Exhibitions are not usually held to commemorate mistakes. When they are they can, in theory, provide useful lessons in how not to do something in order to avoid repeating those same mistakes.
One new exhibition*, Concrete Dreams, that does remind us of mistakes – and some positives – that were made in the redevelopment of Newcastle city centre as well as central Gateshead in the post-war decades (mainly the 1960s and 1970s) has opened at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle University, and it comes at an opportune moment.
Large areas of Newcastle city centre, as well as Gateshead and Sunderland, have taken on new shape in recent years and are continuing to do so before our eyes. Are they avoiding the mistakes that were made five decades and more ago? The new exhibition helps us answer that question.
The postwar transformation of Tyneside
The modernist dream of the region’s political leader of the 1960s, T. Dan Smith, and the town planners, architects and engineers around him, with their heads full perhaps of modernist visions of European pioneers in the field from earlier in the 20th century like Le Corbusier, Gropius and the Bauhaus, seemed exciting at the time. They talked airily of the Venice or Brasilia of the North. Newcastle’s chief planning officer even wrote of the astonishing aspiration (seriously meant, apparently) to make Newcastle into the biblical New Jerusalem.**
The damage done to the city’s infrastructure in pursuit of this vision was caused firstly by the architectural vandalism involved in knocking down some of the elegant, historic and much-loved old buildings that give Newcastle its unique character, and secondly by the inappropriate nature of many of the new structures that went up in their place. Many were examples of what has become known as brutalism, and it is well named, as the exhibition’s photographs of the time mercilessly expose.
Concrete was exciting for architects of that era because it could be moulded into any desired shape, said one, but looking back now, he for one could see it was inhuman, or at least used in an inhuman way. He could not think of a single prominent building from that period still standing in Newcastle that he was proud of.
There must architects today in practices that were prominent in the North East at the time who, if they visit this exhibition, will be embarrassed to be reminded of what some of their predecessors were responsible for.
One architect did however point out in mitigation that prefabricated concrete had helped meet the pressing post-war demand for new homes, so was appealing to hard-pressed politicians. Britons bombed out of their homes had become used to “prefabs” during the war, as this author saw for himself in 1950s Sunderland.
Down with the old, up with the new
The list of valued buildings lost or severely damaged was headed by glorious Old Eldon Square, partially bulldozed to make way for the red brick shopping mall we see today. Only 32 years after opening in 1976 it too had to be renovated and landscaped to minimise – as it was impossible to eliminate – the aesthetic damage. But still, it struggles commercially as shopping habits change.
The quaint and much-loved Handyside Arcade followed, to be replaced by more shops in what became Eldon Garden. It too struggles, standing virtually empty and is reported to be facing a further transformation in a bid to revive its fortunes.
Down too came Victorian architect John Dobson’s Royal Arcade at the northern end of the Tyne Bridge to make way for the Swan House office block (now flats). The Arcade was meant to be rebuilt but was replaced by a replica instead. A popular story at the time, not verified by this author, was that the original building blocks were marked with chalk to facilitate reconstruction then stored outdoors, where the chalk was washed off as soon as it rained.
Newcastle’s old town hall next to St Nicholas’ Cathedral was knocked down and replaced by an office block because the city elders wanted the business rates. Having seen the old building lost, campaigners tried as second best to have the site landscaped to give a view of the cathedral; they failed in that too.
Plans for the new Newcastle centred on transport as well as shopping and offices. The Central Motorway was driven through the east side of the city centre and Brandling Park against the protests of SOCEM (Save Our City from Environmental Mess). Much of historic Victoria Square disappeared under a motorway interchange. Much more of the central area only narrowly escaped a similar fate when plans to drive a Central Motorway West through the historic Leazes area and a Central Motorway East Bypass through Shieldfield were dropped at a late stage. Drivers on the existing motorway can still see the short stubs of the slip roads, going nowhere, that would have connected it to its stillborn offspring.
South of the river, a monstrous flyover was built which now prevents convenient access to the cultural assets that Gateshead Council has commendably attracted to the town’s quayside: the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, the Glasshouse International Centre for Music and now (it is hoped) the Sage International Conference and Exhibition Centre. Given the position of the Tyne Bridge, determined by the planners of a century ago, it is hard to see how the impact of its approach roads north and south could have been avoided.
Or perhaps it could. The planners of the 1960s were nothing if not ambitious. They wanted, among other things, to build a deck over the Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead and construct a concert hall and opera house on it.
Housing
People as well as buildings were damaged in the process of post-war redevelopment. As thousands of old slums were knocked down many new ones, some destined to have short lives, were built to replace them.
Noble Street, consisting of 434 flats in five-storey tenement blocks in Elswick, was the most notorious modern slum in Newcastle. Completed in 1958 it had to be knocked down again only 20 years later. It was said that the offer of re-housing to Noble Street was the only threat that struck fear into the hearts even of residents of another infamous slum, Rye Hill. The city’s director of housing referred to Noble Street in a report to councillors as a ghetto.
The Rye Hill story was told in a 1972 book by Jon Davies, a Labour member of the city council*** as a confrontation between planners and other officials, with their modernist vision of what was best, and the people living there, including some owner-occupiers and some with unconventional lifestyles, to put it mildly, who were determined not to give up what little they had until guaranteed something better. The confrontation turned into a bureaucratic nightmare for the residents.
There were other parts of the North East that had their planning disasters too. It was the era of Killingworth Towers, North Tyneside (designed 1972, demolished 1987); Trinity Square, Gateshead and its infamous brutalist “Get Carter” car park, also demolished; and Sunderland Civic Centre, now abandoned and earmarked for housing (and what makes it worse, accompanied by the demolition of the fine Victorian Gothic town hall).
There were however some developments that have unreservedly stood the test of time.
The Metro
The Tyne & Wear Metro, – or Tyneside Metro as Sunderland councillors insisted on calling it to make the point that their local taxpayers were helping to pay for it when it did not even run there, which it didn’t for 24 years – was probably the region’s greatest construction project of the 1970s and one of the most challenging of the 20th century.
The Metro features in the exhibition not so much for its architecture as for the design of its distinctive yellow-on-black M signs, which can be seen in streets all over the metropolitan area (except where the network still does not extend, like Washington and Newcastle’s West End). It is a stark contrast with the art nouveau signage of its Paris namesake.
The Metro was Tyne & Wear County Council’s finest achievement and the lasting legacy of its 12 years in existence between its creation by Edward Heath’s Conservative government and its abolition by its successor under Margaret Thatcher. Its contribution to Newcastle’s architecture has been largely indirect and can never be fully known. Who can tell what more acts of architectural vandalism might have been committed to accommodate the car if it had never been built?
The Byker Wall
There were other redeeming features. Local authorities were building a lot of council houses for local people at affordable rents. Newcastle City Council was so active in the field of social housing in the 1970s that it had no fewer than three housing committees – development, renewal and management.
One diligent councillor, Jon Davies (author of The Evangelistic Bureaucrat), long-since-retired, took the trouble to read the Housing Act 1974 for himself rather than relying on an official summary and realised that many of the city’s Victorian back-to-back terraces could be modernised rather than being cleared as old slums to make ways for new ones to be paid for over 60 years but habitable for only 20. This proposal led to a behind-closed-doors row in the local Labour party between advocates of clearance and renewal. The outcome might be described as a draw, with thousands of modernised terraced homes still inhabited to this day in places like Heaton and Benwell alongside many new-builds around the city that continue to be inhabited today without undue problems, as Davies agrees.
One social housing development that was a notable success was at Byker. Tellingly, the architects responsible set up shop (literally) in the area and local people were able to walk in and share their thoughts. One of the residents content to live in the Byker Wall until his recent death, an acquaintance of this writer, was himself an architect, environmentalist and author.
Even in Byker, though, not everything was rosy. The exhibition features a letter from a Mrs E. Kirsopp listing her complaints about her new home in Kirk Street. She was far from happy about her cupboard space, the efficiency of her toilet and the privacy of her stairway. She wrote: “You have to wait till after flushing has finished to see that everything has flushed away the first time…The stairs are a playground for most of the youngsters of all ages from all over the district and you’re out chasing them three or four times a night. Teenagers as well.”
T. Dan Smith and his evangelistic bureaucrats
In Newcastle it was town planners more than any others who were responsible for the developments, good and bad, that changed the face of the city. These self-important officials, according to Davies’ book, were in an uneasy alliance with other professionals like architects and engineers, all vying for primacy in demolishing the historic city and replacing it with a supposedly better, modern one.
T. Dan Smith, their political leader, was associated in the public mind with planning, though of the economic kind as a result of chairing the Northern Economic Planning Council. He was elected council leader in 1960, quickly followed by the appointment of Wilfred Burns (knighted in 1980) as chief planning officer. The city planning department was one of the first of its kind in England.
Smith was jailed for corruption in 1974. He had presided over one of the most transformative, turbulent, controversial and – if personal memory and this exhibition serve well – destructive periods in Newcastle’s history.
The influence and results of the partnership of Smith, Burns and their teams, particularly on the unfortunate residents of Rye Hill, is meticulously documented in Jon Davies’ book and still well worth a read. Allow this author to reproduce here a passage that he underlined when he first reviewed the book 52 years ago. Describing the planners’ vision, Davies wrote:
“Together with the new economy is to come a new society – Andy Capp must go; and along with him must go the jobs, houses and general urban environment which made such a creature possible and necessary. New industries must be attracted to the area; executive-type houses must be built for executive-type wives; slag heaps must be landscaped, dirty back lanes must disappear, Saint James’s (sic) football ground must be transformed into a minor version of the Houston Astrodome. Andy Capp must learn to prefer crème de menthe to brown ale, and to spend his weekends polishing the second car or skiing with his 2.5 children on the plastic ski-slopes.”
While the book focuses particularly on the slum housing of Rye Hill, its analysis of the planning profession is of wider relevance, which is why it is still worth a read and the new exhibition is well worth a visit.
Newcastle Civic Centre
Perhaps the most prominent building of that era to have stood the test of time is Newcastle Civic Centre itself, home to the self-important and warring official modernisers. Standing on the northern edge of the city centre, it was designed by the City Architect, George Kenyon, and opened in 1968 by King Olav V of Norway. The Grade II* listed building was given an award-winning refurbishment which has enabled it to be used since 2022 as home to HM Courts and Tribunals Service, bringing income of £35mn a year, as well as for its original purposes including council chamber, committee rooms, offices and banqueting hall.
The 21st century – glass and steel
The political and professional vision of the 1960s and 1970s of a Brasilia, Venice or even New Jerusalem of the north is rhetorically absent today. In its place the city plan currently in preparation aims to “help the council address our priorities to tackle poverty, address the cost-of-living crisis and work towards achieving the target of net zero carbon emissions by 2030 becoming an economically inclusive city.”****
What this seems to mean in practice is that today’s architects tend to use glass and steel rather than the concrete of their predecessors. One of the first and most prominent examples was the Sage concert hall, opened on Gateshead Quays in 2004, which has since been appropriately renamed The Glasshouse. Newcastle’s Central Library, the Charles Avison building – named in belated tribute to an 18th century composer from the city – opened in 2009 on the site of a predecessor from the earlier era that had lasted less than 40 years.
Now the new materials and style are being seen at places like Sunderland City Hall on the former Vaux Brewery site, the Helix on the old Scottish & Newcastle Brewery site, the new Sage conference centre at Gateshead Quays and perhaps most prominently of all Pilgrim Street East in Newcastle. Nothing is perfect, and one architect criticised the Pilgrim Street East development to this writer for its glass panels – “too narrow”. But the architecture of the 21st century seems to this author at least to be far preferable to that of the 1960s and 1970s.
The new phase of redevelopment has also seen less destruction of important old buildings, though not none at all. The beautiful art deco Odeon Cinema was at the centre of a listed building battle before unaccountably and dangerously being allowed to collapse into Pilgrim Street late one night in April 2017 while being demolished.
But other distinguished buildings have at least had their facades preserved and incorporated into the redevelopment, notably the Central Fire Station, Carliol House and Worswick Chambers, though this was not good enough for some. The Northumberland and Newcastle Society objected unsuccessfully to the demolition of the interior of Carliol House designed and built in the 1920s by, according to the Society, the finest architects in post-First World War Britain.
The intention at the time was that Carliol House would be” a monument to a brave new world and a symbol of a city determined to be at the vanguard.” So, its façade at least will continue to stand as a reminder that the redevelopment ambitions of the city’s leaders of the 1920s were essentially the same as their successors of the 1960s and 1970s.
Let us hope that future generations will find the new buildings of the 21st century both visionary and aesthetically pleasing. Can we avoid today repeating the mistakes made by a previous generation of 1960s and 1970s grasping developers, ingenuous architects and planners and foolish or even corrupt politicians, and follow instead the example of those of the 1920s (not to mention the 19th century) who combined progress with elegance? The signs are encouraging, but the intense current pressure to build new homes and other infrastructure will inevitably cause a tension between utilitarianism and aesthetics.
*Concrete Dreams is an exhibition, installations and events programme, all geared towards exploring the ideals and aspirations that drove the transformation of Tyneside in the second half of the 20th century and the ways they continue to shape the Tyneside of today. Underpinning the project is the question: how amid the many challenges facing us now – from air quality to housing provision – can we build upon the legacies of that era and remake the city once again? It runs at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle University, until June 2025. For details see here.
**A study in Re-Planning at Newcastle upon Tyne. By Wilfred Burns, Newcastle Chief Planning Officer. Published Leonard Hill, London, 1967. Cited in The Evangelistic Bureaucrat.
***The Evangelistic Bureaucrat: A Study of a Planning Exercise in Newcastle upon Tyne. By Jon Gower Davies. Published by Tavistock Publications, London, 1972.
****Newcastle Local Plan.
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