Change and No Change

 Autumn is coming.

Two trees – seriously. mindlessly, damaged soon after they were planted, have struggled along given a helping hand by yours truly – really come in to their own in the next few weeks. Their beautiful forked and inscribed leaves turn from a serious green through a range of colours from orange yellow onwards in the spectrum, including scarlet. 

One was 'done over' again recently and under gone 'surgery' Still it fights back! I hope my species can too. Covid-19 is putting great strain on one and all.

Keep safe.

The New Vitality

A welcome article recently on what might be the outcome of our present difficulties. The Year of the Virus is not over, but we must try to look beyond it. So much that has been good in the developing creative uses for the old and neglected spaces around the city, not least Ouseburn Valley, has been badly hit by the Corvid-19 crisis. From a much more optimistic outlook to a decidedly worse prospect has been sudden. It collapsed a potential re-birth. But I hope we can hold on; it's not as though upping sticks and moving on and letting the obvious gains slide is really a possibility. Move on where? That's the crucial difference. We must seek to draw together and pool our respective aims to re-build a flowering community. In the twenty something years I have been engaged in highlighting the City Stadium, a.k.a. 'Battlefield' this year it has never looked better. But don't take my word for this renaissance. Architect Irena Bauman of Bauman Lyons Architects, Leeds wrote recently in the The Guardian (18th August 2020) on this possibility to gain from the pain.


The existential emergencies we face require a wholesale reimagining of how we live, work and play in urban spaces

It’s often been said that we’re living through an unprecedented moment. But in city centres, the coronavirus crisis has merely accelerated trends that have been unfolding for some time. In Leeds, where I live, many major banks and building societies, cinemas, shops and department stores declined or disappeared as society shifted online. The pandemic has caused the job market to contract, and many more people are now working from home. But in cities across the country, traditional office spaces have long been shrinking, as technology reduces the need for face-to-face contact and a growing number of self-employed people opt for co-working spaces. Indeed, the idea of a dedicated office building is only 200 years old; before offices, many people lived above their workplaces. 

Despite the economic boom that some UK cities have experienced in the last 20 years, the centre of Leeds, like many other city centres, has not yet recovered from industrial decline. Vacated banking halls have supplied glamorous homes for bars and restaurants in regeneration areas, and housing has returned to the centre, albeit in the limited form of small apartments and poorly designed student accommodation. But the continuing trend of “meanwhile use” and sprawling ground-level car parks across the city are evidence that supply still exceeds demand. ...

This green infrastructure is crucial for biodiversity, carbon capture, water management, temperature cooling and wellbeing. It’s the first step towards remodelling our urban environments as “15 minute cities”, a concept first promoted in Paris, which aims to provide all necessary services required for the health and wellbeing of its residents within 15 minutes’ walking distance. In the past, green infrastructure has also been a response to public health concerns: Central Park in New York was developed following a prolonged outbreak of cholera, and Victoria Park in east London, the city’s first purpose-built park, was opened as a response to insanitary conditions, overcrowding and pollution in the city’s East End. 

But we need to go further. We should be using public investment to build networks of new parks with playgrounds and sport and leisure facilities on underdeveloped sites in city centres. Providing this green infrastructure in our city centres would attract families to live there, and compel businesses to follow. Of course, there will be a time lag between the immediate effects of coronavirus and delivering on these ambitious plans. But I’m optimistic that in this period we’ll see a burst of creativity, of the sort that often emerges from the collapse of outmoded systems. (Emphasis added.)

Empty and cheap space may attract new users and institutions, as it did most notably in Detroit after the demise of its car industry. In UK cities, unused office spaces could be converted into modern family homes; in Leeds, Park Square, a handsome Georgian area that was repurposed into offices could be returned to its original residential use. Defunct shopping centres could become sites for new nurseries and community centres. Our coronavirus retrofit should be the work of many hands, a sensitive process of rebuilding cities so they’re durable, equitable and sociable places to live and work, capable of dealing with the twin emergencies of the pandemic and climate crisis.

Look but don't touch ...

Or, 'keep your distance ...'

So the summer hits its peak and we notice the days are getting ever so slightly shorter.  A strange year not all bad: Air quality improved for a while and some places were very quiet even on a weekday. But what of the future? For 'battlefield' mostly good. 

Since I began posting notes about this slice of green space it has improved year on year. Trees have grown so much I can barely recall how it looked when these were saplings. True, some vandalism recently was jarring note. But the area survives mostly and that's enough. I would like to see a little more planting in some places. However, the years when I feared the site would go under tarmac for car parking or be turned into a sports centre for students only (students are among its biggest fans all the same) are long gone now. Urban Green have moved in and that's fine by me.

Some recent photographs:

Warts and All Ouseburn. One of the aspects of strolling through Lower Ouseburn over the years has been its 'rough edges'; this lack of corporate smoothness endears it to me. It isn't neat tidy and tourist 'heritage' – or not yet, but that is coming. The newer developments have been welcome in part but the fear – my fear – is that 'the men in white Porches' will get their monied hands on the area and the 'chic' of dereliction (see the epicly comedy film Zoolander for details) gets the expensive 'landscape features' and general tidying up plus 'gated' zones that have happened elsewhere. Meanwhile all the qualities of haphazard and messy incongruity that gives a favour to places like Ouseburn will be lost. I hope not and some public statements by Ouseburn old hands leads me to feel encouraged if not over optimistic.

One reason for including the 'street art' is its subversion of 'urban renewal'. I would put up with the one to avoid the dead hand of the other.

Where there's muck

Council Depot building June 2020. It's demise has been over stated

More on the Culvert beneath the City Stadium a.k.a. my Battlefield the Beautiful. It seems my informant's ideas about the rest of the Council's building in Sandyford coming down is incorrect. Scaffolding against the remanent shed is being used to create a new gable end. Watch this space.

Meanwhile some very friendly locals with an interest in all things Lower Ouseburn put kindly drew may attention to Peter Shearer's facebook group Classic Photographs of Newcastle and of the East End.

A link to the facebook group is here. You would need a facebook account to open this link. It would be worthwhile because Mr Shearer has compiled a great portfolio of photographs from every decade almost to the begins of photography, among them this one of the construction of the Ouseburn culvert from 1906.

Image: North East Heritage Library

The photograph is taken from higher ground possibly somewhere close to modern day Warwick Street. The closest bridge we see is the N.E.R. rail bridge, though whose arches we can see the columns supporting the Byker Road Bridge. Just thinking about the relationship between this image and what's there today is a bit boggling! The immense amount of material dumped to fill in the space above the culvert top snaking towards us!

Tunnel vision

Tyne gap

Part of Newcastle City Council's depot in Sandyford has been fenced off for months. The reasons were unclear until recently when part of the building was demolished. Co-incidentally, A.D. saw men in orange safety suits lowered down into the inspection hole that leads into the Ouseburn Culvert. The culvert that runs under the City Council's depot ... is there perhaps a link?

Inside information tells A.D. that the rest of the building is coming down.

Last century the City 'fathers' decided they couldn't be asked to build yet another road bridge over Ouseburn Vale to connect Heaton to Shieldfield and the city. The whole area was industrialised to a much greater extent than one might suppose by walking around the lower Ouseburn today, so a road was presumably vital. Instead, they hit on the idea of building the culvert over the burn and filling in the gap over it with rubbish from far and wide. Local born author (and friend of George Orwell) Jack Common described the result as 'Newcastle upon Muck'. Yet, because of the basic implications for any substantial foundations built on this 'muck' the land that resulted has never been swallowed up for more buildings. That hasn't stopped the City Council's later incarnations thinking very hard as to how they could unload it on to someone else. Late last century when developers snapped their fingers, the Council was all for handing over the space, now become better known as the City Stadium, for a huge car park adjunct to said developers plans for yet more 'specious and well appointed' offices the city doesn't need. Fortunately that idea fell into another kind of hole, a financial one.

So, by accident rather than design, the sweep of green space in this well packed part of the city remains  – indeed flourishes. But that decision made over a century ago to use rubbish as infill material may have come back to haunt our present day.

Has something happened deep under Sandyford? Is our own version of the St Andreas fault making its presence felt?

With rather more truth than is usually implied by this expression – watch this space.

This view gives some idea of the elevation of the modern day road
and the actual landform it rests upon. To the right the level roadway
is built over the dip into the Vale seen on the left. The culvert runs
beneath this surface in a curve down to the confluence with the River Tyne.