I guess that to many people arrival by train in Newcastle from
the south is first heralded by catching sight of Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the
North’ sculpture on a hillside to the east of the track. To me the crucial entry point is further on: when
the train edges its way onto the King Edward Bridge and the vista opens up of
the Tyne gorge with its five further magnificent and distinctive bridges to the
right, and the skyline of the city – the castle, the cathedral with its (for
England) unusual ‘lantern spire’, a number of other churches, the cupola on top
of the civic centre, and a number of distinguished commercial and public
buildings from Newcastle’s golden age.
(I shall gloss over the way that St James’s Park, the ground of
Newcastle United, looms threateningly over part of the city centre in this view
from the bridge. Perhaps it’s only fitting that it should do so in a city that
is as football mad as Newcastle.)
There is another, personal, reason why to me the King Edward
Bridge is such a fitting entry point. Whilst
helping to build it, my grandfather lost all the fingers on his left hand when
a girder crashed down on them. Every
time I cross it I remember the way he held a fork between his thumb and the
stumps, and how my grandmother helped him with buttons. She knew what she was taking on – they were
married in 1907, the year after the bridge was finished.
Newcastle is a proud city, and I am proud of my connections
to it, through my mother. She was born
in a little rented house on the Scotswood Road (a thoroughfare immortalised in
the song ‘The Blaydon Races’) and moved with her parents and five siblings,
when she was about 10, to a new council house to the east of the city
centre. Her generation have all died,
and their offspring have dispersed, but I have just had lunch with two of my
cousins.
I have been staying, as I often do in Newcastle, in a hotel
on the quayside – in a building of some architectural importance built of
ferro-concrete, originally as a warehouse for the ‘Co-operative Wholesale
Society’ and dating from a year or two
before the King Edward Bridge. It stands
next to what was once a wharf where ships unloaded produce that would make its
way into Co-op shops all over the country. The ships are now gone, and the building is a
hotel, but the name of its first owner cannot be eradicated since it was built
into the stonework.
None of my relatives was a miner (although one branch of the
family were coal merchants) but my grandfather, his sons and several of their
male offspring all worked in ship-building, in heavy engineering or in the
metal industries. Most of those
occupations have now gone. And it’s
along the Newcastle quayside that some of the most profound changes have taken
place. I was often taken there as a
child – to see the ships unload, to watch the swing bridge rotate for a
sea-going vessel to pass, to be part of the bustle of a working port with
stacks of wood being swung onto boats, sacks of grain coming back the other
way, and noise everywhere. One day after
my grandfather retired, and already suffering the severe bronchitis that his
outdoor working environment had left him with, he took me for a walk down the
Ouseburn valley, still with small factories belching noxious smoke, and then along the quay. And I remember the pride I felt in him when
many of the stevedores and quay workers greeted him with a ‘Haway Charlie’ and
doffed their caps to him (he had retired as an ‘Inspector of Rivets’ from Swan
Hunters, the shipbuilders, a step up from an ordinary riveter). He introduced me as ‘the little fella’ (I’m not sure he could ever remember my name,
but I was the youngest of his seven grandchildren.)
I took the same walk this morning, along the quayside and up
the path along the Ouseburn. The past of
the whole area has not been forgotten.
Indeed, various authorities have provided a fuller set than I recall
seeing anywhere else of monuments, street signs and explanatory boards to
record the historical and ordinary sites of the area. And some of the newly commissioned monuments
are thoughtful pieces of work, begging for a moment’s reflection on what used
to be hereabouts. But with the exception
of the hotel I have been staying in, the old warehouses have all gone. Only the names of some of the new office and
apartment blocks (for example ‘Rotterdam House’) are reminders of the web of
global connections of the old port. I
asked a taxi driver if ‘Paddy’s Market’ still takes place on the quayside every
Sunday morning – my grandmother (a strict Methodist) could never bring herself
to go shopping there on the Sabbath, but it had a fine reputation for second
hand clothing and other hand-me-downs.
But now it is the ‘Quayside Market’ with a range of produce for
discerning contemporary middle-class customers.
The Newcastle Quayside has seen the full process of
deindustrialisation, the death of the port, dereliction of the original
properties, modern planning, office development, gentrification and what is
sometimes called, in a rather ugly word, ‘leisurefication.’ It has passed through a phase as an eyesore
and become a revitalised modern urban landscape. But it no longer produces anything, or moves
goods around. It is a microcosm of
changes that have occurred throughout industrial and port cities around the
United Kingdom – and to my mind the transformation has been handled more
imaginatively here than in a number of other places.
I wonder what my grandfather would make of it all? He died, of chronic bronchitis, exactly 50
years ago, at about the time when the process of change was just starting. One thing I think he’d notice. Gone are those Geordie accents of the
stevedores and dockers of the past. On
my quayside walk early this morning I passed innumerable joggers, chatting to
each other as they pounded the new cobbles of the quay outside the apartments
they own. Not one of them had any of the
traditional intonation of Geordie speech patterns in their voice – I guess most
of them were from elsewhere in the country, and probably with middle class
occupations to go to on Monday morning.
And so I wonder to what extent the working-class population of Newcastle
benefits from the new Quayside?
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