Sunday 4 September 2011

Newcastle Bridges Festival

The Bridges Festival was a major event in Newcastle over the weekend of 13th and 14th of August 2011. For my part I was working with Julia Barton who designed the Lost and Found garden on the Swing Bridge. I did all the participatory work - involving 4 community groups from Newcastle and 4 from Gateshead. We worked together to design potager beds - small scale kitchen gardens set around formalised patterns - 'potage' meaning for the pot from the french. Normally doing planting projects you have months to design, sow, bring on the plants so they are ready and prime for the event. We had 6 weeks. Amazingly it all came off. The 2 days of install were well worth it. The feedback from the public was a resounding 'It should be like this all the time' or comments along that theme. Needless to say the delicate construction and planting was more laboured than the tractor dominated dismantle - All trace of it was gone in a few hours - Lost and found and lost again. A wee bit of Brigadoon - but hey, let's hope it's next year and not next century when we do it again. Some shots of it are below. If you want more of an explanation go to Julia Bartons Blog