Remembrance Sunday 2013

Sunday 10th November was sunny. The sky was a cloudless blue, cold and high and the sun shone at an intimidating angle through the trees.

I went for a walk along Ouseburn and up into Heaton Park. People came and went, young and old, some cycling or running. Somethings are still free. We will remember them.

Heaton Park 10.11.13

One for Christmas Reading

I know it is bit early (though the shops are full of Christmas items despite there being still green leaves on the trees) but some exciting news this weekend from The Observer. A new book on architectural critic and contrarian writer Ian Nairn is published and a programme on BBC Television Four in the offing.

Nairn will just not go away.

Ian Nairn 1930-83

A devoted if small number of admirers have never quite let his memory fade after he he died in 1983 just short of  the young age of 53 (from alcoholism); thereafter he turned up infrequently in short tributes or asides in other people's broadcasts.

Nairn's grasp of the importance of the built environment and the curse of modern 'planning' could be wilful but always large and wholehearted. He taught me as a teenager half a century ago reading his pieces (in The Observer), to look, to note and appreciate what was there, existing and real, the accumulation of buildings, artefacts, roofs and pavements that makes a place a place; the then often unappreciated and neglected, carriers of stories we should and must (for his was a moral concern at its core) attend to, letting it inform our lives, and by so doing give significance to the meaning of living.

Please read The Observer's Rowan Moore review of Nairn's life and influence here (off site link).

Battlefield at the end of Summer

The schools went back; then the migrant birds left to go south for the winter and students arrived back all over the city. So it is the end of the summer. 2013 was a fine one – at the finish. Trees and shrubs reflect this in prodigious amounts of berries and fruits produced. Slowly some of the trees are being to change colour and more and more leaves find their way to the ground.

I am stunned to see how much the year has added in growth all round Battlefield (the name I have given this plot of green space). Trees particularly have grown well.

The old paint factory site lingers on as waste ground. Meanwhile two new blocks have sprung up on Portland Road when once we were promised offices, offices the city patently did not need. Another mini-supermarket has opened its doors locally, hoping to capture the increasing student market share. The economic prosperity of this fair city, like some others around the U.K., is now 'down to them'; the cash injection must be tens of millions annually, bigger than ship building was on the Tyne in the past glory days, so I was told. What though, if the bubble also bursts? No one is thinking of that, or, if they are, they are keeping it to themselves.

Newcastle is now something of a big building site, with more projects underway than for some time past. The area in front of John Dobson's iconic Central Station is having another town planners fantasy frontage cum facelift, the third I can recall in my forty years living in this city. This one has one of those 'Kiss of Death' names attached to it: 'Central Gateway' (possibly, 'The Central Gateway').

But my thoughts on this building boom can wait another posting to come; meanwhile here are some photographs. (Off site link.)

End of Summer

Teri Tynes: An appreciation

I came across 'Walking off the Big Apple' by complete chance, as one does on the internet, some years ago searching for something else. From then on it was a delight to turn away from 'wars and the rumours of wars' to read something gracious, enthusiastic, informed and spiritually generous once in a while. The site was run (single handedly at that) by Teri Tynes, a New Yorker from Texas.

Subtitled 'A strollers guide to New York City', Tynes recorded her walks around Manhattan Island (and occasionally beyond), illustrated with her own superb photographs, the sheer delight city life could bring to the observant and curious mind. However, 'All life is here' wouldn't be true of 'Walking ...'. Tynes left out the soiled and gruesome to elevate her gaze just so far, far enough. Of smart restaurants and snob pleasures there were few mentions, if only to highlight the self imposed chasm that separates those whose money insulates them from experience. Her aspiration was to re-invent the 19th century flanneur, the ironic, knowledgeable and essentially sympathetic wanderer, able to delight in all the inconsequential details of modern urban life; for most of us on this planet now, this is life. She succeeded.

Her energy was prodigious; the site developed and grew in scope; the Internet add-ons (that defeat me) she had a plenty; slideshows and maps, calendars of forthcoming art exhibitions and film reviews (Tynes is an accomplished film critic); historical detail and observations on architecture and eating out; all this combined to provide a user's guide to New York City like nothing else I have seen, since it was essentially the unique product of a single mind, a particularly fine one. She even found time to encourage your humble servant.

Earlier this year the steady steam of postings declined and then halted. Now Ms Tynes has issued a post on the site to announce her retirement. Many followers have added their thoughts to her comments thread, thanking her, regretting the passing of what was, for many, an essential recreational delight. The news came with evident sadness. Reflecting on this news afterwards, I was reminded of some lines by Keith Douglas (1920-44) –

the specimens, the lilies of ambition
still spring in their climate, still unpicked:
but time, time is all I lacked
to find them, as the great collectors before me.


But she had found much, shared much. Tynes' achievement is and remains wonderful, an exemplar. My own sadness is eased by the knowledge that much of what she wrote and photographed will remain up on the Internet. Who knows someone might produce a e-book of her postings. One thing is for certain, Teri Tyne's achievement will not be soon matched nor forgot.

Ouseburn 2013: Part the Second

Ouseburn July 2013 Part II

After a pause, I'll continue ...

Actually, my computer died and I had to bury it and get another. So I will hasten to conclude this two parter with as few words of delay as possible.

From this point of my walk I might as well been in a great forest. Huge trees above me on the bank to my right stretched branches out overhead, creating deep shade on what was the end of another brilliant day in this Summer of 2013. The second slide in the show is of a Trifid-like Giant Hogweed lingering menacingly in the shade, taken from a safe distance. One to keep an eye on ...

My walk took me along the road past the allotments ranged over a flat land adjacent to the burn; the road can be busy and sometimes very unsafe because of the lack of a proper footpath and some blind bends. It serves the emergency services well, apparently, and that has meant little can be done to divert or slow traffic down. Thankfully, the majority of vehicles using this route are driven with consideration for other road users, though, evenso, I would have liked to have seen some 'rumble strips' – raised speed bumps of a kind – just as a precautionary warning. Not that we are going to get them. Nor the other brilliant idea put forward at a public meeting by a woman who suggested decorative gates as a visual signal that this was a special road.

It is still special for all that.

My walk ended by going up onto the flyover that carries traffic through Cradlewell onwards to the junction with the Coast Road. When this flyover was built back in the last years of the past century people (young, fit people) climbed into trees to stop felling operations and to protest the intrusion of a new dual carriageway road through this idyllic dene. They were hauled out of their perches by bailiffs recruited from the climbing fraternity. But the point was made and more time and trouble spent on landscaping and some architectural details than might have once been the case. (I still feel the portico entrances to the short tunnel linking the flyover to the Cradlewell could have been more sensitively designed and built). A benefit of the flyover has been to make the dene below so much quieter and safer to walk. One local ecologist spoke of his delight in seeing fewer dead creatures, killed by traffic, that were a sad feature of the old road.

What we have now is a true 'green lung' and animals and birds can thrive here in peace as I hope these photographs show. But the price of this enjoyment is vigilance.