Power and the Water: Connecting Pasts with Futures is an AHRC-funded project involving the Universities of Bristol, East Anglia and Nottingham. The project examines the nature of environmental connectivities since industrialization and how their legacies challenge us in the early 21st century.
Early in April 2014, Angela met up with one of their researchers, Dr Leona Skelton (The University of Bristol) who is researching the degeneration and regeneration of the River Tyne. It turns out that not only is Leona from Gateshead, but that she also visited Dunston Staiths during the Gateshead Garden Festival in 1990.
A redshank in flight over the Tyne. © Jonathan Siberry, Licensed for Reuse Under Creative Commons (CC-BY-2.0 UK) via Flickr
Leona has written a wonderful blog about her reflections on how industrial interventions can have a positive affect on urban wildlife, which you can find out more about in the “Environment” section. She raises some interesting questions about the unintended consequences of human influence on nature.
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Field Notes: 4th June 2014
Art, Sustainability and Heritage: A Walking Tour with Power and the Water On Wednesday 4th June 2014, Angela led a walk out to Dunston Staiths. The Power and the Water research team, from the Universities of Bristol, Nottingham and East Anglia, agreed to be dragged along for some exercise, art and industrial heritage during their…
Day 5 of Construction
In the flurry of activity surrounding Cone, I managed to have several conversations with Wolfgang about the work. He spoke of his previous architectural-scale projects where he increasingly recognises that it is important that people make sense of the artwork themselves; from the apprentices who help construct it, to the people who view it. The…
Sustainability Cafe
Last Thursday, six people came to the sustainability cafe that was led by the University of Lancaster. With nine people in total, we thought that this was about as much as the staiths could reasonably handle for safety reasons. Inside Cone, the word ‘sublime’ was mentioned on more than one occasion. After spending a while…