browseQuayside (1979)
Amber Films (Producer)
10 mins, 16mm
Black & white/optical
Documentary
Available as VHS
Part of Amber’s campaign to preserve the architectural heritage of Newcastle’s Quayside, the aesthetics of the film were determined by a photographic project in which Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Graham Smith documented the lives and landscapes of a, then, rundown part of the city. The film is a poetic journey along the Quay, the camera exploring its monumental bridges, offices and warehouses, as voices from the past recall the once momentous life of the area.
Once the city’s commercial centre, its solid Victorian architecture was lined up for the developer’s hammer. Businesses were closing: only three years earlier Amber had bought its own Quayside premises from a landlord selling up. An exhibition, a publication and a film Quayside, the work was part of a creative engagement inseparable from the opening of Side Gallery and Cinema. It has a clear relationship to the concerns informing Sirkka’s work in Byker throughout the 1970s and to T Dan Smith (1987).
Debates around the exhibition and film at Side led to a BBC North East discussion programme. After the recording the architecture correspondent of the Sunday Times offered Amber a contact in the Department of the Environment, who would list any building nominated by an action committee. Murray Martin formed the clandestine Quayside Campaign Group, an action committee of two, which managed to get most of the Quayside listed. A wooden café on the corner of Broad Chare came down overnight in response to its new status.
The work coincided with a change in public attitudes to urban redevelopment. Prince Charles was campaigning in the same territory and the new Conservative government effectively brought the city’s plans for a ‘Milan of the North’ to a halt. Across the road from Side Gallery, Cinema and Café, a concrete walkway stops abruptly in mid-air, indicating the direction of the intended demolitions.
The success of the campaign enabled the eventual development of the area as a centre of Newcastle’s bar and club culture. Across the river Gateshead acknowledges the preservation of the Victorian Quayside as a critical factor in their ability to launch the programme of culture-led regeneration that has included Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the Norman Foster-designed music complex, The Sage Gateshead.
AMBER FILMS
Made with financial assistance from Northern Arts.