Where there's muck

Council Depot building June 2020. It's demise has been over stated

More on the Culvert beneath the City Stadium a.k.a. my Battlefield the Beautiful. It seems my informant's ideas about the rest of the Council's building in Sandyford coming down is incorrect. Scaffolding against the remanent shed is being used to create a new gable end. Watch this space.

Meanwhile some very friendly locals with an interest in all things Lower Ouseburn put kindly drew may attention to Peter Shearer's facebook group Classic Photographs of Newcastle and of the East End.

A link to the facebook group is here. You would need a facebook account to open this link. It would be worthwhile because Mr Shearer has compiled a great portfolio of photographs from every decade almost to the begins of photography, among them this one of the construction of the Ouseburn culvert from 1906.

Image: North East Heritage Library

The photograph is taken from higher ground possibly somewhere close to modern day Warwick Street. The closest bridge we see is the N.E.R. rail bridge, though whose arches we can see the columns supporting the Byker Road Bridge. Just thinking about the relationship between this image and what's there today is a bit boggling! The immense amount of material dumped to fill in the space above the culvert top snaking towards us!

Tunnel vision

Tyne gap

Part of Newcastle City Council's depot in Sandyford has been fenced off for months. The reasons were unclear until recently when part of the building was demolished. Co-incidentally, A.D. saw men in orange safety suits lowered down into the inspection hole that leads into the Ouseburn Culvert. The culvert that runs under the City Council's depot ... is there perhaps a link?

Inside information tells A.D. that the rest of the building is coming down.

Last century the City 'fathers' decided they couldn't be asked to build yet another road bridge over Ouseburn Vale to connect Heaton to Shieldfield and the city. The whole area was industrialised to a much greater extent than one might suppose by walking around the lower Ouseburn today, so a road was presumably vital. Instead, they hit on the idea of building the culvert over the burn and filling in the gap over it with rubbish from far and wide. Local born author (and friend of George Orwell) Jack Common described the result as 'Newcastle upon Muck'. Yet, because of the basic implications for any substantial foundations built on this 'muck' the land that resulted has never been swallowed up for more buildings. That hasn't stopped the City Council's later incarnations thinking very hard as to how they could unload it on to someone else. Late last century when developers snapped their fingers, the Council was all for handing over the space, now become better known as the City Stadium, for a huge car park adjunct to said developers plans for yet more 'specious and well appointed' offices the city doesn't need. Fortunately that idea fell into another kind of hole, a financial one.

So, by accident rather than design, the sweep of green space in this well packed part of the city remains  – indeed flourishes. But that decision made over a century ago to use rubbish as infill material may have come back to haunt our present day.

Has something happened deep under Sandyford? Is our own version of the St Andreas fault making its presence felt?

With rather more truth than is usually implied by this expression – watch this space.

This view gives some idea of the elevation of the modern day road
and the actual landform it rests upon. To the right the level roadway
is built over the dip into the Vale seen on the left. The culvert runs
beneath this surface in a curve down to the confluence with the River Tyne.