Through the power of dance!

The first time I saw Marlborough Crescent and the nearby streets was from the top of a bus travelling west into Scotswood, then being taken away in the back of fleets of lorries following T. Dan Smith’s Great Leap Forward for Newcastle city in the early 70s. Cruddas Park was not yet synonymous with intractable urban problems. The lower end of the West Road around Bath Lane, Pink Lane and behind the historic Stoll Theatre was grim. Very grim. Great patches of beaten flat mud alongside the dereliction were home to heaps (in every sense) of battered second hand cars. Many even had matching coloured doors.

Somehow Marlborough Crescent and the streets to the north avoided complete demolition. One born and bred Geordie friend told me it was here, not the Grade II Listed Eldon Square where the retail centre of the same (misused) name should have been sited. He was probably right.

Instead it became the home of Dance City.

Originally housed in a lane off Waterloo Street, these dance studios got the money together to build a brand new centre with a marvellous performance space alongside one of T. Dan’s infamous urban motorway schemes, known to us as the Jackie Milburn Boulevard. I’ll say no more.

By the 90s the district was to be rebranded as the Theatre Village. I’m not sure what John Hall, one of the proposers, got out of it. If it ever meant much, the brand name hasn’t damaged the place that’s for sure. Waterloo Street had been revitalised by the superb North British development in 1980, still one of the best looking in the city. This scheme was followed by an imaginative re-purposing of a very fine 1930s brick building that had had a long and often shabby recent history bang opposite, Some of the other additions since then have not been either as successful nor have gelled as well; the large central space between Dance City and the newly built Holiday Inn Express seems a desolate place even in sunshine and what little that has been done to landscape this sweep of concrete simply underlines this.

Fortunately, this hasn’t undermined what has been gained. Many trees around the area and besides the motorway planted twenty years ago have begun to make an addition to the feel of place here that I find reminiscent of some of the best urban spaces I know or have seen around the country and overseas. There is a fine feeling about this slice of urban living between the ‘Boulevard’ and the Central Station. It is both large scale and small scale, busy and quiet, a complex of surprising vistas. One can see a distant hillside topped by woods in one direction and in another a narrow 19th century lane that looks as though horses and carts and business men in stovepipe hats have only just left.

Slideshow here (off site link)