Newcastle

Now, a £60m Music Centre designed by Foster and Partners, a five-star Hilton hotel, a £20m entertainment complex developed by Taylor Woodrow Properties, the £46m Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Chris Wilkinson’s £19m Baltic Millennium Bridge are all set to change the face of the city and of Tyneside as a whole.

So, on the face of it, the market seems healthy. But beyond these glamour projects, work is thin on the ground. Local firms are suffering from a paucity of bread-and-butter work, as well as losing out to national firms and big-name architects on the area’s high-profile projects.

Also, although Gateshead and Newcastle’s quayside are prospering from government and lottery cash, Newcastle’s historic Grainger Town has only just secured regeneration cash, and other parts of the city have yet to see any aid. The newly formed One North East regional development agency hopes to remedy this with a £135m annual investment programme supporting 65 small regeneration partnerships and land reclamation schemes, such as in Middlesbrough’s docklands.

Jonathan Blackie, director of regeneration of One North East, freely admits that the whole area has big development problems. “The North-east is the region in England that has experienced the most significant economic and structural change in the past 10 to 15 years. There has been considerable inward investment, but a lot of work still needs to be done – the Gateshead Quays, for example, were untouched by the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, which was responsible for the now booming quayside.

“There is also a major job to be done in reclaiming the former coalfield sites and investing in communities which have, in a sense, lost some of their reason to exist. The area has a complete range of decline to manage, from rural coalfields to urban centres.” Blackie paints a bleak picture but one that helps explain why, as contractors such as Tarmac admit, developers are less willing to speculate in the North-east than in other regions. Tarmac Building’s business development manager for the North-east, Nick Corbett, says enquiry levels and tender prices are low, but he adds: “If anything, we are suffering from the slow speed at which projects in the pipeline are coming into the market.” He speaks of insecurity and indecision in the market. “I don’t know what’s causing it. I’m puzzled,” he adds.

Corbett is not alone. The word most commonly used to describe the situation is “flat”, although one QS based in the North-east goes further and calls it “desperate”.

Small local firms complain that there is hardly enough work in their own back yard to keep them afloat. Last August, architectural practice Couves went into liquidation, and a couple of other small practices are rumoured to be in financial trouble. Successful local architects, such as FaulknerBrowns and Ryder, have found that the way to win work is to look outside the region. FaulknerBrowns in particular draws only a relatively small proportion of its fee income from home-grown schemes. It recently completed a health club in Newcastle and is working on two leisure/retail schemes, but its major projects are currently in Manchester and Milton Keynes.

Bill Ainsworth, locally born and educated, formed Ainsworth Sparks in 1963 and worked as executive architect on the city’s metro system with FaulknerBrowns. His practice is struggling to compete with London architects: “It’s difficult for someone who has worked in the region for a long time and proved they can do it,” says Ainsworth. He believes clients are to blame because they think they get a better building from a “name” architect.

“I don’t mind if the buildings are beautiful, but they are not always beautiful,” he says.