Recent Developments
As heavy industries declined in the second half of the 20th century, large sections of the city centre were demolished along with many areas of slum housing. The leading political figure in the city during the 1960s T. Dan Smith who oversaw a massive building programme of highrise housing estates and authorised the demolition of a quarter of the Georgian Grainger Town to make way for a shopping centre Eldon Square). Smith's control in Newcastle collapsed when it was exposed that he had used public contracts to advantage himself and his business associates and for a time Newcastle became a byword for civic corruption as depicted in the films Get Carter and Stormy Monday and in the television series Our Friends in the North. However, much of the historic Grainger Town area remains to this day and was, for the most part, fully restored in the late 1990s. Today the city is a vibrant centre for office and retail employment. Though conversely, just a short distance from the flourishing city centre, there are impoverished inner-city housing estates, in areas where the original raison d'être was to provide affordable housing for employees of the shipyards and other heavy industries that lined the River Tyne. The Newcastle City Council has recently begun implementing plans to regenerate these depressed areas, such as those along the Ouseburn Valley.
Read more about this topic: History Of Newcastle Upon Tyne
Famous quotes containing the word developments:
“I don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.”
—C. Vann Woodward (b. 1908)