marcus westbury

MakeSpace – a Renew Newcastle project I’m on the road for about a month in the USA and Canada and meeting a lot of people who are interested in Renew Newcastle but don’t know too much about me, Newcastle, the project or its history. I thought i should try my best to put a few [...]

Sometimes something so amazing happens that you pinch yourself. As regular readers — and irregular ones, anyone who has known me or met me or had the misfortune to be stuck next to me in transit for an hour  – will know if i have one obsession in life it’s with my home town of Newcastle. [...]

I’ve been meaning to write a long essay about this for a while but stumbled at figuring out exactly who would publish it. So brain dump follows… One of the things that my friend, collaborator, enabler, and founding Renew Newcastle board member Craig Allchin has pointed out to me many times is that is that i used [...]

The Crew from Firstdraft From The Sydney Morning Herald, apparently The City of Sydney is responding to the Newcastle threat: Look out, Clover Moore. Newcastle is beckoning your artists. To shore-up talent in her domain, the Lord Mayor has arranged for buildings disused by the City of Sydney council to be leased as studio space. [...]

Renew Newcastle as featured on last night’s edition of Stateline, NSW. According to host Quentin Dempster’s intro, Renew Newcastle has “recycled, reinvigorated, revived, revitalised, recreated and reimagnied the city.” I’ll take that! Frankly this was the last thing i did before i got home from my epic adventures in Ireland, UK, Germany, Dubai, Abu Dhabi [...]

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 [...]

The discussion just keeps coming… The  HVRF talk i gave last week has garnered a lot of attention for its analysis and response to the problem of dysfunctional commercial property markets. In the contexts in which i find myself talking about Renew Newcastle the economic issues are rarely discussed or analysed. Given the interest i [...]

OK, “on my side” is something of an exageration. But Justin Fox, the business and economics columnist for TIME magazine has written a little piece about Renew Newcastle in TIME’s The Curious Capitalist economics blog. I like Justin’s work and have been known to leave the odd comment on his blog at times. His article [...]

Classic TINA program from 2002 – my last year in charge. The 1st-5th of October is the time to be in Newcastle. Renew Newcastle is working up a series of events that will take place over the This Is Not Art Festival weekend. We’ll be running tours, talking about and showing off the project for [...]

Last night i had the honour and the opportunity to deliver one of this year’s Hunter Valley Research Foundation lectures at Newcastle’s City Hall. It’s quite an honour given some of the impressive people who have done it before. Anyhow, in case you missed it (and although there were a few hundred people there most [...]