This is one of the 1,000 cast iron Millennium Mileposts placed along the National Cycle Network. In 2020, about a quarter of the National Cycle Network was axed, which means that many of the mileposts no longer tally up with routes, which seems a bit of a shame.

This one was designed by the Scottish sculptor Iain McColl. Like most of the mileposts, it used to be black and had a circular disk attached with a coded message. The disk is long-gone, but the remaining post got a bit of jazzy re-painting in June 2023.

Yesterday, I posted a picture of the boating lake at Newcastle’s Leazes Park, a 150-year-old construction that was once one of two lakes in Tyneside’s first public park.

I’m sure you gazed at the photo and wondered to yourself: where did all that water come from? And thereby hangs a tale.

I talk far too much on this blog about the Ouseburn, which is only one of Newcastle’s notable ‘burns’. ‘Burn’ is an Old English word for a small river, still retained in Scottish and Geordie, but also evident in place names elsewhere in the country (think Bournemouth or Holborn, for example).

One such burn flowed through the centre of Newcastle and, much like the Thames, was converted by human activity into an open sewer. It therefore became ‘the poo burn’—but Geordies are a polite bunch who borrowed the Old Norse word for poo, ‘lortr’, naming it Lort Burn.

As the recent General Election results testify, people generally disapprove of rivers of poo flowing through their local communities, so in 1696, the Lort Burn began to be buried underground. By 1784, it was fully covered. Over the next century or so, the path of the burn became some of Newcastle’s most famous streets, including the much-celebrated Grey Street.

As it happens, the Lort Burn rises in what later became Leazes Park, and the boating lake is fed by its water. Given the history, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this wasn’t celebrated when the park opened.

In 2003, a project was launched to mark the hidden burns of Newcastle with artworks. The Lort Burn was to be marked with an artwork in Leazes Park, and a grand competition was held. More than 200 artists submitted proposals. Bob Budd wanted to put giant soup cans in the lake, which could have been fun, while Sophy King suggested some metal spheres engraved with maps.

But it was Tom Grimsey’s proposal which won out and was constructed within a couple of years: a bizarre series of blue concrete slabs inlaid with metal flowers, tracing the path of the Lort Burn through the park. It’s known as ‘The Flowering of the Lort Burn’, and the Council called it ‘a playful demonstration of human expression’—which feels like a quotation that could be attached to almost anything.

The site where the Lort Burn rises is marked by these sculptures, frequently and optimistically described as ‘seats’.

I’ve never seen anyone sitting on/in them—but perhaps one day someone will, and they’ll ponder the open sewer while they do.

It’s twelve years since I last visited the transporter bridge: the longest extant transporter bridge in the world. It remains an astonishing sight, although in one crucial respect, it has changed beyond recognition.

For five years now, the Transporter has been out of service, becoming a monument more to modern underinvestment in infrastructure than early 20th century engineering. It looks like it might take investment of £30m to press it back into service.

Waiting for me dad, a sculpture by Mackenzie Thorpe, commemorates families waiting for the return of the workers across the bridge at the end of their shifts on the industrial sites beyond. As events transpired, it was unveiled about twelve weeks before the bridge ‘temporarily’ closed, which lends it a melancholic air to expectation it depicts: the figures will be waiting for far longer than they expected for anyone to return over the Tees.

The wall text at the start of this exhibition reads, in part;

Belonging takes different forms. Humans can share an affinity for a specific place, familial bonds and friendship, or spiritual connections based on religion or stories. Geography can also underpin local, national, and international connections. Hobbies and traditions in both real and imagined space can inspire a sense of camaraderie.

I’ve previously mentioned Wendy’s propensity to respond to wall texts by saying ‘I don’t have the bandwidth for that’. On this occasion, it was me perhaps imperceptibly rolling my eyes. Belonging does take different forms, but it’s hard to see how you can successfully curate a coherent exhibition around a feeling you’re choosing to define so expansively.

And, to be honest, I didn’t get it. But there were some nice pictures.

Here’s Mary Cantrill’s 1941 watercolour of a local landmark, Leazes Park Lake in the Snow of 1941. The label said that the park ‘offers tranquil escape in the bustling city’, which is probably true, but my overriding association with Leazes Park is of being asked to find patients who had absconded there from the RVI, which is just over the road.

This is JW Carmichael’s 1839 lithograph of The Ouse Burn Viaduct, looking like it is crossing an impossibly rural setting. It’s only a few weeks since I featured a photograph of the viaduct on this very blog.

This is Beryl Davies’s 1940s watercolour of The Haymarket, a part of Newcastle that has changed surprisingly little despite huge changes outside of the frame. This was painted as part of a project run the The Laing. After the council approved major redevelopment work in the city centre, the gallery’s committee sent forth artists to document the city as it existed before the work started, which feels somehow inspired and a little eccentric at the same time.

There’s something about the lighting in this picture which, along with all of the arches, that sort of feels like the kind of art that AI generators often spit out. It is, in fact, an 1813 painting by Thomas Miles Richardson, show a View of the Ruins of Tynemouth Monastery. For some reason, I had always thought that the the monastery had been damaged in the war, so to find out that it was in fact already a ruin over two centuries ago was a bit of a surprise!

And lastly, here’s that other local home of brilliant art, the Baltic, captured in watercolour here by an unknown artist at some point when it was clearly still a flour mill rather than a centre for contemporary art.

Belonging continues at The Laing until 30 November.

I recently visited MIMA for the first time: I came perilously close to visiting more than a decade ago but didn’t quite make it through the door.

The exhibition I popped in to see was ‘Working Lives’, which brings together works from the Middlesbrough Collection with newer pieces by contemporary artists in the Cleveland Art Society.

The curation didn’t do much for me—it seemed a bit random—but I think that’s probably because this was a pretty speedy visit without time to consider and reflect the choices that the curator, Alan Morley, had made. I perhaps didn’t give him a chance.

But two works did catch my eye.

At the top of this post is Sandhaven , a 1983 work by Ken Cozens, the late and much-celebrated local artist who contributed much to the local art scene by working for the local museum service, including as Fine Arts Officer at Middlesbrough Art Gallery. My photo is rubbish, but I was absorbed by the drama of the image, and also liked the colour scheme.

Below is the 2020 work Fractured Land 5 by Derek English, a much-loved local artist and art teacher. I liked the abstraction in this one, and found the lines and shapes intriguing.

The two paintings were exhibited beside one another, and I reflected that, if I’d had to guess, I’d have dated them the other way around—though I can’t really explain why!

Working Lives continues at MIMA until 29 September.

In celebration of its bicentennial, the National Gallery has deigned to send some of its works out of London and out to visit the nation that owns them. Newcastle has been ‘loaned’ The Fighting Temeraire, Turner’s 1893 masterpiece which Radio 4 listeners once voted ‘the greatest painting in Britain’. If I’m totally honest, I’m so ignorant about art that I’d probably not have recognised it.

I wrote recently about the grief of aging, and it was that feeling that came to mind as I contemplated this painting: the outmoded sailing ship being pulled along to its final destruction by new-fangled Tyneside-built tug boats. The exhibition, though, made me note the brightness of the sunset, which perhaps represents hope for the future. The grief of aging is often paired with the joy of a new generation taking over.

This being the Laing, they haven’t just stuck The Fighting Termeraire on the wall and left it at that: they’ve built an ambitious and absorbing exhibition around it, featuring dozens of Turner paintings alongside other works. They even—and here’s a bit of lateral thinking—have displayed a piece of wood from the actual Temeraire.

I particularly liked how the exhibition unpicked Turner’s technique, featuring colour studies and sketches that would go on to inform his future work. I’ve never really thought about the artistic process of watercolour painting before, nor really of the way an artist would want to plan out both the colours and the objects in this way.

There was some interesting discussion on Turner’s view on the ethics of the sea battles he painted: was he a patriotic supporter, or more interested in the abhorrent loss of life? I find it difficult to look at his paintings and see anything but the latter—they all feel tinged by sad reflections on humanity. But for this to be a point of academic disagreement, there must be another way of seeing them, and I must just be projecting my views.

The exhibition also made the point that steamships are now as old-fashioned as sailing ships were in Turner’s time. That made me think about whether there is any art being made now, chronicling the ‘industrial revolution’ we are going through in terms of artificial intelligence putting people out of work. Are the Turners of today making brilliant works about that revolution which will be revered in centuries to come? We can only hope.

Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia continues at The Laing until 7 September.

Yesterday, I wrote about a quirky construction in Middlehaven: the only one of an intended set of five which was actually constructed. I visited it back in 2012, and had returned twelve years on to see how it was doing.

All of the above also apply to today’s post, which is about Anish Kapoor’s Temenos.

Twelve years ago, I called this massive artwork ‘soulless and bland’—which is very much how it felt on this visit, too. The demolition of the crane which previously stood behind it at least gives Temenos room to breathe, but it doesn’t really say much to me.

It was intended to be the first of five ‘Tees Valley Giants’, humongous sculptures spread between Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Hartlepool, Redcar and Darlington. None of the others have been built, and it doesn’t feel like Temenos has become a local landmark in the way that was perhaps anticipated.

I wrote yesterday about the benefit of whimsy in life, and I think I actually prefer this much cheaper artwork nearby: a giant stick of rock.

There was a story by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times recently about the dress code in the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot, which included the startlingly specific fact that hats:

must include a base that is at least four inches in diameter. That means “fascinators,” those bizarre concoctions of net and sparkle that sit on the edge of a headband like a bird on a twig, are not allowed.

There are few things I’m less likely ever to need to know than this dress code, but it made me wonder quite how specific the requirements could possibly be. The answer is ‘very’.

Friedman quotes a milliner: ‘To err on the side of extravagance as opposed to modesty is a joy for everyone.’

I find within myself a surprising degree of sympathy for that perspective, but it seems a shame that it applies only to women. Men are prohibited any hint of extravagance: my choice is only of a grey or black top hat, about which colour ribbons, feathers or other embellishments are expressly prohibited. Even for ties—the definition of a useless embellishment—‘novelty patterns’ are disallowed. It’s just a sea of boring men in dull grey (or black or navy) suits.

It feels like such a strange choice in the modern world. It doesn’t even feel particularly traditional for a country with quite outlandish masculine fashion traditions—there will be working blokes there wearing scarlet jackets, gold buttons, winged epaulets with bloody great bear skins on their heads for goodness’ sake, with a far longer history than a Moss Bros top hat.

If it were me, I’d go full on ‘suits of armour’, ‘gold-threaded royal tabards’ and ’mandatory codpieces’. The current option just seems terribly boring… but then, it was never my thing to begin with.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

One of the greatest pleasures of attending an art exhibition with Wendy is her reaction to the more pretentious object labels.

There was a moment in Madrid’s Reina Sofia when, after reading a particularly florid text, she just said ‘I don’t have the bandwidth for that’ and turned on her heel. It’s usually hard to disagree.

Wendy wasn’t able to attend ‘Fragile Beauty’ at the V&A with me, but when I read the label accompanying Richard Caldicott’s untitled triptych, I did wonder what she’d have made of it:

Richard Caldicott’s red, yellow and blue triptych playfully transforms everyday objects – in this case Tupperware food-storage containers – into a sea of colour. The artist’s choice of primary hues references classic colour theory, underpinning hundreds of years of optical experiment. To stand in front of Caldicott’s photographs is to be confronted by a field of light refracted by luminous kitchenware.

I think she may well have furrowed her brow and exclaimed: ‘But why would you want to be confronted by luminous kitchenware?!’

Fragile Beauty continues at the V&A until 5 January next year.

I went to see this overcrowded exhibition of photographs at the V&A. It’s an oddly curated selection of photographs from the Elton John and David Furnish collection.

The blurb claims that the exhibition ‘tells the story of modern and contemporary photography’—I don’t really think it did.

There were a lot of brilliant and arresting images in the collection, but there didn’t seem to be a thread, story or argument to the curation. Perhaps there wasn’t supposed to be—perhaps the point is just to appreciate the photographs. I found it a bit unsatisfying.

But here’s something I took away: four images of the American flag from different time periods. I think this is an interesting series to contemplate: I’d have displayed them together, but the curators had other ideas.

So take the following series of images as some guerrilla curation—and perhaps the series will play on your mind as it has on mine.

Untitled by Larry Clark, 1971.

American Flag by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1977.

Flag by Mitch Epstein, 2000.

Untitled (confetti #8) by Roe Ethridge, 2012.

Fragile Beauty continues at the V&A until 5 January next year.