OUR Northallerton archive of three weeks ago included a photograph of a family group standing outside their shop, Wright's confectionery, somewhere in the town. Thanks to everyone who informed us that it was the building to the south of Lewis and Cooper in the High Street which is now occupied by Caffe Nero.

Pearl Lynas got in touch because the photograph, taken in 1910, shows her family. Her father, Victor Lewis Marshall Wright, is the little boy on the left, and his sisters, Ivy and Violet, are with him. The ladies on the top step are Pearl's great aunts, Miss Sarah Jane Wright and Miss Emma Mary Wright, who ran the shop.

And Arthur Peacock, who lives near Middleton Tyas, got in touch because his family took over the shop from the Wrights in the 1920s. Indeed, Arthur lived the first seven years of his life in the flat above the shop.

His mother, Marjorie Alice Whitfield, ran it with her sister, Winifred Pamela, and so it is their middle names that are on the board over the door where it says "AP Whitfield". As they were trained bakers they could correctly be called bakeresses although the proper, if ancient, word for a female baker was baxter. Anyway, as backeresses, they installed ovens in the cellar and turned the shop into the Thornton Cafe which they named after Thornton Watlass where they had grown up.

They leased the shop from the Barker family of haberdashers across the road, and in the late 1930s they didn't renew their lease but instead concentrated on their families.

WE'VE also been looking recently at Gunnergate Hall which was at Marton, Middlesbrough, until it was demolished in 1946. Fairy Dell Park occupies its extensive gardens.

Betty Hughes of Marton kindly sends us a cutting from the Yorkshire Gazette advertising the auction of Gunnergate Hall at the Black Lion, Stockton, on February 24, 1830. The hall was described as being "for the reception of a genteel family, with garden, orchard, carriage house and stabling for nine horses". It had 116 acres of farmland, four cottages and three acres of grassland at Ayresome, and had been owned by Thomas Robinson of Marsh House, Ayresome.

This comfortable country property was later acquired by the Quaker banker Charles Leatham, originally from Wakefield, who on March 8, 1851, married Rachel Pease, the daughter of Joseph Pease whose statue stands in the centre of Darlington. The D&S carried a lengthy report of their marriage at the town's Friends' Meeting House, the ceremony being attended by "an assemblage of the beauty and influence of the town".

It is a marvellous report: "As we are not skilled in describing the mysteries of a lady’s toilet, the curiosity of our fair readers must be contented with the simple statement that then lovely and accomplished bridge was attired in a dress of white silk, surmounted by a paletôt (we believe that is the word), and bonnet of similar materials."

It was Charles and Rachel who turned Gunnergate into the grand hall seen in our picture, although Charles died aged 33 in 1858, and Rachel soon moved out – she later became the wife of William Fowler, the MP for Cambridge, who was the brother of the steam plough inventor, John, who has a monument in his honour in Darlington's South Park.

The new owner of Gunnergate, ironmaster Thomas Vaughan, spent so much money on extending the hall further that it toppled him into bankruptcy. It was then owned by the Bolckow and Dixon families before the military used it during the Second World War and left it derelict.