A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley

Author:Owen Hatherley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781844677009
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Salford Quays

Chapter Six

Tyneside: From Brasilia to Baltic

The Tyneside conurbation, or, as current branding calls it, NewcastleGateshead, is an area of wild contrasts. The first impression is of the serious urbanity of its nineteenth-century buildings. The Red-brick Gothic and Wrenaissance that denotes civic pride in so many English towns seems grasping and arriviste in comparison with the centre of Newcastle, which has far more in common with the more European urbanism of Glasgow or Edinburgh. Meanwhile, the multiple levels of the city, its bridges, walkways and steep changes of view give it a rare sense of spatial drama. Lots of this derives not just from the accidents of geology, but from planning: Richard Grainger’s planned speculative town centre is enormously impressive. There are two very good things about this area which are not shared by many English cities. The first is, as mentioned, the planned centre—odd to have something this good named after a property developer, or to imagine that all this dark classicism was part of a speculative development (and Grainger was apparently not a very efficient speculator, running up massive debts and risks). Regardless, the end result is that, like Glasgow, Newcastle looks like a city that actually had an Enlightenment as well as industrial capitalism, something that certainly can’t be said about Manchester or (pre-1953, post-1987) Sheffield.

Squaring this with the city I have read about in Viz for the last twenty years is difficult—at least until you see the remarkable women with their minuscule skirts, enormous heels and imperviousness to cold, with their somewhat less glamorous, shirt-and-chinos male charges, emerge for an evening’s entertainment at around 9 p.m. Nonetheless, even some awful malls and Terry Farrell’s egregiously bumptious ‘Centre for Life’ can’t spoil the centre of Newcastle, and the best postwar parts of it—the Civic Centre, MEA House and its walkways—seem to fit into it neatly. Even the accidents have a certain serendipity, as when the tower blocks and terraces seem to slot together into the same geometric pattern.

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