The Farrell Centre

On Saturday we popped into town to The Farrell Centre to check out their Concrete Dream exhibition, which looks at the big urban planning projects of the 1960s and 70s in Tyneside. Side by side with Brasilia of the North (which I sort of thought was part of the same exhibition if I’m honest) it uses photographs, artifacts, but especially some really lovely models, to show the range of projects from an era of transformation for the area. Some smaller ones that are part of the landscape today, and some hugely ambitious ones. The proposed Tyne Deck, which would have joined Newcastle to Gateshead with an enourmous river-spanning development. Its a futuristic looking bit of urban planning, and kind of fun to visualize, but would have destroyed the quayside as it now exists.

However the other bit of big picture thinking on display is something that did get built; The Metro! Because it’s such a part of the landscape and mundane daily use, its hard to put yourself in a time and place where it had to be dreamed up, planned, and implemented. It is if anything more ambitious than the Tyne Deck plan, can you imagine if things had gone another way, the parallel timeline where we stood on a museum on the Tyne Deck looking at plans for a public transit system that might have been? The utopian future doesn’t always look like you imagine.

Finally The Fight for Byker examines another project that was completed, the rather wonderful Byker Wall.