A Late Night in Newcastle
A night in the Toon was once a much less sober experience than our recent visit to The Late Show, which describes itself as a ‘free culture crawl’ around the city centre and surrounding areas. We started at Blackfriars and finished at the revamped Mining Institute without once visiting a pub…what’s gannin on!?
Blackfriars on a sunny Saturday evening was full of bright young things sipping ice-cold Chardonnay so we blended in smoothly and easily with our flask and home-made sandwiches. The blackboard was advertising the Ballard of Blackfriars so I had brief hopes of something dystopian and challenging from JG but it turned out to be a typo and was in fact a Ballad. I feared three lads with fair isle jumpers and fingers in their ears but it wasn’t like that at all.
Staged in one of the upstairs rooms, it was an unexpected treat from a funky trio comprising a percussionist, sax/clarinettist and a bloke on punk accordion. The last time I saw somebody playing an accordion with such eccentric verve was Kimmo Pohjonen who used to perform while wrestling with his souped-up electronic instrument. Tim Dalling (voice, accordion), Jeremy Bradfield (video, percussion) and Faye MacCalman (sax, clarinet, voice and electronics) did a wonderful job of telling a history of the building - full of gothic tales, fearsome images and what Faye calls ‘honks and bass’.
After that, we went to the Grainger Market in search of digital projections and stories that imagine what happens in the market after everyone’s gone home. The light in the Grainger Market on a summer’s evening is like a swimming pool filled with air. Many years ago, I used to write about eating breakfast in different places - more about the places than the food it has to be said. Anyway I came to the market a couple of times and wrote about a cafe called Olivers one Christmas:
“I find myself in Olivers, whose lack of an apostrophe makes me assume a multiplicity of Olivers are involved in this enterprise (Cromwell, Goldsmith, Stone?). You get to sit al fresco (market style) at Olivers, which is good for aimless gazing around but a bit nippy, which may account for the preponderance of santa hats...if it gets much colder, it might be worth investing in your own beard.
Breakfast was the usual veggie version and was canny. A bit small - on an oval plate about the size of a side dish. A cunning ploy, I suspect, to make you believe the breakfast is bigger than it really is. It's possible that one of the many Olivers (Hardy?) is concerned about recent rises in obesity or it could just be portion control taken a bit far. It looks as though the eggs are hiding something but it's nothing more than some innocent beans and mushrooms:
You get a pot of hot water with your tea pot, which is good. Like most cafe teapots, it drips all over the table and when you use a serviette to mop it up you discover that said napkin is made of a kind of paper designed to repel all liquid. Why?”
It was good to see Olivers still going strong, despite their criminal punctuation, and there was an acapella group singing something about something while people ate chips. We might have joined them but we weren’t there for chips or acapella - we were looking for digital art and projections from Deborah Snell and Multiminded. We avoided a couple of young lasses belting out power ballads at the karaoke stage and eventually found the digital screens, which showed fish, dinosaurs, animated fruit and veg with other weirdly wonderful objects and creatures wandering the market aisles looking for pleasure, solace or trouble, accompanied by a brass band, booming bass and drums. The Grainger Market occupies an important space in the centre of Newcastle, as well as my own memories, so it was a treat to see it transformed by art, video, sound and imagination.
Finally, we walked down Grainger Street, turned left past the station, to the revamped Mining Institute in Neville Hall that has recently reopened as The Common Room. It’s a grade II* listed building I must have passed hundreds of times on my way to the Lit and Phil but had never been inside. It was a complete surprise and pleasure to get a chance to see the thoughtful, painstaking renovation of this architectural and industrial gem.
There was an augmented reality art trail by Emma Tominey in which you could point your camera at a picture of one of the many blokes on the walls, when an image of a woman scientist or engineer would appear, including a short bio of her life and work. It was a clever way of revealing the work of women pioneers in the fields of mining and engineering, including Dorothy Buchanan who was a member of the design team for the Tyne Bridge. She was also the first female member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and there’s now a blue plaque on the bridge in memory of her.
The real star of the late show was the building itself, which has been at the centre of north east mining since 1872. Neville Hall was the headquarters for The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers and holds the largest publicly accessible collection of mining information in the world. Prof Margaret Jacob describes the collection as “One of the two most important collections in the world for the study of the birth of the Industrial Revolution”. The Institute was founded in 1852 to address safety issues in mines and promote research and learning in the fields of mining and engineering.
Some of the spaces we saw within the building were its Victorian Library, the Edwardian Lecture Theatre and the Arbitration Room, where mine owners and workers would meet to settle disputes over working conditions. A special highlight was Wood Hall, named after Nicholas Wood, a founder and first president of the Institute.
Seeing Newcastle through the eyes of its venerable buildings and creative artists can help us to imagine the history and future of the city.
Interesting story--and I love your dry sense of humor!
Another fascinating read - loved it!