Two for the road

Two articles - one a review - by architectural journalist Rowan Moore on topics of significance to this blog and I hope other readers.

First, Moore's review of a book of essays by Jonathan Meades, the cultural commentator and 'contrarian'. Meades has made several fascinating documentaries for B.B.C. television, mostly recently a series on France (Jonathan Meades on France). Meades carries on where others leave off when it comes to pulling off wings from cherished contemporary or near contemporary ideas about culture and society; it is helpful in this regard that he has a mastery of the one liner, the metaphor and the quip direct that few do possess.

I pick out from Moore's review the following to give a flavour of the whole:

Architecture, the most public of endeavours, is practised by people who inhabit a smugly hermetic milieu which is cultish. If this sounds far-fetched just consider the way initiates of this cult describe outsiders as the lay public, lay writers and so on: it's the language of the priesthood. Architecture talks about architecture as though it is disconnected from all other endeavours, an autonomous discipline which is an end in itself. Now, it would be acceptable to discuss opera or sawmill technology or athletics or the refinement of lard in such a way. They can be justifiably isolated, for they don't impinge on anyone outside, say, the lard community – the notoriously factional lard community. To isolate architecture is blindness, and an abjuration of responsibility.

"Notoriously factional lard community" is pure Meades.

Better yet: –

It doesn't matter what idiom is essayed, it is the business of attempting to create places that defeats architects. Architects cannot devise analogues for what has developed over centuries, for generation upon generation of amendments. They cannot understand the appeal of untidiness and randomness, and even if they could they wouldn't know how to replicate it.

That is post Nairn.

The second piece is Moore's views on art and regeneration ("housing market renewal" – a term that stinks of the focus group) published in the London Observer (23 September 2012) focused on Liverpool, a city that has been kicked about for all sorts of reasons, none of them good or even true. Yet, these observations apply equally to Newcastle and a dozen other cities and towns across the country.

Your place or mine?

Since summer departed the skies have largely cleared of cloud and some bright, albeit cold, days have encouraged me back on the beat.

I've wanted to record the progress being made on the large and imposing student blocks being built on Portland Road overlooking Battlefield a.k.a. the City Stadium; but grey skies discouraged me. Until now.

The slideshow below records my recent walk from Sandyford in a loop around the district. Apart from the sizable new addition to the skyline, please note the wonderful facade of the Biscuit Factory art emporium receiving the reflected light from neighbouring existing student accommodation on Shieldfield Lane; next, the replacement of La Gabbia restaurant by the 'Ernest' café bar (of which I have heard good reports already) and The Tower (plus vintage shop), of which I hope to learn more.

As yet no sign of work beginning on the planned several more accommodation blocks of equal size on the former paint factory site; these should have been finished by this date. These were to house the expected influx of students, Chinese leading the way, that were expected to join expanding courses at the two local universities. That particular business model has been broken by the Great Slump, Credit Crunch, or whatever you like to call it ... That and, as I have mentioned previously, news filtering through of China's (very clever) move to build it's own universities en masse* and thus attracting overseas students (including, I expect, many Brits) to China to study at considerably less expense than they would incur studying in the United Kingdom.

In more ways than one, watch this space.

* B.B.C. 2 television's 'Newsnight' (08.12) reported China is 'planning to build a hundred new universities'; one well informed old friend told me this figure is by a long way an underestimate. 

It's all about location

The B.B.C. wrote to me. I would like to tell you it was an offer to make a programme about concreting over open spaces ... But it wasn't. Instead they simply and politely told me (and dozens more locally) that the Beeb would be undertaking filming for a children's serial in a café on our street for a week.

Such a lot of organisation goes into a film shoot. Yet, from my casual glances outside, it involves lots of people sitting around waiting, just as we have been told by so many actors on countless talk shows.

Mr T–, the lovely man who owns Tia Amo's bistro café, didn't let on when he told me he would be closing for three months to take a holiday in his native Italy. I hope someone has told him whose moved in and how much they've altered his cafés exterior ...

Meanwhile, the latest over-scaled student accommodation block is taking shape (if that is the word) beside Portland Road. There is no sign at all as yet of any work beginning on the several blocks destined for the nearby paint factory site. Given the changed circumstances and rapidly changing U.K. higher education "business model" I am not surprised.

In large part this held that there would be for some time to come a very lucrative stream of Chinese students beating a path to study in the United Kingdom. No longer true it seems, if indeed it ever was. Instead we now have the intriguing possibility of U.K. students trekking to China to take advantage of far cheaper degrees in a society where the cost of living is also well below the U.K.'s. To think: Somewhere in that vast country, constructors are getting apartments ready for a wave of foreign students flying from high fees and staggering accommodation costs.

It can happen.

But if so, what is the future for this sprawling site?

Cruddas Park photographs

A slideshow of a selection of photographs taken recently of the Cruddas Park demolition and re-vamped tower blocks. The weather was in keeping with our lost summer.

New for new old: Cruddas Park redux

Visiting an apartment in one of deified architect Le Corbusier's most famous schemes, art critic Robert Hughes was amused to find the interior at odds with the severe Modernist principles of the building that contained it. The sharp angularities and 'truth to materials' (concrete) were not for the occupant. Frills, tassels and decorative patterning – kitsch and tat in other words – were everywhere on view. The principles began and ended on the drawing board.

This mismatched zeal – evangelicalism one might call it – was at the heart of the problems that beset the re-development of Cruddas Park in Newcastle's West End in the late sixties. It has resulted in confusion, disruption and finally, an expensive failure. Today the new Cruddas Park is coming down; or, most of it.

I recall well being shown Cruddas Park from afar as I waited on the platform at Newcastle Central Station to catch a train south at the end of my first visit. "No architect would live there" was my verdict. I had seen similar high rise complexes in and across south London and heard of the dislocation, alienation and health problems that afflicted occupants. Crime too.

Cruddas Park is sited in what was once the wealthiest suburbs of Newcastle, High Elswick. Today this area's past is best appreciated in what remains. A few old buildings and evidence of vanished ones in railings and stone walls left behind. But to get the real measure of the district's past perhaps the best place to look are its cemeteries. Huge ornate and Victorian tombs mark the passing of the rich elite whose vast houses dotted Rye Hill and High Elswick. Below, alongside the River Tyne, were the factories and industrial strength that supplied the wealth to pay for the grand homes.

Two long wars and industrial decline put paid to that. By the end of the Second World War the decline was absolute. There would be no coming back.

At the Second World War's end in Britain a brave new world based on more egalitarian thinking replaced privilege. The Welfare State ushered in not just a health service and improved schooling but opportunities in govenance for a generation that had been marginalised and ignored beforehand, women and men of modest backgrounds who found the doors to the Town Hall were open and they had the keys in their hands. Among them was T. Dan Smith.

I have written elsewhere about Smith so will not go over the ground again. He is still a controversial figure; for many, a villain who had a deserved and mighty fall into disgrace, to others a failed leader of brilliance, mostly misunderstood. The new Cruddas Park scheme of the sixties had been one of Smith's ways to re-imagine Newcastle. His chosen tool was Modernist architecture. He sought to re-invent the city, to wrest Victorian and Georgian Newcastle into the 20th century and, as I see it, away from its visible past, draped in memories of class superiority, of birth and status. Many others had the same dream at that time.

The problem was that Modernism's founders were no less intent on privilege than those they replaced, albeit somewhat differently focused – the "life of the mind" – rather that plutocracy. These leading figures of the European avant garde were, in reality, as distanced from the lives of 'ordinary men and women' as the Victorian magnates whose empty and vandalised houses were pulled down to make way for the building of high rise flats (with all 'mod-cons') such as Cruddas Park. The people from the Victorian terraces that combed the steep sides of Scotswood in row upon row were decanted into 'homes in the sky' for their eventual and assured 'improvement'. What happened was the destruction of one community and the creation of a dysfunctional one. Within a few years the problems steadily mounted, exhibiting themselves in numerous ways; private and social. Finally, all these added up to one big problem. Initially, planners blamed the people. Increasingly the people blamed the planners.

Across Britain these social problems were tackled in numerous ways. Specialist teams – youth workers, community artists, health care centres and social clubs tried to knit people together and tackle the chronic sense of neglect and marginalisation. Structural issues – condensation was a continuing problem for many schemes – were 'dealt with', again and again. But finally, decades after the dawn of this new age, the dispensation of fitted kitchens and inside toilets was found not to have produced the one thing the whole enterprise had set out to achieve: A settled and happy community.

Acknowledging that fact required a new generation and the realisation that there is not a bottomless pit of money to throw at chronic housing problems. Now Cruddas Park has been re-developed once again. In the process, many of the blocks are being demolished. Apparently, money to re-furbish all the blocks was not to be had. Whether entirely by circumstance or design I wonder. The benefit will be to have another chance to build Jerusalem.