This is me with Pudsey The Bear and Hope from Greggs at the NTDF AGM in the hall at the Shiremoor Centre this was took in September 2016 when I was 30 years old when I was younger. This is one of my favourite photos that I’ve always really liked a lot I think it’s very nice.

I use to love watching The Muppets when I was little it was one of my favourite cartoons I use to watch it all the time. I use to watch it a lot and I loved it. All of these are The Muppet Babies to and I always use to think it was a funny cartoon.

We are getting new computers at Park View Project because the old ones use to break down a lot with wifi problems and internet problems. We are back up and running next Tuesday the 30th November. We hope that we get new people using the new computers at Park View Project. Simon and Mart are excited to use the new computers next Tuesday.

I love chocolate cream eggs I love eating them at Easter time to when it’s Easter I’ve loved them since I was little since I’ve been younger I’ve always loved eating them.

I use to love going through a car wash in the car when I was younger I use to think it was fun and I use to really enjoy it. I use to really enjoy it when I was little to I still think it’s pretty cool.

This is where the Dracula films were filmed this is where Transylvania is and where the Dracula horror movies were filmed for years. This is the castle where Dracula was filmed for a lot of years I’ve never been here before but I have always wanted to go and go for the day to.

I love watching this when it is on the television Dads Army is one of my favourite comedies it is sometimes on BBC2 on a Saturday night.

A unique café located in the Linskill Centre and only a ten minute walk from Tynemouth and North Shields. Café 32 has just been refurbished and has a new logo and decor to reflect its position at the heart of our community hub. team at Cafe 32 offer a warm welcome to visitors, tenants and centre users from Monday to Friday. The café is fully licensed and free WiFi is available so customers can keep in touch with family and friends, work or simply relax.

Linskill Park is an Extra Care scheme in North Shields, offering independent living in spacious and contemporary retirement apartments, with on-site care services and a range of communal facilities designed to encourage social living.

Linskill Park is set in its own attractive grounds and comprises 63 two bedroom apartments and four bungalows. Communal facilities include a hair salon, restaurant, library, two residents’ lounges and a well-equipped laundry room. There is also a guest room for use by visiting family and friends.

The court’s large rear garden features a patio and seating area, raised beds and trellising. Residents are able to get involved with the gardening, with their own areas to tend.

There is also a golf club and rugby club close to the court, and a popular local park. There are two retail parks close by: Royal Quays, which has a number of shops, a pub, restaurant and hotel, and Silverlink, which offers shops, restaurants and a cinema. There are two leisure centres close by in Whitley Bay and Tynemouth, a short drive away.

North Shields holds an annual Christmas Market, and nearby Tynemouth hosts markets every Saturday and Sunday, with a farmers’ market the third Saturday of each month.

After the murder of his former friend and later opponent Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, the penitent King Henry II commissioned a new stone bridge in place of the old, with a chapel at its centre dedicated to Becket as martyr. The archbishop had been a native Londoner and a popular figure. The Chapel of St Thomas on the Bridge became the official start of pilgrimage to his Canterbury shrine; it was grander than some town parish churches, and had an additional river-level entrance for fishermen and ferrymen. Building work began in 1176, supervised by Peter of Colechurch. The costs would have been enormous; Henry’s attempt to meet them with taxes on wool and sheepskins probably gave rise to a later legend that London Bridge was built on wool packs.  In 1202, before Colechurch’s death, Isembert, a French monk who was renowned as a bridge builder, was appointed by King John to complete the project. Construction was not finished until 1209. There were houses on the bridge from the start; this was a normal way of paying for the maintenance of a bridge, though in this case it had to be supplemented by other rents and by tolls. From 1282 two bridge wardens were responsible for maintaining the bridge, heading the organization known as the Bridge House. The only two collapses occurred when maintenance had been neglected, in 1281 (five arches) and 1437 (two arches). In 1212, perhaps the greatest of the early fires of London broke out, spreading as far as the chapel and trapping many people.

The bridge was about 926 feet (282 metres) long, and had nineteen piers linked by nineteen arches and a wooden drawbridge. There were ‘starlings‘ around the piers to protect them (they had deeper piles than the piers themselves). The bridge, including the part occupied by houses, was from 20 to 24 feet wide (6.1–7.3 metres). The roadway was mostly around 15 feet wide (4.6 metres), varying from about 14 feet to 16 feet, except that it was narrower at defensive features (the stone gate, the drawbridge and the drawbridge tower) and wider south of the stone gate. The houses occupied only a few feet on each side of the bridge. They received their main support either from the piers, which extended well beyond the bridge itself from west to east, or from ‘hammer beams’ laid from pier to pier parallel to the bridge. It was the length of the piers which made it possible to build quite large houses, up to 34 feet deep (10.4 metres).

The numerous starlings restricted the river’s tidal ebb and flow. The difference in water levels on the two sides of the bridge could be as much as 6 feet (1.8 m), producing ferocious rapids between the piers resembling a weir. Only the brave or foolhardy attempted to “shoot the bridge” – steer a boat between the starlings when in flood – and some were drowned in the attempt. The bridge was “for wise men to pass over, and for fools to pass under.” The restricted flow also meant that in hard winters the river upstream was more susceptible to freezing.

The number of houses on the bridge reached its maximum in the late fourteenth century, when there were 140. Subsequently many of the houses, originally only 10 to 11 feet wide, were merged, so that by 1605 there were 91. Originally they are likely to have had only two storeys, but they were gradually enlarged. In the seventeenth century, when there are detailed descriptions of them, almost all had four or five storeys (counting the garrets as a storey); three houses had six storeys. Two-thirds of the houses were rebuilt from 1477 to 1548. In the seventeenth century, the usual plan was a shop on the ground floor, a hall and often a chamber on the first floor, a kitchen and usually a chamber and a waterhouse (for hauling up water in buckets) on the second floor, and chambers and garrets above. Approximately every other house shared in a ‘cross building’ above the roadway, linking the houses either side and extending from the first floor upwards.The Frozen Thames (1677) by Abraham Hondius in the Museum of London, showing Old London Bridge and Southwark Cathedral at right

All the houses were shops, and the bridge was one of the City of London’s four or five main shopping streets. There seems to have been a deliberate attempt to attract the more prestigious trades. In the late fourteenth century more than four-fifths of the shopkeepers were haberdashers, glovers, cutlers, bowyers and fletchers or from related trades. By 1600 all of these had dwindled except the haberdashers, and the spaces were filled by additional haberdashers, by traders selling textiles and by grocers. From the late seventeenth century there was a greater variety of trades, including metalworkers such as pinmakers and needle makers, sellers of durable goods such as trunks and brushes, booksellers and stationers.

The three major buildings on the bridge were the chapel, the drawbridge tower and the stone gate, all of which seem to have been present soon after the bridge’s construction. The chapel was last rebuilt in 1387–1396, by Henry Yevele, master mason to the king. Following the Reformation, it was converted into a house in 1553. The drawbridge tower was where the severed heads of traitors were exhibited. The drawbridge ceased to be opened in the 1470s and in 1577–1579 the tower was replaced by Nonsuch House – despite the name, a pair of magnificent houses. Its architect was Lewis Stockett, Surveyor of the Queen’s Works, who gave it the second classical facade in London (after Somerset House in the Strand). The stone gate was last rebuilt in the 1470s, and later took over the function of displaying the heads of traitors. The heads were dipped in tar and boiled to preserve them against the elements, and were impaled on pikes. The head of William Wallace was the first recorded as appearing, in 1305, starting a long tradition. Other famous heads on pikes included those of Jack Cade in 1450, Thomas More in 1535, Bishop John Fisher in the same year, and Thomas Cromwell in 1540. In 1598, a German visitor to London, Paul Hentzner, counted over 30 heads on the bridge:

On the south is a bridge of stone eight hundred feet in length, of wonderful work; it is supported upon twenty piers of square stone, sixty feet high and thirty broad, joined by arches of about twenty feet diameter. The whole is covered on each side with houses so disposed as to have the appearance of a continued street, not at all of a bridge. Upon this is built a tower, on whose top the heads of such as have been executed for high treason are placed on iron spikes: we counted above thirty.

The last head was installed in 1661; subsequently heads were placed on Temple Bar instead, until the practice ceased.

There were two multi-seated public latrines, but they seem to have been at the two ends of the bridge, possibly on the riverbank. The one at the north end had two entrances in 1306. in 1481, one of the latrines fell into the Thames and five men were drowned. Neither of the latrines is recorded after 1591.

In 1578–1582 a Dutchman, Peter Morris, created a waterworks at the north end of the bridge. Water wheels under the two northernmost arches drove pumps that raised water to the top of a tower, from which wooden pipes conveyed it into the city. In 1591 water wheels were installed at the south end of the bridge to grind corn.