Student City 2015

The seemingly never ending, unstoppable, rise of student accommodation 'blocks' continues. It looks like a very competitive market for student cash.

My most recent jaunt around my patch took me to sites dotted about Shieldfield in more and more surprising places; a former building construction premises has speedily vanished and is being replaced even faster by a children's playing brick style development where the living spaces are pre-fabricated in factories and fitted together on-site. Around the corner on Stepney Bank another such venture (The Glassworks) is speedily joining recent and not-so-recent additions.

I shall have something more to write on this stream of development activity, meanwhile, enjoy the photographs here (off site link).

Ouseburn Walk Part the Three

The final part of an early year check up on what has been happening in the Lower Ouseburn.

Some new developments – the Byker Bridge Housing Association apartments for one – are welcome. Lower down besides the infamous barrage, sustainable housing has created a blot on the landscape. Whatever the merits of the buildings as energy efficient dwellings, the architectural short comings are obvious, and at this date, somewhat puzzling. How did the plans get approved? Desperation might be the answer.

Sustainable 'architecture'

After all, the Council needs to generate a lot of income to pay the charges on the debt run up by the 6 million plus GBP Ouseburn Barrage.

Otherwise the photographs show why Ouseburn has been a wasting asset in this city. A wonderful combination of topography, industrial heritage and natural regeneration. It seems able to cope with whatever is thrown at it by those without eyes to see.

Link to photographic slideshow here.

Ouseburn Walk Part the Two

Sometimes I think one should be silent and let the images do the talking.

Link to Part the Two slideshow here.

I would say just this. How much I love the inconsequential and the unplanned; a roadway made long ago from pieces of volcanic dolerite jumbled together are to be treasured. Jacob's Sheep and nearby a veteran Rolls-Royce (when they were such). Views of places that might be far outside rather than inside a city.

Ouseburn Walk Part the First

A run of days of clear blue, cold skies. Time to record the passing season and note the changes taking place between 'Battlefield' open space and the Lower Ouseburn Valley as the days grow longer.

Increasingly, I am attracted to chaos. Interposed against the creep of planning, its order and mediocrity, are the stubborn, the ugly beauty of chance and accident. Despite the earth movers and cranes, tarmac and 'directions', Ouseburn retains its scraps and scars like a unloved fringe, waiting for recognition. 

I hope you agree. Link to off site slideshow gallery here

A View from the Bridge

 Quayside

Amber Films – a collective of like-minded film makers and photographers – made this short film in 1974. It is about Newcastle and was made for the City's planners at a time when the city was being re-developed along Modernist lines. Some of the city's fine architecture that had been valued and was of historic importance regionally and nationally, had already been demolished by this time. More was to follow in the next decade.

You can watch it on this link here.

The film was rejected by the planners – they appear at the end of this film working in an office that is high up in the then newly built Civic Centre where T. Dan Smith, the controversial leader of the Labour local government, worked to bring about this transformation of a run down, but still magnificent Georgian Victorian city, into somewhere that could have been anywhere. Smith later fell from grace and went to prison for corruption – though he personally seems to have made little or nothing from this. After his release Amber Films made a film about him instead of one about the city he and his associates set out to destroy. The film about Smith is somewhat better than this one Amber made on Newcastle, but it does give a truthful portrait of how the city looked and felt forty years ago. Perhaps that is why it was rejected.

The opening shots of Newcastle's Quayside and the bridges is taken from the then run down area called The Side, where Amber were based and still are. Murray Martin, who produced this film, went on to nearly single handedly prevent the destruction of the Quayside by the planners. If you watch the planners in their office playing with their tiny plywood rectangles and plain faced tower blocks you can get a sense what might have been.

Bigg Market