St Cuthberts Village- Tyneside Brutalism 

Late 70s early 80s.i worked as a removal man. I remember Women crying with Joy when we were moving them out of St Cuthberts Village. Just another monstrosity inflicted on Gateshead folk in the late 1960s, like the Flyover and Multi story car park.

Great video, I lived just off Coatsworth Rd right next to St. Cuthberts Village when I was a kid back in the late 80’s early 90’s. I remember it being a right dump and wouldn’t go anywhere near the place, seemed quite dangerous too.

Hey Honey. I was raised there. Our group is on Facebook for former residents. That’s a great place to go for research. It might be seen as okay to demolish all the Brutalist Architecture in Gateshead but for us who lived there and was raised there, of the 80s kids n teens, it’s wiped out all our childhood and more or less it’s just obliterated all that was. All that 60s/70s vibe that seems horrible to modern people, was our lives. Yes, the dead ends with railings , where it’s just land, was my part where I lived. The part nearest the railway , city and river. The lower village. Yes, there were absolutely problems. But all that’s because of how the council and social services handle people. The homes that are now there - new builds -are absolutely nothing like what was there. Not in any way, shape or form. St Cuthbert’s Village was an urban council estate for people who didn’t have much materially and many people there were absolutely lovely. I look back and miss the good ones I knew. The older Characters that can never ever be replaced by the way things are now in society. It’s scary and sickening the way things have become. Good luck in your research

The research and presentation of these videos is just brilliant.

I love that Sunbeam.

I never lived in the village, but very close to it. After decades away from Gateshead and at the age of 57 it still makes an occasional appearance in dreams, especially variations on the open middle part, but with a much steeper vertiginous slope to the ground and more elaborate and bizarre walkways. I did have schoolfriends who's parents had flats there, and my memory is off an unusual determinedly modern layout, but warm and welcoming once you were in. It was just running the gauntlet getting there...

Just a couple of pronunciations off - the u in Cuthbert is like the u in custard, rather than an oo sound. 'Lough' as in Beacon Lough is pronounced 'loff'. It's a characteristic of Geordie English to pronounce gh in proper nouns as an 'f' sound. Just like the gh in Redheugh is pronounced like an f.

Great video. I live on the site now at the highest point and yes it's a fantastic view.

Loving your content Jordan! You should cover some history on Low Fell; a lot of history around there.

Another great video with a fascinating insight to this particular area of Gateshead. As you rightly point out the views are superb......IF the land is developed properly it could arguably become a desirable place to live and work? Fingers crossed then for the council to do the right thing 🤞

Absolutely fascinating Jordan, I love your videos, the content, the background music, the pacing of them. I like how it keeps cutting like your chopping them, it just seems to work. I only know about this village because of Get Carter. I went looking for all the locations from the film in 2001 and used the remaining St Cuthbert village high rise as a reference. The actual filming of the inside scenes were shot on location too I believe. Caine blew his stack because the camera man messed up in the scene.............anyway I digress, cracking video Jordan 👍

The Askew arms and the shops on the south side of Askew road were still there in the early days on the top of the village they would have went along coatsworth road , the arrival of vivo spar and laws pretty much finished the small shop

I grew up in the terrace houses on Stanhope Street, and so did Hank Marvin. He's done better than me, but it was a great place to live. I knew all my neighbours and they were good working class people, went to Todds Nook school, were the teachers were really old fashioned, thought nothing of hitting you on you nuckles with the edge of a ruler for writing with you left hand.

Lived in beadnell and bellshill walk as a child, was there when they knocked it down, used to love the place. Good to see it again really, I miss the places in a way.

I lived in one of the walks off the walkway at the bottom of the Village - as we called it - 1978 to 1982. Lowick. Like anything, there were good and bad points. I still dream about the walkway. As a 5 year old child, it was sort of space age. The good: the stucco rooftops which had no divisions were lovely and bright in summer. Full of plants and pets (ferrets!) - like a discovery park. The community centre discos and activities were great and The Mitre pub (get it: St Cuthbert’s 😉) was very community minded. There was a Spar and a laundrette(?) Also, there were small holed cubby dens underneath the ground walkways and a great park and not far to the Library, school or the Tyne of the brambles on the rail yard. To us, it was all adventure. The split level was quite groovy. On the negative side: the rubbish chutes were not a good idea (the smell of rotten split open waste in sumner was disgusting), the inner build quality was poor and, as commented, the council did not maintain the halls or the buildings well enough. And as residents and families moved out, it was filled with some less socially minded people. My overall memory is off feeling on the edge of a world, like a limbo - between the town and the river. It was also never Coothberts: it’s pronounced as it is normally - Cuthbert’s.

Ivy Hodge's exploding gas cooker back in 1968 certainly changed public opinion on high-rise living; sadly before some estates were even completed they were unpopular. I know some blocks in Newcastle were converted to all-electric, and I remember seeing previously fitted blast angles installed in some tower blocks in Sunderland during a recent refurbishment, designed to hold everything together if an explosion were to happen.

Just a few things, Heaton and Jesmond are not in Gateshead, it's Cuthbert not Coothbert, this part of Askew road is 40mph. I was about 5 when me and my family spent about 6 months in this place while the houses on our estate were being low standard badly refurbished or as the council put it modernised, the flats were okay and it just a short trip to the shops on Coatsworth Road or Gateshead Town centre so using no corner shops was a lame excuse, the problem was the residents and their kids who ran riot, those kids most of them ended up in the same high school as me and they were always in trouble and on leaving school most of them turned to crime and drugs, the area would have been okay but it was left lawless. I would be surprised if Gateshead council still own the land as the have sold every other bit of available land to developers.

That tower block still standing, I lived at no4.

Hi Jordan - I never thought I would be interested in Urban Planning - but I do find your videos interesting for the "back stories". As an urban planner of the future, I am interested in your views around cities going forward. I live in Australia (ex Newcastle)- A lot of my colleagues now work remotely from home (various cities) - visits to the City office are not required so much - obviously there is a lot of office space available these days. Do you think the nature of cities have now fundamentally changed due to the effects of Covid - or will things revert back to pre-covid. As a planner you obviously have to take the long term view - I am interested what you think as that future Urban planner. Keep up the good work :)

My father was the architect who designed Saint Cuthbert's Village. I disagree that this was brutalist architecture. As a resident has pointed out, the design might seem dated by today's standards, but at the time it was developed with modernisation and a better standard of living in mind. My father developed split-level apartments, the first of their kind back then, and was considered so innovative that it was officially opened by then PM, Harold Wilson.

Horrendously cold in winter months, I used to babysit on Cestria Walk 🥶

Who was Saint Coothbert?

nice vlog i live near there

No one consulted ordinary working people about the type of accommodation they wanted to live in back in those days and brutalist architecture was just a way of reducing unit costs and building times. Building control and planning in those days neither rigorous or devoid of corruption and many blocks suffered from dampness, water ingress, cold bridging, poor heating and poor ventilation from the outset. To compare Shieldfield/Jesmond with St Cuthbert’s ignores both the radically different geography and demographic. A fairer comparison might be with Cruddas Park. It is also important to remember that the council in those days played a gate keeper role and ensured that people ended up in particular developments or districts using criteria which are quite abhorrent in this day and age. The failure of certain brutalist/modernist housing developments was as much due to these policies and the abject failure to canvas the opinion of prospective tenants, as the poor real world execution of the schemes.

What job do you do? Seems to me like you do something to do with planning or architecture.

Fella. If you got rid of the music in the background of this video that's very distracting and off-putting. You will have a great video here. Please re upload this video but without the music. It totally overpowers your voice. However a very well researched video. Thank you for uploading it. Pure.

Interesting, now Ouseburn part 3, Ouseburn part 3! or Helix or Ochre yards. Thank you very much ;)

Used to go out with a girl at the bottom end of the estate (Tracy sykes, spelling probably wrong 🙈) used to think they were very modern at the time as I grew up in a old Victorian house but looking back I would of hated living in them now.

You're quite right, we have a lot of this sort of thing in the former East Germany (still called the "new federal states" 30 years later - some of the "old" ones are only 70 y.o.), but being pernickety, I would call into question your description of the architecture as "brutalist", which I understand as more Le Corbusier & Co - in Germany we call this style "Plattenbauweise", "prefabricated elements construction". Ferroconcrete skeleton, prefabricated cladding, drywall internal partitioning, bob's yer uncle. A term I have heard used is the "high rise estate", which always contained five-storey blocks as well as towers. "Brutalist" needs to have the aesthetic of the concrete bunker i.m.h.o. Again, you focus rightly on the social issues. These were solved in E. Europe in quite a different manner. Not to be recommended.

Great video but your pronunciation is a little off for some of the place names. Overall though great video and I've subscribed

Lived on Bamburgh walk St cuthberts village

Nearby was Clasper village and that last not much longer than St Cuthberts. Not a great place to live.

sound not in sync

My family come from this area

I hate that bridge, I purely hate that bridge have lots of unhappy memories crossing it, it’s a magic bridge coz no matter how far along you are it just never seems to end when walking across it #justsaying

They have just replaced one set of problems for another set of problems simple as

Who is this coooothbert? It's cuthbert! It's really off-putting when you pronounce common names wrong!

I wonder why English schools don't teach this style of presentation, say a few words... stop, move a few inches, start talking again, stop etc etc etc... maybe because it is annoying, pointless, they aren't trying to be american replicas

Clueless

This man needs to give up what he's doing he has no clue about the village are people who lived there and for saying the no shops are pubs in the area don't no where he's getting that from he's completely deluded