The Gateshead Garden Festival Legacy

Way back in the 1980s here in Britain there were riots in the poorest and most deprived areas. The then governments solution was to hold a series of Garden Festivals. Now it is all to easy to be facetious especially when talking about the Margaret Thatcher administration, but why should I work hard defending a government that wrote off whole communities, and dismissed the whole industrial base of the nation as being irrelevant.

So holding these Garden festivals as a way of placating the anger that communities felt as a result of the policies was daft if the reasons for doing them was to create employment opportunities. On that score the failed. However, it did have the beneficial effect of getting contaminated industrial land cleaned up. While the Millennium dome was much ridiculed, the real reason for carrying out that project was to clean up that industrial site, so lessons from the Garden Festivals was learnt by future administrations.

Here in Gateshead there was one of the Garden Festivals, and I watched as the former gas works was transformed. I actually missed the festival as I was working away from the area. After the festival almost all the reclaimed land was sold off to developers and houses and apartments were built. Not for social need but upmarket flats that further displaced the disaffected.

Especially as in the original proposals there was a pledge, a promise, that small industrial units were supposed to be built as well as the festival providing training in new skills, the way the site was redeveloped did upset many people. As none of the training happened nor was there any legacy of jobs. There is not even a park left for the people.

As my ex wife and I lived next to the site of the Garden Festival I got to know it well. It was a comment that I overheard on the bus that prompted me to go and look at what remained of the site. While most of the land was sold to developers, the guts, tidal streams that were used as sewers, remained in council ownership. These were planted with reeds so that the reeds could aid the cleaning of these effluent channels. I am pleased to say that it looks as though it has worked.

The last time I inspected them about ten years ago, there was still an odour and an oily film on the water. Now however, the odour was absent today and the water looked clean. Moreover, there were Reed Warblers that I heard in the reed banks. In the mud there appeared to be small mammal tracks, previously it had been to polluted even for rats.

So while the legacy was supposed to be jobs, I am happy that the Garden Festival here has gave the environment a chance to clean up.

The chance remark I over heard was about an owl being spotted near the guts, so I knew that something had changed for the better.