Gushing

Threatened – with vibrancy

City News is a regular fictional account of what is in the pipeline for the citizenry of this great city, though, to be fair, some of it is inadvertently – one presumes – revealing.

The Grand Design for wrecking one of the country's least known but important Georgian-Victorian cities was mapped out by the ineffable T.Dan Smith half a century ago. There is a scene in a film made at that time of planners in Smith's seat-of-Empire solemnly placing small rectangular blocks of polished wood on a model of the 'new' Newcastle as envisaged*. A series of fiercely yet talent free cuboids would spread out over a demolished city centre through whose canyons cars would freely circulate ... Freely because, in around 1970 or so, there would never be more than a handful. Such is the optimism of planners.

Only part of Smith's 'vision' was created. Bits remain, testament to a fact of the impersistence of Modernist dreams, that concrete does not weather, it only rots. The damage was heroic if the reality is not. Today log jam cars queue through the mid afternoon to go at walking speed over the Tyne Bridge and yet still more to come. For this, much that had grace, vigour and grandeur went down to dust.

So has Smith and most of his deeply unedifying acolytes. But the 'legacy' seemingly persists, warmed up from time to time. Those wood blocks are safe in some cupboard one feels.

City News is gushing this month. It even held a launch of its Trust for the city parks in Leazes Park. Last century the City Council wanted to hive off Leazes Park to Sir John Hall's 'Newcastle United Sporting Club' creating a private playground from a public space on Common Land, the Town Moor. Unsurprisingly, given the players on this pitch, this kind of beneficent approach to the public interest survived that debacle and the shameless City News announces that somewhere it has just decided to call East Pilgrim Street is preparing to go 'vibrant'. Anyone with a memory must tremble at the prospect.

It is common knowledge that the 'High Street' is struggling. Eldon Square and Northumberland Street hold the majority of the large established chains in the city. None are exactly thrilled by the idea another set of stores are planned to join in slicing, even very thinly, the available shopping pound. The news that 'East Pilgrim Street' – vibrant East Pilgrim Street – is about to be developed as another additional shopping venue for the city,  regional centre for shopping no less, might not be the Christmas present the writer of this gushing piece believes it to be. True there is not much competition for miles around, but then again, there is this invention the internet ... you see where this is going.

But all is not what it seems, as is usually, almost invariably in fact, the case with these City News bombshells. The crucial kickstart here, 'key turning' I think the term is, will be a gigantic block of offices –

'Work is expected (nb) next year on the glass fronted (wow!) building which (sic) has been hailed (by whom?) as the catalyst for the rebirth of East Pilgrim Street' – with emendations Ed.

To be followed by more bars, 'leisure' and 'living' developments and a 'pavilion' towards Carliol Square if the wind is set fair and vibrancy doesn't flag.

Eagle eyed among you will be some who will recall the rather large new offices that have been built around the city this century that have never had a paying tenant. As for bars, well, there are no end to the number Newcastle can support it seems. As with all the News one must watch this space.


*Commissioned from the Amber Films collective it was never used. Latterly, and perhaps not unconnected, Amber Films led the fight to preserve the historic Quayside from the wood block treatment. As is, the Quayside is perhaps the singular reason Newcastle is Newcastle still.

Guys to go

A break in the rain and I made my way to Battlefield a.k.a. City Stadium to snap a few more pictures before the wind and rain strip the trees of their colour. Busy. The path a flow of  people, mostly young and I assume students, with a few oldies like me joining them. The sun shone. The ingredients all there. How amazing the place looks now!

Then I came on a green Land Rover parked up and two guys running a pop-up coffee (and more) stop, Zees Beans. George and Zak. They couldn't escape and so had me to bore them half to death with stories about this green space I have seen grow from benighted 'threatening' No Person's Land to what is now a lovely haven for us locals, visitor's and wildlife. They put up with me as I talked non stop and guzzled a very nice and strong coffee. Over on the stadium, the set of up for the fireworks was under way.

Later: I came to watch the first fireworks. Huge crowds, all friendly types. Then there was Zees Beans, busy with a queue of customers. Good luck. It's what is making this part of the city thrive, people with imagination. So many good developments in this past couple of years and, for me, a lot of potential still.

Part One of a photographic essay is here (Off site link)

Way to go

More and more pressure for housing – student or other kinds – grows and grows. More of our green spaces are going to feed the frenzy. But are these homes or housing assets? The planning rules have been relaxed but the 'homes' being built are as I have seen up and down the country, are unaffordable to all but well heeled and or investors. Since the Great Banker's Depression of 2008, finance for social housing has dried up. The double hit of no money and forced to sell the existing social housing stock has produced the predictable situation of unmet demand. Housing lists grow – you've more chance of winning the lottery, any lottery – as fast as the green fringes go under bricks and paving.

I saw plans recently for 5000 homes to swallow up farmland. Much of the landscape where I spent my teenage years has vanished under huge new build schemes in a few years, all detached and few semis, none for starters on the housing ladder not those unable to stump up the necessary thousands for a deposit. Ballooning estates depending on the same infrastructure that coped well with one tractor a day now faces hundreds of cars daily merely for access. The public will have to stump up the deficit in education, health and transport created by private entrepreneurs.

But here is better news. A slight correction to public finances has produced a sort of flag waver for public housing, housing moreover in urban environments; re-development of 'failed estates' or public controlled land. The Guardian has the details here.

Those of us who seek to protect urban green space neglect the housing crisis at our peril. Too few environmental groups proactively promote sustainable urban housing. Not only does it make sense, it promotes social justice.

“The planners told us it was the future.”

"At the time, the zeal of architectural modernism was all-consuming. Many cities outside London, such as Newcastle, Liverpool, Bradford, Birmingham and Plymouth, saw sections of their mostly Victorian historic centres lost to comprehensive redevelopment."

A timely reminder of what has been lost from Simon Jenkins in The Guardian today. Timely, because a wave of spec building has swept over this city and doesn't look like its ending soon. The Chronicle warbles on about exciting developments (sic) around the city that hinge on office blocks, blocks that will join others that have never had paying tenants since they were built in the pre-2008 boom.

Jenkins, not that I am a fan of his, is surely correct in claiming that for many of us, the very features of urban living that have produced the greatest creativity and dynamic growth have come about by re-purposing older buildings and transforming districts collectively, rather than through corporate speculation. Prize examples are to be found in and around Shieldfield, where dilapidation and neglect create chances for low budget revivals. Ironically, as with Ouseburn this eventually draws in the white Porche driving developers, sussing out a market for the chic well heeled in search of authentic urban roughage minus the roughs. Still, there is hope and as the article shows, we can win.

Read the article here (off site link).

Bringing it home

One of the exciting, indeed, energising consequences of finding a green walk on one's own doorstep is the way the connection to nature and environment can suddenly be integrated in one's every day life without an effort. Much of our 'getting away from it all' involves physical transport, timetables, time keeping and no little psychic exhaustion. Little wonder we need to unwind and move at a different pace, to linger and look.

The old track way from Byker down to the Tyne is also reclaimed space for life.

Nearly every year we are seeing or hearing of more and more of the so-called 'Green Belt' going under housing, aspirational housing that does not begin to address the housing problem and recedes the landscape beyond ever further, pushing wild life away from us, particularly the resources poor us. It seems we shall have to await a very different age to redeem what we have lost.

My own feeling is that the post Second World War planning for the future, however well intentioned, was itself a product of viewing life as mechanism. One only has to view those old newsreels on the New Towns or look at the Modernist designs for our bombed cities that were all the rage then to see this essentially bureaucratic view of human society, structured, highly organised. It shared too much with a totalitarian ideology: You Will Be Happy. The faults with it are so obvious now. It has become outmoded.

If one looks objectively at the Green Belt, one of the planners achievements, a trade off to the regimentation elsewhere, what is there? Precious little. Hardly any of the Green Belt is actually available for walking, cycling or simply wandering in. The sacrifice we are making today is simply one of vista. We need to re-think what green space is and what it is for.

I began this blog because the slice of green space on my doorstep was being measured up for a 1300 spaces car park! That was almost twenty years ago. Since then this green field of uncertain parentage has turned into a park in all but name. I would like to live long enough to have it designated as a park. It springs to life in the summer months and walkers and strollers use it as much as speeding cyclists. It has grown an identity too; it's a place. It's accessible and increasingly well used. It gives the young real experience of natural life, a place where imaginations can find projection. That is what quotidian 'green space' does. We need it in our lives. We need to bring it home.

Meanwhile a few snaps of the marvellous efforts that have made the windswept and forlorn warehouse facing 'Battlefield' into the Star & Shadow cinema and cultural hub. Someone (or three?) have also set to and made the former flower beds bloom, a fair compliment to the wildflower strip alongside the cycle path that almost always leaves the best to last as the days grow shorter.