Newcastle Dreaming

Exploring the modernist city as a site for imagining and enacting radical futures.

Modernist architects and planners were not content simply to transform the towns and cities in which they practiced, but saw their work as part of a collective project that would ultimately remake the world. Across the country – with Newcastle for a time at the vanguard – architecture and planning became tools for enacting progressive, sometimes even radical policies geared towards raising living standards, improving prosperity and creating a fairer, more equal society for all.

As the tide turned against modern architecture and planning in the 1970s and 1980s, the seeming failure of so much of what was done in their name – from low-quality council estates to destructive urban renewal projects – was used as a way of discrediting the policies and ideals with which they were indelibly associated, indeed the very idea of the future itself.

In this event, speakers explore how despite the still prevalent attacks on the ideas that shaped it, the modernist city – both real and imagined – remains a vital site for imagining progressive, even radical futures. Can Newcastle’s future be built on the ruins of its modernist past?

Speakers

Alex Niven is a writer, critic, poet and Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University. He is author of The North Will Rise Again In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands (Bloomsbury, 2023), among other books.

Claire Harper is an architect and director of Harper Perry. In addition she is Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University and co-organiser of Something Concrete and Modern – an ongoing project to document the North East’s modernist heritage.

Sally Watson is a researcher at Newcastle University. Her recently completed PhD examined the creation of spaces for children’s play in postwar Newcastle.

Part of ‘This Was The Future’ – a series of events with expert speakers tackling the big questions and key issues around Tyneside’s 1960s and 1970s transformations.

Image credit: Artist impression of Kenton Bar Estate, 1966. Image Courtesy of Newcastle City Library Local Studies Collections