The White Swan Centre Site
This is a large white building in the town centre.
Originally, a building owned by Merz & McLellan, built in the 1960s, stood here. This office block contained 100,000 square feet (10,000 m2) of office space and employed 600 professional and clerical people. Constructed by Northumberland County Council, the building towered over Killingworth and could be seen for miles around.
Over the years, the office space became vacant and, like the former Woolco site, it was disused through the 1990s. Then the building was reduced in height, remodernised, reopened and renamed the White Swan Centre. The name White Swan was chosen from suggestions provided by local school children and reflects the swans found on the local lake. The White Swan Centre was built to house many of the local services previously provided in the demolished buildings which had been attached to the high-level shopping precinct. For example the doctors' surgery and library, a small gym was also housed in the White Swan centre as the swimming pool and sports centre had also been demolished. The new Lakeside swimming pool and sports centre has since been built alongside the lake (next to the High School).
Read more about this topic: Killingworth
Famous quotes containing the words white, swan, centre and/or site:
“In marble halls as white as milk,
Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. In marble walls as white as milk (Riddle: An Egg)
“But all is changed, that high horse riderless,
Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode
Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In the centre of his cage
The pacing animal
Surveys the jungle cove
And slicks his slithering wiles
To turn the venereal awl
In the livid wound of love.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is. When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)