History
After a long period of industrial use throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, including development of a large gasworks for the production of town gas from coal, the site became disused. In order to regenerate the area, Gateshead Council included the site in the Gateshead Garden Festival, held between May and October 1990.
Remediation for the purposes of the Garden Festival was restricted to regrading and capping to provide a suitable medium for planting. This included the use of earth mounding to cover the remaining buried structures, such as gasometer bases.
Following the Garden Festival the site was sold to a subsidiary of the Sir Robert McAlpine civil engineering business. Part of the site was designated an Enterprise Zone in order to encourage new employment uses but repeated marketing over nearly a decade failed to attract any commercial or industrial buyers for the site. Gateshead Council's original intention was that the site would be taken up for a major employment use. Japanese construction equipment manufacturer Komatsu had sponsored the Japanese Garden on the site for the Festival and would have fitted this expectation but concentrated their production capacity in nearby Birtley instead.
After years of lying vacant awaiting a use, a final remarketing exercise was undertaken by local land agents in 1999. This invited offers for any use, with the intention of changing the Council's expectations for an employment use on the site. As a result of this process, the North East region of Wimpey Homes made an acceptable financial offer based on redevelopment of the land for housing.
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