As a child, the default brand of model cars in my much-loved
hardboard toy garage – built by my dad’s friend Artie Withnall - was Dinky
Toys. An excellent product, well-made, realistic and finely detailed, with each vehicle in the catalogue sized appropriately in comparison with
its colleagues. Occasionally, as presents, I would acquire Corgi toy cars,
which were built to a smaller scale than Dinky, and sometimes I would get hold of other
brands, of varying size and scale. Though I suppose I was aware of the
differences in size, mixing them all together for the purposes of play was
never a problem, and the fact that a racing car was larger than a petrol tanker
simply didn’t matter. I accepted it all as perfectly natural.
Fast-forward sixty-odd years of critical observation. Last Saturday morning I was standing in the
“viewing box” of the Baltic in Gateshead. The view out from the
building far surpasses anything you are likely to see inside. I was focused on the view of the Tyne and its bridges –
surely one of the finest urban perspectives anywhere, especially for any
lifetime bridge-fancier like me.
I noticed that the buildings on the Newcastle side of the
river closest to the Tyne Bridge are of a visual density that complements the detail of the bridge,
which – like many steel structures of its era, Art Deco, more or less, and
completed in 1928 – looks immensely solid, reassuring, a tour de force of daring and precision engineering, adored in its familiarity, "iconic" as the cliche has it, and covered in an immense number of rivets. The more rivets, the
stronger one imagines the structure to be. According to Wikipedia, there are
777,124 of them. So I guess it's quite strong. I know you’re not suppose to take Wikipedia at face value, and
you have to check these things, but the truth is I’d only counted about half of
them before it was time for my train.
The buildings along the quay here possess a grittiness and a
granularity that I find appealing. According to Abraham Moles, things have to have the right amount of detail, the right
level of information - not too chaotic, not too bland - or they confuse and
overwhelm or, alternatively, bore. One of those Goldilocks-style happy mediums which is certainly true here. The bridge itself reminded me of a not too distant age of excitement in achievement, progress, and competence, of
an admiration for and personal psychological investment in what was being done by local people. A structure whose construction would have been watched excitedly day by day. “Made in England”, and made properly, made to last, made as perfect
and as well and as thoughtfully as possible. We could still do that, you know,
the mindset still exists in places like Tyneside. Something built by "us" for "us", not the sort of negative progress imposed by "them", which is so often today's depressing tale.
Moles to Newcastle, as they used to say, and back to the Dinky analogy. Further east along
the north bank, beyond the gritty bits, away from the Tyne Bridge and towards the Millennium
Bridge, and you get buildings at a scale less appropriate and appealing. Not taller than the others, but less
finessed, less interesting, less likeable. Not bad buildings, by any means, but representative of our less confident age. Plastic, glassy, glossy, shiny,
boring. Definitely not gritty. The skyline too, across the city centre and beyond – spiky and multi-levelled and with huge amounts of detail, too much for the eye to take in properly – yes, brilliant,
but spoiled by a handful of ungainly late 20th century boxes (one in particular, in the photo - which was not in fact taken from the Baltic, but from a viewpoint a little to the west) that are the wrong
size and lack the necessary detail. In a word, boring. In a few words, boring and in the wrong place. The sort of incompatibility that I never noticed with the toy cars of childhood, but which I certainly do now, with an inner groan.
