Bringing it home

One of the exciting, indeed, energising consequences of finding a green walk on one's own doorstep is the way the connection to nature and environment can suddenly be integrated in one's every day life without an effort. Much of our 'getting away from it all' involves physical transport, timetables, time keeping and no little psychic exhaustion. Little wonder we need to unwind and move at a different pace, to linger and look.

The old track way from Byker down to the Tyne is also reclaimed space for life.

Nearly every year we are seeing or hearing of more and more of the so-called 'Green Belt' going under housing, aspirational housing that does not begin to address the housing problem and recedes the landscape beyond ever further, pushing wild life away from us, particularly the resources poor us. It seems we shall have to await a very different age to redeem what we have lost.

My own feeling is that the post Second World War planning for the future, however well intentioned, was itself a product of viewing life as mechanism. One only has to view those old newsreels on the New Towns or look at the Modernist designs for our bombed cities that were all the rage then to see this essentially bureaucratic view of human society, structured, highly organised. It shared too much with a totalitarian ideology: You Will Be Happy. The faults with it are so obvious now. It has become outmoded.

If one looks objectively at the Green Belt, one of the planners achievements, a trade off to the regimentation elsewhere, what is there? Precious little. Hardly any of the Green Belt is actually available for walking, cycling or simply wandering in. The sacrifice we are making today is simply one of vista. We need to re-think what green space is and what it is for.

I began this blog because the slice of green space on my doorstep was being measured up for a 1300 spaces car park! That was almost twenty years ago. Since then this green field of uncertain parentage has turned into a park in all but name. I would like to live long enough to have it designated as a park. It springs to life in the summer months and walkers and strollers use it as much as speeding cyclists. It has grown an identity too; it's a place. It's accessible and increasingly well used. It gives the young real experience of natural life, a place where imaginations can find projection. That is what quotidian 'green space' does. We need it in our lives. We need to bring it home.

Meanwhile a few snaps of the marvellous efforts that have made the windswept and forlorn warehouse facing 'Battlefield' into the Star & Shadow cinema and cultural hub. Someone (or three?) have also set to and made the former flower beds bloom, a fair compliment to the wildflower strip alongside the cycle path that almost always leaves the best to last as the days grow shorter.