A couple of years ago, I took part in some Northumbria University research about the underpasses in Newcastle… by which I mean I filled in a survey.

It made me reflect on a few things, not least the fact that I use several underpasses daily, and rarely did so before I moved to Newcastle. It also made me realise that underpasses where the exit isn’t visible from the entrance seem inherently less pleasant.

It turns out from one of the resultant papers that some of this research was about ‘sensory criminology,’ a concept that was entirely new to me but really quite fascinating. Jordan Reeve, who often posts videos about the urban landscape of Newcastle, has made a video exploring the findings with Ian Cook, one of the authors:

I know I bang on about it more than I should, but—for a city dweller—I am so lucky to have such a bucolic walk to and from work.

Pillar Man, which I showed you a few days ago, isn’t Nicolaus Widerberg’s only sculptural contribution to Northumbria University: he has quite a few scattered around the place.

This 2013 piece is called Collar and Wave.

This miniature statue, high up on a building, has the dubious honour of being Newcastle upon Tyne’s only statue of a non-royal woman. In fact, I can be even more specific: it’s Newcastle’s only statue of a woman who isn’t Queen Victoria.

The subject is Dame Eleanor Allan, who died in 1709. She is commemorated as a philanthropist who founded an eponymous school, initially for providing for the education of sixty poor local children per year. Remarkably for the time, these weren’t all boys: a third of the places were reserved for girls. These days, her schools charge about £15k per year.

As with many historical figures, Dame Allan doesn’t necessarily live up to the moral standards of the twenty-first century: her wealth came from the tobacco trade, which was of course money earned in large part of the back of slave labour on American plantations.

Dame Allan is, perhaps, an unfitting choice given that Newcastle’s most famous statue is probably that of Charles Grey, most famous for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. But then, to only have a single woman recognised in a city with such a storied history of famous women is also unfitting. But who am I to say?

Sixteen years ago, I completed one of my medical school rotations at the Tranwell Unit for psychiatric patients at the QE Hospital in Gateshead. I really enjoyed it, and very nearly applied to specialise in psychiatry a few years later as a result.

The front part of the unit is octagonal, with an enclosed octagonal courtyard in the middle. In this courtyard stands a 3.5 tonne granite sculpture which shows a staircase ascending through an archway leading to… well… nothing. Just a sheer drop.

I vividly remember a seminar in which one of the psychiatrists asked us what we thought of the sculpture, which he introduced as Inside Outside. Some people commented that a staircase to a sheer drop felt a little unnecessarily suicidal for a psychiatric unit. The psychiatrist helped us to reflect on the degree to which the answers reflected our preconceptions about psychiatry. I remember their suggestion that the staircase ascending through the archway symbolised people coming from being stuck in their inner world and rejoining the outside world, and ascending into happiness as they did so.

I hadn’t thought about that seminar in years. But yesterday, my eye was caught by the way that this sculpture at Northumbria University had been enhanced by the luscious planting surrounding it:

On searching the web, I learned that this has the slightly unimaginative title Book Stack, and was unveiled in 1992 to celebrate Newcastle Polytechnic’s transformation into Northumbria University. As it turns out, the artist, Fred Watson, is the same bloke who created that sculpture in the middle of the Tranwell Unit that I’d discussed all those years ago.

I was surprised that a sculpture as brazenly literal as Book Stack could be by the same artist as something as seemingly abstract and symbolic as Inside Outside… but perhaps I just don’t fully appreciate either of them!

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.