Relationality, place governance and heritage: the Lower Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne and ‘Ouseburnness’

ABSTRACT

A distinct collective place imaginary has developed in recent decades for the Lower Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, or ‘Ouseburn’, formed by the experience of ‘rediscovery’ of this post-industrial area, as well as its longer industrial past. This has crystallized in the idea of ‘Ouseburnness’, a placeness that is used to actively frame the area’s character and future. In this paper, we examine this story in the context of a relational understanding of place and the translation of place imaginary into place governance, and vice versa, in the process raising questions of wider relevance to heritage management and urban planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Place imaginary
• place-ness
• conservation planning
• place governance

Introduction

This paper is concerned with how senses of place and place attachments that have evolved over decades of activism, influence the way the Lower Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (now usually shortened to ‘the Ouseburn’), has been governed as a place. Central to the city, but sitting a little beyond the historic core, the Ouseburn was a marginal industrial area that has been ‘rediscovered’ and regenerated, with the opportunities afforded by (initially) cheap space and land. Heritage has been integral to these processes, following a path of what Myambo (2021) coins ‘creative-conformist gentrification’ that can be observed across much of the world (Pendlebury & Porfyriou, 2017; Myambo, 2021). As we will describe, multiple-place identities have developed and been mobilized simultaneously in the rediscovery and regeneration of this post-industrial landscape. Understandings of the landscape, and connected place identities, constructed between the material, the topographical and the human participants active in shaping the Valley, have consistently influenced the local planning and development process. Combined, these place governance activities we understand with Healey (2018, p. 68) as ‘bringing into collective attention some concept of a place, as a shared imaginary and resource within a community.’ A shared spatial imaginary operates as a medium through which social relations are both reproduced and changed (Watkins, 2015). As Healey argues, such imaginaries may involve the development of a ‘place-ness’, as a socio-spatial construct that recognizes the quality and character of a place in that collective gathering of imaginaries (Healey, 2018). As well as a medium through which social relations are negotiated, we show how this shared imaginary may also become a storyline to draw on, and a frame to guide future change.

The particular landscapes mobilized in our research were, variously, based on ‘traditional’ heritage narratives of Ouseburn, rooted in its industrial history and surviving remnants thereof; the combination of dereliction and industrial vacancy that afford an industrial aesthetic familiar across the world, and, a deeper, more effective sense of place that has been constituted as part of the process of change and is most deeply held by long-term Ouseburn activists. The research underpinning this paper includes eight 1-h semi-structured sit-down interviews, two 1-h walking interviews and two 1-h group discussions, with various activists, volunteers and practitioners with involvement in Ouseburn governance, together with ongoing participant observation, cultural mapping and policy analysis.¹ The major part of these interviews were undertaken in 2017–18, with follow-up interviews in 2022. Our interviewees are all involved in the governance of Ouseburn in one way or another, whether as volunteer, activist, conservation officer or heritage manager, with some having moved, or moving, between these roles – with the Ouseburn Trust being an important connector between all interviewees, even if not all interviewees are directly involved with the Ouseburn Trust. We analyse how the interviewees' understandings of place come together in the area’s governance, shaping the process of future urban change, as well as the future of the community of people who feel at home in and care for Ouseburn. We also show how the continuous process of revitalizing and upgrading of the area is portrayed and framed by this group, and how it has become part of the various histories mobilized in urban regeneration.

The next section of the paper reviews the evolution of understandings of place in relation to place governance. Subsequently, we introduce the Ouseburn case study before moving on to discuss the development of a ‘place-ness’ we observed through our interviews and other participations in the Ouseburn, and their translation into visions for the future, and how this is relationally produced. In conclusion, we widen the discussion to implications for (conservation) planning practice more broadly and reflect on the relational understanding of place. We argue that place governance rooted in multiplicity and placeness needs to constantly negotiate such place imaginaries, and the relations they develop upon, in space and time, to understand the different place narratives that exist within communities as part of evolving a more inclusive strategy for managing place.

Place and place governance

Understandings of place as something that is not fixed but relational developed from the 1970s, when it was argued that it is the experience of physical space that leads meaning to be attached to, and ‘make’ place (Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977). Subsequently, there have been numerous different conceptualizations of place, theorizing it as something that is socially produced and reproduced. Seamon (2015, first published in 1980) developed the idea of a mutually constructive relationship between place, space and person through his concept of the ‘place ballet’, arguing that places are shaped continuously through the actions of agents and structures in society and that people’s use of space and interaction with their environment through routines leads, over time, to familiarity, meaning and attachment. Social constructivist approaches subsequently questioned the dominant role of the physical environment in such phenomenological theories (Cresswell, 2014; Dovey, 2020) for underplaying political economy and promoting defunct ideas of universal value. Others argued that people are responsible for shaping place both in terms of its materiality and its meaning (Harvey, 1982) leading to a focus on the processes or socio-political structures that create place and seeing the creation and use of place as a political act (Hayden, 1995). Massey sees place as an emplaced actor and as a relational construct (Massey, 2005 part 5; Baldwin, 2012), and Hillier (2013) builds on this ‘multiplex’ and relational understanding of place by showing how it is both an outcome and precondition of the relational interaction between space and society.

Thus, we can consider place as the process and product of relation-making, with, through and in the context of the history, materiality and sociality of space. As Law and Mol show (1995) materiality and sociality are produced together, in-between and through each other, and they are co-constituting and mutually entangled when we think about the making and maintaining of urban environments (Tonkiss, 2013; Watson, 2019). For example, the materiality of commemorative squares or statues anchors memory in place and co-produces sociality through personal and community relations held to and with the object, its meanings, the person reflected, and its commemoration, and vice versa (Davidson, 2016).

These relations with, between and through identities and entities, co-constituted with multiplicity, are continuously being (un)made and becoming. This means there is a focus on the (spatial) relations between, as much as on the materialities, entities and identities, which can help to productively (re)conceptualize space (Massey, 2005). Seen in a relational way, place is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence, and thus driven by the desire for recognizing its multiplicity of identities, histories and characters (Cresswell, 2014; Dovey, 2020). Materiality, material objects and physical form are not a backdrop to, but a part of the webs of relations spun to make and un-make place.

The idea of place is now central to debates about the purpose and mobilization of planning (Tait & Inch, 2016; Schmitt & Wiechmann, 2018). In England, this is evident in both place-focused policies and their emphasis, over the last decade, on ‘localism’ and neighbourhood planning, and through more theoretical discussions, emphasizing ‘relational approaches’ (Massey, 2005; Healey, 2018). This is reflected in work analysing place governance and the use of local partnerships to tackle place-specific issues (Edensor et al., 2020) and often involves other-than-public actors (Rex, 2018; Veldpaus & Pendlebury, 2019). We would add that, in a conservation area, the conservation planning assemblage of institutional and other actors, combined with the local legal and policy context and normalized practices and discourses (Pendlebury, 2013; Pendlebury et al., 2019) sets out one of the wider contexts in which place is constructed.

However, whilst place is thought of as in flux and open, the management of heritage is often focused on a fixed resource. Heritage protection has a history of focusing on physical and material place qualities, using very old ideas of places having a particular personality, a character. The most well known of these concepts is genius loci, which has Roman origins as spirit of place, or guardian spirit (Plevoets & Cleempoel, 2019). In the twentieth century, the less rarefied anthropomorphic concept of place character became prominent and was incorporated into British place protection legislation; for example, conservation areas are areas ‘the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance’ (Planning Act, 1990 section 69:1a), implying a singular fixed character to preserve. Transcending the limitations of practice, critical heritage studies literature sees heritage as relational and as a process of mobilizing the past in the present. Heritage is an actor, which is doing things by (re)enacting, (re)producing and mobilizing some past(s) in the present (Veldpaus & Szemző, 2021; Veldpaus et al., 2021). Conservation, as a way to deal with heritage, is part of the process of heritage making. What heritage as a process means ‘on the ground’ in the context of conservation planning, and amongst other planning concerns and actors in a wider conservation planning assemblage is not always very clear, let alone explicitly considered by those engaged in the governance of place. However, as Garrow (2021) shows, heritage, defined as a way of mobilizing the past in the present, is important in the creation of place bonds. She also shows that these relations are social, dynamic and shifting, which makes them hard to grasp and formalize in the process of conservation planning (Garrow, 2021; Madgin & Lesh, 2021).

This sense of a collective imagination of place returns us to the idea of imaginaries. Significant academic work has focussed on the idea of collective imaginaries, variously considered as social or spatial imaginaries (see e.g. Lindner & Meissner, 2018), developed from an intellectual history in philosophy and sociology (Davoudi & Brooks, 2021). The imaginaries we describe in this paper are both social and spatial, and we thus adopt the term place imaginaries. Important landmarks in the translation of imaginaries into place-based scholarship include Said’s Orientalism (1978), describing how the spatial imaginary of the orient was mobilized to pursue colonial ambitions and Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) use of social imaginaries to understand how heterogenous and spatially dispersed communities have been bound together as nations, which Hall (1999) then develops to relate to heritage and (un)belonging. Davoudi et al. (2018) seek to define characteristics for spatial imaginaries, namely that they entail shared background understandings, are emergent, collective and performative, epistemic and normative and contingent and dynamic. Watkins (2015) in his review of the imaginary concept in geographical scholarship emphasizes the benefit of viewing spatial imaginaries as performative, that is, they have an active role as a medium through which social relations are both reproduced and changed. We return to this point in our conclusion.

In summary, we consider place to be a relational construct, where relations are co-constituted with and by the materiality and sociality of place, which collectively bring into being socio-spatial imaginaries. In this process, heritage is often explicitly used to interweave place and the personal, in terms of peoples’ histories and identities (Garrow, 2021). As hard as this is to grasp, it makes a case for exploring how a relational understanding of place embeds itself in conservation planning processes and place governance. We do this by looking at how place-ness, and thus place imaginaries are created between things, thoughts and memories, identities and entities, and how they affect – and are affected by – place governance. We have engaged with a particular group of individuals, who are influencing the production and process of bringing about the future Ouseburn landscapes – and we explicitly focus on how they use and understand the role of heritage within this. Our interviewees hold a variety of imagined futures, existing in parallel and overlapping landscapes. This has been translated to some extent into formalized place governance structures such as the conservation, design and planning policies for the area. In turn, these place attachments also develop in relation to different performative role participants have assumed, through, for example, activism and resistance, care and commodification.

The becoming of ‘the Ouseburn’

The Lower Ouseburn Valley is located east of the city centre of Newcastle, situated in a steep valley along the River Ouseburn, a tributary of the River Tyne. Largely a ‘post-industrial’ area (albeit with some continuing industrial use), it has been subject to various waves of heritage-led and culture-led regeneration initiatives, mirroring the transformation of such edge-of-centre areas across the UK and indeed across much of the globe (see e.g. Tiesdell, 1996; Gospodini, 2006). The Valley is presented as the cradle of the industrial revolution in Newcastle and the wider Tyneside region and historically it housed important industries included glassmaking, pottery, flax and flour milling, tanning, glue working, tailoring, butchery, lead works and, later, engine manufacturing and biscuit and toffee factories (Morgan & Newcastle City Libraries, 1995; Whiting, 2013; Morrison & Tyne and Wear Sitelines, 2017). Because of its topography, the Ouseburn Valley wasn’t suitable for large-scale manufacturing, meaning that smaller scale industry continued when the adjacent River Tyne was dominated by heavy engineering and shipbuilding.

In recognition of this industrial history, the Lower Ouseburn Valley was designated a conservation area in 2000. However, by this point steps towards a change in the use and character of the area – its regeneration – had been underway for over 20 years. Initial changes were small scale and bottom up. Byker City Farm (now Ouseburn Farm) started in 1976 and in 1982 the listed flax spinning mill at 36 Lime Street was converted into artists’ studios.² The music scene was also an important contributor.

there was a punk group called Penetration […] the woman who was the lead singer, Pauline Murray, she rented a building just round the corner there and started a band rehearsal studio. So musicians started to come down. The combination of the artists and then the musicians started to change the area and that sort of kick started it. (Interviewee A)

But many buildings remained very run down and neglected. As a response to experiences with the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, and its less than participatory ways of urban governance in its development of the Newcastle Quayside (González & Vigar, 2010), the East Quayside Group, a local pressure group set up to challenge these developments, moved its attention to the Ouseburn in the early 1990s. The feeling was ‘time’s now to get in there first before other people come along and wreck the place’ (Interviewee A). The Ouseburn Trust was formed in 1995. Newcastle City Council (NCC), also appreciating the area was next for redevelopment, started the process to create a conservation area, which would allow a ‘certain amount of control over how it [Ouseburn] developed, retaining the character and significance of the area despite the fact that it was changing.’ (Interviewee F)

Subsequently, Ouseburn regeneration has developed under various governance structures, sometimes led by the local authority – at the height of local authority involvement NCC had about 15 officers working on the regeneration of the valley – and sometimes led by the Trust (González & Vigar, 2010). The kick-start of larger scale regeneration was a successful bid for central government Single Regeneration Budget money for a collection of loosely connected interventions for which the Ouseburn Partnership, a collaborative partnership of 18 partners led by the Ouseburn Trust, received £2.5 m over 5 years (Ouseburn Trust & Cross, 2016). These interventions included improvements to the public space and some of the historic buildings, but also community engagement activities and events.

The Ouseburn Trust inherited the legacy of this project, including some partnership assets and land, which remain their core property portfolio and income generator. When the economic climate became more difficult in 2007/8, the Trust decided they had to focus on their financial sustainability and therefore on property management and development rather than the more activist community role they had historically played. This reduced the capacity for the Trust to involve itself in planning and wider regeneration matters and this was taken up by a new voluntary organization in 2012, Ouseburn Futures, before it, in turn, merged back with the Trust in 2017.

The Ouseburn Trust has become the main and most stable stakeholder in terms of regeneration and heritage governance in the area. Whilst the Trust is well established, with a professional staff, volunteers remain critical to its activities and identity. The role of the Trust in the Valley has been described as ‘the guardian of the historic buildings and the cultural identity of the place’ (Interviewee C). The point made about the identity of the Ouseburn is critical – the sense that the Valley has a specific identity has been central to efforts to manage and envisage the future of the area. Due to austerity cuts, the proactive role of NCC has been much diminished over the last decade, but it remains the planning authority. Efforts have been made to use the planning and heritage systems to sustain the character of the area, reinforced by the statutory designation of a conservation area. It was developed ‘with an understanding that this was a conservation area being designated more to control its redevelopment rather than to retain the existing fabric’ (Interviewee F).

Land use in the Ouseburn has been transformed, especially since the mid-1990s. The creative sector, entertainment and cultural industries have been at the heart of this, with, more recently, a series of market-oriented residential developments in the southern part of the Valley, near the River Tyne, with more in the pipeline. However, diverse land ownership, small plots and varied uses have helped slow down the scale and rate of development. Development can be further complicated by the ‘hope value’ of landowners awaiting bigger offers, split ownerships and expensive redevelopment costs due to retaining walls or land contamination. Furthermore, some landowners refuse to sell, and, in some cases, persist in keeping rents low and will rent space out only to certain users such as artists, or small creative-sector businesses.

At the time of writing, NCC is due to publish a Design Code for Ouseburn Central following Ouseburn’s selection as part of a national pilot design code programme (MHCLG, 2021). It is anticipated that the Design Code will follow and formalize the approach developed in Ouseburn and applied in development management, with a strongly integrated approach to heritage and design from NCC, working in close collaboration with the Ouseburn Trust. This understanding of the Ouseburn relates as least as much to recent histories of reuse and ‘rediscovery’ as it does to the older industrial past (interviewee G). We will show that it reflects an ‘on the ground’ place governance that sees heritage as a process of mobilizing the past in the present and has a relational understanding of place.

‘Ouseburnness’

The Ouseburn Valley is very precious to its self-appointed caretakers. They take pride in being part of the community of guardians, an ‘Ouseburn fan club’. Ouseburn, as one of our respondents notes, is a relatively recent place identity:

Ouseburn as an identity of a place called Ouseburn just didn’t exist. If you said to people ‘Ouseburn’, they just didn’t know, […] it was a bit fantasist, calling this area the Ouseburn Valley. (Interviewee D)

This interviewee is talking about memories of the late 1990s. But Whiting and Hannam (Whiting, 2013; Whiting & Hannam, 2017) found when undertaking fieldwork in 2010–11 that on occasion the area was still unknown to people who had lived in Newcastle their whole lives. Some of their respondents also described the area as a secret garden, and a place which took part of its charm from being hidden. Ouseburn is now an established and well-known area, perceived as middle-class and self-consciously branded, and portrayed by almost all interviewees as ‘a sort of yuppie area’ and portrayed in The Guardian newspaper as the ‘Shoreditch of the North’ (Dyckhoff, 2018). At the same time, many of our respondents referred back to the earlier period or ‘rediscovery’ and a nascent sense of place. One interviewee talked, with great passion, about the gritty alternative place Ouseburn had been, the quirky atmosphere, his memory of the unusual smells and mechanical sounds. He drew a picture of overgrown vegetation, burnt-out vehicles, odd smells, barking dogs and goats wandering about. With a hint of nostalgia, he remembers the

odd mix of the first artists, and craft people who moved into The Cluny, next door to people who were stripping tyres off old trucks. It made for a good mix, goats grazing, and whinnying animal noises going on in the background, and I don’t mean from the pub, I mean from the animals. [Laughter]. (Interviewee B)

His own role in this particular version of Ouseburn’s history, is very much entangled with his passion for and active and ongoing engagement with the area.

We broke open the door to the Victoria Tunnel with a crowbar, there were sheds and breeze block buildings, and we had to knock on the door and there would be somebody in there, making curry or Christmas decorations. We had no idea what was going on. (Interviewee B)

This hints at a strong thematic throughout most of our interviews. He is a fan. When he talks about his role in the Ouseburn Trust, he refers to it as ‘like being a member of a fan club, I suppose, of Ouseburn’ (Interviewee B). The Ouseburn also enchanted other interviewees;

You become, like so many people, grabbed by what’s going on in Ouseburn and its wonderful topography and the energy. There’s something very special about it. (Interviewee E)

Interviewees with less time depth of involvement were also invested;

everybody, regardless of where they’re from, is proud of their heritage in the Valley and supportive of what we’re doing to promote that and nurture it. (Interviewee C)

This place attachment turned out to be central in our thematic analysis. In seeking to describe this, interviewees often spoke in terms of emotional, material, historical and relational dimensions of the area; the industrial and topographical character, the passion felt, the seasonal nature, the serendipity of meeting others accidentally, and thus the community of people working and (more recently) living in the area. One of our interviewees called it ‘Ouseburnness’;

I think if we ever defined it, which we didn’t do often, it was a sense of the place and a sense of its potential and nurturing creative ideas but lovely ways of doing things. (Interviewee E)

The interviews reveal how intertwined sense of place may be with the governance of the Ouseburn, through the commitment and affection many of the principal stakeholders feel for this place. This place identity, this ‘Ouseburnness’ is connected to attracting certain industries and activities, as well as certain visitors, residents and volunteers, but can also create a sense of un-belonging for others (Anderson, 1983; Hall, 1999; Garrow, 2021; Veldpaus & Wacogne, 2021). The area becoming more ‘discovered’ tends to be understood as simultaneously a process of opening up and one of closing down. The area is more middle class, more gentrified and more commercialized and this is alienating for some activists (see also Whiting & Hannam, 2017). It also reinforces disconnection with surrounding areas that remain poor. In conversations with neighbouring community groups, it became clear to the Ouseburn interviewees that,

a lot of people there didn’t like the idea, didn’t like the middle-class, sort of creative sector people, moving into their area. So, I’m standing up at a meeting saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you have craft shops up Shields Road’. ‘No, it wouldn’t be great, bugger off, leave our area to us, stop interfering.’ (Interviewee A)

Whilst there are anxieties about the commodification of working-class heritage, and a lack of connection with the generally financially less wealthy neighbouring areas, overall, the regeneration of the Ouseburn is usually considered an enormous success, if gently mocked for being the centre of hipster culture in north-east England. In the process, the Lower Ouseburn Valley has become ‘the Ouseburn’, a newly recognisable place identity – with a framing place imaginary of ‘Ouseburnness’.

Ouseburnness: the pace and pattern of change

When this Ouseburnness is mobilized as a sense of place, what does it mean, and how does it influence the way the place is governed and produced? In this section, we focus on three key facets of the understandings stakeholders in the area have for its character, as well as their relations to governance and place. First, the way Ouseburnness has been actively made and constituted through the continuous process of change and vice versa. Second, and linked to this, we further elaborate what Ouseburnness is defined as. Third, we consider how, whilst discussed and mobilized collectively, Ouseburnness is a multiplicity of overlapping understandings of place that can shape and reshape place in different ways; as one interviewee stated:

when people talk about the heritage of the Valley, I’m talking fifteen, twenty years ago. I think that is almost as interesting as fifty or one hundred or one hundred and fifty years ago, because that’s when it was the kind of place that attracted people that are interested in it –was a kind of alternative, renegade area. […] a good pub scene, and a crafts and arts type businesses, and the music type thing. (Interviewee B)

The peripheral nature and years of general neglect meant it was ‘overgrown, an edge-land type place, so it was great.’ But it was also clear that it wouldn’t stay that way, so the question became how to keep some of the atmosphere, to have ‘the right things down there, creative things, arty things, alternative things’ (Interviewee B). The mobilization of the rediscovered post-industrial twentieth-century landscape was, in some cases, directly connected to interviewees’ memories and involvement, while for others it is part of a folk history of the area and an identity into which they have been inducted. From the early 2000s the Ouseburn was actively and consciously brought into being as a particular kind of ‘place’, both in these stories and in formal governance documents such as the conservation area management plan. The inheritance of the industrial history is often also mobilized to explain the current situation. For example, an expressed desire for ‘more potters’ in the area references the former Malings ceramics factory. The combination of this focus, and a heritage management emphasis on ‘quality control’ over a more preservationist orientation, has led to an approach to change which is pragmatic and utilitarian and revolves around nebulous ideas of ‘what fits.’ This fit can be temporary – Ouseburn is also seen as an incubator-space – and tends to focus on the type and ethos of new businesses and the way they operate. The investors and start-ups that are desired should have an interest in the area, and an industrial, quirky, crafty or arty aesthetic, and be small, local and emerging.

Thus, whilst there is a clear understanding of, and engagement with, the history and heritage of the Ouseburn, there is not a particular focus on formal heritage or listed buildings when the interviewees talk about Ouseburn as a place, with one of the interviewees remarking that it is cultural more than heritage management that defines the place:

The heritage character comes from the life and the activity and the business and the commerce that is down there so part of the management of Ouseburn’s character is about managing the activity down there as well as managing the buildings and the landscape that those activities take place in, I think. (Interviewee G)

Integral to this is the incremental way the area has developed, with a parallel evolving sense of Ouseburnness. It is exactly the continuously changing and evolving nature and the unpredictable process and pace of change, the industrial aesthetics and the creative uses that sustain and generate character. And whilst materiality is important in the understanding of place and the creation of place identity, this does not necessarily centre on the formal heritage buildings, but on a more general material and visual quirkiness that follows the area’s incremental and spontaneousness evolution:

There are a lot of older buildings in Ouseburn that, by a series of circumstances, we had a bit of money to give to encourage people to go into those buildings to convert them. That’s created a series of quirky, little buildings, and quirky, businesses in those buildings. (Interviewee A)

What I do like are bits of graffiti and I like some quirky arty buildings and uses. (Interviewee C)

The Ouseburn Valley’s topography, and its nature as an ‘in between area’, a cut-off enclave, is also important. This directly links to the area’s ‘settler geography’, as it was described by one of the interviewees, in which the narrative around rediscovery is set. This geography is crucial to how the Ouseburn has developed but also to its current identity. The bridges that over-sail and bypass the valley are seen as defining features, as well as the views across and down the rivers, both the Tyne and the Ouseburn, and the environmental corridors they provide. The tidal river brings nature and liveliness, and continuous change. This geography also means the area is relatively small, leading to spontaneous and serendipitous encounters:

you can be walking around the valley and who you bump into may change the course of what you were going to do that day and may mean that some project gets developed that wasn’t going to be developed. So the fact that all these creative people are all in one place, whether it’s being creative to do with Seven Stories and children’s activities or planting or bringing history to light, it doesn’t really matter. I think that’s what it [Ouseburnness] is. (Interviewee E)

Ouseburnness helps foster relations and produces a place imaginary that integrates the activities, identities and entities of the Valley, and it frames the diverse perspectives, values and ideas about what needs to be changed or created to maintain itself. It is the sense of potential in ‘Ouseburnness’, which creates a precarious balance between becoming and being, that is central to its meaning, and to the place governance. It does mean there is a constant question of how much development the area can take before it starts to lose its distinctive character. The slow pace of change over the yearsin particular, the small and erratic ways in which change happens, is experienced as necessary, albeit sometimes frustrating. The various restrictions on development have, thus far, made big unwanted developments less likely. The 2007/8 financial crisis consistently gets described as a blessing in disguise, as it slowed the pace of change. This is seen as positive, allowing the ‘ecosystem’ of the valley to evolve and not be overwhelmed by one type of development or trend. Finding ‘what fits’ relies on the passion of the many people committed to the ‘fan club’, combined with the geography and the legacy of the valley. The human and landscape characters are entangled, part of a wider web of relations in and with place and time. They reflect early industrialization, the more recent history of ‘low grade’ and ‘creative’ making, and of regeneration in the area through the farm, pubs and cultural, arts and music venues, as well as the future possibilities of place.

In this continuous state of becoming, of defining and redefining what is ‘Ouseburnness’ there is space for several relations and landscapes to exist at the same time, even within the formal governance structures. For example, some speak of the Ouseburn in terms of an urban village and others as a cultural quarter. Although these are potentially two quite different imported and generalized spatial imaginaries, in the Ouseburn they are both relatively recently created identities which refer to a middle-class ideal, overlapping in being materially quirky, cultural in essence and mixed in use. The village imagery references terms such as green, valley, river, historic, for families, farm, safe, cultural and environmental. The cultural quarter refers more to a (memory of) an edgy environment, a hub of creativity with terms like different, mixed, industrial, alternative, odd, pub scene, not mainstream and reproduces a nostalgic ‘grotty and slightly dark’ past.

Thus, it is this place-ness (Healey, 2018), this ‘Ouseburnness’, which both guides and is sustained by place governance. Ouseburnness, as a shared concept of place, is generally agreed upon as something that is dynamic, social and changing, and therefore necessarily not well defined or easily pinned down. It expresses what those engaged in place governance care about as they think about Ouseburn as a place. It aims to combine the potential of this landscape and maintain its character by finding ‘fitting’ futures. As a place imaginary, it has been mobiliszd in the governance practices and mentalities of the area over many years. And through the design code document, it will be translated into formal future place strategy. We discuss some of the implications of this in the next section.

Discussion and conclusion

Despite a long history of place theory, as Healey (2018) argues, a relational conceptualization of place, both in terms of its potential for and its application in place governance, has been little explored. In this paper, we have considered Ouseburn as an emerging example of relational place governance. The Lower Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle upon Tyne has developed a very particular place identity and socio-spatial imaginary over recent decades, becoming simply ‘the Ouseburn’ with its character described as Ouseburnness; this sense of a collective shared character can be seen as a process of ‘place realization’ leading to a place-ness (Seamon, 2015; Healey, 2018).

Place-ness and place governance

‘Ouseburnness’ is used across the various place governance partners, including the planning authority, local organizations, volunteers and local activists, and is now translated into formal policy guidance. As such, this placeness ‘brings into collective attention … a shared imaginary’ (Healey, 2018, p. 68) which combines a variety of understandings of place, somewhat similar, in a spatialized way, to Hajer’s (2005) ‘discourse coalition’ as a shared resource and storyline to draw on, and as a frame to guide future change, in this case used in a pragmatic and utilitarian way.

Ouseburnness is co-constituted by a relatively small group of people actively and passionately involved in the governance structures of the area. Their place bonds draw on personal histories, memories and nostalgias, which are entangled with socio-spatial histories and the present of urban regeneration. So even though it is becoming institutionalized, ‘Ouseburnness’ as a word or concept is not necessarily commonly used outside this group, nor does it have the same precise meaning or understanding for all those involved. While there is a broad shared understanding, the detailed meaning changes between actors, and over time; and relates to the sustaining and creating of their attachment to place and, in turn, reinforces their involvement and participation in the area. As the historical, material and social form of the Ouseburn is in constant flux so is the sense of the valley as a place. Ouseburnness, is the imaginary holding these relations together, both by being performed and embodied; it is not only used to legitimize material practices through language but also enacted and embodied by people through their interactions, interferences, activities and material practices in the Ouseburn. Our respondents talked about being in Ouseburn, and how their sense of Ouseburnness was influenced by physically moving around the area and the interactions and actions that followed. Material practices in the Ouseburn communicate, create and change spatial imaginaries (Watkins, 2015).

Ouseburnness has been employed directly in creating a vision for and managing urban change in the valley, as well as in narrating its history. It is the story of ‘becoming’ and thus a vision focused on achieving development and changes in land-use that are ‘right’ for the Ouseburn, according to its caretakers. As in the past, it is felt, new development should fit in terms of aesthetics and use, and should not happen too quickly, allowing the ‘ecosystem’ of the valley to evolve and not be overwhelmed by one type of development or trend. This vision for Ouseburn is freighted with cultural capital and power. It is a vision that has been generated locally, and in that sense is ‘bottom up’. It is not imposed by the state (although the support of the local state has been enlisted) and is not profit maximizing. The individuals involved work hard to be inclusive and create links with neighbouring places and a wider variety of histories. However, engagement with working-class histories is still limited and surviving, pre-existing industrial uses are gradually but steadily being displaced, as land values rise. Indeed, the rise of land values is an inevitable part of change in the valley, as ‘pioneer’ uses prove economically successful. But it is also through the efforts of activists, often channelled through the Ouseburn Trust, and together with other sympathetic parties, market-forces have not, as yet, overwhelmed Ouseburn. Ouseburnness has sometimes been useful as a ‘tool’ in pushing back against uses which seek to maximize capital gain, as part of an effort to sustain the social and material makeup of the place, as well as its perceived marginality (Whiting, 2013). Nevertheless, there is no doubt it has steadily become a more ‘upscale’ locale, and the growth in owner occupied housing has had a significant impact on the character of the area, challenging the idea of the Ouseburn as a place where ‘anything goes.’ The question is how long can this ‘story of becoming’ be held onto?

Whilst imaginaries can help create belonging and identity, they also create boundaries and un-belongings (Said, 1978; Anderson, 1983; Hall, 1999). Part of the function of Ouseburnness is to work as a somewhat vague and undefined gatekeeping concept, which is used to determine what and who ‘fits’ (or not), now, as well as in the future and the past of this place. This has already created exclusions, and as Ouseburnness comes into formal policy, it will be important to monitor the institutionalization of this place imaginary. Will it open up or close down who gets to decide on ‘fit’ and ‘belonging’, and thus who feels included and invited? Will it remain a flexible moving understanding of place, or will this anchor and structure its meaning? How will it change the role of long-term activists and volunteers and their living memory, central to shaping Ouseburnness? And, in what ways will it influence conservation planning, in Ouseburn and beyond?

Heritage and planning, in Ouseburn and beyond

As we illustrate, placeness and thus place imaginaries are created between things, thoughts and memories, identities and materialities, and they affect – and are affected by – place governance. In this process, heritage is explicitly used to interweave place and the personal, through personal and shared histories and identities (Garrow, 2021). In the Ouseburn, heritage is enmeshed with the meanings of those involved in the past and current place governance, very often arising from their direct participation in processes of urban change in the area. This has occurred within a distinct political economy, whereby the Ouseburn Trust and its volunteers, initially empowered and given long-term security by a local government team and state funding, have become, through austerity, central to the process of sustaining a collective vision for the valley. The development of Ouseburnness also has to be understood within this context, as an ongoing process of becoming. It reshapes the way history and memory are mobilized, as well as how the future is imagined and developed. Thus, it is at once a precondition, a result, and a reflection of place governance (Hillier, 2013). As such, it also shows that all spatial planning is, to some degree, heritage planning because place governance, spatial policies, plans and designs for the future all need engagement with pre-existing conditions and imaginaries (Veldpaus et al., 2021).

It is interesting to observe how Ouseburnness interacts with the wider conservation-planning assemblage (Pendlebury, 2013), the role of local state and extra-state actors and the intersection between planning and heritage systems. Ouseburnness, as we discussed, has been actively constituted through the process of, and out of, the more recent pasts of rediscovery and regeneration of recent decades, and the various ‘alternative’ pasts and characters this represents. This draws in turn on longer industrial histories, by flexibly mobilizing material and immaterial pasts in the present as a process of heritage making that creates and sustains Ouseburnness as a sense of place. Ouseburnness, as such, helps to destabilize traditional ideas of heritage as fixed and focussed on material integrity and historical authenticity. It is one version of the idea that heritage is a process of mobilizing the past in the present, can mean in practice.

Within the conservation planning system, trust is now placed upon the Ouseburnness spatial imaginary, used to guide issues of ‘quality control’ preferred over strict heritage protection, in this particular conservation area. Ouseburnness is tied to the specificities of the physical environment, as well as the (former) industrial character and edge-nature of the valley. Together they create space in which conservation officers have felt they could allow for more iterative, experiential and experimental models of managing change. Such an approach would probably not, at the moment, be tolerated in a more traditionally significant heritage locale. This approach to place deals with heritage as both as a product and process, and as such shifts the conservation planning process towards a more critical and relational understanding of place, as suggested by various authors (Lesh, 2020; Garrow, 2021; Veldpaus & Szemző, 2021).

In this paper, we show how a relational understanding of place is helpful in exploring how place imaginaries develop from personal and shared heritage and history, and influence, and can become incorporated into place governance, and how place governance in turn contributes to (re)shaping the place imaginary. By doing so, we also show how more open and flexible understandings of conservation planning are emerging partly by accident, partly because of austerity, but also partly because of a genuine interest in such change. This comes with the potential to broaden and change the ways we understand heritage, heritage management and urban planning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded as part of the project ‘PICH’ (The impact of urban planning and governance reform on the historic-built environment and intangible cultural heritage) under the JPI Cultural Heritage, ‘Heritage Plus Joint Call’, through the Dutch National Research Organisation (NWO) and the Research Council of Norway [249602/E50]. The 2022 data was collected as part CONSIDER, funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No:101008186.

Notes

1. Subjects for interview were initially identified as part of the PICH project, although the authors have ongoing involvements in the Ouseburn area that have been drawn upon for this paper. Interviewees are anonymized and identified by letter only. Whilst different respondents had different views, we are not seeking to analyse here, nor did we detect, a significant variance of response based upon positionality. Most of our interviewees are professionals or have a professional background. They were a mix of genders and ages, although were typically white, and mid or late career. The length of their involvement in the Ouseburn ranged from a few years to more than two decades.

2. A more detailed overview of this history can be found in the timeline produced by the Ouseburn Trust https://www.ouseburntrust.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=affce4b0-121e-49bd-be4f-598454dc6db4.