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.

The Groves of Byker Part the Second

I will have more to say. For now the photography will do.

Another photographic slideshow here on an off site link.

A follow up collection of thoughts about the significance of urban walks soon.

The Groves of Byker Part the First

The start

A walk in high summer down the delightful pedestrian and cycle path that begins behind the local Mecca Bingo, under the roadway, past the imposing archway sculpture that tries (quite successfully) to reflect the former industrial activities this railway once served and onwards towards Walker and the Tyne.

The walk is inspiring for its sense of history in the remains of the impressive 19th century railway architecture that survives and the riotous nature that has seized on an opportunity to thrive in the midst of the city. But make up your own mind. Off site photographic gallery here.

Ring out the awful, bring in the so-so

The old Tyne & Wear Council offices on Sandyford Road,
one of the ugliest buildings in the whole of Newcastle,
currently dominates the entrance to the development
I hope the developers plan to knock it down.

When I first saw the transformation of the former Scottish Life buildings alongside the old Jesmond station, betwixt and between Sandyford Road (sic) and the Central Motorway, I was sitting with a man who had shaken hands with Frank Lloyd Wright. He looked at the concrete framework against the setting sun and said "I wish they would leave it just as it is'. It did have a certain Cubist attractiveness.

Years later the transformation has almost been completed except for a proposed tower block that will soar above the junction of Jesmond Road and Osborne Terrace. It is quite a sight even on the drawing board.

I missed the open event where the architects and developers presented their plans. Pity. But I did a bit of wandering about myself a day later on a nice evening and made a record of the current development.

I have to admit it isn't all bad. Not for me, but as an alternative to eating up the greenbelt, and, above all, an imaginative re-purposing of an office block, much to commend it. The detailing is good but also rather 'Canary Wharf', that soulless material, stainless steel, too much in evidence. What it's like to live next to all that car pollution, noise and poor air quality, I do not know.

So a guarded welcome for me. And a hope more of this city's wretched old office blocks and several newer ones that are unlet or never been let, will find a new use as housing. Bringing people back into our cities should be a priority

What do you think? Link to off site photograph gallery here.

The Rurban Belt

As more and more of Newcastle and Tyneside's Green Belts go under concrete the focus is on saving what's left. What is that exactly? Much of it is rye grass and barbed wire, jig-saw puzzled by Sitka spruce lozenges; or blocked out by golf courses. None of these places are friendly to walkers and cyclists and there are few footpaths and these not well sign posted. It leaves one thinking 'What is the Green Belt for?'

In defending the Green Belt in recent years the alternative sites for house building have often been focused on 'brownfield', land where industry once stood, now cleared of buildings, extensive concrete floors or runways, pockets of self sown birch and buddleia sprung up uninvited. Build on these sites first seems to be the argument. Oddly, in my experience brownfield sites are potentially if not actually, much richer in terms of their eclectic plant and animal populations than the, sainted by historic legislation and custom, Green Belt.

Recently I have been on two expeditions to see what old industrial land looks like. The experience is much more positive and exciting than looking at fields of chemical sprayed grass and crops.

Brockley Whins. View to the east from former Bolden Colliery.

There is something marvellous at seeing nature making a come back. There once stood a large colliery and a bank of railway yards transporting coal to the near by River Tyne. Long gone, the resultant landscape, bruised by heavy usage. In places it's possible to see the planted woodland is growing from a mixture of limestone ballast deposits and colliery waste. Yet wildflowers, particularly one's attracted to higher pH levels. In places a kind of grass meadow has formed. rich in Bird's-foot-trefoil. In wetter spots,  orchids and yellow flags. Of concern, and not just at this site, is the lack of flying insects. We seem to be in a time when the once familiar 'hum' of a warm summer's day in our countryside is memory.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to be optimistic. Whitethroats, Great Tits, Chaffinches still singing, ubiquitous Magpies, a Moorhen obviously displeased to have its young bothered by a passer by, and a Heron beside the burn that bounds the site were all welcome. Even a few butterflies, common blue and gatekeeper types.

Have we got it right about Green Belts and nature? It seems to me not. If I am honest I think the what the Green Belt stands for in people's imagination is not meeting current needs. A Green Belt that is uninviting, cannot be explored needs re-examining. It's time to think about what delivers experience and connections rather than mere expanse. I'm not trying to make the case for overwheening greed, opportunism or simply bad planning, such as is the case today around the north east, but bringing a fresh point of view to these discussions. A nature beyond reach, is not nature in people's lives at all. It's a concept out of reach.

Online gallery here (Off site link)