Local government (3)
Dan's castle': after the. fall
Jane McLoughlin
While the world waits to see what will be the next item of T. Dan Smith's dirty linen to be washed in public, we might spare a thought for the innocent victims of his ambitions the citizens of Newcastle upon Tyne. Dan's Castle, it,used to be called, when he was 'Mr Newcastle,' and promised that he would make their city the Brasilia of the North. Today, more than ten years later, they mutter that if he had said building site, he'd have been nearer the mark.
They believed he was a visionary when he proposed to erase the bitterness, the poverty and the unemployment bogey of the past by pulling down much of the city and creating a phoenix from the ashes. What is left of Newcastle today stands as a sad reminder that the phoenix was a myth, but it is, very hard to forget the excitement of that period in the early stages when it looked as though a brave new world really might be possible. The impossible dream has left Newcastle today a vast building site; unfinished work on the giant motorway schemes, Central Motorways East and West, have gashed the main artery of the city and left it 'pitted with moon-face craters, which in their turn have swallowed much of the best residential buildings, leaving sad
islands of houses marooned by excavated motorway moats; and gone is the city's lung, the broad green expanse of Town Moor.
The rise and fall of Newcastle is mirrored by Dan Smith's career. He was born' in a poor district of Wallsend, east of Newcastle along the Tyne, and trained to be a painter. He set up his own painting and decorating firm, and joined Newcastle City Council as a Labour member for Walker Ward in 1950. At various times he was chairman of the Housing, Finance, Planning and Traffic committees, then leader of the council, then Chairman of the Northern Regional Planning Council. For a period of over ten years, Dan Smith voiced local impatience with lack of effective action from local or central government, and when he claimed that democracy must be interrelated with efficiency and that outdated systems of local government were holding the north-east back, he became virtually king in his own country.
Not without some opposition, for even as long ago as 1960, he was accused of megolomania by a fellow councillor, and described as a 'Little Hitler.' But Newcastle shared his own sense of being underprivileged, and in 1960, when one in three
People was inadequately housed and the unernployment rate was one of the worst in tne country, plans he pioneered for slum Flearance and the building of 7,000 new homes In five years were what the people wanted to hear. The problems of traffic from the main Al road which passed through the main shoPPing street were growing, and Dan Smith Would deal with that, too; in shopping areas, Pedestrians would reign supreme, but the motorist must have adequate provision. He himself pointed out the hopelessness of Promising pie in the sky when we die, and he set out to suit actions to his words. He ap. Pointed technical men to the Civic Centre, and the city embarked on a wild spree of !arining to build motorways, office blocks, igh-rise flats and shopping centres. In a ril\rod of confidence in the future, much of k,ewcastle was razed to the ground. What has 7e,n put in its place, and much of that is still "rnY on paper, is causing depression and im1))ntent fury among the people who live there. sLan Smith aimed to make the city one of the ;nom/pieces of the country, setting an example 'n enterprise and imaginative planning. In the event, other towns have already found the 13)leans do not work, but in Newcastle what has en publicly fought for must not be changed, ;nd there is little hope that the disastrous 'rend will be changed. rhe plans for the roads system consist of 0 motorways literally buttonholing the city er,ast and west of the immediate centre. The 'entral Motorway East is under construction, a,,nd it is this that has destroyed Town Moor 7nd Brandling Park. So far even the first link
this road, the coast motorway, which was uf,rilider construction in the late 'sixties is un ished, and at a conservative estimate eight
nine times what has already been done '„eniains to do on the East Central motorway. ii'orne curtailment of the West Central road „,as been announced by the new Tyne-Wear te%uthority, but indications are that this only wnts a quarter of the proposed work. Even „ hen the whole plan is complete, it will only t'-atuer for 30 per cent of the city's traffic, and
the whole horrific devastation process
start again for the proposed Newcastle 4nderground, the Rapid Transit System. Put local politicians and residents who ailed to sound a note of caution at the time nd say now that if they had known what it iivould be like, they would never have let it ci413Pen, will never be able to return to the aaYs of their old 'canny toun.' Even architects v11,. d Planners, looking now at a 1958 aerial of Newcastle, are staggered at how h"'Ooli of the good building has gone. The rr°gramme of building office blocks to Place older, out-dated buildings is well nder way. Several are already in use .— or kl'artial use. In spite of the number due to be hut, many of the new offices are empty, and bardlY a street in the city has not at least one Lidding site. i„,The office-block building programme was h'!iroduced partly because the city needed a ,Igh income from rates to pay the bills for the a•Vtorway plans, and the only money availTr for development was from speculators. blocks that are already built stand as dtp.ring, uniform evidence that Dan Smith's varn did not come true, for he wanted a t„`Ure of great opportunities for local archi‘,,,-hets in the creation of the built environment, ci"e,re they could fulfil their potential in the fv,Ls'gn and construction of buildings. Very are even involved, for outside property telopers bring with them their own architfts, and the pressure is not towards archi:ctural or even social merit, simply towards ( t. So eager have the council been not to 2;1_,I'd in the way of developers that they are fi"u to have ignored the building of four extra stnors on what should have been a sevenw'c'reY block for which planning permission as Riven.
In dealing with the housing problems, the early method was to split the city into areas, calculate the number of houses which should be demolished, and the number of houses needed for overspill. The only solution seemed to be multi-storey flats, and these have proved socially undesirable. Today, in spite of the rebuilding and the slum clearance, there is a crying need for housing, and the housing programme seems to have disintegrated. One architect's office which is used to having three or four housing schemes for the council in hand, each of about 350 houses, admit that the largest plan they are working on at the moment is for thirty-six homes. More houses are certainly being knocked down than built, with the added problem that with the rising cost and scarcity of private housing, people who might have bought their own homes cannot afford to raise a mortgage, and are going on the council list. It is too late to stop much of this wholesale destruction of Newcastle; Dan's dream was fought for too publicly for mistakes to be admitted now. If national government cut their contribution to some of the motorway plans or for the Rapid Transit System, some of the developments may lapse, but unless the plans are very publicly killed, what must set in will be planning blight on a huge and horrific scale. But something more than the buildings and the landmarks have gone out of the city since Dan Smith first set his schemes for a 'new Brasilia' in motion. They joke now on the buses that all they need to build now is a new city wall, not to keep the Scots out, but to keep the ratepayers in. Small traders — and much of the character and tradition of the city depended on them — have beer) squeezed out of their premises to make way for new buildings, and are unable to afford the rates of new shops or offices. On the other hand, the people for whom the new Brasilia was to be built may have to leave Newcastle for work outside. The legacy of Dan Smith has not changed the lack of employment, but he has had a hand in changing the nature of it. Many of the engineering and industrial firms have moved out to the new towns to leave sites free for development in the city. Now Newcastle offers educational opportunities in the university, in polytechnics and colleges of education, but the educated young must in the end leave to find work. By 1971, the North East Regional Planning Council was describing a situation with no new industry wanting to come to the area as 'rock bottom.' Dan Smith blamed the boom in the South East, but he had engineered the change of purpose in the city. He described a campaign to keep open an economically shaky shipyard as a • "primitive regional objective,' less important than the creation of a new traffic environment.
Perhaps the success he seemed to be having in the mid-'sixties turned his head, but Dan Smith was looking for broader pastures by the 'seventies., He told a reporter on the Newcastle Journal: "I am more relevant to the solutioti of European problems than anyone I meet. A national government cannot solve national problems any more, and as cities become monolithic, we must develop a cityprovincial society, for the future of civilisation is in a provincial set-up.” But he has taught Newcastle a useful lesson. The successor to the man he appointed as Regional Planning Officer for Newcastle has written recently, in a book in which several planners talk about their cities, of the difficulty in his job of developing an argument in support of even a medium-term plan; people living in twilight areas cannot be expected to concern themselves about a brave new world ten years away. Well, in Newcastle they did, and look what happened to them.
Jane McLoughlin is on the staff of the Daily Telegra_ph and formerly worked on the New castle Journal.
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