Postcard from Newcastle upon Tyne
Preti Taneja
An eighteen-storey tower is planned for that puddle, which currently reflects the sky. A tidy set of town houses will come up around that brick box, which houses the pump station for sewage in this area and it cannot be moved. This is what they call a form of nothing; a ‘brownfield site’ and the government has marked it for construction. The developers say it is one of the most complex sites in the country, because of what is underground. Pipes, iron supports, the silt and soil. The river is under it, and around it. There’s a flash of it visible through the barriers. The water level is rising. Arching over it: the bridges, the ballooning concert hall, the waves of roofs from decades ago, hint at what only the people who live here know. That rainbows happen here often, almost every time it rains. Imagine if it was something to do with the way the water curves to the sea, refracting the light from many angles. Or perhaps this happens everywhere; only here they are more visible just because the height of buildings has so far been kept low. Enough for this city which lies between a dark sky park and the fresh North Sea. The water is rising. Turn around.
Behind this mudflat is a neighbourhood that loves an artist’s silent practice; the changing graffiti across long walls speaks to our need—to speak of our lateral restlessness, our desire for the spontaneous, the embrace of the beautiful, transient, new. There are small shops in industrial arches grown up by collectives, at first to survive the next winter. Beyond that, the height of a brutalist wall built to replace slum dwellings with social housing across a decade of the late 20th Century. Now inside that iconic place, corrugated roofs are rusting and the mutual aid struggles to provide. People fleeing war are resettled here; may one day or never call it home. The water is rising. Anne Carson reminds us: you cannot eat winter.
Turn around. On this brownfield site marked for construction, the present will bring: commercial units, (which the developers say might include cycle hubs, a yoga studio,) apartments valued for seven digits in an eighteen-storey tower. I am standing here as temporary archivist of this view. The scientists say the water is rising. The build will start in weeks. In sixty years, I know I will be gone. Everything in this picture will be submerged.
Preti Taneja is a writer and activist. Her first novel, We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press/Knopf), won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK’s best debut of the year and was listed for international awards, including the Folio Prize, the Prix Jan Michalski, and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. It has been translated into several languages. Taneja lectures in creative writing at Newcastle University and broadcasts on world literature and culture for the BBC.
