The Farrell Centre, above Claremont Tea House (formerly Quilliams), will be playing three short films of mine from September 19th within their exhibition “Concrete Dreams”. These films are reworked extracts from my PhD project “Brasília of the North” at Newcastle University, a forthcoming feature length documentary I’ve been working on since 2020. I’ve added new archive and unused footage to give them a somewhat new identity.

The first film examines the legacy of the creation of a new “Brasília” in Newcastle: a reimagined, orderly, planned redevelopment, in which the old, decaying industrial city would be modernised by bright concrete modernism, efficient and safe “streets in the sky” and renewed civic institutions. The second film, Byker: A Different Way of Living, explores Ralph Erskine’s attempt to overcome the perceived failures of the high rise at Byker while the final film delves into the Amber Film Collective’s celebrated T. Dan Smith and its representation of the region’s politics and architecture. 

I made a little film to promote the exhibition and short films. See it at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1180566466556783&ref=sharing

Brasília of the North is a feature length documentary which examines the political, social, economic, cultural and architectural influence that the figure of T. Dan Smith and his generation of politicians, architects and planners have had on contemporary North East England. The film focuses on not just this history but the experience of residents in the West End of Newcastle, Byker, Killingworth and Peterlee, exploring many of the themes discussed in “Planning and its Discontents“. I interviewed 61 participants for the film, including the Amber Film Collective’s Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts, photographer Carolyn Scott, Lindisfarne’s Rod Clements, Sir John Hall, journalist Andrew Hankinson, councillors Mehrbahn Sadiq and Hayder Qureshi, among others.

The history of the period is explored through several different lenses, crafting a mosaic which combines expert and resident testimony, archival material, new filmed footage and observational documentary sequences in the West End, Byker and Peterlee. My objective is to investigate the living legacy of the 1960s and 70s, and the region’s currently crumbling concrete modernism, as well as the end of the post-war political order and the rise of the New Right in the 1980s (Enter: John Hall and the Metrocentre). Stay tuned for information about the film’s release!

Stills from Brasília of the North’s opening sequence

A few shots from the taster screening

“A New Brasilia”, “Byker: A Different Way of Living” and “Amber’s T. Dan Smith” now playing at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne