A Return to Durham
An unexpected opportunity presented itself: a drive up to Durham, well like buses, not just one, but two drives about a fortnight apart. Not wanting to waste the moment—or the soft northern light—I decided to throw the camera in the car and have a leisurely mooch about the place for some architecture photography. This post is largely about the second trip, with the first trip being a bit of a recce more than anything. I had, in fact, attempted this very jaunt Northeastwards before. Circa 2007, I think it was. Unfortunately, that trip coincided with the Durham Miners’ Gala, a fact I only discovered after navigating two and a half hours of motorway and arriving to find the entire city engaged in what looked like a coal-themed carnival.
The air was thick with the brassy blare of marching brass bands, and everywhere I turned there were enormous trade union banners being paraded with great enthusiasm. I remember standing there, utterly bewildered, wondering if Durham was always this festive. It wasn’t until a kindly stranger offered me a pamphlet and called me “comrade” that the penny dropped.
With the city centre thoroughly overtaken by miners and music, the day’s plans were quietly abandoned in favour of tracking down a decent gastropub in the surrounding countryside. We consulted the internet—back when you still had to trust it—and set off in search of two promising candidates, both of which, it turned out, had recently joined the ranks of Britain’s great closed-down pubs. It was, all told, a bit of a washout, however it was one outing which was well remembered.
So when a chance to revisit Durham emerged, and crucially not during the Gala, I seized it. This time I’d get my quiet stroll, my architecture photography fix, and perhaps even lunch that didn’t involve a detour into culinary purgatory.
To avoid the M62—which at that early hour functions more as a car storage facility around Leeds than a motorway—I took the more scenic route north along the M6. I turned off at Tebay (home to a service station with actual, but pricey food), then headed through the market town of Kirkby Stephen to the A66—a road which, as promised, still offers the odd kick. This elevated route delivers broad, sweeping views and a sense that you might be driving into a nineteenth-century painting.
Through Barnard Castle to Early Durham
Before long I found myself winding through Barnard Castle, an ancient town that seems to have paused somewhere around 1750, the year, not ten to six in the evening. Its sloping High Street and looming castle ruins whispered promises of future exploration and a bit of architecture photography too.
Soon enough, I was gliding into a multi-storey car park beside the River Wear. At £3.50 for nearly four hours, it felt like the sort of financial win that deserves a small fist-pump. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock, and the city was deliciously still. I made my way up the steep old steps at Elvet Bridge and over the river, noticing how eerily quiet it all felt.
Of course, this is a student town, and I imagine most of them were still nestled in bed, blissfully unaware that 8 o’clock happens twice in one day. The weather was doing its best impression of the inside of a Tupperware box—warm but grey, hazy but not quite dramatic. Still, Durham’s narrow streets and historic architecture did a fine job of blocking out the worst of the sky, leaving me to focus on the textures of stone, the odd clatter of bins being emptied, things being sluiced down outside and the gentle satisfaction of finally arriving on the right day this time.
As I ambled up Elvet Bridge—Durham likes to name its gradients, possibly to warn the unsuspecting—I found myself heading towards Saddler Street. The morning light was beginning to show some character, and so too was the city. A couple of potential photographs presented themselves without too much persuasion.
Capturing the City in Morning Light
One was a classic composition of general architecture photography: cobbles catching the low morning sun, the old stone and brick street curling uphill like something out of a Merchant Ivory film. The textures alone would make any Instagram filter weep with joy, but most Instagram filter have to be content with some bugger gurning into the camera ignorant of what is actually going on behind them.
The other shot was far outside my usual remit. A young woman—presumably a student—was sitting quietly on a set of stone steps cum seating area, bathed in a shard of sunshine that had somehow broken through the morning murk. She was entirely absorbed in her phone, utterly unaware that she had wandered into a potential Rembrandt. The contrast was arresting: her bright figure standing out against a backdrop of deep shadow. I don’t do ‘street photography’ as a rule. People move, they blink, they point fingers and get belligerent. But this was one of those rare tableaux where everything aligned, and it would have been photographic negligence to pass it by.
Continuing the slow incline up Saddler Street, I made a point of simply looking. Not just glancing at things, but actually seeing them—something we tend to forget while busily navigating from coffee shop to cathedral. The buildings lining the way revealed their past lives in architectural whispers: faint signs, old fixtures, doorways where once there might’ve been a bell to summon the shopkeeper, disused and cracked windows. Many of these structures, particularly as you approach The Bailey, date back several centuries. You can almost feel the layers of commerce and domesticity stacked atop one another—shops below, lodgings above—like an early Georgian sandwich.
For this outing, I’d opted to wander around with the 300mm Nikkor telephoto fitted to the camera—a lens that lives in the Bellingham bag and really earns its keep. It’s versatile, starting at a wide 28mm, but with a satisfying reach when extended and a good allrounder for architecture photography. Ideal for city wandering, where you often want to isolate a curious cornice or an unusually smug flying rat (pigeon) from the visual clutter around it.
It came into its own here, as Durham seems to have a fondness for unnecessarily elaborate doorways. These flourish-heavy entrances are often attached to otherwise quite drab façades, which gives the impression that the architect lost interest halfway up. The results are both endearing and slightly absurd—like a man in an immaculately tailored dinner jacket, starched shirt and silk bow tie, yet wearing and cotton pyjama bottoms. One suspects these grand entrances serve no practical purpose beyond ensuring that entering the building feels ever so slightly ceremonial.
Cathedral, Castle and Collegiate Grandeur
Of course, the real architectural heavyweights in Durham are the trio that dominate the skyline and much of the city’s identity: the Cathedral, the Castle, and the University. The latter, despite its ye-olde-worlde air and fondness for Latin mottos, was only founded in 1832. I had always assumed it was a medieval institution as venerable as the Castle, Cathedral and the scholar Bede who is buried within its Galilee Chapel, but no—the University of Manchester, in that industrial upstart of a city local and familiar to me, predates it!! Still, Durham manages to look older though, in the way certain actors always seem to be playing characters twice their age.
Durham University follows the Collegiate system, much like Oxford and Cambridge. This means that a number of buildings around the city bear proud heraldic crests—colourful coats of arms placed above or beside doorways to indicate the college within. It lends a vaguely aristocratic air to student accommodation, and for a moment you can almost believe the residents inside are diligently studying Aquinas rather than bingeing on Netflix box sets and surviving on beans on toast and Deliveroo.
I spent a cheerful while mooching about the North and South Bailey, loitering with aesthetic intent around the gardens of the Durham Cathedral Chorister School. The architecture here plays a well-rehearsed tune—stonework weathered just so, archways with a quiet smugness, and a liberal scattering of heraldic decoration that wouldn’t look out of place in a Netflix drama about medieval courtly intrigue.
It stirred a curious sort of envy in me. Not for the elite education or the Gregorian chanting, but for the coat of arms. I began to wonder whether I might commission one for my own front door. After all, my house dates back to 1760—practically a youngster by Durham’s standards, but venerable enough to warrant a bit of painted heraldry. A rampant badger perhaps, on a field of biscuit beige. I didn’t pursue the idea much further, but the fantasy lingered a while.
Departures and Detours
I chose not to descend to the riverside this time. I’d walked the loop before, and dutifully collected those postcard shots: the cathedral and castle rising dramatically above the River Wear, perfectly reflected in its slow-moving mirror. No doubt they still looked magnificent, but I was more taken today with the quirky survivors—the buildings with characterful decay, ivy creeping where it shouldn’t, stone cornices sagging gently like retired aristocrats.
Time, however, was not on my side. I had to be back at the car and on the road by one o’clock, and there was the small matter of a pint calling my name. So I made my way back to Elvet Bridge and ducked into The Swan and Three Cygnets, a riverside pub with a name that sounds like it ought to be illustrated on a tea towel.
It’s a Sam Smith’s establishment, which means three things: wood panelling, no music, and prices that seem to have been frozen sometime in the late 1990s. I was delighted to hand over a fiver and receive in return one honest pint of bitter and two bags of crisps. It was like ‘Spoons, only without the ambient despair and clientele who look as though they’ve been assembled from spare parts found behind a Lidl.
Refreshed and feeling faintly victorious, I made my way back to the car park. The camera’s card was rather more full than when I arrived, and I’d spent the morning surrounded by history, eccentric architecture, and the faint aroma of medieval ambition. Not a bad way to spend a Friday.
And so, with the bells of midday echoing faintly across the rooftops and a satisfying weight to my camera bag, I took my leave of Durham. It had been, all told, a quietly successful sortie: no miners, no bandstands, no closed-down gastropubs—just a wealth of weathered stone, heraldic doorways, and the kind of crumbly charm that makes you want to start a restoration project you’ll never finish. There’s something wonderfully unhurried about Durham when it’s not mid-celebration. It’s a city that doesn’t feel the need to impress you all at once. Instead, it unfurls itself slowly, in crooked alleys, faded signage, and door knockers shaped like mythical beasts. It rewards loitering.
And while the cathedral might hog the postcards, it’s the forgotten corners and dignified decay that stuck with me. That, and the knowledge that somewhere in the city, there’s still a pint to be had for about three quid—and not a fruit machine or football shirt in sight (well, there was a elderly man in a well worn, yellow Leeds United shirt, but then that poses the question of whether the performance of Leeds United out on the field could be classed as football?)
I’ll be back, no doubt. Perhaps next time I will commission that family crest.
Rampant badger optional.
