I was living in Jesmond when I filmed this, so the Palace of Arts wasn’t a new discovery. I’d walked past it more times than I could count. What stopped me on this particular afternoon wasn’t the building itself but how empty the scene was. Bare trees, a flat grey sky, the lake still. In summer this same spot is packed, and the building is a bar and venue with live bands and DJs. I caught an excellent set from Gilles Peterson there one evening, a different building entirely to the quiet one in this shot.

No Plan, Just a Camera

There was no plan to the shoot. I didn’t go out that day to film Exhibition Park specifically, I just had the camera on me, as I usually do on a walk, and this is what stopped me. A duck crossed the water just as I finished, which I didn’t wait for and couldn’t have planned.

That’s the method for most of these clips. I’m not scripting a shot or scouting ahead of time. I’m walking somewhere I already know well and noticing when it looks different to how I usually see it, an empty version of a place that’s normally full, quiet light instead of the summer crowd. The familiarity is part of what makes the quiet moments stand out.

What’s Actually There

The building has more going on behind it than most people walking past would guess. It’s the Palace of Arts, Grade II listed, and the last one standing from the North East Coast Exhibition of 1929, which opened here on 14 May that year and drew over four million visitors before it closed in October. Now it’s Wylam Brewery, which is what most people assume it always was.

Behind the building there’s a miniature railway, run by the Tyneside Society of Model and Experimental Engineers, who’ve been putting on public running days here since the line first opened in 1951. And the lake in front of it has its own model-boat history. The Newcastle Model Boat Club sailed there from 1882, and at the 1929 exhibition itself there was a straight-running competition where powered model boats were set off one at a time toward a target. None of that was visible when I filmed this, but it’s part of why the park keeps pulling me back with a camera, a place with several small, specific histories layered under whatever’s happening on the surface that day.

These clips are part of an ongoing series I shoot while walking through Newcastle and Gateshead, usually no longer than 30 seconds, usually a static or barely-moving frame. You can see more on my Newcastle & Gateshead Landscapes Instagram, or in my wider Landscape & Environment work.