Former Tyne & Wear Council offices on Sandyford Road
A friend once invited me one evening to meet a man who had shook hands with Frank Lloyd Wright. We met up at the Jesmond Station besides the former Scottish Life office complex on Sandyford Road, just then being converted into apartments. As we chatted the man who had met Wright pointed at the 'skinned' block opposite now just a series of reinforced concrete beams and vertical supports netting the setting sun. 'I just wish they would leave it like that'.
I could see his point. What had been a clasp built box of unflinching mediocrity was now a Constructivist sculpture of elegance and poise making a weave pattern against the glowing sunset. It didn't stay that way but what it became was somewhat more aesthetically pleasing – discrete anyway.
That block and the associated tower block facing onto Sandyford Road was last occupied by the long gone Tyne & Wear Council.* For some reason developing the tower block was delayed – Covid? – but has finally begun. Before it disappears under some newer scheme of out facing covering, we can enjoy the sight of perhaps one of the best sculptures in the city.
Northumbria University's mediocre Claude Gibb tower block
*The history of the Tyne & Wear Council is here:
Those who knew claimed the Tyne & Wear Council had a more interventionist and imaginative policy outlook than those local councils that replaced it. Maybe that was the intention behind dissolution?
