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Northern soulCulture, creativity and quality ofplace in Newcastle and Gateshead

Anna Minton

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contents

contents

introduction 2

chapterone from coal city to culture city 8

chaptertwo urban soul 14

chapterthree the beginning of a brain gain 26

chapterfour investing in diversity 32

chapterfive social inclusion and quality of place 40

chaptersix the next city 46

references 50

acknowledgments 52

At one minute past midnight, the Baltic Flour Mill, on the

banks of the river Tyne, stood illuminated against the

skyline. An expectant crowd of thousands were packed into

Baltic Square, the new public space linking the winking eye

of the Millennium Bridge to the old mill. Friday night

revellers, more accustomed to drinking in the bars of the

‘party toon’, mingled alongside families and older people

who had come into town especially for the occasion.

As fireworks exploded across the river, theconverted Baltic Mill opened its doors –transformed from a flour factory into an artfactory. The symbolic significance of theoccasion for the nascent partnership betweenNewcastle and Gateshead was undeniable. They were back on the map.

The following week, the US magazineNewsweek dubbed Newcastle/Gateshead one of the world’s eight most creative cities. Shortlyafterwards, their joint bid for European Capital

of Culture 2008 was tipped as the bookies’favourite.

The sense of excitement in Baltic Square waspalpable, not just because of the opening of the gallery, important though that was. Nor was it simply the result of Gateshead’s iconicregeneration projects, from the toweringpresence of Antony Gormley’s Angel of theNorth to the award-winning Millennium Bridge and the soon-to-be-completed SageMusic Centre.

introductionBaltic Square, Gateshead, 13th July 2002

There have been many attempts to define whatit was that brought Newcastle and Gateshead tothis point and what maintains the sense ofenergy and excitement present in the city today..The Newcastle Gateshead Initiative simplydescribes it as ‘the buzz’.

This report attempts to explain what creates thebuzz and how a city can retain it, withoutoverheating or losing momentum. Our coreargument is that the buzz comes from the spirit,or soul, of a place. It is soul – that indefinable Xfactor – which gives a city its character andmakes it a special place to live in or to visit.

Soul is not something that can be easilycaptured by conventional indicators or economicdatasets. To experience the soul of a city, youneed to get out into the streets and talk topeople. And so this is what we did – throughfocus groups, interviews with councillors andcommunity representatives, and by spendingtime walking around the contrasting districts ofNewcastle and Gateshead. This report presentsthe results of our journey, our experience ofnorthern soul, and presents new evidence that itis this soul – or quality of place – that is helpingto generate a new brain gain for Newcastle andGateshead, as creative people are attracted to it.

Soul is a vital ingredient of urban success, butthe key question confronting urban plannersand policymakers is how to create cities whichretain their soul. The report argues that theanswer lies in a process of urbanentrepreneurship, a proactive, risk-taking andinnovative approach to city renewal. Urban

entrepreneurship is all about seeking out andnurturing new energy and ideas capable ofgenerating and sustaining quality of place. It isthis process of urban entrepreneurship thatNewcastle and Gateshead – in particularGateshead Council – has excelled at.

This notion of urban entrepreneurship alsoenables us to disentangle what can be aconfusing debate about the relationshipbetween successful cities and culture-ledregeneration. We argue that culture-ledregeneration is one approach to urbanentrepreneurship, but it should not be mistakenfor the whole story.

The value of culture-led regeneration has beendemonstrated in many post-industrial cities,from Glasgow to Berlin and Bilbao to Liverpool.What all these cities have in common is theneed to find a new economic base following thedecline of manufacturing and heavy industryfrom the late 1970s onwards. The old industrialbase has increasingly been replaced by theknowledge, service and leisure sectors of thenew economy. Some cities more than othershave adapted to this. With people andbusinesses more mobile and fickle in theirchoice of location, cities need to be competitivein the range of cultural assets and activities theycan offer. Investments in culture and leisurefacilities, such as galleries and theatres, aretangible investments in the quality of place andquality of life people can enjoy. Culture-ledregeneration has also brought with it anemphasis on the cultural and creative industries.Silicon alleys of hi-tech creative businesses have

4 5

replaced the mass assembly line.The value of culture-led regeneration when it isdone well is not in doubt. It has the power totransform the physical fabric of a city and toalter people’s perceptions, as well as mobilisingpublic and private sector resources around newshared goals. However, culture-led regenerationis only one dimension of what we mean byurban entrepreneurship.

This brings us back to soul. The key to successfultransformation is not only what type of change– creative iconic, commercial retail, newresidential loft development – is promoted, buthow it is carried out. If it is delivered in amanner which is in tune with the soul of a place,it is likely to succeed. But if it goes against thegrain of local distinctiveness and identity, it willstruggle to take root and is more likely to falter,as a number of disappointing cultural projects inUK cities have shown.

We have selected Newcastle and Gateshead as acase study because they offer a clear example ofsuccessful transformation from coal city toculture city, underpinned by a dynamic form ofurban entrepreneurship. They are alsointeresting because their experience helps us tomap the contours of the next stage of the urbanrenewal agenda. Three issues stand out here.First, the need to invest in diversity as a way ofbreaking the ‘buzz to bland’ cycle, wherebysuccessful regeneration is rapidly followed byhomogenisation. Second, the importance ofinclusion and everyday participation as a way ofensuring opportunities and benefits are spreadacross the entire community. Third, the need to

be serious about long-term sustainability, ratherthan quick fixes or short-term solutions.

Investing in diversityOne of the qualities that people prize mostabout a city is its diversity. In the interviews andfocus groups we ran in Newcastle andGateshead, the buzz of so many different thingsgoing on was frequently cited as a reason whypeople had chosen to live there. This diversitymakes cities impossible to control and predict,but it is also a source of their creative andadaptive capacity. With such a rich mix of ethnicgroups, household forms and lifestyles in manyof Britain’s cities, it can sometimes seem as if wetake the complex ecologies of cities for granted.However, the experience of Newcastle andGateshead shows that cities need deliberatestrategies to invest in diversity. Failure to do sorisks one particular activity or household typebecoming dominant, damaging the ecology ofthe city and its overall identity.

The ‘buzz to bland’ cycle is one way of describingthis fallout, as high rents and land valuessqueeze out independent traders and lower-income residents. More worryingly, the USexperience suggests a growing phenomenon of‘place wars’, as different groups contest the rightof others to live in a particular area. There is alsoa flip side to investing in diversity. If diversespaces, places and activities are invested in,there is an equal need to support shared spaces,places and activities that bring different peopleand communities together. Otherwise, there is adanger that an atomised rather than a cohesivecity will be created. Chapter 4 examines two

introduction

such threats in Newcastle and Gatesheadaround gentrification and the night-timedrinking economy.

Inclusion and participationThe panel judging the eight bids for 2008Capital of Culture made inclusiveness one of itskey tests. Both Newcastle and Gateshead have anumber of innovative schemes aimed atincreasing the reach and accessibility of culturalactivities and institutions, but Newcastle CityCouncil got badly caught out when the inclusivelanguage and aims of its cultural strategy jarredwith the starkly non-participatory approach ofits Going for Growth strategy, which announcedthe demolition of 6,000 homes in a localnewspaper, before informing – let alone asking –the people who lived there.

One-off consultations are no longer enough forcity planners to understand the needs of a city.This type of top-down approach cannot dealeffectively with the complexity of city life.Instead, more opportunities for participation atthe everyday level need to be developed.Participation in cultural activities is not an endin itself. It needs to be connected up with otherforms of direct participation in the public realm,through involvement in community activitiesand the co-production of public services. And inturn, if cities are serious about the needs ofeveryone, participation needs to inform andinfluence how planning and governancesystems are operated. Chapter 5 explores thelimitations of conventional approaches toconsultation, and highlights new models ofcultural and civic participation.

Thinking long-termThe buzz created in Newcastle and Gateshead isbeing reinforced by an unexpected ‘brain gain’,as a new generation of creative professionalsand knowledge workers is drawn to live in thetwo cities. Chapter 3 details initial evidence ofthis phenomenon, and explores the reasons thatlie behind it. Our research shows that incomersare being attracted by a quality of place andsense of authenticity, magnified by theexcitement of a place that is in the throes ofchange. Over time, we argue that this brain gaincould reverse the long-term trend of populationloss from the north to the south-east, which hashindered the progress of northern renaissance.

However, being the city of the moment is aprecarious thing. As with clothes or music, cyclesof fashion in cities can be rapid and shallow. Toensure a sustainable quality of place, urbanplanners need to generate longer, slower-pacedcycles of change that can be continuallyrefreshed and renewed. The Newcastle andGateshead partnership offers an interestingmodel of how to approach this. Initially basedaround culture-led regeneration, thispartnership was driven by an awareness thatthe two authorities needed to pool their assetsin order to reach critical mass and create a long-term, sustainable urban unit. This example offar-sighted urban entrepreneurship hasaccelerated the pace of transformative changewithin the Newcastle /Gateshead and the widerregion. The next chapter tells the story of thattransformation.

7

introduction

chapter one

from coal cityto culture city

chapterone

9

Newcastle was not only the regional capital butalso the industrial powerhouse of the NorthEast. The railway and the turbine engine wereinvented here. Today, in the heart of the citycentre, the newly restored Georgian terraces ofGrainger Town reflect the city’s historicprosperity and confidence. Taking in theelegance of Grey Street, it is easy for the visitorto imagine the high living of the city’s captainsof industry and civic leaders.

The 1960s were another period of municipalconfidence for the city, under the leadership of T. Dan Smith, the infamous council leader whoended up behind bars. Smith’s grandiose visionfor Newcastle, of which little was ever realised,was inspired by the concept of a ‘Brasilia of theNorth’. The result is a mix of Victorianarchitectural excellence tempered by thereinforced concrete drabness and divisivearterial ring roads and roundabouts of the 1960sand 1970s. Yet despite its failure, T. Dan Smith’svision does illustrate an important truth about

Newcastle: the ongoing desire of the city toproject itself as a regional powerhouse on thenational and international stage.

By the early 1980s, as industrial Britain movedinto terminal decline, no amount of historicaland cultural identity could save the city from acrisis of confidence. In common with otherformerly strong industrial centres, Newcastleand Gateshead underwent immense andtraumatic change. Twenty years ago, 50 per centof all men were employed in the four heavyindustries of shipbuilding, mining, steel andengineering. Now the figure is just threeper cent. As the jobs seeped away during thelate 1980s and early 1990s, Newcastle andGateshead became socially and economicallydepressed places to live, stripped of their formerindustrial identity but with little to put in itsplace. Rioting in 1991 in the West End ofNewcastle and Meadowell in North Tynesidereflected this growing disaffection.

For the visitor arriving in Newcastle by train, the Victorian

grandeur of Robert Stephenson’s High Level Bridge acts as

a timely reminder of the city’s former industrial identity

as the historic capital of the North East. Similarly the

viaduct that towers over the approach to the Quayside

inspires awe at the engineering prowess that gave the

City its reputation as ‘the workshop of the world’.

Yet today the picture, on the surface at least, hasradically altered once again. ‘From coal capital toculture capital’ is a phrase increasingly heard inthe region and appears to reflect the type ofsocio-economic changes experienced not only byNewcastle/Gateshead but by many post-industrial cities. This trend, often termed post-Fordism, reflects the decline of heavy industry –symbolised by the mass assembly lines of thecar manufacturer – and the rise of the financialand service-based industries of the neweconomy, accompanied by the thriving culturaland leisure sector symbolised by the ‘culturecity’ image.

Although the Capital of Culture title ultimatelywent to Liverpool, there is no doubt thatNewcastle and Gateshead have been at theforefront of the culture and leisure revival. So far,it would seem that this attempt to find newsources of economic growth following the yearsof post-industrial collapse is reaping dividends.Alongside the Newsweek accolade crowningNewcastle/Gateshead as one of the world’smost creative cities, Condé Nast recentlyheralded it as the UK’s top holiday destination.

Any visitor can quickly see what prompted thistype of coverage. The quayside has beentransformed from a ‘rat-infested swamp’ (1) toone of the most stunning riverfronts in the UK.And this is just one in a series of iconic image-transforming projects. The first to impact on thenational consciousness was the erection of theAngel of the North in 1998. Next came theconversion of Gateshead’s Baltic Flour Mill into

an art factory and gallery, linked to theNewcastle side by the Stirling Architecture Prize-winning Millennium Footbridge. And duefor completion next year is the Sage MusicCentre, designed by Sir Norman Foster andrecipient of the biggest lottery grant of any artsproject outside London. A giant Hilton hotel isalso under construction on the Gateshead sideof the river. As one Newcastle cabbie confided,gone are the days when hotels would slip him a fiver to bring them customers from the station– now there are barely enough hotel rooms to go around.

It is no exaggeration to say that the changesthat have taken place were inconceivable duringthe grey years of industrial decline when theimage of Gateshead fixed in the national mindwas the multi-storey car park featured in thefilm Get Carter. What prompted thistransformation and how it can be maintainedare the central questions of this report.

The dangers of a two-speed economyDespite the shining symbols of change on theQuayside, the post-industrial transition has notbeen a seamless process. The reality is thatNewcastle and Gateshead continue to haveserious economic problems with far higherunemployment than the national average.According to figures from the Tyne and WearResearch and Information Unit, unemploymentrates are currently running at 5.6 per cent forNewcastle and 5.3 per cent for the North Eastregion as a whole, compared with a UK averageof 3.1 per cent. In addition, both Newcastle and

11

chapter one

12

Gateshead, in common with every core citynorth of London except Manchester, continue tolose population in net terms.

Set against these figures are some significantgains in the new economy, in particular thecreative, cultural and leisure sectors. The shareof people employed in the culture and leisureindustries is running at 21 per cent compared to19 per cent nationally. (2) These figures are backedup by new evidence highlighting the start of a‘brain gain’ for Newcastle and Gateshead,reversing the years of brain drain to London andthe south-east, a trend which we will explore indepth in Chapter Three.

These apparently contradictory trends areindicative of the type of two-speed economythat is coming to characterise many post-industrial cities. In Newcastle and Gateshead, asin many other parts of the country, these trendsare most clearly reflected in a polarised propertymarket where the pattern of hot spots and coldspots is becoming pronounced.

For example, house prices in fashionableGosforth are among the highest in the country,with a recent survey finding that the area was

home to the same number of millionaires asNotting Hill or Richmond upon Thames (3).Equally a two-bed flat in Jesmond or Heatonwould not leave you with much change from£200,000, and the marketing brochures for theOuseburn and the Quayside are clearly pitchingfor middle to high earners or well-heeledretirees.

In sharp contrast, a couple of miles away inNewcastle’s West End, it is possible to purchasea house in Scotswood or Benwell for under£10,000. (4) Whether or not communities here arefeeling the benefits of the city’s culturalrenaissance is a question frequently posed bycritics of culture-led regeneration, who claimthat little of substance lies beneath the froth.

Even so, despite the fact that Newcastle/Gateshead remains polarised, what has takenplace in recent years cannot be so easilydismissed. The cities’ cultural landmarks havereinvigorated an already strong sense of civicpride and confidence, and are now attractingincreasing numbers of visitors and incomers, insearch of the quality of place on offer. It is thisintangible yet vital quality of place – the soul ofthe city – that the next chapter seeks to explain.

chapter two

15

Not least, it serves as a way of reinvigoratingwhat are sometimes unnecessarily dry debatesabout cities. In the discourse of policymakers,the sense of inspiration that should animateefforts to create exciting and vibrant places inwhich to live and work, is all too oftensubmerged in jargon. Debates about the qualityof our urban environment should be asimportant to the general public as discussionsaround education or health, yet somehow theyfail to engage people on the same terms, notleast because of the language in which they areoften couched.

By contrast, soul offers a way to communicatequality of a place that resonates with mostpeople. It captures an emotional response to acity that we all feel when we walk down a busystreet or through a leafy park. While the specificfactors behind the success of a place can bedifficult to articulate, we know when a placeworks. Similarly, we can tell when places havelost their soul or never had it in the first place.

The soul of a place is both innate and changing,bringing together deeply rooted aspects oflandscape, built environment and heritage, withthe more transitory and adaptive characteristicsof people, culture, and ideas. Quality of place isnever stuck in aspic, instead it must be alive togrowth and change.

Yet the path that this change follows is veryimportant. The goal should be to evolve whileretaining a sense of authenticity, which workswith the grain of local identity and local culture.This quest for authenticity is more than a rose-tinted nostalgia for the way things used to be.David Boyle, author of a recent book onauthenticity, acknowledges, ‘The currentdemand for authenticity…does hark backwards,but it’s more than that. It derives from the so-called “cultural creatives” in the USA and the so-called “inner-directeds” in Europe – those peopleidentified by sociologists who put education,individuality and authenticity at the hearts oftheir ambitions for themselves.’ (5)

urban soul

chaptertwo

Soul may seem like a hazy term to land use planners and

regeneration experts more accustomed to talking about

section 106, zoning and development control. But as a

concept, it goes straight to the heart of what creates

living environments which really work and stand the

test of time.

chapter two

Today, this idea seems to be gaining ground,partly as a reaction to a sense that many of ourcities are developing in a similar fashion.Speaking at a conference soon after herappointment as Culture Minister, Estelle Morrismade clear her frustration with what she called‘sameness’ in the urban environment. (6) Morerecently, the Campaign for the Protection ofRural England has been running a campaignprotesting against the blandness of our chain-store saturated high streets. (7)

Dutch architect Berci Florian gets to the nub ofthe issue:

‘Demand and supply seem to be sailing inopposite courses. While the public increasinglywants choice, diversity, distinguishing featuresand depth to enrich their own individualityand connect emotionally with theirenvironment, what is on offer appears to beheading energetically towards monotony andpredictability. This means that cities are in

danger of losing the power to differentiatethemselves and to elicit emotions, bonds andinvolvement. They are becoming impersonal,anonymous and in the end uninhabitable.’ (8)

Untrammelled commercial forces, left to workalone, will actively run counter to distinctiveidentities and towards uniformity, creatingsimilar environments across the country. Theclearest example of this is the creation ofidentikit high streets dominated by the samebrands up and down the country. In policy terms,this means that a better balance must be struckbetween growth and the distinctive identitythat keeps a place special; a balance that tapsinto the soul of a place and sustains a feeling ofexcitement and ‘buzz’.

Soul reflects the culture of a city in its broadestsense. It is about recognising and valuing theunique assets and character of a city – itsauthenticity and rootedness. It reflects therelationships between people and the physicalspaces of the city. It is dynamic and open to newideas, new people and new ways of living. And itis the art of combining old and new in order tomaintain a healthy balance.

This idea is gaining currency. For example, arecent English Heritage report on theregeneration of Borough in London details howthe area needs ‘a keeper of its soul’. It explainsthat while ‘market forces have always shapedthis part of the city… there has to be a balancewhich will allow the area to continue to changeand respond as part of Central London and yethang onto the evolving essence of what makes

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the place unique and vibrant.’ It goes on to saythat there is a need to ‘understand the elementswhich make the area special – the memoriesand associations, the people, the movement, thebuildings and the spaces – and to explore howthey might respond to change in a way whichamplifies rather than mutes their intrinsiccharacter.’(9)

Underlying all this is a hard economic reality.Cities with soul are today’s successful cities.They are the cities that are proving increasinglyattractive to mobile knowledge-based workers,whose willingness to move for greater quality ofplace is giving rise to the ‘brain gain’phenomenon. Creative professionals areincreasingly choosing to live in cities likeNewcastle and Gateshead which provide theauthenticity and sense of identity that more andmore people are seeking.

The Newcastle-Gateshead story

Soul cannot be created from scratch accordingto a fixed policy prescription. It has to be therealready. In Newcastle and Gateshead, theachievement of policy makers has been to workwith the soul of the place, enhancing itsdistinctive identity, most notably throughGateshead Council’s cultural regenerationstrategy. The two cities offer a very tangibleexample of how a series of investments canhave a transformative impact on a city’s qualityof place. This process we term ‘urbanentrepreneurship’. Within it, there are a numberof key elements:

1. Civic leadershipThe driving force behind the Angel, Baltic,Millennium Bridge and Sage Music Centre wasGateshead Council. Newcastle was at timesstrongly opposed, and only came to embrace the culture-led regeneration agenda in the mid-1990s. For a time, Newcastle City Council waseven against the building of the MillenniumBridge. The contrasting behaviour of the twoauthorities illustrates an important point abouturban entrepreneurship. Now that culture-ledregeneration has become commonplace, it issometimes easy to forget that projects like theone Gateshead embarked on often require theinherited apparatus of city governance andadministration to take on new actions or goals.This is not a simple task for public bodies, which are often characterised by an aversion to failure and risk-taking and riven by inter-departmental turf wars. How Gatesheadnegotiated these potential obstacles is anessential part of the story.

Part of the reason for Gateshead’s success, andNewcastle’s past problems, is down to thepolitical culture of the two authorities.Gateshead Council has been an unusually stablepolitical authority, characterised by flexibilityand delivery. As one key player in the region toldus: ‘Gateshead has been a very single-mindedpublic authority with no problems or crisis ofpolitical leadership. George Gill was a verysingle-minded political leader and Les Elton isoutstanding. They have developed a very clearvision and in many ways put Newcastle CityCouncil to shame. Newcastle had to go alongwith it.’(10)

chapter two

In terms of delivery, Gateshead is in the top 15per cent of authorities in the UK who scored‘excellent’ under the Audit Commission’s recentComprehensive Performance Assessment.Council leaders emphasise that this delivery ofbasic services is what underpins the politicalacceptance and popularity of the city’s culturestrategy. The council is particularly proud that itis top in the country for the emptying of wheeliebins, missing only two in every 100,000, a figurethat reflects incredibly close attention to theessential details that contribute to quality of lifefor local residents. (11)

By contrast, during our interviews with people inthe North East, the picture of Newcastle thatcame through is of an authority that has, atleast in the past, been dogged by viciouspolitical infighting and personality politics.There has also been a history of grandiosevisions and masterplans, from Brasilia of theNorth onwards, but without the necessaryleadership skills to deliver them.

The longevity of key personnel is another usefulindicator. In Gateshead, both Les Elton, the ChiefExecutive, and Bill McNaught, Head of Culture,have been at the council since 1984 while thecurrent leader Mick Henry started as a councillortwo years later in 1986. In Newcastle, althoughTony Flynn has been leader since 1994, histenure (and that of Sir Jeremy Beecham beforehim) has been characterised by factionalism anda high turnover of chief executives.

This infighting and the lack of stability withinNewcastle City Council had a direct impact on

its ability to mobilise around new cultural goals.Several insiders told us that an unwrittenagreement that the new music centre would besited in Newcastle was undermined byNewcastle’s factionalism, with the result that itwent to Gateshead.

2. Asset poolingHistorically, Newcastle and Gateshead werebitter rivals. Newcastle, the regional capital witha population of nearly 300,000, always lookeddown on its smaller cousin across the river. Triballoyalties, not to say anecdotal enmities, arestrong throughout the region. As a leadingpolitical figure in the area says: ‘Newcastle hasbeen traditionally regarded with a mixture offear and loathing in surrounding areas – theyexploited the area and a degree of hostilitysurvives to this day.’ (12)

Yet today the picture could not be moredifferent. The two authorities have achieved adegree of cooperation that would have beenunimaginable a decade ago. Deputy PrimeMinister John Prescott highlighted thistransformation when he spoke at the 2003 CoreCities conference in Newcastle: ‘Ten years agoyou would have been lynched for evenmentioning Newcastle and Gateshead in thesame breath. Now look at them,’ he told theaudience. (13)

Paul Rubenstein, Head of Culture at NewcastleCity Council, characterises the partnership as‘refashioning a city with a critical mass of half amillion with a river running through it.’ (14)

Instead of a small city, divided from the town

opposite by a river, a decent-sized European city,with a river at its centre, is being created. If youtalk to his opposite number in Gateshead, BillMcNaught, he’ll tell you about his not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek ambitions for re-naming thetwo cities ‘Newhead’.

The collaboration between the councils beganwith culture. Although Newcastle dragged itsheels at first, informal working between the twoauthorities gradually increased, and waseventually placed on a more formal footing by‘Building Bridges’, a joint cultural strategypublished in 2002. The Newcastle GatesheadInitiative (NGI), which was behind the joint bidfor Capital of Culture, operates alongside this.Despite not winning the Capital of Culture, bothauthorities are keen to emphasise that the jointstrategy and NGI will continue.

This level of targeted urban entrepreneurshiparound culture-led regeneration was highlyeffective in mobilising two different authoritiesaround a shared vision. What is equallyimportant is how this has helped to generatetrust by making the benefits of partnershipvisible. Collaboration in other areas, includinghousing, transport and cross-river planning havenow developed and as Paul Rubenstein says,‘There is a formal recognition that where it addsvalue it should happen.’ (15) What lies beneaththis pragmatic approach is a recognition thatNewcastle and Gateshead together comprise aviable urban unit and can generate valuablemultiplier effects when they pool theirresources.

For all its former difficulties as a Council,Newcastle has always had the name and theregional and national pull. It also has a numberof other key assets that contribute towardsquality of place: two universities and a teachinghospital, a Premier Division football team and ahistoric Georgian town centre. Today Gatesheadcomplements this with the Angel, the Baltic andthe soon-to-be-completed Sage Music Centre.Perhaps most importantly, it was Gatesheadwhich built the award-winning MillenniumBridge linking the two cities across the Tyne.Together this critical mass of unique assets andnew developments has created the momentumwhich has given Newcastle and Gateshead theircurrent buzz and sense of excitement.

In other parts of the country too, there are signsthat city-to-city collaborations are beginning todemonstrate their value. The joint city statusshared between Brighton and Hove stands outas one example. There are lessons here for othercities, particularly in regions trying to combatthe dominance and pull of London.

3. Building on local assetsIf the soul of a city is both innate and evolving, itis clear that, in line with the views of the greatAmerican urbanist Jane Jacobs, developmentwhich enhances soul involves the art ofcombining the old with the new.

Every city has its own unique set of territorialassets, from its location and topography, to itsbuildings and its people. How these aredeveloped and invested in is crucial in ensuringit remains distinctive and that new

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developments resonate with what alreadyexists. Newcastle and Gateshead not onlypooled many of their territorial assets, they alsorecognised the value of investing in otherswhich are unique. Two main examples standout: the Quayside and Newcastle’s historic citycentre, Grainger Town.

Grainger Town, named after Richard Graingerwho developed the Tyneside Classical style in the1830s and 1840s, is one of the region’s finestassets. Many of the original Grainger buildingshave survived and 40 per cent of the buildings inthe 90 acres designated site are listed. (16) Itsmain shopping street, Grey Street, won the titleof Britain’s best street in 2002.

Ten years ago, it was a very different story.Retailers began leaving in the 1970s and officesfollowed suit in the 1980s and 1990s. By themid-1990s Grainger Town had a large amount ofempty and unwanted floor space, many historicbuildings were in a serious state of disrepair ordereliction, and the entire area was neglectedand degraded. Craig Wilson, a conservationacademic at Northumbria University recalls:‘The place was emptied of tenants. Inconservation terms it was a major danger – thebuildings were at risk.’ (17)

The solution was a £40million project torevitalise the area funded largely by EnglishPartnerships and the Single RegenerationBudget, with contributions from the City Counciland English Heritage. Grainger Town has nowbeen restored to a high quality living andworking environment in a historic – yet not

‘faux-heritage’ – setting, where convertedwarehouses and restored Georgian frontagesspeak of every phase of the city’s development.In terms of attracting the creative andknowledge workers of the ‘brain gain’, describedin the next chapter, this regeneration of thehistoric heart has been crucial. As well asplacing Newcastle at the centre of the 24-hourcompact city lifestyle favoured by such workers,the sense of history and identity provided by theweathered buildings of the Georgian centreprovide the authenticity that so many peoplelook for when making their location decisions.

The Quayside has a more mixed story, but hasserved as an important catalyst for change inNewcastle and Gateshead. Alastair Balls, theformer head of the Tyne and Wear DevelopmentCorporation (TWDC), says that the Newcastleside is now ‘twenty times better than it was’,transformed from a dilapidated swamp ofbroken down wharves and warehouses into an‘urban public park with an unbelievable level ofpublic ownership’, (18) as evidenced by the scoresof weekend strollers and evening revellers in thebars. Yet while there is a widespread acceptancethat the TWDC’s development has had a verypositive impact on the city, the transformation isnot without its detractors. One localregeneration expert says: ‘It’s fine but it’snothing earth-shattering. It’s a predictable late-twentieth century model, it’s become a “smart”environment as opposed to scruffy, but there’snothing stunning which would bring peoplefrom far and wide. The 'wow’ factor is all on theGateshead side.’ (19)

20

The Sage Gateshead Music Centre

chapter two

Nord-Gren warns that there are ‘lots of traps onthe road – some cities have succeeded very wellwhile others have not’. (23) The BilbaoGuggenheim – the most famous contemporaryicon of culture-led regeneration – is according tomany regeneration experts an example of aproject that has not made the most of itsopportunities, particularly through its failure toconnect with the rest of the city.

Inclusion in creative projects is critical to theirsuccess. If they are rooted in a city’s culture andcommunity, they will ‘take’, acting like the Angelor Baltic as a signal of change. If, however, theyare intended as little more than a touristmagnet, they will come to be seen as whiteelephants, and will ultimately underminecreativity and change. The failed pop museum inSheffield is a good example of this.

Nord-Gren believes that unlike Sheffield andBilbao, Gateshead started this process ofculture-led regeneration in a highly inclusiveway. The Council and other public agenciesworked with the soul of region, sensitive to thechallenge of combining the new with old andinnate assets. The Angel of the North – a 20-metre high bronze sculpture towering over theapproach to Gateshead, was built in theTyneside steel-yards, and acted as a tippingpoint in the process of cultural renewal.

The Angel was highly controversial when firstproposed. The local media ran a vociferouscampaign against spending taxpayers’ money onan irrelevant monument, which could have gonetowards better schools and hospitals. Yet today

it is hailed as an outstanding success and apositive symbol, not merely for Newcastle andGateshead, but for the north of England as awhole. For sculptor Antony Gormley, themoment of genuine acceptance came whenthree Newcastle United fans draped a nine-times life size replica of Alan Shearer’s footballshirt over the Angel. This iconic image wascaptured on the front page of the DailyTelegraph, and catapulted Gateshead into thenational consciousness, by linking the sculptureto the lifeblood and passion of the region –football.

Gormley described the adoption of the Angelproject by Gateshead as a ‘fluke’.(24) It was not hisfirst attempt at a monumental piece of work fora local authority, but his earlier experience, withthe Brick Man project in Leeds, had left himjaded. After five years of development work, thecouncil abandoned the proposed 120 ft-highBrick Man in what was, according to Gormley, anexample ‘of how local authorities normallybehave’. He puts the fact that Gatesheadpursued the Angel down to ‘a reallyextraordinary fluke of local chemistry’, whichsaw Les Elton, Bill McNaught and Councillor SidHenderson (then chair of libraries and arts)united in their committment to the project,despite local opposition.

The secret of success

A central question for urban entrepreneurship ishow to nurture the type of political and civicculture that enables such innovative ‘flukes’ to

22 23

Part of the problem can be explained in thegenesis of the regeneration process. When thethen Regeneration Minister Nicholas Ridleylaunched the TWDC in 1987 he told local leadersthat the test of its success would be the extentto which land values increased. (20) The kind ofqualities associated with Gateshead’s projects –such as creativity and design excellence – werelacking, with development too narrowly focusedon physical change and an uplift in propertyvalues. Alastair Balls is the first to admit this,saying that while the UDC provided thenecessary ‘boosterism’, ‘it lacked the spark’. Buthe adds, ‘What Gateshead went on to docomplemented it perfectly.’(21)

Gateshead for its part refused to allow theTWDC to develop any of its land, so when thetime came for the Council to develop itsambitious plans, it had the land available onwhich to site them. The result was that thecomplementary activities of the TWDC andGateshead Council created a critical mass ofactivity on the river. For all the criticisms of theTWDC, without a viable quayside on theNewcastle side it is hard to imagine theMillennium Bridge being built. On the otherhand, it is impossible to deny that it is theBridge, the Baltic and the Music Centre whichare inspirational in a way that the developmentson the Newcastle side are not.

Despite the well-documented successes on theGateshead side, it is also necessary to sound anote of caution at this point. A growing numberof critics claim that the residential andcommercial developments currently under

construction on the Gateshead side behindBaltic Square are failing to live up to thestandards set by the larger projects, and arethreatening to undermine the integrity of thearea. The fear is that these new buildings will beas short on imagination and quality as some ofthe developments on the Newcastle side. Thisillustrates once again the difficulties of carryingthrough an ongoing regeneration process whichcontinues to inspire and enhance the soul of aplace.

4. Culture-led regeneration ‘Regeneration with the help of culture is not anew medicine’. For Sune Nord-Gren, theoutgoing Swedish Director of the Baltic, youhave to go back to post-war Germany and thelaunch in 1955 of Documenta in the bombed-out city of Kassell.

Hosted in a ruined shell of a building,Documenta aimed to rebuild the city’sconfidence and reconnect with the culture ofthe pre-war period, by showing artists such asPaul Klee, who had been labelled as degenerateby the Nazis. By the 1970s, this had become oneof the biggest international biennials, andstarted to generate clear economic dividends.Research revealed that for every mark spent onthe exhibition, the city received seven marksback through tourism and boosted localbusiness. Today this figure is estimated at 10euros back for every euro spent. (22) And biennials,from Venice to Liverpool, are now a tried andtested means of fostering regeneration.

So although he describes it as an ‘old trick’,

chapter two

24 25

Flexibility and an organic visionFlexibility, an open-minded approach toinnovation and an element of risk-taking hasconsistently characterised Gateshead’s approachto culture-led regeneration. Gateshead went foran art factory and international exhibitionspace, in spite of pressure for a traditionalgallery housing a regional collection. It alsochose Dominic Williams as the architect, at thetime an unheard of 28-year-old, who won theopportunity to remodel the building through anopen competition.

The Millennium Bridge offers another exampleof the organic, flexible type of developmentpursued by Gateshead. There had been no plansfor another bridge across the Tyne and asAlastair Balls, former head of the TWDC, admits,it was something no one had ever thought of.The bridge arose out of what has been describedas ‘creative serendipity’ (28), namely the spottingof an opportunity by Gateshead to link theirprojects with the transformation of theQuayside on the Newcastle side. When theunexpected opportunity arose to bid for theMusic Centre as well, Gateshead Council seizedit. The result of this series of opportunistic leapsis a set of iconic projects which retrospectivelymake up a coherent whole but which in factwere never part of any overarching masterplan.Describing his strategy over the last decade BillMcNaught says:’If I’d written down ten years

ago what I thought Gateshead would be doingthey’d have locked me up and thrown away thekey. You need flexibility and you need to beopportunistic and we have been. We studiouslyavoided setting out grand visions.’ (29)

Confidence and local ownershipA prerequisite for flexibility and innovation isconfidence. The design excellence of the Bridge,the Baltic and the Music Centre signal a returnto the civic confidence of the past. This hasresonated with local people, and helped tofoster a broader sense of civic pride – a sensethat Gateshead and Newcastle are back on themap. During one focus group a local residentsummed this feeling up: ‘It’s really done usproud.’

This sense of local ownership is vital if cultureprojects are to be sustained and provideopportunities for participation in the civic life ofthe city. So far, the Baltic has been innovative inspotting opportunities for participation. One ofits first major projects was Antony Gormley’sDomain Field, which opened in May 2003. Twohundred and fifty local people were picked fromthousands who applied. On the second floor ofthe Baltic, they were each wrapped in gorse andplaster and had their cast taken. Their statuesnow stand as a crowd in the gallery with visitorsfree to walk among them, seeing if they canrecognise any of their friends or family.

thrive? Looking at the story of culture-ledregeneration in Newcastle and Gateshead, it ispossible to isolate a number of factors thathelped make its particular brand of urbanentrepreneurialism so successful.

Long-term commitmentThe Angel was part of a wider strategy totransform the post-industrial environment ofGateshead through the use of public art, whichhad been pursued since the mid-1980s. The site,a former baths for the old pithead at TeamsColliery, was identified as suitable for a large-scale public art project as far back as 1989. Thisstrategy involved an intense level of jointworking between different council departments,led by the planning department in collaborationwith arts officers.

This commitment was severely tested by thelevel of opposition to the project, but was offsetby the staying power of key officers and electedmembers at Gateshead. The triumvirate of LesElton, the Chief Executive, Bill McNaught, theHead of Culture and Jerry Barford, Director ofPlanning has been in place since the mid-1980sand has overseen all of Gateshead’s iconicprojects. In 1992, before the subject was trendy,a council report, Urban Regeneration through theArts, was produced jointly by McNaught, Barfordand Elton and paved the way for Baltic andsubsequent projects. (25)

High standardsAnother key factor that characterises this seriesof projects is an adherence to high standards.

From its inception, the Baltic drew on the verybest international expertise, appointingexperienced consultants as advisors andinvolving Sandy Nairne, now the right-hand manto Nicholas Serota as Assistant Director at theTate. Graham Marchant, formerly a senior figureat the South Bank, carried out the feasibilitystudy. High standards may seem an obvious partof any recipe for success, but this aspect of thestory relates to wider arguments about elitismand inclusion in the arts. As one insider put it,‘The view was that Baltic would be an elitistcontemporary art facility which would competewith Newcastle’s facilities.’ (26) Another said,‘Newcastle wanted to spend the money onpopulist art projects, such as interactiveexhibitions about football, which they thoughtwould ensure high visitor numbers.’ (27)

But far from an elite art gallery, Baltic has beenbuilt as a contemporary art factory, housingstudio spaces for working artists, five galleriesand a rooftop restaurant. Visitors can see artbeing constructed in front of them. A strollaround it has little in common with a visit to thetraditional cloistered world of the art galleryAlthough it is only a year and a half since itopened, there is no doubt from the Baltic’s ownresearch, that it is drawing in ‘ordinary’ localpeople delighted at this distinctive, high-calibrefacility on their doorstep. Visitor numbers havebeen consistently high despite the fact thatcritical opinion of the content – in common withmost contemporary art spaces – has beenmixed.

27

Places with soul are seen as ‘real’, with a livesense of their gritty past, combined with anability to tell a confident story about the future.The sociologist Manuel Castells describes thissearch for an authentic, unique and distinctiveidentity as increasingly important to theindividual in today’s impermanent world. (31)

Newcastle and Gateshead, with their strongsense of place and identity, are in a strongposition in this respect.

It is also possible that a sense of identity isenhanced – in part at least – by the process oftrauma and transition a city experiences. It is nocoincidence that some of the world’s mostsuccessful cities today are places with a history ofproblems, a factor which appears to strengthenidentity and act as a magnet for certain types ofpeople, including the so-called ‘creative class’ –US academic Richard Florida’s term for peopleworking in knowledge-based professions. (32)

Describing the regeneration of Barcelona, MayorJuan Clos has pointed to the fact that the cityonly held its first free elections as late as 1979,during a period of profound economic crisis. (33)

Similarly Berlin, another historically traumatised

city, is undergoing a tremendous renaissance inthe wake of re-unification.

While political events in Newcastle andGateshead were never quite so dramatic, the citywas at the heart of the UK’s post-industrialcrisis. It is not alone in having come through thiswith a strong sense of purpose. Glasgow andLiverpool are similar examples. Belfast too,despite being the most fought over part of theUK, was among the initial contenders forEuropean Capital of Culture, something thatwould have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The lesson appears to be that cities with a grittypast, twinned with a sense of excitement aboutthe future, are those that succeed in drawing invisitors and new inhabitants. It is a combinationof local identity and history that helps to createa sense of soul. Our research indicates thatNewcastle and Gateshead have got this mixright, with the majority of local peopleinterviewed claiming that there are nowsignificantly more people moving into the areafrom London and the South East.

the beginning of a brain gain

chapterthree

Authentic places with soul are where the creative

professionals of the knowledge economy want to live.

Such places also appeal to visitors, as demonstrated by

recent research for Britain’s tourist authority, which found

that what people are searching for in cities is ‘passion’,

‘heart’ and ‘an element of anarchy’. (30)

chapter three

This runs counter to conventional accounts of acontinued brain drain from the north-east to thesouth-east. Our research suggests that theheadline statistics about population movementare obscuring a subtle yet significant trend. Agrowing number of creative, highly-skilledprofessionals are now being attracted by thequality of place in cities like Newcastle andGateshead. Students and graduates, whopreviously would have come to university in thenorth-east and then moved back down south,are also choosing to stay.

There is powerful anecdotal evidence to supportthis trend. Cathryn Harvey, Head of the CareersService at Newcastle University, says that she iscertain the numbers of incomers have soared. ‘Iwould say definitely that the whole place is justbuzzing with creative industry people anddevelopments but we don’t have the figures onit. What has changed over the last few years isthat the employment opportunities havechanged. There is much more support for start-ups and many more links between theuniversities and arts related organisations.’ (34)

The figures remain hard to pin down, and thereis a definite need for more robust research totest this hypothesis. But in the absence ofcomprehensive data, we attempted to explorethe extent to which greater numbers of creativepeople are being attracted by the quality ofplace on offer. Our research found that there isindeed compelling evidence of a brain gainamong creative and knowledge professionals

Over the summer of 2003, we surveyed seventycompanies in Newcastle and Gateshead in the

fields of architecture, PR, advertising, webdesign and TV/film production. Fifty-four percent of these 70 firms said that they wereincreasingly employing people from outside theNorth-East region. Twenty-five per cent said theyrecruited ‘a majority’ of their employees fromoutside the region. Our survey found that thebrain gain trend had become most pronouncedover the last three years.

Survey of creative firms

A Percentage of firms that displayed evidence ofbrain gain

B Percentage of firms where the majority oftheir recruits over the past three years havecome from outside the North-East

C Percentage of the total number of recruitswho came from outside the region

D Percentage of firms who reported an increasein the proportion of their workforce comingfrom outside the region in the past threeyears

E Percentage of firms who said Newcastle andGateshead were good places to do business

F Percentage of firms who said Newcastle andGateshead had improved as places to live andwork in the past three years.

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These findings are backed up by statistics fromthe government’s latest Labour Force Surveyfrom the Office of National Statistics. It reportsthat 2002 was the first year for a decade whenthe balance of people coming into the regionexceeded those leaving it. Of particular interestis the growing trend away from London and thesouth-east towards the north-east. In 1998,8,000 people chose to leave London and thesouth-east for the north-east. This rose to 9,000in 1999. By 2002, the number of incomersreached 10,000, finally overtaking the numberrelocating south, which stood at 9,000. (35)

More than fashionWe ran focus groups with a number of incomersto find out why they had moved to the region.This revealed that improved quality of life wasthe main factor behind their decision to move.What came across most strongly in our focusgroups and interviews was the desire not justfor the ‘buzz’ of the cultural renaissance, but foreasy access to different types of city life,revealing just how broad the definition of‘quality of place’ can be. One recent incomerexplained why Newcastle and Gateshead weregood places to be: ‘It’s more relaxed, more fun,less money driven. The friendliest people I’vecome across. Beautiful countryside and coastlinewithin 30 minutes of home, but a city with areal buzz and sense of excitement.’ (36)

The brain gain is also being boosted by one verypractical factor: affordability. While parts ofNewcastle have seen an exponential rise inproperty prices, property is still, on the whole,far cheaper than in the overheated South East.

A two-bedroom flat in Heaton, for example,costs around £90,000, while at the EastGateshead Staiths Development, designed byWayne Hemmingway, one-bedroom flats start at£65,000. Similarly, the cost of renting businesspremises is lower.

The degree of mobility amongst today’s creativeand knowledge workers, which was unknown ageneration ago, is another crucial factor. Theyare increasingly prepared to up sticks and movein search of a better quality of life or quality ofplace. Compounding this mobility, the arrival ofbroadband communications has removed thetraditional geographic disadvantage of thenorth- east. Creative professionals, many ofwhom only need a laptop and a connection, can now work from anywhere.

But above all it is the distinctive identity andsoul of Newcastle and Gateshead which appearsto bring these incomers to the region. Inconversation, many give the impression thattheir location decisions are as much based onthese softer factors as on professionalconsiderations. In some ways, choosing where tolive is becoming akin to choosing what to wear:an emotional decision, rather than one basedpurely on property prices or job prospects.Choosing where to live is a core statement ofpersonal identity and of how someone wishes tobe perceived by others.

If we accept that Newcastle and Gateshead arenow succeeding in attracting and retaining anew wave of incomers, the question is how theycan accelerate this trend, and maintain the

30

sense of freshness and excitement – the ‘buzz’ –that attracts so many people. Cities on the cuspof change often maintain this buzz for a whileand then lose it, falling victim to the pressuresof rapid growth which, if pursued withoutsensitivity, can destroy the soul of a place. Howcan cities avoid this ‘buzz to bland’ cycle?

The challenge is two-fold. First, success canoften create negative feedback loops, with rapidgrowth leading to rising rents that price outdiversity. Second, after the kind of disruptiveinnovation that happened in Gateshead andNewcastle, there is a need to broaden the socialbase of the renewal process. Quality of placeneeds to work for everyone, not just creativeprofessionals, if it is going to be sustainable.Precisely how this can be achieved is the focusof the next chapter.

Project North EastPink Lane used to be notorious as Newcastle’s red-light district. Today it is known as Silicon Alley andhas a cluster of almost 100 creative hi-techbusinesses. Set up by Project North East 12 yearsago with just £40,000, the project now receivesthirty enquiries a month from aspiring businesses.The availability of affordable space has proved acritical factor in attracting businesses to ProjectNorth East, which is able to subsidise workspaceand provide small business support.

The project’s clients are mainly drawn from localtalent or people who have returned to the region.It has helped to strengthen Newcastle’s emergingreputation in film and television production, kickstarted thirty years ago by the Amber FilmCollective and Live Theatre, whose writers includeAlan Plater, Peter Flannery and Lee Hall,responsible for the box office smash Billy Elliot.Channel Four’s seminal music show The Tube, seenas integral to shaking up television in the 1980s,had its founding roots in Newcastle and many ofthose involved have chosen to return to theregion. Andrea Wonfor, formerly Director ofProgrammes at Granada TV, recently chose tolaunch her independent production companyLiberty Bell in Newcastle. And the on-line retailerEyestorm, which sells art multiples andphotographs to collectors worldwide, hasrelocated to Newcastle, claiming that the city’sinternational profile in the visual arts will enhancetheir reputation.

chapter four

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investing indiversity

chapterfour

Our most successful cities are the ones that manage to

combine a sense of soul with an innovative approach to

change, which is enhanced by a diverse set of people,

activities and places. It is this mix of innovation and

organic development, driven forward by diversity, which

gives rise to the sense of excitement and ‘buzz’ that

Newcastle/Gateshead have nurtured so well.

However, there are strong trends, not only inNewcastle and Gateshead but across a growingnumber of UK towns and cities, that militateagainst diversity and can dilute the sense ofbuzz. This chapter focuses on two such trendsand explores how they can be countered. Theaim for urban entrepreneurs is to find ways ofbreaking this ‘buzz to bland’ cycle ofdevelopment.

Gentrification and place warsThe trend for artists and creative businesses toseek out cheap industrial workspace, which thenacts as a catalyst for regeneration andgentrification, is well-documented.But it is not merely the cheap rents and largeempty buildings that bring the artists flocking. Astrong sense of history, embedded local cultureand identity, are also appealing to creatives whocrave authenticity and gritty reality.

There is, however, an inherent tension here.Once the artists move in, and a formerly run-

down area starts to take off, property developerswake up to an opportunity, rents start rising andbefore too long the area is overrun by themepubs, expensive restaurants and mock loftapartments. The artists and locals are priced outand the distinctive quality of place that peoplefound attractive in the first place is lost.

We must be careful not to condemngentrification as entirely negative. Revitalisingblighted areas and bringing people back into theinner city are an important part of urbanrenewal. It is clear, however, that these trendshave to be handled with immense sensitivity ifthe soul of the area – and therefore its long-term appeal – is to survive such a rapid processof change. In The Rise of the Creative Class,Richard Florida explains this problem:‘Gentrification in major urban centres continuesto threaten the diversity and creativity that havedriven these cities’ innovation and growth in thefirst place.’ (37) In addition, there is growingevidence that a failure to balance development

with the needs of local people can lead to realconflict between communities.

In the US, the growing phenomenon of ‘placewars’ has been identified, as local people getpushed out of their communities by incomers.For example, in San Fransisco, a recent campaignagainst gentrification has been described as ‘apowerful portent of things to come’ (38). In thesummer of 2000, a coalition of artists, clubowners and residents organised nearly fortymarches and collected more than 30,000signatures in a protest against the gentrificationand high-tech development of variousneighbourhoods.

These issues are just as relevant to Newcastleand Gateshead as to San Fransisco. A tellingexample is the proposed private residentialdevelopment on the Quayside, going towardsByker, which has provoked outrage among localresidents and an opposition campaignspearheaded by the local vicar. Local people arefurious that they will ultimately be pushed outof the area by such developments. Anotherflashpoint is the old industrial area of theOuseburn, which is being earmarked forexpensive development which will have little todo with the original community. There are alsofears that some of the Ouseburn’s best lovedpubs, such as the Free Trade and The Cluny, maybe under threat from corporate development.As one local resident said to us: ‘They’re building2,000 one and two bed apartments. They’re notcatering to families so there won’t be acommunity. We’ve lost the Ouseburn.’ (39)

Within any process of gentrification, there is aneed to maintain some affordable areas, bothfor housing local people, who are unable toafford soaring prices, and for independent andcreative businesses which initially lend an areaits buzz and kickstart its fashionability. This isalso in keeping with the government’s aim ofcreating mixed and balanced communities.Planning Policy Guidance Note 3 states: ‘Localplanning authorities should encourage thedevelopment of mixed and balancedcommunities: they should ensure that newhousing developments help secure a bettersocial mix by avoiding the creation of large areasof housing of similar characteristics.’ (40)

The night-time economy‘They should cater for older people too. Places onthe quayside, they’re not for everyone, I meanwhen I’m older I want to be able to playdominoes and darts. Can you do that inNewcastle anymore?’ (41)

Newcastle’s reputation as a ‘party toon’ extendsthroughout the UK and internationally, withthousands of young people descending onto thestreets of the city centre every weekend. But thishas been a double-edged sword for the city.While the ‘party toon’ is undoubtedly verypopular, both with locals and tourists onweekend breaks, it is also an extreme exampleof the type of binge-drinking, night-timeeconomy which characterises many city centresaround the UK. A recent House of CommonsEnvironment Select Committee report raisedserious concerns about this phenomenon. (42)

34

The danger is that Newcastle will fall prey to thesame ‘buzz to bland’ cycle that has afflictedplaces such as Temple Bar in Dublin, whereoriginality and diversity are undermined by acorporate bar culture and a drunken party zone.Europe’s biggest party city, Amsterdam, is also aworrying model for regeneration experts inNewcastle and Gateshead, especially as theregion becomes a venue of choice for stagparties and hen weekends. There are concernsthat the ‘party toon’ culture swamping the citycentre is mono-cultural and excludes largesections of the community. Critics argue thatthere is little space for alternative entertainmentsuch as jazz, comedy or live music. There are alsofears that the largely white culture of the citycentre is not welcoming to ethnic minorities.Families with children and older people, whomay want to visit the centre for a meal in theevening, also tend to be marginalised.

However, despite these concerns, we need toremember that Newcastle’s party toon doesoffer a very popular night out which has becomea central part of Geordie culture, andconsequently is a core element of the identityand soul of the place today. While sections ofthe community may not enjoy what isessentially a white working class night out, it isan inclusive experience for a large percentage ofpeople in the region. The issue, as withgentrification, is when one activity or type ofdevelopment comes to dominate, such that itblocks out the possibility of other activities. For acity to retain the ability to adapt and renewitself, it needs to keep a diversity of developmentoptions open. A narrow dependence on one type

of activity reduces this flexibility. A saturationpoint can be reached, when the dominantactivity becomes so intense that it begins todegrade itself.

There are now signs that the party toon is losingits local distinctiveness. National and regionalchains dominate the nightlife and eveningeconomy in Newcastle City Centre. Sixty-six percent of city centre pubs are owned by nationaloperators. (43) Regional operators such as 42ndStreet Bars and Fitzgeralds own thirty per cent,and less than five per cent are independentlyowned. This is a very low figure compared withother cities – in Leeds for example a full 18 percent are independent. Most planners accept thatindependent operators are more likely to providethe diversity and vitality so crucial to a thrivingcity centre. They also provide greateropportunities for innovative DJs, musicians,performing artists and spin-off industries infashion, music and art. The concern is that ifthey continue to be squeezed out, the soul ofthe city centre will be damaged.

36 37

Ways forwardThe solutions to the dangers of over-gentrification or a mono-cultural night-timeeconomy, are well known. A call for ‘mixed andbalanced communities’ features in numerousgovernment policy documents, from the UrbanWhite Paper to the detail of Planning PolicyGuidance. However, achieving this balance isharder in practice, as any local authority officialnegotiating a Section 106 agreement with itsprovisions for affordable housing in newdevelopments will testify. The short-term needsof many developers to clear a profit, alongsidethe pressures on the local authority to achieve‘best value’, often seem to contradict the longer-

term needs of ensuring a place has a sustainablequality of place. Investing in diversity involves acomplex juggling act between the needs of abroad coalition of interests: government,business, developers and the local community.More thinking needs to go into how tocoordinate outcomes across these groups, butthe experience of Newcastle and Gatesheadoffer some clues as to the way forward.

A need for affordable propertyNewcastle has recognised the need to invest indiversity by finding new ways to support its artsand culture sector. Importantly, this has meantthe council taking on a new, cross-departmentalrole linking up the Culture Directorate with theProperty Services Department.

Liz Archer is the Cultural Estates Manager forNewcastle City Council. As far as she is aware,she is the only local authority Cultural EstatesManager in the UK. She describes her role asbeing ‘a one stop shop’ for artists seeking adviceon property. Until Liz came along there was ahuge gap with artists ‘finding it difficult to sortout these things and property professionalsfinding it difficult to cater to artists.’

A typical example of her work was theacquisition of the Wards Building in GraingerTown, a former print works that now houses theWaygood art space. With additional fundingfrom One North East, the rest of the building isnow due to be converted into an arts complex,with a commercial element in the basementthat will be used to subsidise the non-commercial gallery and studios. Another

chapter fourQuayside loft appartments

Byker Wall

example is the Council’s acquisition of SWSHouse in the Ouseburn. This will be marketedas a cultural venue, but the user clause will berestricted to keep rents low.

Property services is a commercial arm of thecouncil and is required to conform to ‘best value’requirements when renting out properties. Liz isacutely aware that artists can’t afford tocompete in this context. Instead she has thepower to take individual cases to the Council’sCabinet and, if they are deemed a non-commercial or charitable organisation, they canescape some of the restrictions of the ‘bestvalue’ framework. This is a deliberate effort togive greater recognition to quality of placeconsiderations. As Liz said: ‘It’s a balancing actbetween commercial interests and benefits forartists, which have spin-off benefits for the area.’ (44)

Other cities are also beginning to recognise thevalue of investing in diversity through supportfor artists and the cultural industries sector. TheLondon Development Agency (LDA), following itsCommission on the Creative Industries hasproposed setting up ten to fifteen local PropertyTrusts across the capital. These trusts willpurchase properties and provide an asset basefor creative industries, and will also provideadvice on property-related issues, includingquantity surveying and finance for feasibilitystudies. The LDA is also proposing that all newdevelopments above a certain size require someaffordable space for creative industries; asignificant extension of what are understood as‘key workers’ for today’s cities. (45)

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The move to invest in diversity should not endwith better support for artists and the creativeindustries. The portfolio approach to propertyadvocated here, which rests on the need for anelement of affordable space, should retain adegree of flexibility and be open to supportother forms of diversity that help make up theecology of a city. This might mean supportingcheap shops in areas suddenly swamped withhigh-end coffee houses and retail outlets. Or itmight mean supporting the local pub againstthe large chains.

Perhaps most important of all to the creation ofbalanced communities is the policy of ensuringa percentage of affordable housing is built innew developments. This is already enshrined inthe planning system as the notoriously complexand opaque Section 106, otherwise known as‘planning gain’. If this system worked, it wouldbe a powerful force for positive change. But localauthorities still struggle to enforce Section 106in the face of short-term financial pressure fromdevelopers, so more needs to be done to enablethe spirit of the legislation to operate in practice.

Time and spaceThe need to diversify the city centre has beenrecognised elsewhere. Leeds begantransforming its nightlife ten years ago under its24-hour city initiative and has made goodprogress. There is now a greater mix of venuesand activities, from jazz clubs to comedy clubsand restaurants. Alongside these changes a newpublic square now exists for events thatdeliberately aim to attract families and olderpeople into the city centre. These events havebeen very successful and have included parades

that saw children welcomed in the city centre aslate as 10pm and 11pm.

Newcastle city centre, in common with many UKtowns and cities, experiences a dead time afterthe shops shut and before the pubs and bars getgoing. Shoppers, older people and families withchildren leave the centre when the shops close.A few hours later, the young people return for anight out. This form of segregation underminesdiversity and quality of place. If soul is alsoabout the art of successfully combining the oldwith the new, too great a level of segregatedactivities can prevent different types of peoplemeeting, let alone mixing. Zoning reinforces thisproblem, especially when bars and night clubsare concentrated in certain streets or areas. Theresult is that these become no-go zones for alarge number of residents. Newcastle’s BiggMarket is a classic example of a dense drinkingstrip where every other building is a bar or club.

The solutions are increasingly being recognisedby a number of cities across the UK. They includeinvesting in the 5pm-8pm ‘bridging economy’, byextending library, gallery and shopping timesand making greater use of public spaces for adiverse range of activities. There may also be acase for trying a more dispersed pattern for thenight-time economy. For example in New York itis not possible to obtain a licence to open a barwithin 500 feet of another, while in Paris it is250 feet with a cap on the number of premisesin any arrondissement. The forthcoming reviewof Planning Policy Guidance 6 on zoning and thegovernment’s Licensing Reform Bill offer achance to experiment with alternative models.

chapter four

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chapter five

41

A vociferous campaign against Oxford’s bid byresidents of the Blackbird Leys estate denouncedthe Council for spending a small fortune on ‘aplaything for the middle classes, [that was]nothing to do with life on council estates or what survives of working class culture.’ (46)

Similarly, Glasgow’s year as European City ofCulture in 1990 was derided at the time ashaving little to do with life on the city’s mostdeprived housing estates.

Statements are often made about theinclusiveness of particular culture-ledregeneration projects, but there is a lack of hardevidence to back up such claims. And the terms‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ are freely deployeddespite being highly contested and opaque.Demos research has identified three broaddimensions of inclusion: access to social goods,empowerment, and institutional trust. (47) Each ofthese is highly relevant to cultural regenerationprojects because without them the projects willeventually fail.

Access to social goods: inclusion involvesensuring that all individuals and groups,including those in the most marginalisedcommunities, have equal access to the collectivegoods that are any citizen’s basic socialentitlement. Alongside more traditional socialgoods such as education, housing, legal advice,and public transport, access to culturalexperiences and assets is a core social good.Indeed, Article 27 of the UN’s UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights states, ‘Everyonehas the right freely to participate in the culturallife of the community, (and) to enjoy the arts’.

Empowerment: to have meaning, the right toculture as a social good must translate intoactive engagement not passive provision.Participation in cultural or art activities can be atransformative experience for individuals andcommunities, as people discover their owncapabilities and capacity for creative thinkingand action.

social inclusion and quality of place

How inclusive a development is and how widely the

benefits of a project are distributed has been a central

question in debates about regeneration over the past 20

years. For example, all six cities on the shortlist for the

2008 Capital of Culture title had to demonstrate the

inclusiveness of their bids.

chapterfive

Institutional trust: culture-led activities engageindividuals and communities in a different kindof relationship with the city and the institutionsand organisations that usually represent it. Theycan help to articulate a new narrative about aplace that can mobilise people around sharedgoals and generate trust between people andlocal institutions.

Newcastle and Gateshead contributed to eachof these dimensions of inclusion with theirprogramme of culture-led regeneration. In thefocus groups we ran, long-term residentsexplained how projects like the Baltic madethem feel proud about their city. One said, ‘I have pride in where I live. It’s taken about 15years for this place to get going, but it’s doingwell’. (48) Antony Gormley’s Domain Field with its250 local volunteers is a fine example of thetransformative potential of culture, with localpeople co-producing the art. And despiteappearances, with its lavish Norman Foster-designed building, the Sage-Gateshead Music

Centre will be a community-based inclusiveenterprise, aimed at spreading activeengagement in local music and culture.

The Sage Music CentreThe Music Centre represents the comingtogether of two very different organisations andtraditions: the Northern Sinfonia and Folkworks,a community-focused folk music organisation.Education and community programmes areintegrated into the Centre’s artistic programmeat every level. The Director of Community Music,Katherine Zesserson, describes the plannedactivities, which will span the region and rangefrom DJ-ing projects in Scotswood and Byker tocommunity choirs in Seaham and Durham. TheCentre is also working with every secondaryschool in the region, offering training forteachers, and has a programme trainingcommunity musicians – 16 have already graduatedand are working in the north-east region.

42 43

Everyday inclusionCultural inclusion is important in itself, but alsohelps to illuminate the wider need for inclusionand participation across the whole range of citylife. Indeed, Newcastle Council got badly caughtout when the inclusive language and aims of itscultural strategy jarred with the starkly non-participatory approach to its Going for Growthstrategy, which announced the demolition ofover 6000 homes in a local newspaper withoutfirst informing – let alone asking – the peoplewho lived there.

Going for Growth Going for Growth is Newcastle Council’s twenty-year strategy document to reverse populationloss by remodelling rundown parts of the city’sEast and West End into ‘urban villages’.According to the Going for Growth Green Paper (49),Newcastle is losing its population at a rate of1,500 people a year which on current trendscould result in the loss of 17,000 people by 2020.This sizable figure does not take account of anyof the brain gain effects discussed in this report.

The aim of the strategy is to attract the middleincome people who are leaving the city for thesuburbs and green belt, while at the same timeturning around areas of multiple deprivationwhere the housing market has collapsed. Thecost of decline in Scotswood and other parts ofthe West End is a huge drain on Councilresources, of up to £10million a year (50).

The story of Going for Growth is told throughthe eyes of local resident and chair of the

Scotswood Area Strategy, 68-year-old RoseMcCourt. (51)

‘We first heard about Going for Growth with aphonecall from the Newcastle Journal when thereporter told us street by street which homeswere earmarked for demolition. The Councilknows Scotswood and they knew that when thiscame out all hell would break loose and it did.’

According to the plans most of the 6,600 homesto be demolished were in Scotswood and Walker,a riverside area in the East End. In the Going forGrowth document both are coloured red,meaning they are ‘unviable’. Rose says she wastold that in Scotswood only 30 homes were tobe preserved, as a ‘gateway’ to the proposedurban village. The result was a wave of localoutrage and‘Save Our Scotswood’, anunprecedented community campaign that tookthe city and the Council by surprise.

‘Seven hundred people turned up to the firstmeeting. We couldn’t fit everyone into thechurch and we had to have another meeting thefollowing night. After that we had to holdmeetings at the Scotswood social club, it wasthe only place big enough. People were literallyemptying their purses into the bucket – on aThursday.’

Rose is keen to point out that the communitywas not opposed to change, simply to the way itwas being implemented. ‘We knew there wouldhave to be changes. There were a lot of emptyhomes. People here are not thick, they knowwhat they need.’

chapter five

Boarded up homes earmarked for demolition in Scotswood

As a result of the campaign the initial planshave changed considerably, with the Councilclaiming to have taken account of communityviews. However, an enormous chasm of distrustbetween community and council remains.

‘The Council asked us to come in and tell themwhat we thought. Our main group went awayfor a weekend and came up with a plan whichwe presented to the Council. We gave them, ifyou like, lower Scotswood – we knew wecouldn’t sustain everything. We picked outcertain areas for demolition on the understandingthat people who wanted to be rehoused inScotswood could move to the top end.’

The Council responded positively to the plan andset up a joint working group with thecommunity to take it forward. Rose, however,has little faith in it and has since left theworking group.

‘I stopped going. The Council would say they areworking to our brief but they are not. In realitythey are moving people out of housesearmarked for demolition but they aren't fillingup the houses which are meant to be staying.There’s a show home next to me but it’s notbeen shown to one person…. In terms ofdecisions the working group can’t make anybecause everything has to be referred back tothe cabinet. It felt like we were going round incircles and going nowhere.’

As to what the outcome will be she is far frompositive: ‘I think they’re running Scotswooddown. They don’t want it. It’s a very family-

orientated place with many extended familiesbut this is breaking them up and scatteringpeople in different places.’

What happened in Scotswood goes to the heartof the debate about inclusion. It is clear that thistype of top-down approach is no longeradequate for the complexities of modern citylife. Nor can it effectively engage people. As PaulBrickell wrote in a Demos pamphlet, ‘Across thecountry, a growing number of people havegrown weary of the traditional methods ofcommunity consultation and communitygovernance, which have consistently failed toengage the interest and commitment of localpeople or to effect real change in their lives.’ (52)

The architect Richard Rogers made a similarpoint when talking about Scotswood to theGuardian in 2000, just after he resigned fromthe project, ‘In this kind of situation it’s a matterof life or death. In the 1950s and 1960s, we tookthe wrong road. We were centralised. The bestyou had was consultation. There is a bigdifference between consultation andparticipation. With consultation the authorityarrives at a plan and asks people: ‘Do you like it?’With participation, you get round the table withcommunity leaders to work on solutionstogether." (53)

It is no coincidence that the themes andlanguage used here – the need for physicalregeneration projects to be locally rooted if theyare to succeed – are the same as for cultural

44

chapter fiveregeneration projects. In both situations, greateropportunities for participation at the everydaylevel need to be created and joined up. Directparticipation in cultural activities is not just anend in itself; it needs to be integrated with otherforms of direct participation, such as voting,community activity and choices about thedelivery of public services. In turn, if cities areserious about the needs of everyone, directparticipation needs to inform and adjust howplanning and governance systems are operated.Through everyday participation, the process ofshaping a city’s life can become a collective anddistributed endeavour. The adaptive capacity ofthe city is enhanced because more people areinvolved in helping to generate ideas andsolutions.

Gateshead has already begun thinking abouthow to extend the debate around culture-ledinclusion, by exploring how creativity can bedistributed more widely than through clustersand art factories. This is crucial if cities are todevelop a broader, more sustainable economicbase rather than being reliant on a growing butrelatively small and largely imported ‘creativeclass’. Creativity Challenge is the brainchild of BillMcNaught, the Head of Culture at GatesheadCouncil. The aim of this cross-cutting initiative isto pull together what he sees as the four crucialstrands of urban entrepreneurship: business,education, neighbourhood renewal and thecreative industries.

The initiative kicked off earlier this year with atwo-day brainstorm led by managementconsultants Cap Gemini. Forty people working in

each of the four strands attended, includingGateshead’s Director of Community-BasedServices, the Head of Neighbourhood Renewaland representatives from the Department forEducation & Skills and organisations such as theNorth East Museums Libraries and ArchivesCouncil.

The main benefit of the brainstorm, according toMcNaught, was not so much the clarity of theresulting programme but the deeperunderstanding of the agenda shared among theparticipants. ‘We’re trying to recognise that theskills set around creative thinking and creativityis the one most important to the 21st century. Interms of social inclusion, for example, we wantto bring creative thinking into our discussions onneighbourhood renewal, to allow local people toarticulate what kind of neighbourhood they wishto become. Creative thinking skills can empowerthem to do that,’ he explains.

Gateshead has now appointed an officer to lookat how the Challenge can be incorporated intothe roles of Council employees across the fourstrands. One aspiration is to develop a majorprogramme for creative skills development inschools and at a neighbourhood level. AsMcNaught says, ‘Why not teach creative thinkingas an essential skills set? We’re looking at havinga creativity education advisor and we’d like toencourage Creativity Champions within schoolswho can talk up the role of creativity within eachschool plan. The problem with our economy isthat anyone who is not a straight line thinker isregarded as weird but this type of thinking isvital to the knowledge economy,’ (54)

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47

There have already been too many copycatcultural initiatives across cities. Instead, thelessons lie in understanding how it is thatNewcastle and Gateshead came to have anAngel and a Millennium Bridge. The mix ofleadership, skills and capacities in these twocities represents a shining example of what wemean by urban entrepreneurship: the ability toseek out and nurture new sources of energy andideas, and combine them with an existing stockof resources in order to fuel renewal and ensurethe long-term quality of a place.

The most interesting part of the Newcastle-Gateshead story is what gave rise to this cultureof collaboration and success. But theirexperience also tells us something about thenext set of challenges, risks and opportunitiesfor cities and regions seeking deeper and moresustainable forms of renewal. Three core themescan be identified which have relevance not justto Newcastle and Gateshead, but across the UKand beyond.

First, there is a need for citywide strategies toinvest in diversity. The complexity of urbanecologies is often taken for granted. However, acommon if not inevitable side effect ofdevelopment and culture-led regeneration is theundermining of urban diversity. Two suchthreats in Newcastle and Gateshead aregentrification and a mono-cultural night-timedrinking economy, both of which couldaccelerate the ‘buzz to bland’ cycle which wouldundermine the soul and long-term viability ofthese areas.

To sustain this diversity, a broad coalition ofinterests needs to be mobilised, ranging fromdevelopers and local authorities, to independententrepreneurs and local community groups.While this is a difficult task, the need to givelong-term support to the cultural and creativeindustries is now recognised, as the work ofNewcastle’s Cultural Estate Manager and theLondon Development Agency’s proposedProperty Trusts show. Both approaches have

the next city

chaptersix

On their journey from coal cities to culture cities,

Newcastle and Gateshead have excelled at a particular

brand of urban entrepreneurship which has worked in

tune with the essence, spirit and distinctive identity of

the place – in other words, its soul. The lessons for other

cities lie not in how to build their own Angel or

Millennium Bridge.

chapter six

much to recommend them and could beadopted by other cities.

But investing in diversity requires more thansupporting the creative industries. Similarapproaches also need to be found to supportother diverse spaces, places and activities thatmake up the rich ecology of a city that has soul.This includes the neighbourhood pub or cheapshops to serve local people in areas that havebecome gentrified. The need for affordableproperty in successful areas with rising landvalues underpins these innovative approaches.

Second, cities need to take seriously the needs ofeveryone. The debate about the inclusiveness ofculture-led regeneration – often frustrating forits lack of supporting evidence – is importantbecause it highlights the need for cities toincrease their capacity for direct, everydayparticipation. Newcastle’s experience with itsGoing for Growth strategy highlights both thelimits of the conventional top-downconsultation approach and the dangers ofpursuing contradictory approaches toparticipation. At the same time as Newcastlewas mobilising city residents for its Capital ofCulture bid, it was making seemingly unilateraldecisions about the future of a large swathe ofthe city.

The benefits of cultural inclusion are clear,including access to social goods, empowermentand increased institutional trust. Newcastle andGateshead’s culture-led regeneration strategyhas generated value in each of these areas. Thenext challenge is to join up and boost

opportunities for everyday participation in otherareas of the city, including its public services,public spaces and neighbourhood strategies.Currently, there is no one organisation withresponsibility for thinking about how to join upthese different spheres of everyday participation,but as Gateshead’s ‘Creativity Challenge’ showsthere is an opportunity for local authorities toplay a leadership role.

Finally, Newcastle and Gateshead havedemonstrated an unusual level of long-rangethinking by overcoming their historicaldifferences and collaborating. Culture-ledregeneration has often been characterised bycompetition, as ‘boosterism’ takes hold andcities vie for the best galleries, tourist attractionsand so on. The collaboration between Newcastleand Gateshead shows that a long history ofbitter rivalry can be overcome. The pooling ofassets can create a more robust and viableurban unit. This has important lessons for othercities, particularly in the context of continuingregional disparities.

The principle of collaboration is also relevant tonew forms of genuinely joined-up workingwithin local authorities. In developing theirvision for culture-led regeneration, firstGateshead and then Newcastle were effective inmobilising the resources and apparatus ofdifferent departments around a new set ofgoals. To maintain such adaptive capacity overthe long-term, cities need to invest in theirability to connect different fields of activity.Gateshead’s joining up of different departmentsin formulating its culture strategy is one

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example of this. Newcastle’s Cultural EstatesManager is another. This ability to shift categoriesand expectations in this way is an essential part of urban entrepreneurship. Such fleet-footedness, which simultaneously broadens therange of interested parties, has also provedeffective in mobilising public support.

It seems that the limits of the first phase ofculture-led regeneration have now been reached

in Newcastle and Gateshead. Today – andtomorrow – the challenge for both cities is toretain an adaptive and flexible mindset. If theymanage to retain their sense of identity,openness to diversity and quality of place –above all, their sense of soul – then there isevery chance that the next phase in theirtransformation will be even more exciting thanthe last.

1. Senior local public official, Demos interview, February 2003. 2. Brian Ham, Director of Strategy at One North East.

Comments made at RICS North East Annual Conference, 20 March 2003.

3. L. Hands (7.2.03) Millionaires Us? That’s rich, The Journal,Newcastle.

4. K. Mumford and A. Power, (2002), Boom or Abandonment,Chartered Institute of Housing, London.

5. D. Boyle (2003), Authenticity: Brands, fakes, spin and the lustfor real life, Flamingo, London.

6. E. Morris speaking at the Creating Places Conference, Tate Modern, July 2003.

7. Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, BlandessSurvey, see www.cpre.org.uk/campaigns/landscape-and-beauty.

8. B. Florian (2002), The city as a brand. Onder Redactie VanUrban Affairs/Veronique Patteeuw, Rotterdam.

9. English Heritage, The Borough at London Bridge. An UrbanStudy. (1999) London.

10. Senior Newcastle academic, Demos interview, February 2003.

11. Senior Newcastle politician, Demos interview, February 2003.

12. Senior Newcastle politician, Demos interview, February 2003.

13. J. Prescott speaking at the Core Cities Conference inNewcastle, June 2003.

14. Paul Rubenstein, Head of Culture at Newcastle City Council,February 2003.

15. Ibid Rubenstein. 16. F. Robinson (2001), Investing in Heritage. The Renaissance of

Newcastle’s Grainger Town. Dept of sociology and social policy,University of Durham, Durham.

17. Craig Wilson, Conservation academic, Demos interview,February 2003.

18. Alistair Balls, Demos interview, February 2003.19. Senior Gateshead official, Demos interview, February 2003. 20. Senior Gateshead official, Demos interview, February 2003.21. Alistair Balls, Demos interview, February 2003.22. Sune Nord-Gren, Director of the Baltic, Demos interview,

February 2003. 23. Ibid Sune Nord-Gren. 24. A. Gormley, Demos interview, March 2003. 25. Gateshead Council (1992), Urban regeneration through the

arts, Gateshead.26. Senior Gateshead official, Demos interview, March 2003.

quote about Baltic be elitist.

27. Senior Gateshead official, Demos interview, February 2003. 28. Alistair Balls, Demos interview, February 2003.29. Bill McNaught, Demos Interview, February 2003.30. Visit Britain representative, telephone conversation,

March 2003. 31. M. Castells (1997), The Power of Identity: The Information Age:

Economy, Society and Culture. Blackwells, Oxford.32. R. Florida, (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class and how it is

transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. BasicBooks, New York.

33. Juan Clos speaking at the 2002 Urban Summit inBirmingham, October 2002.

34. Cathryn Harvey, Head of the Careers Service at NewcastleUniversity, Demos interview, July 2003.

35. Office of National Statistics (2002), Labour Force Survey,HMSO, London.

36. Newcomer to Newcastle-Gateshead, Demos focus group,February 2003.

37. R. Florida, op cit. 38. R.Florida, ibid.39. Community leader, Demos interview, March 2003. 40. Planning Policy Guidance 3 (2000) HMSO, London. 41. Long-term resident in Newcastle, Demos focus group,

February 2003. 42. ODPM, Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions

Committee (2003), The Evening Economy and the UrbanRenaissance, HMSO, London.

43. B. Hollands and P. Chatterton, (2002), Changing Our ‘Toon’.Youth, Nightlife and Urban change in Newcastle. University ofNewcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle.

44. Liz Archer, Newcastle City Council Cultural Estates Manager,Demos interview, July 2003.

45. Senior LDA official, Demos interview, July 2003. 46. J. Glancey (29.03.03), Bright lights, big city, The Guardian,

London.47. H. McCarthy, M. Mean and T. Bentley (2003), Inside Out:

rethinking inclusive communities. Demos, London. 48. Local resident, Demos focus group, February 2003.49. Newcastle City Council, (2000), Going for Growth Green Paper,

Newcastle. 50. Senior Newcastle official, Demos interview, February 2003. 51. Rose McCourt, Scotswood resident, Demos interview,

February 2003. 52. P. Brickell (2000), People Before Structures: engaging

communities effectively in regeneration, Demos, London.53. R. Rogers cited in J.Glancey op cit. 54. Bill MacNaught, Demos Interview, February 2003.

references

references

51

acknowledgm

entsacknowledgments

This joint project between Demos and the Royal

Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has been steered

from its inception by James Wilsdon at Demos and

Michael Chambers at the RICS. Their commitment to the

project has been invaluable and I would like to thank

both of them for their unstinting support.

I have also been fortunate enough to benefitfrom the input of several members of theDemos team who have helped to shape thedirection of the report and its findings. TomBentley, in particular, provided intellectualinspiration and my discussions with himunderpinned the concept of soul whichemerged. Melissa Mean provided strongresearch support from the beginning, makingmany helpful comments on earlier drafts andcontributing to the editing process. GillianThomas carried out the focus groups in amanner which was both highly professional andenjoyable. I also owe a debt to Peter Macleod forpassing on a number of references which movedmy thinking on greatly. Thanks must also go toEddie Gibb at Demos and Andrew Smith at theRICS who provided communications support.

From the RICS side, Kevan Carrick and PaulGreenhaulgh, who are both members of theRICS regeneration panel, have been consistentlyhelpful and made me feel at home in the coupleof months I spent in Newcastle earlier this year.Paul’s colleagues at the Department of the BuiltEnvironment at the University of Northumbriaalso provided many helpful ideas, and specialthanks must go to the Department’s CraigWilson for showing me around Byker.

I am also indebted to all those in Newcastle andGateshead who spent time in lengthy interviewswith me and to everyone I met who made mytime there so enjoyable.

Anna Minton

About the authorAnna Minton is an author and journalist, whoserecent pamphlet, Building BalancedCommunities, was published by RICS last year. Aformer staffer on the Financial Times she hasworked for all the major broadsheets and iscurrently a contributor to The Guardian.

A note on methodologyA mix of investigative journalism techniqueswere combined with focus groups andqualitative research. The author spent twomonths in Newcastle and Gateshead, talking toindividuals and community leaders fromScotswood in the West End to the ‘party toon’ ofthe City Centre.

The qualitative research took three main forms:• Depth interviews• Focus groups• Desk research.

Depth interviews were carried out with forty keyplayers across Newcastle and Gateshead. Theseincluded politicians, academics, regenerationexperts, property developers, architects, chiefexecutives in the region’s major insitutions,community leaders and community activists.Most of these people spoke to us off the recordand have not been identified, although theircomments are referenced.

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