1 March 2019. Most of the material is in store until Neville Hall reopens in Autumn 2020 after refurbishment. There is a continuing digitisation programme of archives and other resources in the collection and a process to provide online access to digitised material is being developed. Currently The Common Room has an exhibition, Graft and Glory, that explores the North East’s industrial heritage and is touring various venues in the region from the Tweed to the Tees. It is associated with a public programme of family activities, public lectures, oral history workshops and community engagement. Institute building In early years meetings of the Institute were held in the Literary and Philosophical Society and other local premises, but the need for its own building became apparent. Robert Stephenson, son of George Stephenson, a colleague and contemporary of Nicholas Wood, was his pupil at Killingworth Colliery and when Robert Stephenson died in October 1859 he left £2000 to the Institute which started a fund to build its permanent home. In 1867 plans were made and the building constructed in 1869-72 in Grainger's new town on the site of the medical school on land traditionally held by the Dukes of Westmorland, the Nevilles. It comprises the Wood Memorial Hall containing the Library, lecture theatre and other small rooms and Neville Hall which was primarily office space that from the beginning until recently was let to various mining and other organisations, such as the Coal Trade Association, Blyth and Tyne Railway, Freemasons and the Law Society. The architect was Archibald Matthias Dunn, whose father, mining engineer and Mines Inspector Matthias Dunn, had been present at the Institute's inaugural meeting. It was built at the height of the English Gothic Revival and shows a mixture of gothic and Tyneside Classical themes. The Library has high windows and a sky lit barrel-vaulted ceiling - the highest point 39 ft above the floor - with stained glass windows by Cooke of London. It includes a monumental statue of Nicholas Wood mounted on a throne in the setting of an iconstasis. There are other works of art including marble busts of John Buddle and Thomas Forster, the Institute's second president and a carving of the River God Tyne including the Institute motto Moneo et munio - I advise and I protect. The original lecture theatre was replaced by the current one in 1902 designed by local architects Cackett