"Urban archaeologists and naturalists then climbed the three-story-high viaduct and discovered a wondrous new prairie in the sky, a wild green river that flowed through concrete canyons and disappeared into the distance."
from 'Up in the Park' by Martin Filler
New York Review of Books (online edition)
Vol. 56, No 13 13.08.09
A nice article on the uses and significance of green space in cities, somewhat adjacent to what I have been on about on this blog for some while.
Over at Walking off the Big Apple, Teri Tynes stole a march on the NYRB with her account and photographic essay.
In light of this article and more importantly what it has to say about urban greening, it may be worth pointing out that there is a plan in progress to apply for Lottery Money for a scheme entitled 'Ouseburn Parks Project'. The 'Project' aims to stitch together existing public parks through or alongside which the Ouseburn winds towards its juncture with the River Tyne. Strangely, one might think, the plan as submitted fails to mention the City Stadium (a.k.a. 'Battlefield') green space which lies over and above the river. Or may be it's not strange at all, given long term plans to turn this open space into (at various times) car parking for offices, or a sports and leisure adjunct to a commercially driven housing project. But then, nothing Newcastle City Council puts its underhand to ever surprises me.
What do they plan for Battlefield? All my attempts to reach the Council's 'Ouseburn Project' website failed this afternoon. You try! Link
Update 28.08.09: Link to newcastle.gov.uk is now working. However , I could not locate anything about the Ouseburn Parks Project on the web site. If and when I succeed I will post the appropriate link.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Burrowing under
Alarm bells rang as I was whisked past Battlefield last weekend when I spied a huge digger right in a grove of trees and surrounded by security fencing. Has 'it' begun? Had there been a swoop on sleeping Battlefield and the first moves of some great building programme now under way?
I hurried along this morning carrying my camera and tripod.
A few photographs of the 'crime scene' and a glimpse into the large deep hole which has been dug inside the shade of the trees. Then a few raucous shouts. Far from fleeing I sauntered over to the gang of men who had gathered around. Was I a spy? ('On what?' I thought but did not say.) Keep smiling. Yes, and could I get a few mug shots? (In fact I never would take photographs of individuals and figures in my photographic studies are routinely 'smudged' or made less identifiable for reasons I hope are obvious to you.) We had a laugh and I found the men most approachable. They were working on the water and sewage system. One helpfully showed me a map.
Beneath our feet lie nineteenth century sewage pipes and tunnels. Here a problem had been building up with the flow of foul water and the idea is to insert an inspection manhole to gain access to a sharp turn in the travel of the pipe at this point. Of concern to my informants were a number of rats running about. I saw none.
Students, chiefly from overseas I imagine, were walking back and forth. The sun shone and I strolled on with my camera. On a path next to the East Coast Mainline as it leaps out on a fine bridge over the Ouseburn Valley I came across more 'engineering', here relaying a stretch of the path's surface.
Battlefield looked a fine, calm and peaceful place despite these operations. As I turned for home I saw the light angled through trees and thought once again how hard it is to recall one is in a city.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Lower Ouseburn – The 2009 tour
I have today uploaded 62 images together with notes, to this site's flickr web gallery. Please do take a few minutes to leaf through them if you are at all interested.
My journey on foot yesterday afternoon was meant to be for the purpose of collecting some images of the controversial new Ouseburn Barrage, now nearing completion. But the fine weather made me wander and several other sights caught my attention, so I ended taking rather a lot of photographs ...
I will have more to say about some of these in due course.
Useful links:
Note: None of the above organisations, businesses nor any employee or owner is associated with this blog, or endorses its content or its opinions.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Two Iains
Two people exercise a distant yet strong guiding hand on my thoughts and observations about the real subject of this blog: A sense of place.
"In June 1955, the Architectural Review published a special issue, written by the brilliant architecture critic Ian Nairn, then just 25, which it titled Outrage. The issue documents the spread of what the AR calls Subtopia - a compound of suburb and utopia - across Britain. "Subtopia," Nairn writes, "is the annihilation of the difference by attempting to make one type of scenery standard for town, suburb, countryside and wild." The AR documents this with great thoroughness. Everything about the issue - the use of drawings and different coloured papers, the typography - glows with visual intelligence. Nairn shows scores of photographs of street lamps, arterial roads, overhead wires, street advertising and bungled attempts at "municipal rustic". He undertakes a 400-mile car journey from Southampton to Carlisle, producing a written commentary supported by pictures of everything he sees, then switches his attention to the Scottish Highlands, where he looks at housing, roads, tourism, hydro-electricity. The issue ends with a manifesto about what needs to be done aimed at the man in the street, which sets out some precepts ("The site's the thing, not a set of rules, and your eye's the thing, not the textbook") and offers a comprehensive list of malpractices to watch out for ("Has the town lost its centre to the car park? Or the open square to a wired-in public garden?").What is remarkable about Outrage is its controlled anger and passion. The purpose of criticism here is to force open people's eyes, to change opinion and make a difference. The writer has a view of Subtopia grounded in a philosophical awareness of what it signifies for the person who lives inside it: "Insensible to the meaning of civilization on the one side and, on the other, ignorant of the well-spring of his own being, he is removing the sharp edge from his own life, exchanging individual feeling for mass experience in a voluntary enslavement far more restrictive and permanent than the feudal system." The issue became a book, and it's clear from the many reviews quoted on the cover that it received a level of attention in the papers that a design magazine initiative would never be granted today. "Sameness can become a most virulent form of ugliness," writes The Observer. "If we are not shocked into recognising it in time, we shall ourselves become subtopians, sub-humans, no longer individuals but for ever members of a herd." To produce a scorching critique like this you need profound idealism and a shared sense of what matters, and we have lost this now. Much of what Nairn and the AR feared came to pass in spite of their protests. In their terms, the visual environment of Britain was carelessly ruined. Subtopia - sprawl, if you prefer - continues to throw a dull blanket of sameness over everything in its path. Design and its offshoot, branding, were instrumental in stamping this uniformity on to British high streets to a degree that Nairn, who died in 1983, can scarcely have imagined. Many people find it harder to feel such a keen sense of outrage today because they have ceased to believe that it's likely to have much effect. What counts is to find ways of accommodating things as they are and of making whatever practical interventions you can lever, though these aren't expected to bring about fundamental change. In architectural circles, the term "post-critical" has gained currency as a way of describing some younger architects' acceptance of the prevailing social, economic and cultural reality. In a recent issue of Harvard Design Magazine, Reinhold Martin notes that this form of architecture is committed to "an affect-driven, nonoppositional, nonresistant, nondissenting and therefore nonutopian form of architectural production"." Rick Poynor writing in ICON magazine online March 2006
Both are named Iain.
The first is dead. The articles written for the London Observer each Sunday by Iain Nairn (1930-83) were my introduction into architectural criticism. Nairn was a controversial figure and an outstanding influence. His best writing has lasted and he coined the term "Subtopia" for symptoms arising from post-war architecture and especially town planning, one which has stood the test of time. He made me aware of the dangers of the blandness of much post-war building and the desire to impose rather than to appreciate. Nairn demonstrated that there are tangible qualities associated with a 'place' which are significant and that these give meaning to our lives.
In the rush to re-build and sweep away something was lost and quite early on, Nairn put those losses into words, as explained here:
"In June 1955, the Architectural Review published a special issue, written by the brilliant architecture critic Ian Nairn, then just 25, which it titled Outrage. The issue documents the spread of what the AR calls Subtopia - a compound of suburb and utopia - across Britain. "Subtopia," Nairn writes, "is the annihilation of the difference by attempting to make one type of scenery standard for town, suburb, countryside and wild." The AR documents this with great thoroughness. Everything about the issue - the use of drawings and different coloured papers, the typography - glows with visual intelligence. Nairn shows scores of photographs of street lamps, arterial roads, overhead wires, street advertising and bungled attempts at "municipal rustic". He undertakes a 400-mile car journey from Southampton to Carlisle, producing a written commentary supported by pictures of everything he sees, then switches his attention to the Scottish Highlands, where he looks at housing, roads, tourism, hydro-electricity. The issue ends with a manifesto about what needs to be done aimed at the man in the street, which sets out some precepts ("The site's the thing, not a set of rules, and your eye's the thing, not the textbook") and offers a comprehensive list of malpractices to watch out for ("Has the town lost its centre to the car park? Or the open square to a wired-in public garden?").What is remarkable about Outrage is its controlled anger and passion. The purpose of criticism here is to force open people's eyes, to change opinion and make a difference. The writer has a view of Subtopia grounded in a philosophical awareness of what it signifies for the person who lives inside it: "Insensible to the meaning of civilization on the one side and, on the other, ignorant of the well-spring of his own being, he is removing the sharp edge from his own life, exchanging individual feeling for mass experience in a voluntary enslavement far more restrictive and permanent than the feudal system." The issue became a book, and it's clear from the many reviews quoted on the cover that it received a level of attention in the papers that a design magazine initiative would never be granted today. "Sameness can become a most virulent form of ugliness," writes The Observer. "If we are not shocked into recognising it in time, we shall ourselves become subtopians, sub-humans, no longer individuals but for ever members of a herd." To produce a scorching critique like this you need profound idealism and a shared sense of what matters, and we have lost this now. Much of what Nairn and the AR feared came to pass in spite of their protests. In their terms, the visual environment of Britain was carelessly ruined. Subtopia - sprawl, if you prefer - continues to throw a dull blanket of sameness over everything in its path. Design and its offshoot, branding, were instrumental in stamping this uniformity on to British high streets to a degree that Nairn, who died in 1983, can scarcely have imagined. Many people find it harder to feel such a keen sense of outrage today because they have ceased to believe that it's likely to have much effect. What counts is to find ways of accommodating things as they are and of making whatever practical interventions you can lever, though these aren't expected to bring about fundamental change. In architectural circles, the term "post-critical" has gained currency as a way of describing some younger architects' acceptance of the prevailing social, economic and cultural reality. In a recent issue of Harvard Design Magazine, Reinhold Martin notes that this form of architecture is committed to "an affect-driven, nonoppositional, nonresistant, nondissenting and therefore nonutopian form of architectural production"." Rick Poynor writing in ICON magazine online March 2006
The second Iain is very much alive and is embroiled with his local Borough Council in London over his recently published book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report. Mr Sinclair was not permitted to launch his work on premises owned by Hackney Council for reasons the Council makes unclear.
Sinclair is part a movement dubbed 'psychogeography'; this is a rich mixture of overlays which disciples gather up from strolling through the landscape of urban and suburban spaces, particularly London, but obviously might be applicable to many other cities. It is an appreciation of the signs of activity left to us by the passage of time, and more especially, people and events which are significantly present and blended together by the action of our own participation.
Sinclair is a poet foremost; Nairn was a sometimes rough pragmatist. Yet both are inspired by uncovering the origins of what we are tempted to believe is 'ordinary life' and show us in different, yet complementary ways, that we need to think about that phrase and its interpretations.
Iain Sinclair
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Clocks and clouds
I once began a review of an exhibition about artistic responses to the subject of climate by writing "It is a cliché that when two strangers from these islands meet they begin by discussing the weather." For a cliché to work however, there must be a grain of truth in it.
Our weather has this week brought spells of intense heat followed by bouffant clouds bubbling and tearing open to reveal seraphic blue over which some divine artist has dragged a brush loaded with cream; or, dotted with a herring bone of gauze. In turn one (if you are that kind of 'one' at least) is reminded of Samuel Palmer's 'Valley with a Bright Cloud' or the even more sumptuous (less mystic perhaps?) creations of Tiepelo, concoctions of sensuousness over which to drape the young and supple models standing in for the old gods.
www.handprint.com
www.cosmovisions.com
Oh, well! Here are my efforts with a camera!
Our weather has this week brought spells of intense heat followed by bouffant clouds bubbling and tearing open to reveal seraphic blue over which some divine artist has dragged a brush loaded with cream; or, dotted with a herring bone of gauze. In turn one (if you are that kind of 'one' at least) is reminded of Samuel Palmer's 'Valley with a Bright Cloud' or the even more sumptuous (less mystic perhaps?) creations of Tiepelo, concoctions of sensuousness over which to drape the young and supple models standing in for the old gods.
www.handprint.com
www.cosmovisions.com
Oh, well! Here are my efforts with a camera!
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