Intriguing

When I saw a triangle of rough grassland had been freshly mown and was in the first stages of being dug up, I feared the worst for Battlefield. However, there was something about this undertaking that gave me pause for thought.

A woman wearing a green gilet sitting on a bench nearby seemed to be involved. She and her soon arrived colleague, carrying an armful of snacks, beamed re-assurance. They were Wild Intrigue.

I hadn't heard of this group – shame! – but I soon learned a great deal more, all of it exciting.

The rough grassland had proven almost dead ecologically speaking and its roots form a membrane that would resist any flowering plants; this is the result of a gradual process where a dominant species excludes others. The lack of 'intervention' produces stasis. No ruminant animals to break it up by trampling, for example.

The Intriguing Two explained what they were about. Removal and replacement of this triangular patch to make a wild flower meadow, improving amenity but also providing a resource for numerous invertebrates, importantly, bees, those tireless agents of growth and sustenance. At the same time my own fears for this open space remaining open space were placed on hold if not completely allayed.

The 'meadow' will be seeded by the end of this month with a wild flower mix, hopefully involving members of the public.

Friends and neighbours

 Made a new friend on my walk around the patch today. Rocco taking his owner for a stroll in the Spring sunshine. He nearly kept still for a second!

An update coming soon with more photographs of this special part of Shieldfield.

Green is Good

Urban Green, the charity set up some five years ago to manage (and develop) the city’s parks and open spaces, great and small, celebrated or neglected, has been voted out by the City Council who have decided they want to resume stewardship*.

Urban Green attracted critics. It attracted critics before it was a thing indeed. The chief favour of these criticisms as I could see it, was this was ‘privatisation’ by another route and that ‘commercial interests’ would steer the new charitable body. I did in fact find a vendor of refreshments with a pitch in a popular park who told me Urban Green had hiked the ‘fee’ for the right to sell in the park by 270 per cent!

My own direct experience was slightly more favourable. The piece of open space (that in fact has no legal protection as I am informed)  I call ‘Battlefield’ has been given much more attention in a good way in recent years. It is a public park in all but name, and maintenance has included improved facilities and encouragement to use the space recreationally. This could go further with some enlightened interventions, but the security of public access and involvement compared with what was planned by the City Council only a few years before, is much to be welcomed.

However, in some dark corner of what are the Council’s Planning Department and co-workers in mischief, there have been hints that the Council has designs on ‘Battlefield’. I don’t not what these are, but I fear the worst. Urban Green might be a mixed bag of tricks, but compared to the record of the City Council, I fancy they have done a good job.

* One query about the replacement of Urban Green by the Council’s Environmental service is where is the money coming from and how will the networks of volunteering and public interactions be continued from this point on?

Meanwhile …

Some photographs of a favourite ‘ruban’ place. These ‘edges’ of our cities and towns are increasingly under pressure and we are set to lose more and more of nearby green space to developers. Enjoy it while we may.

Happy New Year!

Amid the Clamour

A slow year for posts. Partly this has been due to your correspondents age and health. Yet, the purpose that drove me to create this record of a green place here in busy and built up Newcastle has ripened as it resisted. There are now signs up to mark this 'battlefield' (actually City Stadium) as a definite place. 

Over my acquaintance with the City Stadium it has grown remarkably in character. It really does look and feel like a maturing open space.* The wildlife interest has grown – I hear intriguing news about what's been seen and not long ago saw a Buzzard not far away. Thus, my anxiety about what might happen here – de facto privatisation for one – has receded. But we all know that threats to 'open space' nowadays never can be said to have gone away. The fact that City Stadium was by-passed by the proponents of the Ouseburn Way was troubling.

In the intervening years the place of green space in cities has moved much higher up the political agenda. I think that cultural change is now more than a passing fashion. Covid 19 imposed more than a virus on to people's lives; it produced much anxiety and feelings of alienation that so many subsequently described as having been ameliorated solely through access to green space. Walking under trees and the sky suddenly became a life saver, something that scaled the social wellbeing ladder to recognition.

* As far as I am aware the City Stadium has no officially protected status

Another cause for some hope on the urban renewal front has been a growing awareness of heritage with a small 'h'. True, some fine buildings are in states of shameful neglect, awaiting some imaginative thinking. Numerous office blocks that never have had tenants and the 'here to stay' reality of internet shopping is closing down huge department stores with their high rentals and diminishing footfall, adding to inner urban dereliction. Some initiative is being trialled and I hope it succeeds in changing fortunes, life styles and culture with surprising benefits ..

'Art Deco store to become apartments'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gl978dv0eo

Meanwhile .... We abide.

Peace and Joy to all
at this time

A Town walk

Pink Lane

In the last days of this on off Summer, I walked a route through what I call the heart of this city.

Because it still has a heart, – just. Despite the decades long assaults mounted on its once formidable Georgian and Victorian credentials by successive of City Councils, parts have somehow struggled through into the 21st century. Tellingly, these have a genuine character, that mysterious alchemical process of time and use that conveys something that mock stone paving and gleaming stainless steel beloved of planning mediocrities never can.

Here's hoping sometime in the future not too far off, this quality and its gift to the present will be cherished more than fat contracts to developers.

The Town walk photographic gallery can be found here. (off site link)

The walk begins outside St Andrew's Church, one of the city's oldest. and close to what was once the 'city cross', that marked the town centre in  olden days. A gaudy and useless piece of 'street art', an overblown desk ornament that might well be an up scaled version of the sort of thing chief planners have on their vast polished desks, blocks the pavement outside a modern gin palace.

The route turns right down into Stowell Street and then sharp left through into the site of Blackfriars Monastery, a ruin of an even earlier period of iconoclasm in the city's history. Some of the new development here isn't as crass as elsewhere. It's almost as if the developers paid attention to their surroundings.

Charlotte Square next. Once huge elm trees graced this little piece of green space in the gap between the Roman West Road and the New Town of Richard Grainger. Disease put paid to them. For some reason the City Council have never thought to replace them with more than shrubs and, you guessed it, paving and shining steel. One or two of the shop fronts around about are left overs from the past. With minimal attention here is a genuine 'place' that gives off the sort of feeling of the past times that other people in other places have valued. What it is not is a fake 'Quarter', a vapid invention of estate agents.

The walk continues past Pink Lane's exit onto the West Road. More of which later.

This area just to the west of the route of Hadrians Wall. Sandwiched between the St James's Boulevard (honest!) and the great Central Station, John Dobson's masterpiece and one of the finest railway stations in the U.K. is an area without a name. It has plenty of turnings, alley's and two of the best recent buildings, the North British apartments on Waterloo Street and Dance City. The Boulevard merits some praise if only for its trees, all of which have grown well without attendant vandalism. For some with a memory of how wretched this part of the city looked once upon a time in the 60s and 70s – hundreds of near wrecks sold on as secondhand cars only a tiny few of which shared body panels of the same colour – just an expanse of mud and packed down rubble and cyclone fencing. And a sex shop ...

Today it seems to want to thrive, needs to be loved for itself. Brave souls are pushing the boat out in the shape of a café and comedy cum community hub. And no one has cursed it by attaching the 'something Quarter' to it.

Here the walk turns south and then east back along Waterloo Street to admire a wonderful pairing, first of a Arts and Crafts facade with more than hint of the Vienna Secession about it; another fine building also needs some loving. Second, diagonally across from it stands a monument to bricklaying, standing tall and proud. If it isn't listed, there is a scandal in the making.

A swivel through to Clayton Street West's appendage. When is someone, anyone, going to do something about Goldberg's huge building, empty and uncared for in a prime location?

Over the road going down besides Pugin's St Mary's Cathedral and its epic spire and walking past Forth House, undoubtedly engraved by Thomas Bewick who had a workshop somewhere hereabouts. Try telling that to either the Council or the authors of the Buildings of England series. Sharp left and here we come into Pink Lane, once the site where the infamous Keith Crombie hosted his long gone Jazz Café, about which a film has been made. Here is an indestructible part of this city, admired by our present King no less – until they get around to it.

To be continued?