Finding its feet: The Farrell Centre, Newcastle ADC

“More wildflower meadows please!”; “No hostile architecture”; “More trees please … and litter bins and seats and quiet” – these are just some of the comments on a small display installed in the Urban Rooms at the Farrell Centre here in Newcastle. The display presents a project called The Ouse Burn Way, which has been initiated by local charity, the Reece Foundation, to create a seven-mile trail along the Ouseburn river from its mouth at the River Tyne in the trendy Lower Ouseburn Valley up to Weetslade Country Park on the edge of Northumberland.

Although a significant part of the route is already public park – given to the people of Newcastle by the industrialist Lord Armstrong in the nineteenth century – the immediate environment of the river has become degraded, with water quality suffering through urban run off and sewage overflows. The Reece Foundation aims to bring together local authorities, water company and government agencies in order to change this and realise the potential of this unique piece of natural infrastructure to connect people with nature, provide space for recreation and enable sensitive development.

The Ouse Burn Way doesn’t seem like a project that many people would disagree with – and sure enough, the comments we’ve received and the reaction from local policymakers and politicians have been almost universally positive. Yet, alongside the public spirited nature of the project itself, one of the reasons for the lack of objections is surely the very fact that the Reece Foundation, working with the Farrell Centre, have so diligently engaged the public and created a space for comment and discussion.

Right now, the debate about the built environment in the UK has arguably never been more polarised, as witnessed by the seemingly countless arguments over low traffic neighbourhoods in towns and cities across the country, including in Newcastle. But when people feel genuinely consulted, when their ideas, as well as concerns, are listened to and where necessary acted upon, then the debate becomes a lot more productive, and starts to be one that people want to be a part of rather than run away from.

This is why, to answer comments made when the centre opened, we haven’t sought, initially at least, to showcase other, more controversial development proposals. It’s very easy to point fingers at something and say it is bad. But when building an institution, if you do that you find that people stop wanting to talk to you. Instead, we’re working for the longer term, building spaces that bring people – and their views – together, in an attempt to find common ground rather than alienating half our audience. And when we come to presenting such proposals, we do so from a position of trust and confidence.

So for us at the Farrell Centre, The Ouse Burn Way display has been a valuable project in and of itself, while serving, along with the many other programmes initiated since we opened in April 2023, to help establish the centre as a place for local people, as well as those from further afield, to come together to discuss the built environment and the many different ways it affects our lives.

This was Sir Terry Farrell’s vision when he approached Newcastle University to establish an ‘urban room’ for the city, following one of the key recommendations of the review he was commissioned by the government to undertake into the UK’s built environment in 2013. Since joining as the centre’s first director in 2019, and more recently with the centre’s team, I’ve reflected deeply on how we might aspire to meet that vision as an institution, through our building and in our programming.

At the heart of this thinking how we conceive the Farrell Centre as a gateway between the city and the university, between local people and the world of research and teaching. And while it is core to our mission to be sharing knowledge that sits within the academy, as well as in built environment professions which whom we also work closely, it has to be a two-way process. We need to learn from our audiences and communities, as much as they learn from us, with the centre acting as a place where multiple bodies of knowledge not only exist, but intermingle – a place of learning as exchange.

Constructing a public forum

This shaped the building project to transform a late nineteenth-century building into the Farrell Centre’s home, creating spaces that don’t feel like they’re part of the university, but at the same time aren’t like a conventional museum or gallery. As well as local firms Space and Elliott Architects who were responsible for the building project, we worked closely with Mat Barnes and his team at CAN on what would go inside the new spaces, and almost more importantly how they would feel to our visitors. With Mat, we created the second-floor ‘Urban Rooms’ – multi-use spaces containing a range of exhibits and activities devoted to the city’s past, present and future, which we also use for workshops, talks and roundtables, among other things.

Since opening in April last year, the ethos has always been to try to avoid or even subvert expectations about how to use or behave in these spaces. They’ve been taken over in unexpected ways, whether by toddlers in our ‘Little Builders’ workshops, kids making making all kinds of amazing models from the (inevitable) LEGO, teenagers designing maps and postcards from Tyneside, or adults engaging with our displays of city plans – both real and propositional.

The Urban Rooms are also the home to our monthly ‘City Forum’ which offers a space for local people to debate and reflect on key issues shaping their experience of the city. In our first nine months, we have explored everything from cycling to play spaces, bringing together local councillors, university researchers and the community. Then, there are initiatives like ‘Tea at 3’ where we as curators take even more of a backseat in offering visitors to the centre a free cup of tea or coffee and a (warm) place to sit reflect and, if they want to, discuss. Here, the take-up has been predictably more varied, but shows the potential of the idea of blending civic space with the domestic and vice versa.

In theory and now in practice, the Farrell Centre has a hybrid identity: part gallery, part museum, part community space, part of the university and part of the city, focused on the local, and through the exhibition programme that runs parallel (or rather on floor directly below) the Urban Rooms, looking further afield too.

Our first exhibition More with Less: Reimagining Architecture for a Changing World which featured installations by Office S&M, Dress for the Weather, McCloy + Muchemwa and Newcastle University colleagues in the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, actively avoided offering ‘solutions’ for decarbonisation and instead offered provocations for what new concepts of architecture might be required to meet the challenge of the climate emergency. In a way, the exhibition answered its own question by putting visitors at the centre of this, shifting architecture from being something distant and elitist and making it tangible, touchable and meaningful, both in the context of the massive challenges we face collectively and in terms of our individual everyday lives.

Naturally, there is much still to do in fully establishing the Farrell Centre, learning more from our audiences, what resonates – and what doesn’t, what they want to see addressed and how. And, for sure, a hybrid identity sometimes makes it challenging to tell our story. We can’t do everything right away, as much as we would like to. Our mission is a vital and increasingly urgent one, but we’ve always been mindful of not underestimating the challenge of building something from the ground up. So, as I sometimes say to colleagues, judge us after three years rather than nine months.

While the Farrell Centre is unique as an institution, in the city and, we hope, in how we collaborate with our visitors, it is also one of a number of ‘urban rooms’ that emerged subsequent to the Farrell Review. All are different, whether in institutional configuration, scale, funding and focus, but are united by the same underlying mission of engaging local people in the conversation about the future of where they live. So, there is much we can learn from each other and share between us, and we look forward in getting more involved.

What ultimately distinguishes our approach is the centre’s role as a connector, where our agenda is, in a sense, to act as a facilitator or platform, somewhere where people feel comfortable, able to contribute, and confident that their voice will be heard. We hope this is exemplified in everything we do, but, to my mind, came across very clearly in a project with university colleagues working with Year 8 and Year 9 students from three local schools who were given the brief of creating model ‘Houses of the Future’ in which they explored how where we live needs to change to both mitigate and deal with the effects of climate breakdown.

Students drew inspiration from workshops with colleagues in the architecture and engineering schools, from visits to the Farrell Archive which the university also holds, from the More with Less exhibition and their own ideas and experiences. Constructed from balsa wood, cardboard, glue guns and whatever the students could lay their hands on, the models showed incredible ingenuity and belief in our ability to positively shape the future – which is ultimately what architecture and planning are all about. ‘Proud, happy, inspired, excited’ was how one Year 8 student described the project – a description that we hope might apply to the Farrell Centre too.