What happened this year? The Lower Ouseburn marked time and the immense East Coast Mainline bridge was wrapped like a Christo sculpture, a far better art work than the 2011 Turner Prize finalists could come up with in the Baltic on the opposite bank of the Tyne ...
I had fewer opportunities this year to wander camera in hand around my home patch. Some projects have still to be tackled. 2012 is coming.
The reason (well one of them) I started this blog was the re-development of the site I call 'battlefield' (apologies to those who came here looking for pictures of burning tanks or wounded knights) and to the rest to this city as the City Stadium. Threats - in the shape of unsuitable and gimcrack developments inspired by a financial bubble - came along one after another. However, even following a period when money ran like water, the former paint factory site remains, this damp December day, untouched apart from a few piles of builders rubble and swathes of ever more impressive scrub trees and shrubs. Whatever lurks beneath the surface (arsenic, cadmium, antimony ...?) the plants above wave careless.
We shall see what the New Year brings.
With my very best wishes to one and all for
a Peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year
