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The early days of Durham cinema

12:53pm Wednesday 30th December 2009

Film historian DR DAVID WILLIAMS is celebrating 100 years of cinema with a programme of ten silent films at Durham’s Clayport Library. Here, he looks back on the early days of cinema in the city.

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Wartime memories uncovered in journal written by prisoner of war

2:59pm Friday 25th September 2009

Seventy years after the outbreak of the Second World War, the memoirs of a North-East soldier have come to light. Robert Henderson spent five years as a prisoner of war after he was captured by the Nazis. Gavin Havery met his son and took a look at the past.

Handball game turned colliery into brickworks

1:54pm Friday 4th September 2009

WHEN Tom Barker clinched victory in front of 7,000 people in a handball championship, it was to change the face of Bowburn.

Bowburn – the johnny-come-lately colliery village

1:52pm Friday 28th August 2009

In the first of two features about the community of Bowburn, south of Durham, David Simpson traces the origins of the village.

Tracing the past of Canada’s distant cousin

3:45pm Friday 21st August 2009

THE former colliery village of Quebec is located along a front street less than a mile to the north-east of Esh Winning.

What the miners did when the shift was done

3:36pm Friday 14th August 2009

SACRISTON developed from a little mining village of the 1840s into what was almost a small town by the 1890s.

I’ll gie ye a farden, came the cry at pit auction

2:57pm Friday 7th August 2009

IN the 1800s, Sacriston was empty moorland, broken up into fields by acts of enclosure in 1809. There were scattered remnants of coal workings throughout the area, dating in some cases to medieval times, but there was no mining village.

The sacred links revealing the birth of Sacriston

6:15pm Friday 31st July 2009

THE former mining village of Sacriston, two miles northwest of Durham, has the appearance of a small town.

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Surroundings changed with end of the pits

12:08pm Friday 24th July 2009

LITTLETOWN came into being as a pit village following the opening of its colliery in 1831, but it never grew to the extent of neighbouring colliery villages like High Pittington and Sherburn Hill.

The colliery days of the little town that isn’t a town

3:05pm Friday 17th July 2009

WHAT place in Durham lies close to the border of two cities, is a town by name but consists of little more than a street, an old chapel and a former pub?