2014

All my best wishes to everyone for a happy and peaceful New Year.

I'm not posting as much as I once did; but I have much still to add before I close this page of my life. See you soon.

The rush to gush

City Life, the propaganda sheet of Newcastle City Council has come through my letterbox. Like the last one I read – last year? – this is an exemplar of telling the plebs what is good for them.

Newcastle, I was once told long ago, is a city ruled by three forces: Newcastle University, Newcastle United Football Club (NUFC) and Newcastle & Scottish Breweries. Together they got what they wanted. By an almost invisible process plans were made and 'sprung' fully fledged on the punters. Something like this still goes on.

Today these schemes are 'rolled out'. Local media play their part. The infamous attempt to turn Leazes Park (Common Land!) into a subsidiary of Newcastle United Football Club (then owned by Sir John 'MetroCentre' Hall) was planned in stealth and great detail away from the Council offices and appeared overnight with a great splash in the press and a bandwagon primed to recite the words of a script as if this were not the North East, but North Korea.

Other examples of this practise come to mind. Grainger Market was written off (using exactly the same phrases intriguingly) by the Council, Newcastle Evening Chronicle and B.B.C. North East. Grainger Market survives in part due to the fact that the economy would not support the 're-vitalisation' (it ran out of cash) and the rather obvious fact that Grainger Market was not, after all, Covent Garden. Newcastle City Council reminds me of a remark ascribed to Bertolt Brecht when East Germany's 'leadership' felt the populace had let them down: Perhaps the City Council ought to elect a different constituency.

Reading City Life is a bore. It's what they don't tell you that grates. The tone of uplift would make a motivational charlatan blush.

Having manipulated it's 'Awae the Lads' (NUFC's loyal fans) credentials with complete cynicism, Scottish & Newcastle Breweries sold themselves overnight to a multinational who promptly took the brand names and closed the plant down. Hence this:

The large exposed area in the image above is the old brewery site, currently being open cast mined to remove coal before building in ernest begins; excepting it might not. It seems the scheme is being cut back. Nothing has been said but by simply comparing previous statements and plans with what is spoken of now, the differences are obvious. Ambition has a nasty way of colliding with reality like that. So, now there will be some gaps. Parkland may be the answer. Temporary open spaces planted up with flower beds and shrubs. It seems a long way from the fanfare of high tech hyperbole that covered over the loss of an emblematic north east brand and many jobs with it.

Personally, I would welcome this revision. The views over Newcastle from this vantage point are the best I have ever seen short of being in an aircraft. Let's face it, the architecture planned for this dramatic site, a once in a century opportunity to create something worthy of a great historic city, was always going to loose out compared to a tree.

Dereliction. Why is that bad, exactly?

I am being a bit contentious (again). There is just something that I find in the run down and less favoured places that attracts me. Neat, orderly and hygienic has its place: It's called suburbia. One of the attractions of neglect is that there was, after all, something which to neglect.

I wandered about Shieldfield, adjacent to my 'Battlefield' the other day and tried to make some sense of what is happening; the variety of spaces, types of buildings and that remarkable effect, how one kind of new building suddenly, unexpectedly sets one looking again at another, familiar and yet completely transformed by this new association.

Behind Shieldfield next to the, as yet still unredeveloped, old paint factory site, something remarkable is happening. The newly built student 'halls of residence' (as they are not called nowadays) has brought something to the area that threatens to make it one of the most interesting in the city. It vies, it grows and contradicts. What was once derelict and marginalised has been given new life – because to one with a trained and unprejudiced eye, it was always there.

Ernest's Bistro Café thrives; small businesses (vintage furniture, a gym, furniture maker, and a trade supplies outlet) are being jostled by a new music venue. The Biscuit Factory building, old and magnificent is a feature; wonderfully, this is now a place to be and exist. What was simply once a 'threatening' area indeed, is now teetering on becoming 'somewhere'.

A new identity or a resurrected one?

Shieldfield November 2013

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).