I walk past these lovely gates outside Charlotte’s Butchery fairly often, and every time, I’m reminded of this video which I first posted eighteen years ago (with the image quality you’d expect):

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 mention it far too much, but it did look especially pretty on this walk!

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.

On Tuesday, the incomparable Diamond Geezer compared Transport for London’s 2004 plans for their network to the 2024 reality. He concluded:

The map may not have happened in full but a goodly proportion of it eventually did, delivering better transport links for all.

I thought I’d undertake a similar exercise for my home region—North East England—and see how we fared.

In 2002, with much fanfare, the regional public transport executive Nexus published a £1.5bn ‘visionary’ public transport plan, dubbed Project Orpheus. This was to combine light rail expansion in the region with the re-introduction of trams and the construction of a cable car on Gateshead’s quayside. By 2018, the map was supposed to look like this:

So, how much of the 2002 ‘vision’ actually happened? How much fell by the wayside? How much of it happened later than planned?

I’d go through proposal-by-proposal in the style of Diamond Geezer, but it’s not worth it: none of the proposed extensions to the network happened; all of it fell by the wayside. As DG says, ‘all that really matters is what got built’—and none of it did.

Which isn’t to say we got nothing: we’ve had two new infill stations at Northumberland Park (2005) and Simonside (2008), refurbishment of many stations and rebuilding of Haymarket (2009), North Shields (2012), South Shields (2019) and Sunderland (2024). Several single line sections have been converted to dual running, the train shed has been completely rebuilt, and a new communications system has made live tracking available in an app.

We’re also due to get new Metrocars to trundle around the Metro track, maybe sometime later this year, only a decade-and-a-half after the end of the design life of the existing fleet (which is, erm, falling apart to such an extent that timetables have been cut to run the service with few working trains—and even with that mitigation, punctuality fell to its lowest ever level).

Unlike London, we might not have received even a fraction of what was promised, but we have had hundreds of millions of pounds of investment… and that’s an awful lot more than some other places have got.

Here are three bridges crossing the Ouseburn.

Nearest to the camera is the Ouseburn Viaduct, which carries the East Coast Mainline. It was built of timber in 1839, and rebuilt in iron thirty years later. When I took a photo of it twelve years ago, it was undergoing an extensive restoration.

Furthest from the camera is the 1878 Byker Bridge, originally a toll bridge—though the charge was removed in 1895. It carries the road now designated the A193.

In the middle is the newest of the three, Arup’s much-celebrated 1970s curving concrete Byker Viaduct, with joints glued together. It carries the Tyne & Wear Metro between Manors and Byker.

Though people assume he was born in Denmark, Arup’s founder, Ove Arup, was in fact born a stone’s throw from the bridge in Heaton. He was born in 1895: closer in time to the construction of the two preceding bridges than the one his firm designed. He had retired by the time the firm took on the Byker Viaduct project.