Speaker
Description
Historians have focused on the development of road and railway transport infrastructure after Second World War in Newcastle upon Tyne. Names such as T. Dan Smith, Wilfred Burns and Derek Bradshaw have become forever associated with the disastrous plans to make Newcastle into the ‘Brasilia of the North’ by proposing vast urban motorway schemes which would have sliced and diced the urban core of the city. Newcastle was subject to further transport intrusions in the form of the Tyne and Wear Metro, one of the first rapid transit systems in Britain. Unsurprisingly, Newcastle has garnered attention, however it only resides on the northern banks of the River Tyne, what about the other city who shares the river,Gateshead? This paper seeks to create a conversation about Gateshead by investigating the impact of postwar transport planning on the city’s residents and its urban environment. This paper seeks to use the Chandless Estate as a micro case-study to chart the construction of Gateshead’s A1 Central Area Viaduct and the tunnelling of the Tyne and Wear Metro. Employing both traditional methods such as archival research with more novel, qualitative methods such as oral history interviews and interdisciplinary site visits; this paper will generate an urban, environmental, and socio-historical vignette of the influence ofaccretive transport development. The paper hopes to create a discussion around the uses of a range methodologies within transport research and question the value of qualitative research within transport history.
