I took some liberties here. Let’s assume that maybe Willie goes to the Thomas Hepburn Community School. At least today it’s specialised in maths and science, and it’s not so far from where she lives. It’s far enough so she’d have to take a bus there, though. I’ll probably never know how the (school?) bus lines went in east Gateshead in 1998, so let’s just pretend that there was one that went along Carville Street, and then along Sunderland road past Fox Street, and ended up near her school at some point.

Entire neighbourhoods in that area were demolished in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The buildings in the two first panels of course don’t exist anymore. During that period of time, there was extensive redevelopment of East Gateshead, perhaps turning it from this to something better, or gentrifying away large parts of the original residents after having let their neighbourhoods go to hell on purpose, depending on who you ask. (Here is an interesting paper (pdf warning!) about art and gentrification in Gateshead.)
To my great joy, a massive photo documentation was made at that time, involving the residents of the affected areas themselves, and a small part of the photos can be viewed on Flickr. (I used two of them as reference here.)

The Thomas Hepburn Community School was named after the Thomas Hepburn who founded the Northern Union of Pitmen in 1831 and fought for miners’ rights. (More about that here.) Nowadays it seems to be a pretty decent school (with its own special blogs about science and maths that are disturbingly cutesy in a somehow typically British way), and has a brand new building. But there is a facebook page that suggests that things were a bit different around the time Willie would have gone there …

I shamelessly copied the maths from K.A. Stroud’s Engineering Mathematics, the section described as “what they should have taught you in sixth form but probably didn’t”. I am distressed that I used to know this stuff but now I struggle with it.

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It feels a bit weird to do so much research on a place that I have never visited. If/when I go to Gateshead for real, I’ll probably have insanely emotional reactions to everything and start crying and laughing all at the same time when I see the Chandless tower blocks (if they haven’t been demolished yet by then) …