Journal
The Newcastle Connection
The Close is unusually quiet. This normally busy road along the Newcastle Quayside was closed off after a fire gutted a derelict listed, former bonded warehouse last week. The building is now unsafe and will, in all probability, be demolished to make way for a block of luxury riverside apartments; a few hundred yards west along the road, just such a development is approaching completion. Across from the burnt-out shell of the warehouse, standing shoulder to shoulder with BT’s offices, the Copthorne Hotel is hosting a lunchtime conference, its lobby heaving with guests. These massed buildings mark the eastern extent of Newcastle’s vibrant Quayside development. Walk just five minutes downstream alongside the Tyne and you come to the Stirling Prize-winning Millennium Bridge. Across it, in Gateshead, lie the Baltic and the Sage. High above these newcomers to the Tyne valley skyline stands the Gateshead multi-storey car park, the North East’s monument to 1960s concrete brutalism, now under threat of demolition despite the protestations of Get Carter fans. Would Michael Caine, standing on the roof of that car park during a break in filming in 1971, have looked out across the valley to Newcastle and pictured the quayside of today? It seems unlikely. Well before this time, the focus of urban redevelopment had switched to the centre of the city, away from the riverside, and much of the land lay derelict. Discuss this article
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