Wandering around 798 — the industrial scale arts and cultural district of Beijing — yesterday, my old friend Shannon Bufton asked whatever happened to the former BHP site in Newcastle. Then i happened across this video via facebook today courtesy of Bob Cook who worked at the BHP for many years and is now a councillor on Newcastle City Council. It answers the question in a most powerful way.
Perhaps Tribute to Men & Women of Steel is only emotional for those of us who grew up in the shadow of the BHP steelworks but i really felt it when i saw this.
Bob has some other great videos at the Newcastle Industrial Heritage Association site.
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Tags: 798 Beijing · bhp steelworks · Bob Cook · end of an era · former bhp site · Newcastle · Newcastle decay · newcastle empty shops · Newcastle Industrial Hertage Association · newcastle video · Renew Newcastle · Shannon Bufton · videoView Comments
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One thing which always strikes me about stories and images of industrial decline is the sheer physical scale of everything. That must surely contribute to the powerful emotions people feel when it all comes to an end.
Steelmaking in particular is about carving rock out of the very Earth itself, melting it in primal fire and forging it into new things — and in the great age of steam they were things like steam locomotives, again filled with primal fire and hissing and breathing like a dragon.
Now the grand creations of our world are things like the massive infrastructure of Google data centres and optical fibre cables — but they’re almost invisible. Will we feel the same primal emotions when a data centre is turned off?
No, probably not.
Actually my friend Dan Hill of City of Sound http://www.cityofsound.com is a guy you should chat with about some of this stuff. His interest cross eclecticly between architecture, IT, urban planning etc and one his recurring themes is that you can’t actually see what cities do anymore. An office buildings is an office building is an office building so much ot the distinctiveness of places and the connections between what they make and how they feel are broken.
He is very into mixing architecture and data visualisation as a means to deal with this — i’m not 100% sure that always works but it’s a good start — but it’s a really interesting question.
As for the scale of the old BHP site — it was enormous. I still find it’s absence a strange hole in the skyline of Newcastle. I still find myself sitting by the harbour and pining for the huge plumes of fire that used to shoot into the night. I mean, it was probably killing us but man it looked good.
Thanks for the linkage, Marcus.
As it happens, I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of a TV/video program somehow conveying the awe and scale of the modern information age — not about the technology per se but how it’s connecting humans — using various visualisations to help people get their heads around it. Now those thoughts are back in my head. Hmmm…
That was beautiful. When solar power is just that little bit cheaper we can look forward to seeing similar video of some old coal-fired power stations crashing down too. Now that would be a wonderful sight.