Northumberland Road (sic) is now a wholly owned glide slope of Northumbria University® p.l.c. and looks as though banking and insurance are the main activities of the earphone wearers going back and forth engrossed in listening rather than looking. And, no. I have never seen anyone sitting on the oversized tranquilser tablets that are dumped along what was once fondly known as the Queen's Highway. White fake marble and stainless steel are the favoured materials of this style and it is showing up all over the city either placed by the Council or others following this lead. I detest it.
Instant mediocrity would be bad enough. But this is no simple crassness. It is planned. It means something.
What that is I suspect will wring out any of the delights of urban life; the untidiness, the unplanned, the contrasts and sheer imbalances that make food for the mind. It has been a feature around the country and in other parts of the world, that stimulus in cities so often springs up where two things are present: neglect and creativity. Neglect is not fussy. Even great buildings fall on hard times and plain ugly ones can spring into new life when the economics are right. A wave of creative people around the city have landed up in buildings that were once banks and insurance company premises. I visited one recently. Walking around corridors that still had the unfeeling sheen of business all over them and entered a space now converted by not much money but a huge amount of belief into something that resembled a Thai restaurant, if you could find one that did Zombie weddings and funerals. Wonderful!
The fear I have is these ecstatic upheavals won't be enough to halt the three piece suits and their lackeys however.
Maybe some small pockets are just too small and piecemeal for the pinstripe successors to Il Duce to bother with. Yet. Another feature of the Creeping Corporatism disorder is the frequency with which, having pioneered urban wasteland renewal on their own or begged money, the artists and entertainers are elbowed out by people quick to see the dollar potential of the edgy urban lifestyle. c.f. Ouseburn or 'designer Punk' of an earlier episode of cultural appropriation by the wealth 'creators'.
An area that has long intrigued me lies as yet mostly uncoverted and overlooked but showing signs that its potential is being realised by a variety of enterprises, all young, penniless one suspects powered by enthusiasm and a creative eye for the very defects that dissuade property sharks and the pedlars of street furniture. It lies like a set of origami shaped spaces and back ways, scraped up between this vanity project, urban motorways and listed but unwanted buildings between the truly dreadful Jury's Inn building (sic) over the old cattle market site, a flash Casino, the lower part of the Newcastle City University campus, the Discovery Museum and the Centre for Life. The Creeping Corporatism has gripped Blandford Square and the back of Waterloo Street, so the threat is there ... The Boulevard drag theatre and the intriguing back lanes, the admixture of buildings styles, periods and uses makes this corner of the city centre a place for new voices.
I welcome the aplhabetti theatre alongside the 'boulevard' urban motorway as positive sign. That, and the nearby excellent Vegano vegan café (licensed) are a sign of hope that unconformity and repurposing are on the move in another piece of unwanted urban space. Despite traffic hammering past, on my visit to Vegano I thought as I looked out on the sprouting trees that I might be in another city altogether, a re-invented one.
Photographic record of my stroll here (Off site link).
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