Take a stand

NORTH Lodge Park is known otherwise as the outer office, the place where on fine summer days some of these columns are written. This year there must have been two, at least.

At any rate they’ve adopted me, a bit like a tame squirrel – red – but so far no nuts.

Last Saturday, the bandstand was officially reopened, restored at a cost of £216,000 and music to the ears of Yvonne Richardson, enthusiastic chairwoman of the Friends – good Friends – of North Lodge Park.

“Most of the houses around here just have yards,” said Yvonne. “For many of us, this is our back garden.

We needed to reclaim it.”

Bryan Thistlethwaite, Darlington’s mayor, talked of an “absolutely magnificent” job, of his days at the nearby Gladstone Street school – “posh people called it the Central Academy” – and of how North Lodge had the best cheggy tree in town. A cheggy, it should be explained, is a horse chestnut. A horse chestnut is a conker.

Brian Llewellyn, the Punch and Judy man, remembered the swimming baths across the road – “sixpence in the Old Baths, eightpence in the New” – the walk back through the park to North Road station, the Bovril at the Rendezvous Cafe. “We never got Bovril at home,” said Brian.

Others were in Edwardian garb – one as Joseph Pease, another a rather jolly rat-catcher, a third a tramp. “My former father-in-law’s moleskin trousers,” he said, though the effect was spoiled somewhat because he appeared to be wearing Patchouli.

There was a sedate chap on a vintage velocipede, too, if not a pennyfarthing then small change.

Yvonne was herself dressed up to the 1909s. “I never thought it would look like this,” she said. “It’s absolutely fabulous.”

NORTH Lodge Park, five minutes from Darlington town centre, was opened in 1903.

Five gas lamps were installed in 1904, a bowling green and boating lake opened in 1906. The putting green was twopence, order maintained – and occasionally enforced with a clip around the ear – by Ronnie the onearmed parkie.

In the Sixties, it’s recalled, a town police chief suggested that the site should be used as a car park. A new town hall was also proposed on that blessed plot.

If that were environmental vandalism, the real wreckers followed apace – and no longer with park keepers to administer summary justice.

There were drug users, solvent abusers, vermin with four legs and two. “For some reason, all the shoplifters ran into here from the town centre as well,” recalls Yvonne, in Darlington for just 15 years. “It really wasn’t a very nice place at all.”

With Ronnie in charge it had meant trouble simply to ride a bike in the park, much less shove a tube of UhU up your nose.

The once-buoyant bandstand was wrecked and boarded, too, dossers roughing in the roof. “There’d been a low hedge around it, but it was allowed to grow over head height,”

says Yvonne. “You could hardly see the poor bandstand at all.”

The Friends began nine years ago as a park watch group, soon changed their name, joined forces with the council and have helped oversee the park’s impressive rebirth.

There’s been a new playground, new footpaths, new lighting – security cameras, too. “The council has been brilliant,” says Yvonne.

Bandstand grants included £103,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund and, in January this year, almost £50,000 from the Community Spaces fund to enable the job to be completed. They’ve even had a proper writer-in-residence, and not just the one who seeks out a picnic table when things get a bit frantic at work.

“Apart from my family this has been my life for the last nine years, a true labour of love,” says Yvonne, 62.

“I thought at first I could get my life back now but quickly realised that this has only just begun. Now we have to get people to use it.”

NONE appreciates the bandstand view more greatly than Paul Rabbitts. He’s written a book on them, contemplates a PhD on the social history of bandstands and, by happy coincidence, lives in Darlington, too.

Paul has seen many other parks reborn, the bandstands struck up again, thanks chiefly to the Lottery fund. “I really get a kick out of bandstands.

They’re central to many parks and it’s great to see them being born again.”

Raised in Teesdale, he played cornet and tenor horn with Barnard Castle and with Middleton-in-Teesdale bands, joined another while at university in Sheffield but dropped out for health reasons.

“They’d go to the pub after practising and drink more in 45 minutes than I ever thought possible,” he recalls.

“I just couldn’t keep up. If I’d stayed there, I’d have been dead.”

His fascination began in 2002 when employed to oversee the restoration of Albert Park, and its bandstand, in Middlesbrough.

“I love parks, I love the peace and quiet and Eden-like atmosphere, but many of our parks had become crap.”

Once, he guesses, England had about 450 bandstands. Still there are 300, including three in Darlington where the North Park stand is also being restored. His favourites are Albert Park and the Marine Park bandstand – “such wonderful detail” – in South Shields.

“These days they can have rock band concerts and all sorts. I don’t think anyone minds, just so long as they’re being used for the purpose that was intended.”

His book’s expected in February but can be ordered now through Amazon. A second is likely to follow.

The sun shone, Darlington disported.

The band, once again, played on.