Happy New Year

 Let us hope next year will see the end of the present half life we have all been leading in 2021.

Meanwhile, I forget who said this last century but sadly it has proved to be a very apposite description that applies to every issue of the Council's uber up beat City News propaganda sheet:

'The only way to understand Newcastle City Council is that it hates Newcastle'

More dross is being smeared over what's left of the city centre. Already over supplied with empty offices more and bigger ones are coming, designs that make the average budget hotel chains effort or cut price supermarket look like a Mies van der Rohe masterpiece. 

Sadly, more next year if I have the strength.

In the time of Pandemic

Near Pelaw. The Wardley pit looking towards Pelaw Metro

A theme that emerged from many casual conversations, reading articles and blogs devoted to different topics by many hands, and my own experience, in this time of pandemic and restrictions unlike any of us have known before, has been the one of access to green space. For the vast majority, that access has to be local parks and places close to our own front doors. People had to get outside, for more than exercise; it became something vital to their mental well being. It was as if enforced curtailment drove many to recover something that was significantly beyond the reach of warnings and incipient fears. The reassurance of nature, even the trimmed grass and evenly spaced trees of public parks. Something beyond four walls and a window onto sky.

I have noticed this in myself. I needed something I have been doing as part of my life for ages, walking through landscapes, more than ever before. An hour or so litter picking around 'battlefield' produced something inexplicable but felt in myself. I felt normal.
The Guardian has a good article about this here (off site link). It's worth reading. It is a report about one sdmall example of what has been I imagine is a more widespread experience, some of this in groups but more I suggest individually. Many realise the part nature plays in their lives – or sense it even when they haven't sat down and spent time forensically examining themselves. A 'good feeling' most times is best unexamined. It is there to be enjoyed.

As someone I met on my ramble said, 'You look around and it could anywhere out in the countryside'.

Since the Covid-19 restrictions have varied according to infection spread, I have travelled to one or two sites further away but not more than the regulations allowed. I turned my attention to a few places that are in easy reach. All are re-claimed sites, previously coal mines, now landscaped and gradually shrugging off the manicure that replaced pit heaps and shunting yards forty years ago. These are complex places to 'read'. Plantations of mixed trees vie now with uninvited shrubs and 'garden escapes' and a sort of curious experiment and unofficial 're-wilding' is happening by stealth and positive neglect. What fascinates me, all this is happening on people's doorsteps; these are places alongside new and older housing estates, bisected by the odd busy road or Metro line. It's not what the purists mean when they bang on about 're-wilding' – this is for the many not the few.

A photographic record of wandering around what was for me a newly discovered site here (off site link). Spot the dragonfly!

A tree

 The rise of Urban Green was not something I welcomed; it seemed like a hand off to a commercial enterprise. Besides, I know Newcastle City Council ...

However, it seems my fears were misplaced. There is still no assurance that the City Stadium site (a.k.a. "Battlefield') is really safe from some gimcrack scheme. I have seen nor heard of any proposal to give this increasingly important 'green space' some official designation, but can it be delayed forever?

Meanwhile, along with some other specimens around and about, a tree I have watched with some curiosity spring up besides a motor car show room across from my Battlefield has soared ahead of itself as 'blow in' – I cannot see how anyone could have planted it where it is today. 

Trees are a promise to the future.

Window Dressing

Old Eldon Square almost completely demolished despite public protests

Terry Farrell has made a bequest to his old alma mater, Newcastle University, in the form of a shop. Farrell is donating some of his extensive plans and project proposal documents to this enterprise and hopes to make the planning process that baffles many and seems artfully constructed to achieve this end, more transparent. It might be something to welcome, particularly as the site of the shop is slap opposite the Civic Centre. I have my doubts. For one, Newcastle University has been part of the cabal of local 'interests' and behind the scenes actors that included Newcastle and Scottish Breweries (R.I.P.) and the Freeman in carving up the city as it suited them(1). Skullduggery over Leazes Park was exposed only by diligence by a few private individuals led by the late Dolly and Cliff Potter and a brazenness on the part of the main schemers who had the local media in their pocket and left a trail of slime behind them anyone over five years of age could follow.

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic has killed millions world wide and caused great suffering so it might seem an insult to turn ones gaze to seemingly more mundane outcomes; however, we must somehow re-create something like a confident society out of these troubling times. One aspect of the pandemic has been the acceleration of certain trends that were slowly changing our towns and cities before that fateful year; the decline of shopping per se, the rise of the internet marketplace not just in household and clothing but food deliveries and bought in meals. These latter enterprises actually expanded as most had to stay indoors for much longer than perhaps anytime in our modern history. The future of our living spaces and work patterns is already being discussed in ways that are speculative as much as innovative. The High Street and the Shopping Mall are seemingly at the end of a road. Pity then so much of what once once fine and inspiring (shorn finally of its mere privileged pretensions post 1945, post 1963 even) was pulverised by numerous councils of every stripe around the country, and most notoriously here in the capital of the north east(2).

Surplus to requirements: Nottingham Shopping Mall due to come down.
The similarity of all our city Shopping Malls is striking – but never in a good way.

Can one have any hope for the future? Yes has to be the answer but judging by the past and very recent past, don't bank on it.

The Farrell story in full from The Guardian here.

(1) The historic Haymarket public house that must have once been the watering hole for generations of people bringing produce, some of it on four legs, to the bustling markets was knocked down swiftly by Newcastle University and afterwards described by Vice Chancellor and outspoken Cold War warrior Professor Laurence 'personally I think there is a case for the neutron bomb' Martin, as a haunt of undesirables, including the present author apparently.

(2) Eldon Square, Grade II Listed was flattened almost completely for a hotel that never materialised only to be replaced by 'Eldon Square' Shopping Mall. Eldon Square's financial future looks uncertain. Around the country cities are demolishing such places either in whole or part. So something that today would not have looked out of place in any grand European city was laid waste for what? Shoe shops and a gymnasium.

Re-Cyling

More trees are cut down to make way for cycle lanes around 'Battlefield', that increasingly important 'green lung' in Shieldfield better known as the City Stadium.

Lidl's GB Limited have secured a site off Portland Road next to the new student 'Portland Green' developments. I welcome this. The site was formerly occupied by a company that sold motorhomes and latterly was used as a secure area for storing materials and parking constructor's machinery; it has been a cleared space for some while. It helps I like Lidl's.

So imagine my shock and disappointment when I saw this:

A semi mature cherry tree mutilated just as it came into full flower! It stands besides the pavement and is outside the Lidl's stores footprint as presented in a widely circulated document prior to planning approval.

Why indeed! Someone else was moved by this spectacle. 

I e-mailed my three local ward councillors and copied in Lidl's GB public relations:

'Dear Councillors,

LIDL UK's NEW STORE ON PORTLAND ROAD NE2

I welcomed the plans to construct a new Lidl’s store on Portland Road Newcastle in a public consultation last year; our local community has grown rapidly through student housing in recent years. That together with the impacts of necessary restrictions on retail shopping under Covid regulations have underlined isolation for many from suitably close at hand affordable and product diverse shopping in the ward as you will readily appreciate. My concern is however the unnecessary and complete destruction of trees adjacent to the planned development.

Several trees outside the site's surviving inherited fencing, particularly two semi mature miniature cherry trees have been cut down to stumps. One has had an impromptu ‘Why’ inscribed on the cut area of a branch. I ask the same question. These trees added something special to a street not over blessed in flowering plants and these were in full blossom at the time of their destruction. As you will recall this location was previously used by the companies developing the student housing blocks and was already an open space for the parking and security of large plant, building materials and associated vehicles over night for the duration of the works. I would suggest an area of greater than ninety per cent of this site on Portland Road is in fact, already levelled and clear. The trees on the periphery promised no interference in the forthcoming plans as published; the proposed vehicular access point to the planned store was not Portland Road but the side street leading into the Portland Green development; safer and logical planning in respect to the site layout. Therefore the destruction of these trees seems spurious to the conduct of operations. If so, why so?

The close by Warwick Street City Stadium open space has, due to imaginative care, become a very important green space and a developing site for recreation and ecological enjoyment. It is certain those of us who saw them will never again see spring coming to our corner of the city in such dazzling and welcome form again. The chance to unify both commerce, recreation and environmental development has been set back by some distance even if remedied in due course; for this writer in his eighth decade of life, for good.

I hope you, together with Lidl UK, can explain what the reasons for this over enthusiastic use of chain saws amounts to, beyond casual unthinking destruction.

sincerely ..'

I received no response from any Councillor. Finally, I did receive a reply from a senior member of the Lidl's GB team.

'Hi (names with held)

Thanks for the email which our press office passed on to me. 

 

Lidl’s ownership includes the strip of land from the old fencing up to the back of the existing footpath which includes the trees in your photos.  In 2009 when the Portland Green development was originally granted planning consent, this strip of land was to be dedicated to the Newcastle City Council (NCC) to allow the widening of this section of Stoddart Street to two lanes in the south bound direction.  NCC have now proposed a new cycle lane to replace the road widening, this is shown on our proposed site plan attached.  The strip of land will be dedicated to NCC to allow these works to be completed.

 

The trees in your photos were located on land where the new footpath will be located, adjacent to the new cycle lane, the trees would have had to be removed by the Council in any event as they will likely complete these works.  The trees that were removed are shown on the plan by 4 red circles and were done so at this stage to prevent birds from nesting which could have preventing the development progressing.

 

We are proposing to plant 24 new trees as part of the development, 17 on site and 7 to the north in the park.  7 of the trees on site will be located along the western boundary where the cherry trees were located.

 

The main roof of the store will be covered in solar panels to generate up to 1/3 of the store’s annual electricity requirements, we do not use gas to heat the store, all heat is recovered from the refrigeration system and air source heat pump.  

 

We are also proposing a green roof on the areas not covered by the PVs principally the front and side canopy.

 

If you have any more questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

 

Regards ... (name with held)' – (Emphasis added by BftB)

This then is the second time well grown trees have been removed to benefit cyclists in an around Shieldfield. The cycle track over Battlefield required many to be removed for reasons that were not entirely apparent. This is concerning since the cycle path seemingly opens potential clashes with pedestrians. Where the cycle path goes after it reaches the junction of Portland Road and Shieldfield Lane is also moot.

Thanks to Lidl GB and Rachel Locke of Save Newcastle Wildlife.

Retour à Alphaville

Swan House. Soon to be joined by much needed offices.
Newcastle has many unused office blocks.
Most have had no tenants since completion.

French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) director Jean-Luc Godard made a film in 1965 that parodied American culture and 'B' picture film genres, notably the film noir style that he so admired; low budget films that were quickly made but that, to Godard and his fellow enfant terribles of emerging seminal French cinema, inadvertently expressed something definitive of our present human condition than more sophisticated stories, beyond mere entertainment. They said more with less. That film was Alphaville.

What Godard thought they brought was a sense of the ridiculous, paranoid and controlling that was inherent in our emerging modern world. But all of this was summarised by the banality of our developing surroundings that had become, to echo Kierkegaard's dictum, 'emptied ... of its significance'.

That comparison came to me as I walked about through the No Man's (sic) Land that lies between the epic Tyne Bridge and Manors. Re-development has done nothing for the desolation and alienating landscape produced by T. Dan Smith's 1960s schemes, excepting Swan House now shows its contours openly to the world or that bit that is so confused as to wind up walking in this increasingly hostile at all hours of the day and in all weathers Dead Zone.

But judge for yourself. Photo album here (off site link). Note on the way, those fragments of an older Newcastle orphaned by planning.

Two for One

 Newcastle doesn't do well for parks. One had a motor way built through it on two sides and the other survived – survives? – by accident.

Exhibition Park as come on a lot since it suffered the blow of being amputated from the city by a road scheme. Making best of a bad deal.

Leazes Park was the subject of a devious plot but in one bound was set free, despite the best (sneaky, underhand) efforts of the Council, Hall Enterprises and the Freemen of the City. The proposed Sporting Club of Newcastle United with private access, exclusive shops and gym etc., etc. were never really on. Leazes in actually part of the Town Moor and so Common Land, protected by Act of Parliament. I was persuaded by a long time observer of things Newcastle that the 'scheme' was a scam. But Leazes remains and thrives too.

As 'the virus' continues, we hear much about the changes the year of quarantines and restrictions on our daily lives will mean long term. The consequences for two previously bubbling along nicely sectors, student accommodation and offices are sharply in view. Newcastle's universities relied for their financial security on overseas, especially Chinese students; even before Covid-19 that was looking shaky and now positively dire as we come out of the Chinese silver lining that marked the first two decades of this century. An obvious bubble. Then there is the continuing mystery of office building where few of the completed blocks have ever had paying occupants.

On top of which the famed High Street that boggled the small mind of at least one over promoted functionary heading English Estates last century –'High Street U.K.' flopped in 2008 with the Banker's Gambling Debt crisis.

Forward thinkers are now looking at the post Covid city. What some have suggested will form the discussion in my next post. Meanwhile here's a look at our two isolated but precious green spaces in winter. Photographic gallery: Leazes Park here. (off site link) Exhibition Park here (off site link)

Full house at a frozen Leazes Park Lake

Sent to Coventry

Coventry a la mode – soon to be the U.K.'s next City of Culture.
Many towns and cities went for this 'look'. It reminds this writer of the
deeply unloved and unlovely Newgate Shopping Centre (demolished)

One of the forgotten parts of this country's modern history is the widespread destruction by aerial bombing known as the Blitz of the Second World War on our cities and towns. Many never recovered from a loss of heritage that still shocks to read and inwardly digest. Leicester in 1939 might well have been recognisable to Richard III in 1483. Canterbury saw its Chaucer era medieval centre flattened. Bath, Bristol, Belfast, Glasgow. Liverpool, London, Newcastle and more – ancient and modern together.

But what happened post war to these ruins is the subject of a debate among historians and architects to this day. Unlike Continental Europe, the idea that one might re-build as things had been occurred to no one in authority here in the United Kingdom. Town planners seized a 'once in a life time opportunity' and the peculiar anaemic styles of British Modernity flooded over the spaces created by high explosive. Few were pleased by the results but with so much else to do in a country that was functionally broke, shrugged and moved on. The audience for the competing arguments about heritage and modernity in built form was much smaller than it is today. Besides, the influential wanted a new start and put the past away – and much survived, so what was the problem?

The Guardian reports on one such planning response of the 50s in the iconic victimhood of Coventry, singled out in one infamous raid in 1940. The post war enthusiasm for concrete and motor cars – Coventry was England's 'motor city' at the time, helped polish off such fragments of medieval heritage* that the bombers missed.

How is this relevant to Newcastle? Planning in this city always has something waiting in the wings. The development (sic) of East Pilgrim Street anticipates more offices and retail space at a time when neither faces a rosey future. In Coventry, as the Guardian article explains, there has already been re-think for the mix of one part of its proposed dramatic 're-modelling'; a seventy thirty split of office and retail versus accommodation has been reversed, reflecting the changes brought about by as much else Covid-19 on the patterns of our lives and occupations. Newcastle already possesses – if that is the right expression – a massive over provision of office space, large parts of which have never had a commercial tenant since completion this century. 

There is also a real threat hanging over the 'business models' of our three Universities. The Chinese turning in-house after Hong Kong and Covid-19 issues and an increasing froidure in their international relationships, plus student debt versus employment prospects, reflects badly on what it costs for a few years of 'uni' life. The pell-mell 'money for old rope' student dwellings racket is on the verge of bursting me thinks. What happens next? This city has, as it were, planned for a war that isn't going to happen and is soon to be stuck with its very own version of the Maginot Line.

It might have been so different as one comment beneath the Guardian article explains:

'Philosophaster writes –

• 'Travel all through Europe and every town has a centre largely made up of old buildings made of local materials in local styles that make them all unique, interesting and worth visiting. Even in Poland, which was mostly flattened in WW2, they've rebuilt their centres how they were. In the UK, however, with a few exceptions which are now the centres of our heritage tourism, every historical town centre has been destroyed, several times each, by our own town planners, building companies and corporations, replaced with generic style and materials, cheaply designed and constructed, and filled with the same shops and offices. If you were dropped into a high street, you would have no idea were you were, it could be Anytown. An industrial mill from the 20th century is often the best we can hope for by way of preserving architectural heritage. Simply, the UK has the ugliest towns in Europe.'

*This echoes the post war planning history of Canterbury. A severe attack late in the war destroyed much, but the then city council did the rest. A Town Hall that pre-dated Chaucer's classic tale of Pilgrims was allowed to deteriorate to the point that it was demolished post war. Other gems narrowly avoided destruction at the hands of 'butcher, baker and candlestick maker' councillors.