Newcastle is Peru...

[Guest thenorthumbrian]

From the Guardian, and for once not the usual anti-North Eastern hatchet job from the London media.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/14/regeneration

 

Spirit of the north

 

Its football club is forever underachieving, its bank, Northern Rock, has collapsed and its traditional industries are in serious decline. But Tyneside is thriving, having reinvented itself as a heartland of culture and science - and a place to party. Stuart Jeffries reports

 

At Shearer's Sports Bar and Lounge, the mood is sombre. Nobody tonight at this vast boozarama in the sacred precincts of St James's Park will be drinking deep from the £30 bottles of Newcastle United FC-brand champagne. It's Monday evening after the Toon's 4-1 weekend drubbing by Aston Villa and the party unleashed by Kevin Keegan's appointment as manager is over. Almost everybody is as flat as a Tony Adams-era Arsenal back four.

 

One man tells me that Newcastle is the only club in the land with the fans and the money to break into the big four of Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool. Then he adds: "Now look at us, man, we're in relegation dogfight! I cannae believe it." Another mentions that local rivals Middlesbrough are now higher in the Premier League than the Magpies, to a flurry of head-shaking around the table.

 

A third suggests the unthinkable: namely that the return of Keegan to the manager's job last month may not have been the answer to the problems of this chronically underachieving club. "Ah, man, he's only been in the job three games," retorts another. "Give him a chance."

 

Not many Toon faithful are prepared to bare their wounds or rehearse their fears before a journalist from London. The representatives of the Toon Army have not responded to my emailed overtures, while Biffa (aka Mike Bolam), who runs the nufc.com fan site and is the author of an excellent book, The Newcastle United Miscellany, declines to be interviewed. He writes: "I'm afraid that I'm still quietly fuming about the recent written antics of the enemy within the Grauniad."

 

Biffa could almost add: it's a north-eastern thing, you wouldn't understand.

 

And perhaps the rest of us don't. There is something different, not just about Newcastle and its football club, but about the north-east. Newcastle's like Liverpool - only more so - and nothing in the rest of England quite prepares you for it. "England's a perfect World; has Indies too. Correct your Maps; Newcastle is Peru" went a ditty imputing New World barbarism to this corner of England. True, that was written in 1653, but the north-east is still seen as somewhat alien (no wonder, then, that the longtime Newcastle resident, poet Tony Harrison, titled his 1969 collection Newcastle Is Peru).

 

Its swaggering spirit is captured nicely by South Shields-born history professor Robert Colls in the introduction to a new book of essays, Northumbria: History and Identity 547-2000: "The north-east region is distinctive and different because it thinks it is. The territory has changed little over a thousand years and the region continues to take a particular view of its history." Nobody would say those two sentences of the Midlands, the north-west or the south-west - pride in immutability and apartness are Geordie sentiments.

 

But this is how the north-east responds to the outside world, with often well-founded resentment about being misunderstood, with a local pride that cannot swagger outwards but only look inwards, often with great solidarity and almost sentimental fellow feeling.

 

In this respect it's surely significant that when Northern Rock, the regional bank that employs 5,500 people in the north-east and which, through its foundation, bankrolled many good local causes, collapsed last September, the Newcastle Journal launched a campaign to save the bank, running a front page stating: "In the past 10 years 1,520 organisations have received £175m from the Northern Rock Foundation. NOW IT'S YOUR TURN TO HELP." It's impossible to imagine a financial institution anywhere else in England being so fondly thought of that such an appeal would be worthwhile.

 

The north-east is different, and likes it that way: when the Journal published four years ago its 100 Reasons Why It's Great Up North, number 26 was: "We're 300 miles from London." Number 25 was "Producing every last Rolo in the world at a factory in Fawdon, Newcastle"; number 58, disturbingly, was "Eating stotties filled with ham and pease pudding"; and number 100, understandably, "Seeing the sun set over the Tyne on a balmy autumn evening." The pride - and the scorn for outsiders who don't get it - is as wide and deep as the Tyne.

 

"I know that Mancunians and scousers can rhapsodise about their cities, but Newcastle is worthy of its own," says Richard T Kelly, whose new 556-page Dostoyevskian doorstop of a debut novel, Crusaders, is arguably the great geordie epic the region has long deserved - a saga about the Tyneside myth of industrial decline and cultural resurgence set in the mid-90s, embracing issues of political corruption, Blairite pragmatism and civic pride.

 

"I can't help but love the place," says Kelly. "Partly it's because of the strength of the labour movement and industrial heritage. Newcastle is epic and clear cut and robust and impressive in a way that our other great industrial cities aren't. Its dialect should be a source of national pride. Its humour - Viz, Clement and La Frenais' The Likely Lads - should too." Fair enough, but Kelly lives in London: rhapsodies are no doubt most poignant when delivered from exile.

 

On Monday evening, the Toon faithful (and me) troop from Shearer's Bar to the terraces to watch Newcastle reserves take on the might of Manchester City reserves. The quality of the home team's performance, the loping elegance of striker Shola Ameobi notwithstanding, suggests that Keegan is right in suspecting his squad is currently too small to deliver on his or his fans' aspirations. Long before the final whistle, I've headed off to seek warmth and better entertainment. "Emotion, excitement, passion - free with every seat," says a sign outside the box office: sometimes, maybe, but not tonight. I cross the Tyne and go to the new Sage concert hall. Here, there are rather fewer than the 740 people at the match, but all of them just as informed and ardent, hear the Danel Quartet play Debussy, Haydn and Schubert with great fervour and understanding. Football, thank God, isn't everything in this city.

 

Not that you'd guess it from what Keegan recently said of Newcastle United's fans: "They come here to be entertained. It's like the people down south going to a theatre." In the north, the implication ran, they don't hold with effete things such as drama. It's a remark that glancingly belittles some of the great achievements of cultural regeneration on both sides of the Tyne in the past 10 years, and unjustly confirms some outsiders' impressions of geordies as artistically philistine. It's one that has driven civic leaders and arts professionals potty: they've spent the past decade creating theatres, galleries and concert halls that rival the NUFC's dreams of emotion, excitement and passion, not to mention entertainment.

 

"God bless him and I wish him well and all that," says Andrew Lovett, acting director of the Baltic Centre for contemporary art in Gateshead, the five-year-old jewel in the crown of Tyneside's cultural renaissance, "but he is so hopelessly wrong, he so badly misunderstands what has happened in the region that it isn't even funny."

 

What has happened is a singular story of English regeneration in a region that desperately needed to reinvent itself after the demise of its traditional industries of shipbuilding and mining, and most of its other heavy industries. "One of the major drivers here was that they didn't know where else their future was going to come from except from arts and culture," says Lovett. "With the demise of all the things that had provided wealth and employment in the past, there was a need to change perceptions. There was a need to demonstrate that the region hadn't been dealt a knockout blow with all these industries going, and the creative activity unleashed in the past 10 years - with the Baltic at the forefront - was the start of showing that."

 

The start of that cultural regeneration came, arguably, with Antony Gormley's monumental sculpture, the Angel of the North, in Gateshead, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this week. Sitting on a hill, it stands over the A1 and the east coast rail line, telling visitors that a new spirit has arisen in the region. And that new spirit, along with lots of public money and Lottery cash, has flourished: the Baltic arose on Gateshead Quay with the aid of £34m of Lottery money; the Sage's two acoustically marvellous concert halls with much public money and Northern Rock Foundation backing; and on the Newcastle side of the Tyne, Ouseburn is now home to thriving new cultural initiatives such as the Seven Stories Centre for children's books and The Round, a children's theatre. The superb independent Tyneside Cinema is poised to move back into refurbished city-centre headquarters.

 

But cultural regeneration isn't all. John Shipley OBE, the Lib Dem leader of Newcastle city council, says that Newcastle has also rebranded itself as a party city - with great success: Time Out voted Newcastle Britain's best city to visit, Lonely Planet named the region as one of only 30 must-see destinations in the world; Newcastle's refurbished Georgian quarter, Grainger Town, just won the Academy of Urbanism's Great Neighbourhood award of 2008, beating competition from London and Dublin. These awards are the fruits of a marketing strategy that has seen the two rivals from opposing sides of the Tyne - Newcastle and Gateshead - rebranded as one, their identities radically changed in a way that might well send a chill through the hearts of tradition-venerating geordies such as Colls. Newcastle and Gateshead are no more: they are now NewcastleGateshead, a post-industrial vortex of great pulling power.

 

If the awards and the thriving pubs and clubs are anything to go by, the initiative has succeeded, but there is a problem. "We do think that the level of alcoholic consumption has made it slightly monocultural," says Shipley, "even though we realise that the party-city tag was important in restoring confidence to the region." New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in the north-east there were 323 alcohol-related deaths in 1997 compared with 435 in 2006.

 

The rebirth of the region has been painful in other ways. For geordies such as Colls, there is the worry that the north-east is losing its soul, abandoning its singular geordieness. On a stroll down from Byker, still a tough working-class district with social and economic problems replicated across Tyneside, to the building site for the looming new Hotel du Vin near the Ouseburn Valley regeneration area, one can see his point. Many of the construction cranes seem to be creating buildings that could go up on any English city waterfront - the Conran-designed two-bed quayside apartments, the high-end hotels and all the rest.

 

For others, though, this nostalgic lament for geordie culture past is an intolerable luxury. "The challenge for us now," says Shipley, "is to keep regenerating. We have to develop our knowledge-based economies and that will focus on our two great universities. We can't just rely on cultural regeneration and being a party city. We have to diversify as much as possible."

 

Shipley cites two university-based north-eastern specialisms that he sees as part of the region's future. One is the Institute for Ageing and Health ("It's Europe's leading research facility in this area") at Newcastle University; the other is the Institute of Human Genetics, also at Newcastle University, a £10m government-funded programme on genetic healthcare.

 

What is especially striking about NewcastleGateshead's regeneration in the past decade is that it was done with public money. This flies in the face of the philosophy of one of its leading intellectuals, Matt Ridley - a rightwing, libertarian Old Etonian, the son of a viscount who in 1996 excoriated Newcastle-upon-Tyne at the end of his book, The Origins of Virtue. Ridley argued that the great city built on the philanthropy of its ambitious luminaries had been ruined by an overarching state. It's a passage so lacking in prescience that it's worth quoting - not least because Ridley is a pivotal figure in the region's recent history: he was chairman of Northern Rock when it went belly-up.

 

Ridley wrote: "In two centuries, [Newcastle] has been transformed from a hive of enterprise and local pride, based on locally generated and controlled capital and local mutual institutions, into the satrapy of an all-powerful state, its industries controlled from London or abroad ... Such local government as remains is itself based entirely on power, not trust ... The city is now notorious for shattered, impersonal neighbourhoods where violence is so commonplace that enterprise is impossible. Materially, everybody in the city is better off than a century ago, but that is a result of new technology, not government. Socially the deterioration is marked."

 

He concluded: "If we are to recover social harmony and virtue, if we are to build back into society the virtues that made it work for us, it is vital that we reduce the power and scope of the state."

 

Ridley declined to discuss whether he thought these words were, given the north-east's recent renaissance, wrong. So instead I read them to Shipley. He laughs. "He's wrong about everything in that passage. Without the state, without public money, none of the regeneration of Tyneside in the past 10 years would have happened. Often, regeneration projects have involved 20% public money, inducing 80% private money in its wake. Without the lottery, much of the cultural regeneration wouldn't have happened."

 

I wander down to the Tyne to savour the regeneration one last time before getting the train to London. Hanging from the north face of the Baltic is Mark Tichner's vast artwork, a banner with a slogan shouting from one side of the river to the other. It riffs on solipsism and on the passivity induced by an overweening state, but it also seems like a barb aimed at the regeneration of Tyneside: "Improving the world means improving me. I want a better world. I want a better me." Isn't the worry, I ask Shipley, that the poor of Scotswood, Byker, Walker and elsewhere are benefiting little from the region's renaissance? "I don't think that's true. There are major pockets of deprivation, but we refuse to let them get left behind. A major problem is affordable housing and that's why over the next 15 years we're going to build 15,000 new houses, many for rent or shared equity. Also, we're trying to encourage people back to work and get the life and knowledge skills they need. I'm sure we have a bright future here, but only if nobody gets left behind."

 

These, no doubt, are the words that Shipley, whose Lib Dems will face a challenge from Labour to stay in power in May's council elections, must say. And a bright future for everybody sounds a good thing. Especially, though, for Keegan's Newcastle United and the fans who have suffered so pointlessly for so long.

[Greg]

Decent read.

[Guest LucaAltieri]

:sleepy1:

[DJ_NUFC]

Superb article.

[magpie418]

 

 

http://www.sitcom.co.uk/rab_c_nesbitt/images/char_rab.jpg

 

"Now look at us, man, we're in relegation dogfight! I cannae believe it."

 

 

 

hadaway n' s**** man, nae one says 'cannae' round here.

[Rich]

Canny read that like.

[Guest alex]

Canny read that like.

Aye, I agree. Managed to avoid most of the usual cliches associated with the Toon.

[BlueStar]

hadaway n' s**** man, nae one says 'cannae' round here.

 

Canny read that like.

 

Why not?

[magpie418]

hadaway n' s**** man, nae one says 'cannae' round here.

 

Canny read that like.

 

Why not?

 

why not what?

[Guest alex]

'Cannae' read that. I think that's what he means anyway.

[magpie418]

'Cannae' read that. I think that's what he means anyway.

 

cannae & canny are two different words entirely[/pedantic]

[BlueStar]

Yes. Two words which sound the same but are written differently and have different meanings.  You've discovered what is known in literary circles as a "pun".  Tomorrow we'll make a start on sarcasm.

[Guest hodsgod]

'Cannae' read that. I think that's what he means anyway.

 

cannae & canny are two different words entirely[/pedantic]

 

Not necessarily two different words, but maybe two different spellings, also pedantic

[Guest alex]

'Cannae' read that. I think that's what he means anyway.

 

cannae & canny are two different words entirely[/pedantic]

Think he was joking like.

[Guest alex]

'Cannae' read that. I think that's what he means anyway.

 

cannae & canny are two different words entirely[/pedantic]

 

Not necessarily two different words, but maybe two different spellings, also pedantic

No, two different words too. Also pedantic

[magpie418]

'Cannae' read that. I think that's what he means anyway.

 

cannae & canny are two different words entirely[/pedantic]

 

Not necessarily two different words, but maybe two different spellings, also pedantic

 

Cannae = can not

 

Canny = Canny

 

Two different spellings of two different words, with two different meanings[/uberpendant]

 

 

[Consortium of one]

Oddly enough, "stottie bread" and my last name "Stott" must be related in some fashion.  Does anyone know the origins of that name?

[Guest alex]

Oddly enough, "stottie bread" and my last name "Stott" must be related in some fashion.  Does anyone know the origins of that name?

Think they used to bounce (or stott) the bread off the floor to test if it was ready. I honestly heard/read that somewhere even though it sounds made up.

[magpie418]

Yes. Two words which sound the same but are written differently and have different meanings.  You've discovered what is known in literary circles as a "pun".  Tomorrow we'll make a start on sarcasm.

 

heh.. do you always have to use a smiley on this board?

 

and you call that a pun?

 

looking forward to your lesson [/sarcastic]

 

 

[Guest alex]

Erm, it was a pun.

[magpie418]

heh.. do you always have to use a smiley on this board

 

 

[Consortium of one]

Oddly enough, "stottie bread" and my last name "Stott" must be related in some fashion.  Does anyone know the origins of that name?

Think they used to bounce (or stott) the bread off the floor to test if it was ready. I honestly heard/read that somewhere even though it sounds made up.

 

Thanks.  This may not be the best place for this but is the word "stott" specific to the North East?  The reason I ask is one of my hobbies is geneology and I've hit a bit of a road block in tracing my ancestry.  A Mr. Stott who a deceased family member refers to as a scotchman and fought under Wolfe in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, was granted land and settled in LaColle Quebec.  I can trace everything from his son to me  but that Mr.Stott's first name or where he came from is a mystery.  I have verified that he wasn't a member of any of the Highlander Regiments that fought in that war so any clue I can find I try to follow up on.

 

Anyways, if the word "stott" is area specific, it gives me a little something to pursue.  My apologies if this isn't the proper place to discuss it though.

[Guest alex]

They say 'stoat' in Scotland which means the same thing as 'stott'.

[mofo]

In France it is known as le stott!

[pedro111]

I think he has miss understood the word 'Cannit' for 'Cannae' as in "a cannit believe that"