Gateshead International Space Programme™ Part I
From 1984 until 1992 five National Garden Festivals were held in the UK. One of them was in Gateshead in 1990. It lasted 157 days across that summer and received over three million visitors. People loved it and still talk about it today.
The Garden Festivals were the idea of UK Conservative environment secretary Michael Heseltine in 1980. They were based on the German post-war Bundesgartenschau concept for reclaiming large areas of derelict land in cities.
All the festivals were held in designated areas — reclaimed land that had become derelict and poisonous in the wake of industrial decline. Other festivals were held in Liverpool, Stoke and Glasgow. They each cost between £25 — £70 million.
I made an edit of TV footage from the Gateshead Festival and put a DJ mix onto it as a soundtrack. If anything the original footage is weirder than my edit. You can also find lots of shakey amateur camcorder footage online too. It presents a very strange world; giant inflatable Jonathan Swift characters, US Civil War/Norman conquest re-enactors, Native Americans banging drums, Baphomet sculptures in amongst the begonias and what look like South Sea islanders with no clothes on playing cricket in front of wheelchair bound Gateshead OAPs. A giant space ship was also situated near the banks of the River Tyne — it invited people on board for MISSION:TYNE & WEAR and experience a flight into the stars, complete with adapted flight simulator hydraulics and night club lighting. The whole festival looks brilliant and mad.
You can watch my edit here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinAh76S6BE&t=644s
The garden festival itself is presented like some mad dream and in some ways it is. The festivals were produced to encourage global business into areas that were in steep decline. For Gateshead it was hoped the site would be occupied by Japanese and European technology companies. But it never happened and the land that the festival used remained empty for the next 10 years.
Here’s some more images from the festival including ‘World’s Strongest Man’ Geoff Capes, British boxer Frank Bruno, a glass pyramid and a goat sculpture that wouldn’t look a miss in a Terry Gilliam film.
The area around the River Team, a once highly toxic industrial tributary of the River Tyne, got redeveloped (regenerated) into a nature route and in 2002 work commenced on part of the festival site with the construction of expensive Scandinavian inspired houses designed by the Red or Dead designer Wayne Hemingway. It would be another ten years before the housing was complete — now know as The Staithes. It’s nice and pleasant enough, you can buy a latte in The Staithes Cafe and watch curlews in the tidal basin.
You can trace the pathways and routes of the Garden Festival as you walk along the River Team, which form a convenient barrier around The Staithes development and the housing, industrial estates and 60s tower blocks of Dunston and Teams. If you look closely, in amongst the empty bottles of white cider, discarded laptops, torn suitcases, condoms and nitrous oxide bulbs you’ll find remnants of the festival’s sculptures and the foundations of the mad caterpillar monorail. It’s become an eerie interzone that makes the footage of the Garden Festival seem all the more unreal.
