1980 - 2020
Reinvention No 4: NewcastleGateshead
In the early 1980s Gateshead begins to develop its approach to the same post-industrial questions that T Dan Smith had addressed. New resources liberated by the break-up of Tyne & Wear County Council facilitate a linked narrative that includes the development of Gateshead International Stadium, a public art programme that over 15 years leads to Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, the opening of the Metro Centre, the UK’s first out of town shopping mall, the Gateshead International Garden Festival, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the Sage Gateshead (which grows, in part, out of the ambitions of Northern Sinfonia). The typographical removal of the ampersand in NewcastleGateshead grows out of a desire to project a regional capital that marries this new post-industrial, ‘culture-led’ regeneration to the long history of cultural and urban reinvention on the other side of the river.
Having documented the original Byker between 1969 and 1980, in 2003 Amber’s Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen returns to create a portrait and landscape project in the estate that replaced it – a microcosm of the contemporary post-industrial, post-colonial city. Erskine’s Byker Wall achieves Grade 2* listed status some 30 years after it was reportedly only given a life expectancy of 25.
In 2007, discussions initiated by Newcastle Gateshead Initiative’s Culture10, a collaboration between Amber, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, The Lit & Phil/Mining Institute, Newcastle University and Northern Stage emerges. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Byker Revisited becomes part of a wider exploration of industrial and post-industrial change on Tyneside: Reinventing the City.