found and there were a load of farthings and ha'pennies beneath the floorboards where they'd always played dominoes. If I'd kept them, I could have been worth a fortune."

The column's off for the bus, Derek's planning another stroll around "The centre's changing all the time, " he says.

"By the time I get down the other end, someone else may have opened a cafe."