Tyneside Sounds Society #18 - Gateshead Garden Festival 1990 (Part 1)

The Tyneside Sounds Society is a monthly broadcast dedicated to the recording and reinterpretation of the sonic environment and sound heritage of Tyneside in the North East of England.

From 1984 until 1992 five National Garden Festivals were held in the UK. One of them was in Gateshead in the North East of England in 1990. It lasted 157 days across that summer and received over three million visitors.

The Garden Festivals were the idea of UK Conservative environment secretary Michael Heseltine in 1980. They were based on the German post-war Bundesgartenschau concept for reclaiming large areas of derelict land in cities.

All the festivals were held in designated areas — reclaimed land that had become derelict and poisonous in the wake of industrial decline. Other festivals were held in Liverpool, Stoke and Glasgow. They each cost between £25 — £70 million.

Michael McHugh is joined by artists and mytho-geosonic experts Tim Shaw and John Bowers for an exhaustive journey along the River Team and through the landscape and footpaths of the former festival on the eve of this years vernal equinox.

It's very different to how it was in 1990 and if you look closely, in amongst the empty bottles of white cider, 30 years of lager cans, discarded laptops, torn suitcases, condoms and nitrous oxide bulbs you’ll find remnants of the festival’s sculptures, landscaping and foundations.

It's an eerie interzone and that makes the aspiration and ambition of the 1990 festival feel somewhat unreal.