The piano is out of tune and no tune is being played. The player joyfully and intently offers a discordant rhythm. Nobody seems to mind. Layers of voices fill the room: Spanish, English, Arabic, Geordie. People arrive and embrace like they haven’t seen each other in years. Someone offers you soup. The carpet is scruffy and enhanced by safety tape. The office furniture doesn’t match. Soft light diffuses through a large glass shopfront from the mall outside. A tea urn hisses. On the noticeboard, a laminated picture of the late Queen and a St George’s cross flag is draped over the office divide.
The Community Hub
The Community Hub is an advice and information resource set in the Cruddas Park Shopping Centre, not far from the banks of the Tyne in the west end of Newcastle. Apart from a satellite campus of Newcastle College and a branch library, there is little else there. Vacant shop units, long empty with shutters down, line each side of the large echoing mall. A short documentary, Community Space, filmed inside the hub earlier this year, captures something of the texture of a typical day. It can be viewed on the Bylines Network YouTube channel.
Sirak Hagos is founder and CEO of Triangular – the umbrella organisation which manages the hub along with another centre in Gateshead. He explains that the advice and support activities began many years back in a church hall nearby before finding this site. They enquired about the vacant unit but progress was slow. They eventually paid for their own electricity certificate to get things moving. Gradually other communities followed: Roma, Latin American, Middle Eastern, African. For a while there was even a bingo night, drawing in older local residents. Then Covid came and changed everything.
“For more than a decade we’ve seen first-hand how something as simple as a welcoming community space can change lives,” he says. “Our Cruddas Park Hub has become a trusted place where people find advice, friendship, opportunities and hope. But we’ve long outgrown the building.”
“We’ve been working here for a long time,” he adds. “Not a lot of people know about us because we were just getting on with it.” Now they are getting on with rather a lot. A foodbank. English classes. Computer classes. Feeding Families. Fair Share. Embroidery and sewing. Advice and information across 19 community groups, none duplicating the others.
The single shop unit hums with competing needs. People crowd around small desks as advice workers talk through cases – immigration letters, housing issues, benefit forms. There are queues. The space is not designed for this. It has never been enough and privacy and client confidentiality is an issue .
Irma Karchnakova is Director of the Roma Rights Project which provides support to the Roma community. She is matter of fact about it. “We have no space, and sometimes we should have one-to-one and private space. It’s very difficult because sometimes they will come with letters and details that are very private.” And yet people come anyway, she says, because they have no choice. “They give you full trust. They are in a situation where they’re desperate and they want help, so they don’t mind doing it with us in open space.”
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The Chieftain – a potential new site
The hub has identified a potential new site – The Chieftain, a former pub forming part of the Cruddas Park complex but facing outward onto the street, free from the constraints of the centre’s opening hours. Sirak describes the ambition as “bringing a much-loved former pub back into community use as a lasting community asset” – a centre for learning, wellbeing, culture, volunteering, employment support and community leadership. Rather than allowing a prominent vacant building to remain empty, he says, it could once again become a place where local people come together. A feasibility study and business plan are underway.
For Sirak the case is straightforward. Every day the hub balances multiple activities in a space never designed for them. Community groups compete for space. Volunteers work alongside clients. Activities are carefully staggered because there simply isn’t the capacity to meet demand. He sees The Chieftain not as an upgrade but as an investment in social infrastructure – the kind of long-term commitment, he says, that programmes like Pride in Place – the government’s community regeneration initiative – were created to encourage. By bringing people together and creating opportunities for everyone who calls Cruddas Park and Elswick home, he believes it could strengthen pride in the neighbourhood while giving a forgotten building new purpose for generations to come.
When they make the case to those with the power to help, the response has not always been encouraging. “When we go to people in power and ask for a bigger place,” Sirak says, “they say: ‘Who are you? Come and see.'”
Newcastle City Council was approached for comment but at time of publication they had not responded. The staff at the Community Hub say that the council is looking to work with them to resolve their accommodation issues.
By late afternoon the hub begins to quieten. Advice workers make phone calls, following up on casework. People ebb away. Outside in the mall, the shuttered units stand in the half-dark. Footsteps echo. The space is vast and mostly empty.
Inside, for a few hours each day, it is anything but.
