Yesterday was apparently blue monday, the New Orderiest day of the year and apparently the point in the calendar where we as a nation achieve maximum glumness. Normally I would scoff at this, but seeing as I have embraced sobriety this January (cue obnoxious plea for sponsorship, poorly disguised as a pithy comment) the world has been stripped of its comforting beery glow and I find myself stranded in a Dostoyevsky novel my mood marooned somewhere between alienation, dread and a mild arsiness. My general torpor has been abetted by the weather, which is shitty, the news, which has been depressing, my work situation, which is tenuous, and an annual report published yesterday by the Centre for Cities which seemed to indicate that the place where I live is slowly dissapearing down the swanny.
To be fair, the picture painted by the report is more complicated that that. Wearside's got one of the best manufacturing bases in the country and is apparently top ten for It start ups. However it remains striking that out of the major settlements in the UK, the one I live in is the only one with a negative population growth. For clarity's sake I should point out that I am not of the Mackem persuasion myself. I was born in Yorkshire and grew up in the wilds of County Durham, where we laughed at the hoity-toity Sunderlanderers and their ilk, mincing around with their knives and forks and their 24 hour electricity. I moved here simply because this is where my job was and I've stayed here because this is where the lady I love is. I therefore have no real roots in the place, but it is where I keep the majority of my stuff and it'd be nice and it'd be nice if it could
Part of the town's woes can be put down to shitty luck, with all the town's key industries being wound up suddenly and without warning back in the eighties, with no real thought or care being put into what might replace them. Part of it can be chalked up to a crap location; the fag end of England, starved of infrastructure investment, right next door to a bigger*, better connected and more glamorous neighbour. Part of it can be put down to local mismanagement; it's a bit hard to blame the national government for the multitude of fuck ugly buildings, the notorious one way system or the recent debacle where £11 million of public money was spent commissioning plans for a bridge that was subsequently scrapped.
Regardless of how the place got in its current state, it's current state is where it is and the only useful conversation to have is how to move forward. One silver lining about the areas relative crapness is that there's a number of fairly obvious measures that can be taken to improve things. Half the town is like a building site at present and the council certainly seem to have some sensible-ish plans to relocate more economic activity in the city centre, although there's always a quite sizable gap between talking and doing. The City Deals announced last autumn by the current government are also very welcome, although I can't shake the concern that it puts Sunderland in direct competition, rather than partnership, with Newcastle, and as things stand at present the Mags are always going to win that particular derby. Also encouraging is the formation of the combined authority - made up of the various Tyne and Wear councils, plus Durham and Northumberland - although at present that feels more like a talking shop than anything else.
Regardless, here's hoping by the time that the next report is published a year from now that there's some tangible improvements. Not, you understand, because Wearside can be regarded as being merely at the sharp end of a wedge of an society wide trend that is gradually seeing capital accumulating in the hands of a shrinking number of people, while actual communities are slowly beggared. No. Here's hoping things improve because I live here and my life would be a teeny tiny bit better if we could somehow wrangle it so that the city centre got a 24 hour supermarket (Durham's got two, for fuck's sake) and also maybe a Paperchase.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other news I did another page for Rag and Bone. Aren't I clever
Love and Fishes
Dave Denton
* A lot of Mackems will tell you that up until very recently Sunderland was bigger than Newcastle, which is kinda, sorta trueish if you only look at the populations within the officially defined city boundaries. On the other hand if you look at the population of the continuous built up area, then Tyneside's clearly about 3-4 times bigger than Wearside.
No comments:
Post a Comment