A walk to the Post Office

Our local Post Office has closed. A brief resurrection and then finally, nothing doing. Now, we have a bus ride to use the 'national treasure' we seem to have so carelessly let slip away.

I chose to walk to Byker.

UPDATE 28th May 2013.

The older and easier way to share photographs is either gone for good (or bad!) or I am not sufficiently bright to work out how to attach the newer one. So I am using a reliable off site programme.

Walk to the Post Office

Goldspink Lane winds suddenly downhill and stops just before the narrow gorge of the Ouseburn. The tower block peeping above the trees opposite is in Heaton. This gorge winds through the city; from Jesmond Dene to the north, beside Armstrong Park and Heaton Park then through the Victorian era constructed culvert to the Lower Ousburn and thence, the River Tyne. On a pleasant Spring day it seems a nicer, healthy alternative to waiting for a bus.

As I walk I try to notice what Ian Nairn might have commented on in those Observer newspaper articles I read half a century ago and which formed the basis for my own enthusiasm for the urban scene.

The contrasts are great. Since we find these familiar we are perhaps too ready to think these ordinary. But to my eye there are always surprises, contradictions and provocations to thought.

For example, here are four images all taken on the same day on a walk of about a mile.

The woods beside the Ouseburn 

The old Ouseburn 'road'. This would have been 

used by carts going down to the Tyne

Today garages and 'lock-ups', were such as these built for horses?

Nearly there: Old and new on Shields Road

These seem to me to reflect an important aspect of living; the complexity and varied character of the environment, brought about through happenstance, over centuries, not the instant, fleeting and deterministic. This unplanned 'collage' of natural, ruderal and by-passed living styles is for me attractive, even compulsive. It gives a texture to life as nothing planned can.

Maybe the training planners receive is to blame; the all or nothing approach of town halls everywhere.

At last, the beginning is here

It seemed it would never arrive, Spring that is.

Even the ordinary is, for a week or so, made extraordinary

Weeks of cold winds made it seem buds had been freeze framed on their branches and stopped mid way for good. However, the sun has battered down the wind or increased its temperature just enough.

Battlefield in Spring time looks lovely, even if delayed.

In Camera

It has hardly been conducive weather to take photographs. Grey overcast.

Now a very cold wind blows and the sun shines. I've been neglecting my duties. But not my thoughts.

Council men out today clearing away a fallen cherry on the Battlefield, a favourite one which always came out in small white blossom early despite the season. No more. Even in it's final hours it went into the back of a lorry piece by glorious piece, as if a Japanese stage set were being transported not for chipping, but a display of heavenly beauty elsewhere.

I have been on a long journey, past grim concrete motorways, old red brick Victorian piles being transformed into new premises by men in orange overalls and bright white safety hats overlooked by a steepling crane. Lines of new cars arranged with pride outside showrooms where no one comes and goes.

A fashionable business park built over the site where another Japanese connection to this city was made; capital ships for the emergent Imperial Japanese fleet. Then on past newly restored and revamped (revamped! So much better than mere makeover) tower blocks speeding up along a dual carriage way guarded at its terminal roundabouts by a Challenger tank.

Sweeping up to the shores of the Tyne, here a reach – a perfect word for a sweeping bend of a river – and then over a dyke filled with reeds on into another Business Park, this one as still and formally chic as an Italian film set; Antonioni I should say. Detached, alienated. No one walks here so why comes the bus?

Then a Pottery kiln and scraps of fields, no small pied ponies on view today. A tremendous tumbled down wooden barn, partly see through, filled with splintered cars one above the other like a sculpture by John Chamberlain.

www.chinati.org

The rising valley landscape pushes in on the road that now swings and dips little better than the dirt cart track it once was connecting villages along the Tyne Valley to the west. A newly planted woodland, all thin and straight trunks; crossing and re-crossing an old rail track bed, today a dog walker's and cyclist resource posted with arty signs fashioned as if from old rails. Pigeon lofts, not at all lofty here, and a tiny stables compete with two skewbald ponies, tended not by the well groomed and well heeled,  but youths with hair stained red or blue and rings through their faces.

A steep climb along new built town houses, a riposte to our city council's desire to build out over the Green Belt; if here why not ...?

Neat 1950s council semis, all painted stucco, white or cream, with attractive dun coloured roof tiles, raked at a positively Dutch angle. Graced by mature trees and available street parking, estates such as we do not build any longer. Why is that exactly?

I get off my bus stiffly and walk out into the cold blast of air rushing down from the Arctic, less than two thousand miles away. It feels less.

To and fro

The weather has yo-yo'ed between Winter and Spring, and now, back to Winter again.

These photographs were taken at the end of January on a tour around the district but would serve today just as easily. More snow is threatening.

Work has now ceased on the re-furbishment of the East Coast Mainline Bridge at Byker, a Grade II* Listed structure for it's significance to railway history. A fine job they made of it too. Well done to all those who carried out this heavy and exacting task. The bridge was open to rail traffic continuously during the period of the works.



I shall cover the work being undertaken presently to restore the site alongside the bridge in due course – weather permitting.

First you see it ...

Last week it was this ...

Followed by this ...

Spring. Unpredictable.

But the Byker railway bridge is ready, emerging from its wrapping after fifteen months or so hibernation.