Safe as the Bank of England

A continuation.

My recent walk took me finally into the centre of this city via the notorious Central Motorway at Swan House. Constructed as the focal point to the grandiose plans to create a "Venice of the North" in the 60s – gondoliers were to be replaced with cars; no one in that naive time could foresee that soon the world and his mate would be up for car ownership and the new urban motorway saturated in turn. Nope, this was going to be like 'Metropolis': A very well ordered Rational Society experienced by a new kind of human being, making objective choices in accord with logical principles set out by intellectuals. The Modernists had foreseen the future and now, in this then magnificent Georgian–Victorian city, a great experiment was going to prove them correct. Heaven on earth was obtainable. Pass the slide rule!

I went to capture the last days of the Bank of England building that has stood unoccupied and unloved at the base of Pilgrim Street  for many years. (Pilgrims did walk this way – to visit the shrine of Our Lady at Jesmond - "Jesus' Mound"). In these times watching a Bank crumble into dust is an enjoyable novelty. I doubt this one did much by way of lending to me and thee. I cannot remember seeing anyone going in or out. Like everything from here down to the magnificent Tyne Bridge, the architecture is appalling. Here some of this city's most historic sites were pulverised or marginalised in the enormous effort to build this cornerstone of the Modernists' 'New Jerusalem'. Now the Bank building is coming down after less than fifty years of existence. How I wish the opportunity to demolish the vast Swan House office block itself, empty and unusable, was not grasped a few years ago!

By some piece of 'fast footwork' the empty office block was re-vamped for flats - though demolition was strongly urged. I wonder, looking up, what the new residents do for natural light? The breathless 'now and happening' tone of the subsequent 'lipstick on a corpse' makeover betrays perhaps the absence of any residents who come out in daylight.

Behind the (ex) Bank lies the yards of Bell's Court, opening off Pilgrim Street. This is also mostly now gone to dust or cleared for a car park. I can just remember the alleyway and cobbles beside a dark tenement when it was home to the 'Spectro Arts Centre' in the 70s. It was a slight remainder of an older, pre-'Classical' Newcastle district. Somewhere nearby the infamous French 18th century revolutionary Marat lodged when briefly living in the city awaiting his chance to return to his homeland and take a bath ... A physician, Marat, when not formenting violent overthrow of the world order, had spent time ministering to the horses at Seaton Delaval Hall.*

Nothing of value however, impedes planners. Their overbearing certainty in their own judgements brought merely impermanence and loss to one of the oldest parts of a celebrated city. I recall a firm of demolition specialists (in another city) whose dirty lorries charged about revealing on their battered tail gates this slogan: Watch it come down. Still watching ...

Link for the Holy Jesus Hospital here.

*Thanks to S.B. for information on Marat in Newcastle. 

While the sun shines

Making my way during our recent heatwave (some pessimists say 'summer') towards town via City Road. This is an area that has undergone a mostly unseen re-development in recent years and the area that languished after the Central Motorway sliced it off from the city centre to the west has come back from the dead.

Just enough of the older architecture – styles that reflect the heyday of the commercial history of the nearby Quayside – remains to give this under rated enclave a character of its own. To think, but for film making collective Amber Films (especially the late Murray Martin), it would all (yes, all) have been pounded into the ground. The usual 'roll over and die' attitude that town planners like to encourage in their chosen victims failed because Amber artfully and comprehensively undermined the City Council's case for clearance. Using photography and taped interviews the 'unseen' Quayside told its own unique, diverse story in a subsequent highly popular exhibition at Amber's own Quayside gallery space. Within ten years this attractive diversity had stimulated a landmark re-generation scheme (whose mediocre leadership took pains to distance itself from the radical community roots of this renaissance). By a whisker Newcastle was spared, in part at least, the disease of 'totalitarian' corporate office blocks that have blighted one sea or river frontage after another around the globe.

To me it is ironic that Martin, a socialist of an independent kind, could easily have become a property millionaire had he chosen. Amber bought their own Quayside complex at a rock bottom price and, as I came to know afterwards, were offered other properties nearby at similarly low market values. Within a few years valuations were several ten fold higher.

Murray Martin, film maker and activist, 1943–2007

(photo: Amber Films)

See also: More than a fig leaf

Threatened by sunlight?

After the wettest April for a hundred years (and cold!) we were due some warmer weather. What we got in this land of extremes was a heat wave.

I have wanted for a while to show just how popular 'Battlefield' is with sun bathers and strollers; naturally, I am reluctant to intrude on people's privacy, so discretion and some longer range shots will suffice, I hope, to give something of the appeal this rapidly developing and popular open space (deliberately excluded from Newcastle City Council's Ouseburn 'green corridor' National Lottery bid); thirty five years ago this patch of uninteresting grass had a few stick saplings planted around it. A forlorn place I remember thinking.

Got that wrong, I am happy to say.

My title for this post is taken from verbal remarks made to me by a P.R. representative working on behalf of Metnor Group p.l.c., developers of the old paint factory site. He described the adjacent open space as "threatening".

Beyond the pail ...

Groping along seeking shade from the pitiless sun — (Yes! A week after dreadful cold and dank weather, we now have Hades: The World Tour for our daily sufferings!) — I saw one of the recently planted street trees wilting. Who could blame it?

Wilted. It should look more like this below —

— a little more sprite and less limp.

Action was called for! I made up my mind to do the necessary and cart water to where it was needed. On the way I could marvel in the transformation wrought by a week of sunshine. The old place (Sandyford) looks positively Mediterranean, though somnambulent in the heat of a Sunday afternoon.

Firstly, the pail was filled and then carried to the thirsting sapling to revive it.

The watering tube is thoughtful. How many are ever used?

Streets emptied by sunlight. Later I guarantee the scent of flowers will give way to more pungent ones from barbecues.

A summering Herring Gull wafts past the few streaks that pass for clouds this week.

A clematis overpowers the heat with a gorgeous display, alas! too brief.

Nor bird would sing, nor lamb would bleat,
   Nor any cloud would cross the vault,
But day increased from heat to heat,
   On stony drought and steaming salt;

— from Mariana in the South by Tennyson

Springing Up

One welcome new initiative locally has been to re-plant 'lost' street trees.

Lost is an euphemism, obviously. They got run over by cars. The newly planted trees now come with some protection - not much, - but better than none. Hopefully this will work at least until the trees are established.

A surprising common complaint among locals, those that can be bothered to respond (some give me the impression they live for little else) is trees: The leaves are litter in the autumn; the shade is too over powering; or they simply get in the way of cars ...

Most of the newly planted trees are a species of Sorbus, 'Whitebeams', and are of a modest size when fully grown. In the autumn their bright red berries attract birds. I once watched a flock of Waxwings, largish and attractive plumaged visitors from far Scandinavia, bouncing around one of the few mature trees in this very street.

Here's to the future, something to off set the forest of 'To Let' signs that are now a permanent feature of the local Sandyford scene.