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The Ghosts of Jesmond Dene

Part 1 Project 2019
Louis Carrow
Northumbria University Newcastle | UK
During his career in armaments manufacturing, Lord Armstrong landscaped and imported exotic materials, including birds and animals, into Jesmond Dene, an historically significant urban park in the North East of England. The Newcastle industrialist curated the dene into his very own open-air gallery amongst the trees before donating it to the public in 1883.

Today, Jesmond Dene is a series of disparate architectural fragments obscured by the foliage. Towers, bridges and ruins emerge from the park, in varying states of decay, waiting to reveal a rich history of industry and entertainment. Through a series of interventions in the dene these items, or small fragments of them, are drawn together as an educational resource, preserving both the memory and the physical remains of Jesmond Dene and Lord Armstrong’s heritage.

Four strategies for making interventions in Jesmond Dene are proposed. Each strategy is a new type of ‘Ghost’, and each a different way of rebuilding or reimagining a remnant of Armstrong’s lost architecture. The Ghosts of Jesmond Dene respect Armstrong’s curated gallery but provides a new ethereal layer revealing its history, but also giving it a future. Some rebuild ruined structures, some import old ones, and some distort the existing.


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2019
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