Snapped off the TV from a YouTube British doc about Newcastle in 1966. Mostly about the vibrant youth culture there but it does show this architect's mock-up of plans for a revitalized and modernized pedestrian-only shopping center in the city.
Here's another view of the city from the wonderfully elegaic archi-critic Ian Nairn
I wonder if with that pained voice - he always sounds like he's wringing his hands, on the edge of tears - Nairn could only have been an epigone?
Or did the elegaicism condition and create the highly-strung voice?
I've been to the city just once, in the early '80s - it is an exciting looking place. That bridge!
Three other things I remember from my visit:
Stotties
Pease pudding
A passer-by ejecting from his nostril into the gutter a long string of snot. Never seen that before, nor since I don't think.
Long string of snot = former cokehead.
ReplyDeleteI've been to Newcastle twice. The first time I got talking to a couple of Norwegian goths who told me that Gateshead Metro Centre is where Norwegians do their Christmas shopping.
The second time I chanced upon a great little pub under the Tyne bridge, where a local passionately insisted that I just had to visit Hartlepool. In return, I told him that he absolutely had to see King's Lynn (no irony, it's very impressive) but he just wasn't interested.
Hmmm, I doubt if this bloke was a cokehead - this was long before every cistern lid of every pub in the U.K. became a place for chopping out a line.
DeleteI just assumed it was different norms they had up in Tyneside, so elsewhere in the country you would see people gobbing phlegm in the road fairly often, but Geordies took it just that bit further. But it could have been a one-off and I'm slandering a whole region.
My plans for my retirement are actually to go all around the U.K. visiting towns and areas of natural beauty and so forth. I am compiling a list of destinations - I'll add King's Lynn to it. There's so much of my homeland I haven't seen. And some places I'd like to go again after 30 or 40 years.
King's Lynn has the longest original medieval street in England, which is very nice. It also has the obligatory crappy Sixties shopping arcade, so you can do a "compare and contrast".
DeleteAnother place I'd recommend is Arundel - I've got no idea why this isn't world-famous, because it's the most attractive town I've ever seen anywhere. Think it's deliberately kept secret.
Just wondered if you'd seen "All Dressed Up and Going Nowhere"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lyVzYjHMMY
ReplyDeleteThere's also a follow up made years later, but sadly none of the "hairies" are available to contribute to the film (they're either in prison or have passed away)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIQ9vkzij0Y
No I never did - that's quite a find
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