Kenton Bar Estate - A Blast from the Past

I found the recipe on the net – pretty accurate to what I recollect except we added more sugar with the rationale – more sugar = more alcohol. In fact more sugar = bigger headaches……… we were young….. It makes an exceptionally dry wine rather reminiscent of a Riesling Winemaking Ingredients: Parsley Wine Recipe - Wine Making Guides 1 lb / 450 grams parsley 3 lbs / 1,350 grams sugar 2 lemons 2 oranges Water up to 1 gallon Wine yeast Wash parsley and place in a fermentation bucket. Cover with boiling water and leave for 24 hours. Add sugar, orange and lemon rind (without pith) and stir well until all the sugar has dissolved. Add the yeast and leave to ferment for five days. Strain into a jar and fit an airlock and leave to ferment on your extra wide Kenton Bar Ryder & Yates designed window sills. When fermentation has ceased, rack the wine into a clean jar and place in a cooler environment and leave for a further few months. Rack again if necessary and leave until the wine is st...

I can categorically state that I was the FIRST person on Kenton Bar Estate to get a skateboard. It was given to me by my elder sister who lived in that London and when she visited she brought me one. My first was a wooden affair with rubber wheels with green screen printing on the top. She also brought me a packet of Space Dust. I for the life of me cannot remember the brand or manufacturer. I took it out the same day and used it down the street from me on the bank in front of  Fourstones Close. I cannot remember exactly who played with me but I do think one was Micky Topping – can’t remember who else. The wooden board was quickly broken after a few weeks, the trucks (where the wheels were attached to the board and allowed steering) were very poor and snapped. It was GREAT fun and I was hooked…..

Bonfire Night or as we called it Bonny Night was one of the highlights of the year – why? Because it afforded an opportunity for mischief on a grand scale. Anything and I mean ANYTHING combustible that was not permanently secured to an immovable object would be spirited away to the bonny site or the storage site (usually a disused garage or a hiding place in the fields. It also gave an opportunity for residents to get rid of unwanted tings from their houses like old sofas, old mattresses and basically anything that could be burned.  

well well well ...what, ( thou may be asking thy self ) has this got to do with the blog?...A free pyramid badge( master, where are we with those? ) for the reader who works out the machinations of mein machiavellian mind... let me know if you need a clue!...( Mutley dog laugh )

In the post 'nine a day & dinosaurs' (May 2011)I was wittering on about not being able to remember learning owt at school except nine a day maths and topic work...however I have remembered a book I read at Kenton Bar School that I loved...it was called ' My Side of the Mountain ' ...here it is (follow the link), and here is a link to wikopedia which is an interesting read. You can buy the book here - Buy "My Side Of The Mountain" Kenton Bar Pyramid Appreciation Society

These two things are intimately intertwined in my mind even today and I will tell you why. Blackberrying = picking of blackberries from hedgerows and fields. During one of the school half term holidays commonly known as “Blackberry Week” we would trundle down to the fields with my Mother and pick blackberries from the hedgerows…… BUT the best and plumpest blackberries were to be found in two places:-

In Rutter's book in the 'List of Works' section it dates the construction of the estate as 1964 for Newcastle Corporation...8 house & flat types & over 600 dwellings...the pilot scheme at St Cuthbert's Green in Fenham is listed as 1963 for Newcastle Corporation...4 of the 8 types subsequently used on Kenton Bar Estate & 22 dwellings...( Incidentally something I think I missed-an article in the Journal dated 7th September 1967'Good housing designs take top awards', St Cuthbert's Green, Fenham...I have a new mission! )

I remember one time there was almost a hysteria on the estate as some girl had spread a rumour that she had been confronted by a pervert. I cannot remember what this pervert was supposed to have done BUT it did inspire groups of young lads, myself included, to “hunt for the pervert”. For a few days in the deepest darkest winter these boy-gangs roamed the estate and indeed we caught sight of a pervert – or we thought we did and then gave chase. Of course we never found a pervert and the hysteria died down after 2-3 days when no corpse was forthcoming. Anyone else remember this? It only happened once in my recollection but happen it most certainly did.

At the very least I shall post more about:- Bonfires The Pervert Wine Skateboarding Street names Winter Summer Autumn Bird nests Power cuts The Judo Club - slightly off topic The YWCA - slightly off topic More stuff on the teachers from Kenton Bar Primary that I have not yet posted about I am also working out how to put up a proper photo album/slideshow with all the Kenton Bar pics.

Here is his 'lampshade' type moustache...   Kenton Bar Pyramid Appreciation Society

History under our feet……………. Kenton Bar - Region 1 Regional War Room Video Footage Related articles Some history notes on Kenton - interesting............ (kentonbar.blogspot.com) Subterranea Britannica - Kenton Bar Bunker (kentonbar.blogspot.com)

Mr. Pyle (pictured elsewhere on this blog alongside a football team) was at the school at the time I was there although he never taught me and left after a short while. I do remember he had a deep and distinctive voice and seemed to be a nice bloke. I believe he lived over in the private houses near the back of Mountfield School in North Kenton – somewhere like Hawthorn Gdns. Anyway – Mr. Pyle was a doppelganger of John Alderton of “ Please Sir ” fame. Some factoids about Mr. Pyle:- Mr. Pyle was in fact John Alderton. John was well known as a method actor who lived and breathed his parts and would spend years and years living the role. He was a teacher for 10 years before recording the first showing of “Please Sir”. My Pyle always had a tennis ball in his pocket or at least some sort of lump. He was very secretive about it. I now know from secret sources that this “ball” was in fact the fissionable pit of an improvised nuclear device that Mr. Pyle built in his garden shed. Gary...

Courtesy of http://oldtwbustime.wordpress.com who gave kind permission for me to reproduce these timetables from their site. It is interesting to see that there was a direct route from Kenton Bar Estate to south of the river Tyne. I am pretty sure such routes no longer exist but they did in my day. One memorable time I had been to see a viewing of “Jaws” with Spill and a few others and we got onto the number 10 to come home. Trouble is we got caught the one going in the wrong direction and ended up on Gateshead High Street with no inkling how to get home and no money either. I “think” we scrounged some money from passers-by to get home. Spill may remember this if he is reading……..? Hit “read more” to see more of the timetables and so on and so forth.

funny about that dream, master...I took this photo of the cube flats only yesterday... I hadn't realised the graffiti was also on the north west facing side until I approached from the bottom of the estate...I can only presume it was done when scaffolding was up...it would be very difficult to spray to that standard of neatness from the top of the block upside down and back to front if thou knowest what I mean...incidently all of the flats had external communal 'bin sheds' with I seem to recall metal bins inside...the ones under the shops and down from our beloved pyramid were attached to the flats, but the cube ones and Ryal Walk/Hartburn ones were like annex blocks like this one...I wonder if now they have 2 communal bins( green& blue for filth and recycling-no need for brown for gardening waste as they have no garden )the doors of the bin sheds were wooded with lats with gaps in( why? ) so one could von the von of filth as you passed them...

And here is Duwana Woods, where the ultra posh kids like Dropsy, Jeff Davies, Paul Riley etc( all who went to Kenton Bar School there being no Kingston Park School in those halcyon days of youth )played 'man eating monkeys' which I've wittered on about before elsewhere on the blog...

And here is the magnificent step pyramid also at Ryal Walk, a 2 step one, different from the one at the shops and the one on the small hill at Hartburn, both of which were 3 step...(wonder why they made this one only a 2-er?) only the one at Hartburn remains, the one at the shops being destroyed along with our beloved pyramid by those mindless myopic fools...I remember playing on this with a girl called Tanya who lived in these flats...happy days...

Here are the beautiful table & chairs at Ryal Walk...the only other one I know of are the ones at Reestones Place, which can be found elsewhere on the blog using the search button...wonder if they were designed by Peter & Gordon, or whether such peripherals were the domain of lesser mortals?...

This is the original post:- http://kentonbar.blogspot.com/2010/09/kenton-bar-school-football-team-circa.html I hunted down the higher resolution images that are actually hosted on Photobucket and here they are for all to see and savour (they are actually by superkev61). The ha-ha fence is clearly visible. I cannot quite remember if we managed to name all the names of all the people. The teacher in one shot is clearly Mr. Pyle though. Click on the photo to view the higher resolution image.

This snippet from skyscrapercity.com MOVIE STAR CLARK GABLE LIVED HERE IN NEWCASTLE . . . In the Kenton Bar area of Newcastle there is some very old graffiti which says "C G woz ere". "C G" stands for CLARK GABLE, the 1940s American film star, who (legend has it) lived here in Newcastle for a while! No, there is no graffiti . . …….    

Find an original streetlight - the round ones with the black top and the white bottom...............

In response to Sir Kev, I now give you 'magnificent 5:The Sun:Kenton Bar Boys article...when I was alive I upped a post( see post 'Kenton Bar Boys' 2009 if you are interested in learning more ) Where I waxed lyrical about the so called 'Kenton Bar Boys' which stemmed from an article written in the Sun newspaper in 1983... The good news is... I have discovered this missing piece of jigsaw after months of tireless research and hour of time spent in thedarkest and deepest crevices of the earth... I was right about the deeley boppers and kilts, wrong about the starza jumpers and forgot about the stocking masks...The jpeg is small...I hope you can read it...if not I have transcribed it below...so here is part of the article from the Sun newspaper dated Friday 26th August 1983(28 years ago)...Now I do have the full article...however due to many of our avid fans being octogenarean old men of a fragile disposition I have censored the shocking part in column 2...it ...

I found a great Wordpress site that has old timetables from the 1970’s and it has the timetables for the 8,9 and yes the Mental 10. I will be posting this very soon comrades.

anyone remember making them in the late 70s with bamboo, string, beermats and hurling them on Kenton Bar Field?

space invaders was a great arcade game that suddenly arrived in 1978...nothing like it had ever existed before... The nearest place to our beloved Kenton Bar Estate where you could go to play it was Spanish City at Whitley Bay ...I distinctly remember we used to go in a great hoard on our bikes all the way to Whitley Bay regularly via South Gosforth & the old coast road just to play space invaders...now another thing I remember everyone doing on the way was something called 'sap your joules' (of energy)...this involved riding up along side of someone on the way, then suddenly grabbing their right rooker (which of course was holding onto the handle bar of the bike)with your left rooker and pulling back hard on it, in the process propelling oneself forward past them, using their energy as your bike speeded up whilst their bike slowed down, sapping their jewels (joules) of energy ha ha ha! Related articles Converse Plays Space Invaders on TV Made of Shoes (escapistmagazin...

And maybe a source of research for the vile Ghost Of Mensforth – get to it peon! Taken from http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/core.nsf/a/msl_local_histories_k?opendocument&ID=msl101 Kenton The discovery of some fifty Neolithic flints in 1978 (HER 4609) is the earliest recorded evidence for prehistoric human activity at Kenton. The first historic reference to Kenton is contained in a mid 12th century document stating that William of Newham gave Kenton (HER 1345) to his daughter. It was a member of the barony of Whalton (Whalton is a parish comprising the townships of Newham, Ogle, Riplington, and Whalton. It is bounded on the north by Meldon parish, on the west by Tindale Ward, on the south by Newburn parish, and on the east by Ponteland. It comprises an area of 5,918 acres, and its population in 1801, was 470; in 1811, 541; in 1821, 534; in 1831, 548; in 1841, 531; and in 1851, 461 souls. The decrease of population in Whalton, which is an agricultural parish, is attributed to the empl...

Well it is pretty inconclusive. According to nameberry.com http://nameberry.com/babyname/Kenton it means “Origin of Kenton: English, "the royal settlement"” According to babaynames.com http://www.babynames.com/name/KENTON it means “ The meaning of the name Kenton is From The Town Of Kent” According to http://www.baby-names.tv/meaning_origin_name_KENTON.html   it means “ KENTON male english from a farm in Kent” Some other information from http://www.northumbrian-coast.co.uk/newcastle.htm says the following KENTON was the largest township in the parish. There are two theories about how it got its name, the first being that because the original village was situated on high ground (the area now known as Kenton Bar), it could be "kenned" or seen from many miles away. The other possibility is that in 1242 the name was written as "Kyngton" or "Kington", and therefore derived its name from this spelling. It is uncertain what connection, if an...

The red hills were indeed strange red hills that were located to the north of Kenton Bar Estate, as far as I recall maybe 3/4 miles away and were clearly visible from everywhere on the estate...when we were kids we used to cycle up there because they were great for off road bike scrambling on...( is that why we went?...is my recollection correct? )they looked a bit like this...alas they seem to have gone( I went back to Kenton Bar Estate to see if I could see them ), maybe erased and buried beneath the western bypass or the Great North Park development beyond/to the north west of Red House Farm Estate( aside:wonder if the name of that estate and the hills are linked?...maybe there was once a red house farm so named due to its proximity to the red hills? )...incidently I distinctly remember that there was a blacksmiths on the way up to there... ps:why were they red?...

This one at Reestones Place. I spotted this when looking at this post and searching for the circular scar on Google Earth.

I was musing on Kenton Bar the other day when a memory came into my tiny head. I was speaking to someone a few years ago and mentioned that I grew up on Kenton Bar Estate and the person said “Oh – you mean that place with red roads?”. I was puzzled at the time and on returning home did indeed notice that the road running down Hazeldene Avenue do have a reddish tinge. The main surface ‘bitumen’ is red in colour and the stones embedded into it for grip were black/grey. Later in life I came to know that this was/is an experimental road surface that diminishes road spray. Anyone else noticed anywhere else in the country with red roads? Red Meets Black This is a picture of the red/black junction at the top of Kenton Bar, junction of Hazeldene Avenue and Kenton Lane And this is a picture of the junction of Hazeldene Avenue and Quentin Avenue, again showing red meeting black! I note that there has been a repair of the red road near the shops on Hazeldene Avenue and it has been done wi...

In response to mein master I give you return of the magnificent 7 post 6...'washing line tales 1,2&3' Mein feverish brain was actived re mein comment about the fact that the metal pole outside the cube flats down from the shops has gone, and I was wondering how the tenants now dry their washing... Tale 1: hmmm...later... mebbys... Tale 2: One day me and the master set off for the pub and went out via the back gate...it had been raining heavily and the washing on the line which ran up the side of the path, very close to it, was soaking wet...the master was in front, so I could see the back of his vonning plott only...suddenly a brilliant idea came into my head...at the optimum time as the master walked on up the path towards the gate I grabbed hold of the washing line with my left rooker and pushed it away, causing the soaken wet clothes washing to swing out away, then pulled the line in again real hard, causing the sodden wet washing to swing back in with great velocity an...

Never, EVER, call it the Crofter’s Lodge………. Seems the Kenton Bar is now closed, shuffled off this mortal coil, deceased. It is a dead parrot. I found this on Flickr today. The text below the photo reads: Tyne & Wear: Newcastle Upon Tyne: THE CROFTERS LODGE Situated at Kenton Bar, Newcastle Upon Tyne, THE CROFTERS LODGE was pictured on February 10th 2011. It was originally called THE KENTON BAR, but the name was changed in the late 1980s. A run past it on March 19th 2011 found it boarded up. 3 things in my opinion have given rise to this sorry demise:- Continuing to serve Vaux beers Allowing woman into the bar Adding a conservatory

In the 'Les the ox' post the master commented on how Les had a 'moustache'...I commented that it was fashionable to have one in the 80s to go with the 'wedge' haircut, and suggested that the Jason King moustache was all the vogue...however, I now realise I was wrong:'smoothies' tried to grow the 'walrus' type moustache shown here AKA Tom Selleck or Burt Reynolds...the tash Les managed to grow looked more like the' lampshade' one shown above:the Walrus was a bridge too far for him ( Mutley dog laugh ) Anyone remember anyone else who had a moustache and what type it was?

This piccy differs from the “real” Mental 10 ( http://kentonbar.blogspot.com/2010/10/mental-10-big-freeze-78-79.html & http://kentonbar.blogspot.com/2009/09/89-and-mental-10.html ) in that it:- Has windows Has only a single deck The driver is not swigging from a sherry bottle

In response to mein master I give you return of the magnificent 7 post 4... Now I was trying to remember what(if anything) we actually learned at school at Kenton Bar back in those days of long ago...all I remember was doing '9 a day'(or was it 7 or 5?) in maths which was a like little text book with 9 sums on a page(this was with Usher)...I also remember in the afternoons(apart from football) all you ever did was 'topic'...the teckas would say,'ok, its topic time, get out your topic books'...this did not involve any actual teaching(like the 9 a day did not) but involved you choosing your topic(I remember once choosing dinosaurs) and getting on with it, which involved getting books out the library, drawing/tracing dinosaurs, writing about them(copying out text from library books) This went on month after month...9 a day & topic-for god sake we must have done more than that!...anyway that is all I remember doing at school...anyone else elaborate on the curric...

Mein goot friends: yet another seven new posts await, conjured up by the feverish brain of GOM who lives only to serve the master's blog...request a specific post and I will up it for you... 1. 1970s,1980s fashion on Kenton Bar Estate 2. Dancing at Tommy Moors 3. Space invaders 4. Nine a day & dinosaurs 5. More on nadsat colloquialisms 6. Washing Line tales 1,2&3 7. Clackers

My good friends; I found this article from the letters page, Evening Chronicle July 2006 that I thought you might be interested in: 'In response to DF, of North Kenton, Vent Your Spleen June 30. Your points are well put and also apply to Kenton Bar Estate Estate, nicknamed The Forgotten Estate. You, however, are luckier in some respects, you have more shops, a new library, a sports centre and community meeting places, the KB Estate has few shops. This once beautiful estate, which once had flower beds from top to bottom and a pyramid with a waterfall, is now worse than a council tip, due to neglect and vandalism. Where are the promised street wardens, litter pickers, estate gardeners etc? ... where is the regeneration money and grants allocated for this estate? Ask anyone on the estate, and they want regeneration now. There are no sports facilities , and who stole the playing fields allocated to this estate, and fenced them off? Open up the fields again, they are under-used. On the ...