Our Project Manager Anne Fry received a call from local film-maker James Newrick about a short film he was putting the finishing touches to.  The final edit ‘Crushing Strength’ is a beautifully shot 5 minute abstract documentation of reinforced concrete /mid century architecture and tiled mosaic work in Newcastle.  The film will be screened as part of the Newcastle City Futures exhibition daily in The Guildhall.

You can contact James at newrick6@hotmail.com and view Crushing Strength at James’ Vimeo Channel http://vimeo.com/user5701748.

In full explorer gear drama faciliator and workshop leader Adam Carruthers (Fulcrum Arts and Research) bought a wonderful array of materials into The Guildhall on Saturday morning to help inspire young people to build their own city.  A variety of smells, building materials and images of unusual buildings helped young visitors to make their own designs for a new city.  Amongst other things we saw designs today for a cat hospital and a stink-bomb factory called Camfi!

Adam will be running workshops in The Guildhall for the next two Saturdays from 11am-1pm.

Despite it being a very wet and windy evening on the Quayside, an audience gathered on the evening of 23rd May to listen to presentations organised by Newcastle City of Sanctuary.   Professor Mark Shucksmith, Director of the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal (NIRES), welcomed people to the event and introductions were done by Sarah Smart of Newcastle City of Sanctuary, who also reported that Newcastle had been conferred official City of Sanctuary status.

Presentations were heard from Simon Underwood (International Newcastle), Helen White (Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums), who introduced the new Destination Tyneside exhibition at the Discovery Museum, and Peter Sagar (A Living Tradition).  Lyndsay Cross (West End Refugee Service) introduced a screening of one of a number of films produced by WERS with support from NIRES which capture the stories of asylum seekers/ refugees and their experience of finding ‘a sense of belonging’ as they have made homes for themselves in the North East.  These films can also be found at the WERS youtube channel.  If you haven’t yet seen them please do visit their youtube channel, they are well worth a watch.

We were delighted to welcome Professor Sir Peter Hall to officially open the exhibition on Friday 23 May.  After an introduction from Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Sir Peter told how Newcastle has a strong tradition of innovation in planning and architecture.  Come down to the exhibition and see for yourself…

We’ve been working hard to install the exhibition – with a lot of help from our colleagues at Tyne and Wear Archives, Pyeroy and many others. Here is a sneak preview of the install team at work – come along to The Guildhall to see the final result!

Design Advisor to the Newcastle City Futures exhibition David Mitchell (Design Advisor at Home Group) went above and beyond the call of duty by making these beautiful mini stands based on his and Dhruv Sookhoo’s (Head of Design at Home Group) designs.

This was ahead of meetings with the fabricators earlier this week so here’s a sneak preview of the exhibition, in miniature….!

How do you put an exhibition together when you don’t own any of the objects or materials?

Well, here at Newcastle City Futures we’re working with a number of partners… including James from the Byker Lives archive! James helped us locate some really fantastic images and he even found an original street sign for us to display. Come along from the 23rd to have a look – and to help us figure out who some of the people in the photos are!

You can also explore the archive here: http://bykerlives.com/

Thank – you James!

The exhibition will be installed in a few weeks, so on Friday 6th May we had our first team training session to learn how to handle objects. From train tickets to framed oil paintings to chairs – and with some expensive and fragile objects thrown in for good measure – the team held onto their nerves to check, record, move and display objects like pros. Now for the real thing!