St Cuthbert's Village

     I want to go back now to the Tyneside of the early 1970s and one of the locations used in the film 'Get Carter', the Modernist St Cuthbert's Village, Gateshead.  (I really can't show you the scene, not simply because of any reasons of copyright.)  It is an example of Brutalism and a prime example of the sort of urban re-development that took in the first three decades after the end of WWII in Britain's major cities, as local and national government tried to solve the housing crisis.  It was miles away, figuratively and physically, from the 'New House Book'.

     St Cuthbert's Village was the work of the local council.  It was opened, to some fanfare, by the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 7th, 1970.  It was, I suppose, quite a coup for the local council.  What was produced, however, was a sort of simulacrum, a stand-in for an actual village, like one of those cream substitutes so beloved of food manufacturers Post-War.  It had neither church nor green, nor shops.  Facilities were planned but they were late off the starting block and arrived after the residents.  There was no traditional urbanism.  It was a sort of enclosed community, introverted and not wholly integrated in the warp and weft of the community that surrounded it.  A sort of ghetto.

     The site was located between Bensham Rd (to the s) and Askew Rd (to the n), in the Tyne Valley opposite Newcastle city centre.  Steeply slopping to the n, it was, before Clearance, an area of dense terraced housing, overlooking a railway marshalling yard and the High Level Bridge that takes the East Coast Main into Newcastle. 
       The concept belonged to the Borough Architect, A Leslie Barry.  He had this idea of the 'village community', which essentially was the complete separation of pedestrian and vehicle; and that really was about it.  The actual design was shared, it seems, between Douglas Wise (of Douglas Wise & Partners) and Clifford Tee & Gale, consulting architects to the contractors Stanley Miller Ltd.  There was a single tower, or point, block, and a dense checker board of maisonettes, everything linked by a series of elevated concrete walkways.  The majority of the buildings etc. were constructed of pre-cast concrete sections using the 'Miller Wise Mouchel' system (MWM for short).  Slum clearance began, I think, in 1965, and construction of the 'village' in 1967. The cost of it all was, it seems, £3,700,000.

     The problems were almost immediate.  Things dragged on for some 25 years before it was demolished.  Clasper Village, another development of the period in Gateshead - though not so dense or Brutalist - has also been demolished.

     I now want to skip over the Pennines to Manchester and this BBC documentary from 1974, to show how widespread these problems were.  about the redevelopment of the City on the 1960s.  The documentary presents the council as struggling to keep up with the effects of its redevelopment policy, including apportioning blame on the residents.  We underestimate the complete dislocation that working class people suffered as a result of these schemes.  The Post-War dream of the New Jerusalem was by then beginning to crumble, and I think that in certain parts of the left it brought about a cognitive dissonance, one I think shared by the director of 'Get Carter' Mike Hodges. It simply wasn't corruption that created the sort of places such as St Cuthbert Village; it was rather a cultural and intellectual failure. I think, that in some respects, it was the breaking of the social contract.