Plants, Planters and Gardens

Over the last four years (1999 - 2004) the green spaces within Arthurs hill have both improved and in certain areas become more dilapidated. At one point there was the ridiculous idea of turning one of the few green spaces into a car park for the football stadium in Newcastle!

According to the October 2003 issue of the Moorside Streetsahead paper the council are planning on removing the small grass verges along New Mills and replacing them with Tarmac do you really want this to happen:

How it might look ( the other side of the street)	How it looks now

Here are some more examples of dereliction or poor / inappropriate so called improvements:

Benwell Cricket Ground With the enlargement of Barrack road the stone wall was removed and a few fairly small saplings were planted several of which have been uprooted. The wall has at last been removed (jan. 2004) but the unsightly gates and storage containers remain.	2003 2003 2003
Nuns Moor Park Seems to be loosing trees, A large number have been cut down by the council and in this particular area none have been replaced. You can also see that the far part of the park now has far fewer trees than previously both at the Walter tce. and Barrack rd. ends. It seems to me that people in deprived areas do not deserve trees!	2002 / 2003 2002 / 2003 2003
Inappropriate unaesthetic lighting (1) - Lighting has been added to an old path beside Nuns Moor Park but they are purely utilitarian, compare these with those that are being placed in nearby Leazers park as part of the refurbishment.	2003
Inappropriate unaesthetic lighting (2) - Nuns Moor park has a pavillion which is frequently broken into to help prevent this large lights have been placed on the walls of the building shining outwards, even the prison at Franklin has more appropriate lighting! As do the flats much closer to home at Pitt st.
Inappropriate unaesthetic traffic control (1) Along Walter terrace traffic calming bollards have been introduced and look very unsightly. A simple alternative would have been to build more planters using a similar design to those found along the streets. Several of the boards have been smashed.
Gradual running down of gardens at corner of New Mills st. Within the last three years a noticeable deterioration in the quality of the gardens of the elderly residents of the houses near here has been noted. Once the flower beds and shrubs were carefully maintained now a set of council(?) workers come with brisk inattention and savage the gardens about twice a year, gone are the flower beds and replaced with boring low maintenance, uniform plants. Luckily a few of the original trees remain.	2003 2003 2003
Planters in a poor state. Stanton st had, for about two years, a gardener who lived and worked on the street, this increased the standard of the planters and she even provided hanging baskets in the summer. She has gone and the situation is rapidly returning to the former state of dereliction. Of course the question is why is not the council maintaining the planters, and I don't mean just cutting off the tops of a few shrubs once a year but planting bedding plants at appropriate times throughout the year.	The hanging baskets in Stanton st. 2001 2003 2003
Back lanes The north, and particularly Newcastle is marred by the miserable bleak back lanes, and Arthurs hill is no exception, except possibly being worse than most. I will discuss this further.	click here for more info

While the above highlights specific problems all contributing to the general feeling that arthurs hill is barren and bare.There are a few newly landscaped green places such as the Flats on the corner of Beaconsfield and Stanhope Sts. While these are new developments a little way up from Arthurs hill at the top of Bishop st there is an established set of trees (both sides of this paragraph). Amazingly the council tried to remove these in 2001 but luckily a local protest stopped it.

This is in stark contrast to the back Steets. One or two Streets do have a few haphazard trees, such as Croydon Rd and the once respectable Sidney Grove.

In other places around Newcastle drastic measures have been taken to improve this situation such as removing alternative rows of houses - this certainly improves the area drastically and I feel would be appropriate for Arthurs hill where much of the housing stock is empty. This is in fact what happened in the 60s to the streets around new mills which is now by far the most inviting area. Much less drastic action involves either opening up the backs of houses or removing a few in the middle or end of rows (see below). The least drastic action is to place planters along the lanes. I personally am amazed that the council has not tried deveoping a narrow verge in places - the results might be quite exciting for such a small investment.

Examples of how back lanes have been improved in Heaton

The removal of a few houses can make a drastic change to a street as the pictures of heaton above shows.

Most of the streets are having one or two pairs of flats converted into houses. This can be a difficult task given the fact that the workmen often need to repair damage done the previous night before starting again. The reasons for this are clear - the lack of housing demand in this area and the poor state of repair in the flat roof extension.