The Ouseburn Barrage
I picked up a copy of Ouseburn Valley News recently (1). I rarely see it. Ouseburn Valley News is the newsletter of the Ouseburn Valley Trust, a front organisation of Newcastle City Council. It was this Trust that instigated the Barrage Fiasco that resulted in a massive over spend and an unused barrage that mucked up the area around the popular and successful Tyne Bar. The total cost of the barrage was something like more than six million quid all of it borne by Newcastle Council Taxpayers. An alternative to the barrage idea put forward by an independent group of local campaigners that involved using natural processes to resolve the mud question was overruled. Since that time I have viewed the Trust with askance. It seemed to me, and this was confirmed by subsequent events, that the Trust was pursuing a Newcastle Council 'corporatist' agenda in the Lower Ouseburn.
Long time ago I entertained a visitor to the city, a journalist. He and I went for a drink on the Quayside. We discussed the then recent re-built river frontage and admired the views along the Tyne. Then, we took a stroll into Ouseburn. As we came into the Valley, Jonathan turned to me and said "I like urban dereliction". I know what he meant. So do thousands of other people sensitive to the possibilities that arise with unplanned and often unloved areas of our cities and towns. That old expression 'scope for the imagination' has a grounding in truth. Many such places have been highlighted around the world now, unfortunately too frequently because the bull dozers and developers have rocked up to begin work 'transforming' 'dereliction' into expensive 'destinations'.
Togetherness
Ouseburn has been similarly threatened. Indeed, the barrage was intended to assist and enable Lower Ouseburn to become such a 'destination' beloved of the planners and their corporate mindset. Lower Ouseburn would lose the mud at low tide and then very expensive apartments could be built alongside the burn with the ouse covered by water. Smart? Thank heavens it never happened. Or, not yet.
'Mud, glorious mud ...'
On the front page of Ouseburn Valley News I read this:
'We feel a plan for the Ouseburn should not simply be about its regeneration, but about protecting and celebrating what we already have here too.'
I take 'we' to mean the Board of Trustees. If so, this is good news. No longer a rubber stamp for Council plans then. Moreover, looking forward, the writer also adds:
'We want to be ambitious but do not want to compromise what makes Ouseburn special.'
One way of interpreting ambition in this context would be diametrically opposite to 'what makes Ouseburn special'. That must be obvious. I think it so and from reading between the lines I suspect the writer does too.
My own fear that the Lower Ouseburn was a step on a pathway designed in planning offices and awaiting the next consignment of catalogue instant heritage ye olde finger post signs and genuine fake white marble and original Victorian stainless steel handrails have lessened. Not entirely, but much abated by what I have read.
The essential character of Ouseburn is that it was not planned but re-discovered and cherished exactly for those qualities that are now an obstacle to some and a delight to others. It doesn't need the 'heritage' treatment that ruins so much it touches. The very incoherence and occasional inconvenience – a too narrow pathway or over steep set of steps – has to be set against what the alternative would bring in train. Let's keep it real.
(1) Ouseburn Valley News, April 2019
