At the weekend E and I walked up to the High Street to find a cordon manned by the police blocking our way. The blue and white ribbon extended around the Northern Rock building, across Laburnum Avenue, around Subway, over the High Street to the Townhouse, and back to Northern Rock. Buses and cars were being directed as far away as Cullercoats to get around the obstruction.
We wondered what had happened. I leant towards armed robbery, E towards an electrical fault. But short of approaching one of the police to ask, there didn't seem to be a way to find out. Before the News Guardian comes out this Thursday, that is.
It took a bit of nebbing on Monday, in the end. I asked at the Co-op. Shrinking news. E was right, though the police had feared a gas leak at first. Some cabling had been disturbed and it could have been a gas pipe, but wasn't.
The cordon was down by the end of Saturday, but little plastic rag-ends remain attached to signposts at the street-corners, like old Christmas decorations. I expect they'll be there for some time.
Showing posts with label Local Shops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Local Shops. Show all posts
Wednesday, 23 February 2011
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
718 - Whitley Bay Memories
"But kindly lower your gaze to the lone car. It is a Vauxhall 14 and it is parked outside 7 The Links, my old home. Despite being 16 years old it was the coveted company car of my dad, Eric, works manager for a firm that made concrete lamp standards at the old Cramlington Airship Shed." (Colin Henderson)
From a short collection of Whitley Bay memories submitted by users of the Francis Frith website - worth a read!
Thursday, 4 February 2010
734 - Found Encounter
In Starbucks, Newcastle upon Tyne, across the room, a young white manager, American, head of the Newcastle branch of a successful bottom-up sales company, in meeting with a British Asian job applicant and his well-dressed father.
The father understands top-down, hierarchical companies, and starts by trying to establish what health and safety measures are present in the company, what insurance, should an angry customer assault his son.
"We're all responsible for our own actions," says the manager. He brings in his partner, who says he broke his back and was off work for two months. "I paid him, though he made no sales," the manager says, "Because I felt responsible; he's a friend; it was the right thing to do. But I don't expect you to understand the business model. My father doesn't understand. Behind my back, he tells people I run a business, but never to my face."
"But what do you want out of this? You say you're from Nigeria, but where's your... home? What do you plan to do with all the money you make?"
"I plan to retire. Early. Fifty. Live in the Bahamas. Drink Pina Colladas on the beach ... I want to know I've worked well."
The conversation lasts forty minutes, intensely. Back and forth. Two cultures negotiating, but neither giving ground. Still, neither coming to blows. The manager shakes the hand of the father, and holds his coat out for him, dressing him. The word "respect" is used. The father allows himself to be dressed.
The father understands top-down, hierarchical companies, and starts by trying to establish what health and safety measures are present in the company, what insurance, should an angry customer assault his son.
"We're all responsible for our own actions," says the manager. He brings in his partner, who says he broke his back and was off work for two months. "I paid him, though he made no sales," the manager says, "Because I felt responsible; he's a friend; it was the right thing to do. But I don't expect you to understand the business model. My father doesn't understand. Behind my back, he tells people I run a business, but never to my face."
"But what do you want out of this? You say you're from Nigeria, but where's your... home? What do you plan to do with all the money you make?"
"I plan to retire. Early. Fifty. Live in the Bahamas. Drink Pina Colladas on the beach ... I want to know I've worked well."
The conversation lasts forty minutes, intensely. Back and forth. Two cultures negotiating, but neither giving ground. Still, neither coming to blows. The manager shakes the hand of the father, and holds his coat out for him, dressing him. The word "respect" is used. The father allows himself to be dressed.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
759 - Work Under Way At Whitley's Old Woolies!
Walking past the old Woolies tonight I saw shopfitters at work. I nipped home for the camera. One guy was having a fag outside, so I asked him if I could take a couple of shots through the open doorway.
He told me the new store's going to be a B&M Bargains, kind of like Wilkinsons, or what Woolies used to be.
We looked at the Whitley Bay Football Club fixtures posted on the shop hoarding over the road.
"At least you've got a better team than Middlesborough!" he said.
"First team from the North East to play in the New Wembley," said I.
Whitley FC winning the FA Vase in 2009 was a turning point for the town - an injection of "Let's stop waiting for someone else to change Whitley, and get on with it ourselves". They drove an open-topped bus through the town, with the vase held aloft.
A young guy, curate at St Pauls, I guessed, came over while I was taking photos, and asked the shopfitter what was going on. When I left he was behind me, so we joined up and chatted for a bit. I told him I was into church post-church, networks not institutions, that kind of thing. A happy meeting, I think.
Monday, 9 November 2009
761 - Flowerbed
These pansies are planted on Roxburgh Terrace, alongside another bed rather more abandoned in appearance. How do I feel about them? Tear-tugged by their scrawniness, cheered to a mini-nova by their aspirations.
I guess the Council gardeners could have planted them, but why then only one out of the two flowerbeds? So part of me wants to believe it's one of the shopkeepers.
Last I heard, the gardeners all get the shove the month before Christmas, before being taken back on every February. I understand the Council (Labour at the time) were using short term contracts as recently as two years ago to this effect, which doesn't sound very legal to me. But maybe that situation's changed.
I was a gardener briefly, sixteen years ago. Vested interest maybe. If I had my way the gardening teams would be tripled in size, and the beds they planted up similarly. They'd be full of perennials, edible at that - massive herb gardens. And the brownfield sites lying idle, they could become allotments, or pocket parks, or communal gardens.
Meantime, I salute the pansies, the weeds that grow between them, the shopkeepers, and the North Tyneside council gardeners. Thank you. Thank you.
Sunday, 1 November 2009
Thursday, 3 September 2009
789 - Liturgy (2): Psychogeography
On Cheltenham Racecourse I had a chance to put a question to Iain Sinclair. He's (tangentially, at least) a practitioner of psychogeography. In his books (Edge of the Orison; London Orbital; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire) he explores the experience of walking through various landscapes, mythmaking with the architecture, people and histories he finds there.
He spoke about the devastation inflicted, unwittingly perhaps, on the poet John Clare, who, unable to acclimatise to London's literary life, sought to return to his labouring family home, only to find that enclosure of the commons had, in the name of progress, privatised the landscape he used to wander freely and which had given him belonging and a muse. Doubly disenfranchised, he spent the latter years of his life in an asylum.
Such enclosure currently finds its echo in the Millenium Dome (a space enclosed with nothing in it) and, now, in the site of the 2012 Olympic Village, where you are being photographed as you approach, but where you have no power to photograph back, on pain of the confiscation of your camera. The site is empty, and the architecture to be built on it modern and uniform, but the crushed stone and life-space confiscated from its previous residents was once rich and full.
Sinclair's talk was powerful, and I, and perhaps others after, asked him how, in the midst of cultural obliteration, one might make a proactive stand for cultural rejuvenation. He writes books. What else could one do?
He gave an interesting answer: "Keep moving. Keep finding new projects."
I cannot help but think that this is the way that Whitley Bay will grow: for its people, and those who come to it, to keep moving, keep on walking, keep dreaming, pushing, and pressing our projects to completion.
He spoke about the devastation inflicted, unwittingly perhaps, on the poet John Clare, who, unable to acclimatise to London's literary life, sought to return to his labouring family home, only to find that enclosure of the commons had, in the name of progress, privatised the landscape he used to wander freely and which had given him belonging and a muse. Doubly disenfranchised, he spent the latter years of his life in an asylum.
Such enclosure currently finds its echo in the Millenium Dome (a space enclosed with nothing in it) and, now, in the site of the 2012 Olympic Village, where you are being photographed as you approach, but where you have no power to photograph back, on pain of the confiscation of your camera. The site is empty, and the architecture to be built on it modern and uniform, but the crushed stone and life-space confiscated from its previous residents was once rich and full.
Sinclair's talk was powerful, and I, and perhaps others after, asked him how, in the midst of cultural obliteration, one might make a proactive stand for cultural rejuvenation. He writes books. What else could one do?
He gave an interesting answer: "Keep moving. Keep finding new projects."
I cannot help but think that this is the way that Whitley Bay will grow: for its people, and those who come to it, to keep moving, keep on walking, keep dreaming, pushing, and pressing our projects to completion.
Thursday, 6 August 2009
793 - Betty Boop at Maugham's
Maugham's in Whitley Bay has a shop window full of the wildest out-there ornaments you're likely to see. Here's Betty Boop(s), just left of the Pendelphin range, right from the Native Americans, up from the Chinese Dragons and in the window adjacent to the Elvises.
Monday, 3 August 2009
795 - Playhouse and Dome
Both the Playhouse and the Dome have dropped their scaffolding in the past few weeks. Here they are together...
Monday, 27 July 2009
Monday, 13 July 2009
800 - Skin| Flowers
Detail from a pen and ink drawing on display with pictures by other artists at Restaurant 7 Tapas Bar and Gallery, Whitley Bay, till September 30th.
Friday, 19 June 2009
810 - Whitley Playhouse
The old playhouse saw Ken Dodd and Abba tributes, local am-dram and arthouse cinema. It was a must-play stop-off for big name bands in the seventies and eighties.
The new building (which houses the stage of the old, with the rest of the infrastructure re-built around it) opens in September.
This is taken across the meadow that has sprung from the former site of the Marine Park First School, an oasis of beauty in the town that, I reckon, would make a great nature reserve - the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park?
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
812 - Hotpotz, Park View
E and I at Hotpotz last night. It's one of those places where you buy a plain piece of ceramics, paint it and have it fired for you. This time I sat with my pad, whilst E let herself loose on a heart-shaped wedding-present platter.
Great fun, and paint everywhere...
(Googling for the website, I also found the shopping directory for Park View, Whitley Bay. Worth taking a look.)
Saturday, 13 June 2009
Friday, 12 June 2009
816 - Elephant Seen In Whitley Bay
This life-sized wooden elephant's head looks great on the refurbished curry house at the corner of Marine Avenue. Siam Bay Cuisine is going to sell Thai and Indian food: their website (still in progress) is here.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
840 - Cometh The Hour...
Closed my book on multiple personalities before reading the synopses of creative persona, and went to Morrisons instead.
On the way back I bumped into a guy I worked with at Seven Stories, digitising old reel-to-reel tapes. He told me he'd just completed an oral history project in Suffolk, for which he'd bought a CD robot, capable of cutting individual disks, and printing them with unique labels.
He is planning to use the machine, in his musician's guise, with musician friends, one of whom is his teenage daughter, a guitarist. He told me about the group - how they span thirty-three years; how he is proud that his daughter, when school allows, can tour with them. He says they are anti-rock (the way, I think, punk or radical folk can be anti-rock: something uncategorisable, new). Sometimes they'll gig as slow as possible, like a slow-bike race, I guess.
We talked about awakening creative energy. Now's time for a fresh burst of it. Like King Arthur, he said: when England needs him, he's there waking up.
Rough times ahead, however you view it, if the seventies are back economically, and the eighties, around the corner ready to plunder and despoil what's left. Good to know King Arthur and his bards and battlers are already shaking free of the soil: grassroots against intolerance and the dead hands of exploitation and bigotry.
On the way back I bumped into a guy I worked with at Seven Stories, digitising old reel-to-reel tapes. He told me he'd just completed an oral history project in Suffolk, for which he'd bought a CD robot, capable of cutting individual disks, and printing them with unique labels.
He is planning to use the machine, in his musician's guise, with musician friends, one of whom is his teenage daughter, a guitarist. He told me about the group - how they span thirty-three years; how he is proud that his daughter, when school allows, can tour with them. He says they are anti-rock (the way, I think, punk or radical folk can be anti-rock: something uncategorisable, new). Sometimes they'll gig as slow as possible, like a slow-bike race, I guess.
We talked about awakening creative energy. Now's time for a fresh burst of it. Like King Arthur, he said: when England needs him, he's there waking up.
Rough times ahead, however you view it, if the seventies are back economically, and the eighties, around the corner ready to plunder and despoil what's left. Good to know King Arthur and his bards and battlers are already shaking free of the soil: grassroots against intolerance and the dead hands of exploitation and bigotry.
Monday, 4 May 2009
841 - Rendezvous Cafe Window
Sitting inside with tea and fabulous outsized muffins. I like the way that the marks on the window, and the old-fashioned putty-edged iron frames, make the scene outside look like photographic plates from an ancient camera. I thought about cropping the photo, and tried it, but the vestige of frame in the top left-hand corner guides the eye: removing it opens the picture out too much.
Thursday, 30 April 2009
842 - I Am Reading
"What are you doing today?"
"I'm reading."
Underwhelmed silence. I feel slightly uncomfortable.
"It's a really great book!" I say, over-compensating. "And I'm going to blog... And shop - there's sandwich fillings we're short of."
How do I get across just what I mean by reading? Because it's not only that there is a subtext, there's an entire sub-culture signified by the word. Machiavelli, apparently, used to set a table for two, and dress up in suitable costume, before opening a book: that way he showed his respect to the author - they were eating together.
So here's a list of what I do when I read, sat in the caff with a cup of tea and a pencil in hand:
1. I am reading;
2. I am brainstorming;
3. I am creatively interacting, with the text and people around me;
4. I am performing a piece of art called 'The Reader";
5. I am using my time constructively while I wait for the Church to catch up;
6. I am inviting interruption;
7. I am promoting books, and all things bookish;
8. I am occupying a seat in the caff, thereby contributing to its appearance as the kind of place you might enjoy reading a book in (but I don't get free coffee for this);
9. I am not trashing the streets, or mouldering in front of daytime TV;
10. I am sending out love and peace vibes;
11. I am intriguing people;
12. I am blending in;
13. I am deconstructing the prevalent assumption that to be a worthwhile member of society you have to tick boxes, stress over work, and live a line on someone else's bankroll;
14. I am dancing (inside, textually);
15. I am reducing my carbon footprint;
16. I am growing neural connections;
17. I am tending my marginalia;
18. I am travelling, by ink and bleached wood-fibre, miles and miles;
19. I am a programme running on the analogue internet;
20. I am a librarian without walls...
"I'm reading."
Underwhelmed silence. I feel slightly uncomfortable.
"It's a really great book!" I say, over-compensating. "And I'm going to blog... And shop - there's sandwich fillings we're short of."
How do I get across just what I mean by reading? Because it's not only that there is a subtext, there's an entire sub-culture signified by the word. Machiavelli, apparently, used to set a table for two, and dress up in suitable costume, before opening a book: that way he showed his respect to the author - they were eating together.
So here's a list of what I do when I read, sat in the caff with a cup of tea and a pencil in hand:
1. I am reading;
2. I am brainstorming;
3. I am creatively interacting, with the text and people around me;
4. I am performing a piece of art called 'The Reader";
5. I am using my time constructively while I wait for the Church to catch up;
6. I am inviting interruption;
7. I am promoting books, and all things bookish;
8. I am occupying a seat in the caff, thereby contributing to its appearance as the kind of place you might enjoy reading a book in (but I don't get free coffee for this);
9. I am not trashing the streets, or mouldering in front of daytime TV;
10. I am sending out love and peace vibes;
11. I am intriguing people;
12. I am blending in;
13. I am deconstructing the prevalent assumption that to be a worthwhile member of society you have to tick boxes, stress over work, and live a line on someone else's bankroll;
14. I am dancing (inside, textually);
15. I am reducing my carbon footprint;
16. I am growing neural connections;
17. I am tending my marginalia;
18. I am travelling, by ink and bleached wood-fibre, miles and miles;
19. I am a programme running on the analogue internet;
20. I am a librarian without walls...
Sunday, 26 April 2009
844 - Howay The Bay!
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Smashing!
(Now, if it were possible to paint the front of the old Co-op and Woolworths, too...)
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