Steve Rowell Newcastle visit June 2010
In June 2010, as part of my HaSS fellowship at Newcastle University, I researched and conducted two bus tours that investigated the landscape surrounding the city, covering parts of Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne and Wear, and North Yorkshire. Part performance, part conceptual / contextual / spatial exercise, part pedagogical experiment, these tours are part of my practice as an artist and, especially, as collaborator with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (www.clui.org), a Los Angelas based multi-disciplinary organization that focuses on the built environment of the United States as well as the Office of Experiments (www.o-o-e.org), a similar UK-focused organization based in London.
These interpretive tours were divided into North and South, military and industrial, each zone interspersed and layered with cultural meaning and symbolism. The public was invited to join both tours, but the primary audience consisted of faculty and students from some of Newcastle University's various schools: Architecture, Planning & Landscape; Arts and Cultures; Geography, Politics, and Sociology. The tours were full-day events, beginning from the moment of departure from the campus, and continuing throughout the day until the bus returned to the same spot as before, closing a phenomenological feedback loop, shared by the group collectively and by each participant individually. The gulf between the collective and individual experience is one that can vary greatly in size, but that will always remain an unquantifiable value, explained and communicated in ways that never quite compare to the experiences themselves as perceived by every individual that participated and contributed to these outings.
Months before the actual tour dates, I began with the research phase, which included remote sensing through the use of online mapping and satellite imagery software, establishing contacts and organizing fieldwork and tour visits, and collecting documents towards the research of sites in the area. These sites were selected based on historical and contemporary significance, relative to the themes applied to each of the two landscapes, as well as simple curiosity of some places that might be tangentially useful to investigate on-the-ground. The value of serendipity should not be underestimated.
For the Northern tour, entitled Military Landscapes of the North-East, I focused on places that represent the broad range of meaning inherent in the defense-related landscape north and west of the city, ranging from the batteries at Tynemouth and Blyth, to the Otterburn Range, the Borderlands, RAF Spadeadam, and back into the city by way of the ship, gun, and tank building history along the Tyne. This counter-clockwise, forward and back again, timeline defined the tour route. As with many cases, this landscapes is quite large and contains way too many points of interest to all be included in a single day’s journey, even without stopping.
The tour itself, conducted on Friday, June 18, 2010, began with the departure from the city, north, towards the first actual destination: The Blyth Battery, a semi-restored military and local history heritage site representing the former system of coastal defenses, used primarily during World War I. The Blyth Battery representative was unable to meet us due to illness and the bus quickly departed after the tour group spent a few minutes strolling, in the rain, amongst the empty grey and pink buildings and empty gun mounts resembling minimal art works of concentric circles – targets etched into cement platforms.
After a brief drive by the Alcan Aluminum smelter, an incidental monument to the residual heavy industry legacy of the North East, we made our way to the main destination of the day, the Otterburn Army Training Estate. The red flags were taken down the previous day and the range was eerily quiet. Despite this, a plume of smoke drew our attention and the group was able to hike a short distance to an overlook. Our presumptions that the fire was due to shelling earlier in the week were confirmed by an MoD official sent out to investigate our large tour bus lumbering across the range, skirting the line between public, private, and restricted land. Over 230 square kilometers in size, Otterburn is the largest artillery firing range in the UK. What’s particularly interesting is that this place doubles as a national park, when the flags aren’t flying. As an American, I was struck by this; military land and public, especially recreational, land are kept very much separated in the States.
A few days before the tour, I visited the main camp and met with commander there. Guns of all sizes were firing that day, remotely, over the hills, as well as startlingly close, just off the road. Samples of my geo-tagged field recordings of this percussive ambience can be found at the online sound mapping archive: Radio Aporee <http://aporee.org/maps/?loc=7600>. Scan the map to hear recordings of mortar, artillery, and small arms fire.
After Otterburn, we drove south, towards Hadrian’s Wall, making a brief stop in a stand of trees between the road and a field of sheep to pay tribute to the Battle of Otterburn monument. A well storied and hallowed place, this monument is best appreciated while looking at the surrounding horizon, for all of it - the foreground and background - still embody the history of this terrain. If possible, one should time a visit here with an active red flag day. With eyes closed and the guns firing, their concussive booms echoing across the soft, rolling land, it’s not difficult to imagine what real war sounds like.
We crossed the Wall, careening down the highway, watching video footage of a curious experiment at RAF Spadeadam that involved recreating the explosive and unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1605 at the House of Lords that became known as the Gunpowder Plot. 80 kilometers later, we park the bus, buy ice cream and hike to the top of one of the higher points of Hadrian’s Wall, where the Romans would fend off the barbarous tribes of the north before giving up and retreating back to a collapsing Roman Empire. The sun was shining by the time we reached the crest of the trail and members of the group settled down with binoculars and scopes, scanning the horizon for visual evidence of the mysterious RAF Spadeadam. Various simulated targets - tanks, planes, buildings - lie scattered across cleared fields along with transmission towers and radar and communications equipment. RAF Spadeadam is where the Blue Streak rocket program was developed (and cancelled, before completion,) but serves today primarily as an electronic warfare range. The technologies here fall under the official secrecy act and, as such, require that this place be kept out of public view, as much as possible.
Some of the many sites excluded from the tour for this reason include the curious radomes at RAF Boulmer and RAF Brunton along the coast, near Seahouses; Kielder Water and Forest; George Stephenson’s birthplace and sites of his gun factories (now BAE System’s tank factory) near Lemington. The territory is expansive and varied, indeed.
For the Southern tour, entitled Post-Industrial and Future Landscapes of the North-East, the histories of coal, steel, shipbuilding, chemicals, and even dark matter were investigated. The itinerary began at the end of the shipbuilding era, on Tyneside, over the coastal post-coal-scape to the chemical and steel industries around Teeside, transitioning onto the North York Moors, or what lies beneath - potash and a dark matter research facility.
Soon after departure, on a sunny Tuesday (June 22, 2010) the tour began with a drive through the area of Tyneside, at the end of Hadrian’s Wall, where former shipbuilding yards are being turned into flat, open areas of land once again. The industrial history here is being erased, reverse terraformed, interpreted and historicized. One of the land uses of places like this are waste treatment plants, and that’s exactly what we smell as we loop around a few times before descending under the river, heading south into the tunnel that takes us into County Durham: coal country. All that’s really left of coal in this part of England are the grass covered mounds between the sea and the hills. Upon these are small clusters of towns, office parks, and a few dead ends, strung together along narrow roads between the larger cities around Tyneside and Teeside further south. While crossing this landscape of erasure, the monitors on the bus show images of the regional coal strikes in the 60s and 80s when the industry, and the trade unions that represented it, were dealt their final blow by Thatcherism.
Following this historical drive-through, the first stop of the day was at a former magnesium plant sitting directly on the beach, between a struggling golf course and an old cemetery, a few miles north of Hartlepool. Steetley Magnesite was where magnesium was distilled from seawater, suctioned in from the sea by way of long, pipelines. Enormous, partially flooded tanks, their sides rusting and collapsing in the acrid, salty air, are the most photogenic of the ruins here, all of which are covered in random graffiti and similarly spray-painted warnings of imminent death and injury. A single tower, hundreds of feet tall, seeping some kind of tar-like fluid at its base, serves as a beacon to curious explorers, vandals, and revelers alike. Beginning with an overlook, we strolled through the plant and down to the beach where naturally occurring sea-coal washes on shore, beneath the monumental disused elevated pier that was used for saltwater intake (and waste outfall) by the former plant, and, finally, through the cemetery where the group begins to feel the heat of an unusually blazing sun.
Driving south, we pass the aging but still-critical Hartlepool Nuclear Power station, and neighboring Able UK Recycling (ship breaking) facility in Hartlepool, noting the barely visible remains of a French aircraft carrier that was considered too toxic for the ship breakers in India. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Around the bay, we park briefly and take in the view from a bird-watching blind. Beyond a few migrating water fowl, the horizon to the south is punctuated with the towers of a thriving petrochemical industry where the River Tees meets the North Sea at Graythorp, Middlesbrough, Seal Sands, and Redcar. A mile down the road, over lunch at RSPB Saltholme, the group watches more birds and looming more elevated pipelines, cooling towers, and explosive flares made possible by BP, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Vopak, and so many more.
Visions of science fiction films come to mind. Ridley Scott was born in South Shields and went to school in Middlesbrough. The visual affects of this industrial landscape became special effects with a virtual Teeside horizon transposed over a near-future Los Angeles in the opening sequence of Blade Runner. After crossing the River Tees (not on the Transporter Bridge, sadly) and moving past the new Anish Kapoor public art sculpture, the bus attempts to reach a point high enough to simulate Scott’s distopic view. The highest it can manage is a 20th century castle / golf course where oil and steel company executives, allegedly, golf while surveying their spoils below.
Continuing down the coast, past the recently shuttered Corus steel plant, it’s furnace still hot and belching steam, the bus heads toward the final stop of the day, the Boulby Mine, the largest source of potash and deepest hole in the UK. Due to the extreme depth (1,400 meters or 4,600 ft) Boulby is also home to a small but determined Dark Matter Research facility. Our guide meets us in a barley field, right on the cliff wall, above the North Sea to make a few points about the particularities of the mines location, gesturing outward, beyond the breakers. Most of the potash, an agricultural fertilizer and prime ingredient in low-sodium table salt, mined here is taken via tunnels that run thousands of feet from the coastline and hundreds of feet beneath the sea floor. We slowly drive through the mining facility, taking in the views of piles of potash, tailings and scattered buildings. One of these huts is the office of the Boulby Dark Matter Research Lab, the only evidence of an otherwise elusive and possibly non-existent crew, tasked to find the elusive and possibly non-existent particles that could help to define dark matter – yet another great unknown in the universe.
This article is only one way of recounting the events that occurred on these two public tours, explorations into the region around Newcastle. I welcome any comments and questions of those that weren’t able to join as well as any memories and photographs from those did. Please send your emails to stv@steverowell.com.
