Spreading the news

The outlook seems to be slightly more rosy for Gosforth Nature Reserve following a very vigorous local campaign and some astute good work by supporters in exposing a rancid scheme to cement over Newcastle's Green Belt.

Guardian blogger The Northener has sat up and taken note.

Protesters' site visit 2011 © Judith Anne Tomlinson

It Begins ...!

Hammering sounds drift down my street. The earliest of early Springs is here and the earth is moving.

Finally, after what seemed an age and at least four separate 'schemes', the old paint factory site is being prepared for building work to commence. In a way it's a relief. Now we (I?) can concentrate on what is coming into view rather than being plotted behind closed doors. I captured some of the activity, including, incredibly, a long shot of youths attempting to hold on to their precious piece of 'track' that had been their informal skate board park, while huge earth movers lumbered by them as in some dystopian fantasy film.

I doubt there would be much support for my own desire to see the site kept as open land, albeit with a purpose; skate boarding park, tree shelter belt and walks down to the Lower Ouseburn, coupled with spreading re-generation of old industrial and commercial sites to a variety of new uses. Instead a vast student city complex will rise up. It might be worse.

Hopefully the arrival of a large new population will encourage enterprises interested in cateing for the in-coming young people; two new supermarkets have opened in and around the district recently. I hope so. Maybe the field will interest some for it's potential as a free space. The more obtuse ideas planned for this piece of free land may not happen; the quasi-privatisation of urban green space delayed if not halted.

In any case I'll be watching, recording and reporting.

Learning to plan Part II

I like dereliction.

So did John Constable, one of the 19th century's great landscape artists. He once wrote (in defence of his vision then so out of kilter with the accepted taste) -

"The sound of water escaping from Mill dams ... Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts & brickwork. I love such things ..."

In cities the equation of dereliction to crime and even disease is simply made. Yet, the fact that such places exist and go on being recreated by a restless economy intent on consuming its own innards as it were, producing fertile ground for those whose means are perennially slender and tastes lean toward the frankly neglected and, or, unprecious. Le Bateau Lavoir in early 20th century Paris, Docklands in London towards the end of the century and New York's Greenwich Village post World War II, Berlin's 'artist quarter' latterly, may today be chic addresses for the wealthy; once they decidedly were not. I had these thoughts in mind as I continued my recent walk around Rye Hill in Newcastle's west end.

Reaching the foot of the bank that runs down from Rye Hill through Newcastle College's ever expanding campus, I was confronted by Jury's Inn, built a few years ago over what had been a car park and long before that, the old Cattle Market. A frightful prospect it is too. It took something like genius to squander the opportunity this magnificent site had going for it: A commanding position overlooking the Tyne Gorge and the western approaches to the city, it is also the first building one notices entering the city by train from the south. It is so trivial it is not even banal.

I turned away, attracted by the back streets. First I had to pass by the graphite coloured walls of the newest building on the campus.

Beside the newly built Lifestyle Academy (the worse feature of which is, perhaps, it's name) begin a series of back lanes and alley ways that sidle around 60s era commercial premises, characterised by that baldness of purpose, designed with a lack of any pleasing detail, that are the trademark of all trading estates everywhere. Many of these low yellow now red brick 'units' with metal roller shutters and close wire mesh over metal framed windows embrace a run down look they were always destined for, moreso for their misplaced confidence in the authority of gaudy plastic signage. Some of these 'business premises' are ear marked for demolition to make possible further expansion of Newcastle College. One old filling station and forecourt have gone already and the site is presently being re-developed for a new Sixth Form College.



Yet, I hope not all of this maze of time expired investment goes for re-development. In my mind's eye I see in this present neglect a chance to do something on the margins, where penniless creative talent lives. Following London or New York, I could imagine here clubs, bars even health and fitness centres, specialist food shops, and more besides, bringing life where today students take short cuts and the pigeons wrestle with gulls for bits of 'berger.

Game, set and match?

I will believe this when I see it.

Gosforth reserve plans 'withdrawn' - The Journal

Mark my words, Newcastle City Council planners don't give up easily. This open land will remain in limbo unless it is placed 'irrovocably' beyond the grasp of developers. It should be purchased by wildlife interests and leased for agriculture and other approved activities.

Learning to plan Part I

Rye Hill. I saw this district go up in flames in the early 1970s.

Not as the result of urban protest, but one of the late major spasms of 're-development' sweeping Newcastle inspired by the grandiose dreams of T. Dan Smith. Great Victorian mansions were being torn down and their wooden bits pieces and floorboards were heaped up and burnt on newly cleared earth. By twilight homeward bound school children danced around the flames.

Many years later I had a conversation in a bar with an architectural salvager; he told me he had gone into a large Victorian house on Rye Hill to see two workman swinging away with sledge hammers, smashing to bits a newel post carved from a piece of green Connemara marble at the foot of a formerly grand staircase ...

The great and good of Newcastle had lived on Rye Hill when today's smart addresses were meek suburbs on the outskirts or even more modest villages further afield.

Now Rye Hill is a housing estate on the road to Cruddas Park. Newcastle's 'West End' as a whole has suffered a catalogue of problems that are usually bundled up in the evasive shorthand term "inner city".

I took a stroll with my camera this week when a high pressure front brought the first clear blue sky for weeks. Rye Hill was only part of my exploration. I wanted to record and comment on developments in and around Newcastle College, a rapidly expanding Further Education college. The excellence of the work I have seen over the past few years at student's final shows has impressed. Testimony for the college has filtered down to me. But welcome as the news about course standards are, I am pre-occupied with something else. Good and bad transformations of urban space and the 'unitended' consequence that comes from neglect as much as it ever did from planning.

The old settled Victorian community has vanished. It went long before the arrival of the wrecking ball; by the era of Smith's vaulting ambition, the huge staterooms and multiple floors of these mansions, high above the Tyne to the west of the city, were dosshouses and worse. Like the bleak home of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, time and history had by-passed them. A few streets of smaller Victorian terraces somehow or other survived, tucked away beside Summerhill Square and to my eyes offering a reproach to the newcomers constructed on the cheap in fish paste coloured brick, houses that have had several expensive facelifts, award winning designs that appealed to panels of planners and architects yet proved virtually uninhabitable as completed. What, one thinks, is new?

Part II to follow.


For details of the late "Mr Newcastle", T. Dan Smith, see earlier posts or simply google it yourself.