If you’ve heard of Gateshead, it’s probably because of the Angel of the North or the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. Perhaps you have been tempted to visit Baltic, the centre for contemporary art, or seen coverage of The Sage Gateshead, a music centre
and concert halls designed by Sir Norman Foster.
You may think Gateshead’s approach to regeneration is to concentrate on big and memorable projects. Visibility is important
to overcome entrenched stereotypes, but – like an iceberg – the most important part is what you don’t see under the surface. The key thing about Gateshead’s renaissance is that we created a clear vision focused on making life better for local people. We prepared the way, we involved people and ultimately it is they that will make it a success – by tapping into their creativity as the catalyst for regeneration.
Our approach has always been to deliver things that will make
a real, lasting impact on people’s lives. First, you have to make sure you’re doing a good basic job for all your residents. It is harder to sell a radical vision of the future if it comes from an organisation that can’t even empty dustbins on time. Another key lesson is to prepare the way. Hardly a week goes by without a call asking how we built a large sculpture like the Angel. The answer is, you start with little ones first. Gateshead had been putting art in public places for more than fifteen years before the Angel and we’re still doing it now.
We had no contemporary gallery so we took art to the people, and we’ve involved them all along the way. Primary school children worked with artists on body castings, using the same techniques that Antony Gormley used to create the Angel. Secondary school students created their own sculptures, chose a site and then debated the merits of their work and its location. People in our Prime Time arts project for older people wrote poetry and prose about it and at our annual family sculpture day hundreds came to design and build their own angel sculptures.
,p>The large cultural projects on Gateshead quays and our Capital
of Culture bid have taken most of the attention, and that serves a key purpose, giving local people self-confidence and pride once again. These schemes not only create jobs, they also create confidence in the private sector – attracting new housing, leisure facilities and businesses. And, of course, they will attract visitors – but they will just be nice architectural gestures if they do not achieve something else for local people.
The Sage Gateshead is a building that will be open eighteen hours a day, with more than half a million people a year playing, creating and listening to music. One hundred thousand of them
will use the music education facilities. This could mean anything, everything, from toddlers doing taster sessions in percussion, teenagers learning to ‘Scratch DJ’ or pensioners taking the country’s first ever degree in folk music.
We still have a long way to go, but it is pleasing to hear from some of the experts that they think we are heading in the right direction. Sir Peter Hall, Professor of Planning at University College London, said that following examples like Bilbao, every ex-industrial city is trying to re-invent itself using culture. Building architectural icons as attractions for ‘cultural tourists’ misses the point entirely. They need to involve and include local, unknown talent working inside and developing their artistic and musical skills as they are at Baltic and will be at The Sage Gateshead. They need to make the
area itself more creative.
By tapping into this, Sir Peter noted: ‘Gateshead will become the equivalent of nineteenth-century Vienna, or even Vienna and Paris rolled into one. Even if that doesn’t happen immediately, the place should emerge as a magnet for young creative talent. And that’s the message: when a satiated tourist public has finally tired of the latest touring celebrity concert or exhibition, it might gravitate to places where creativity is bubbling out of the local earth – like Gateshead.’