There’s a little place called the Engine Room….like a small cosy dark venue
John Hill in The Engine Room copyright Hazel Plater
I’m kind of a newcomer to North Shields, my family all grew up in the Newcastle area. When I was a kid living in Hastings we would drive up, my mother and my sister and I would drive up the length of the country to go and visit my nan. So I remember exploring North Shields and Tynemouth quite a lot as a visitor. Moving to the coast seemed like something that was of out of reach and only recently a couple of friends of ours announced that they were moving and asked if anyone wanted to buy their house. So, we found ourselves here. It’s just over a year now.
I’d lived in the same house for about 13-14 years, I arrived at Newcastle for a Journalism job. The first place that I went when I moved to start my new job, I took the Metro down from Gateshead to North Shields and found myself next to the Prince of Wales pub. Coming down the road from the Maggie Bank and found myself next to the dolly statue that’s down there and I kind of explored it along the coastline along the beach and stuff like that. I really love the atmosphere of North Shields because I love towns that are intersections of things like the new and the old. If you have too much of one or the other it doesn’t feel quite right but it’s got this real sense of beautiful older buildings and lots of new things happening. I also think that you can’t underestimate how important it is to feel like stuff is happening now in a town, in a place, in a community.
Every morning when we can we take our labrador puppy Willow down the hill to the fish quay and she’ll go in the sea. We decided to get Willow because we had all this stuff on our doorstep, because we had the beach, because we had all the beautiful landscape that she could play and experience things in. It still blows my mind that you can walk down and get a ferry overnight to Amsterdam. You can walk down there and just randomly decide to get on a boat and go to a different county, which is awesome.
When I was exploring the place, I went down past Northumberland Park, headed down the hill to Tanners Bank and there’s one little place around the corner as you pass the Three Tanners and you would almost miss it. Just before you hit that beautiful new mural there’s a little place called the Engine Room and the Engine Room’s like a small cosy dark venue area. I found out that they’d set it up as a space where they let people play gigs and they’re open to new and upcoming bands from the area. I remember talking to people and going wow, you felt possibility in that. I think it’s really important, like a lot of modern cities they build these structures now, sort of metal and glass and like they’re there and meant to be stared at and gawped at but they leave no room for people. They’re almost scared of people, and I think that for a city or a town it’s got to feel like it leaves room for people to place their own creativity and imagination on the landscape.
The murals that are coming up around the town are a really good example of opening up a space for people to be creative. There was a games writer I was reading recently called Edwin McRae and he said, “You can’t place yourself inside of something that leaves no room for you.” It’s that whole idea that you’ve got to have a town or a city that feels like it leaves room for the people that live there to be imaginative and to do something and to create and that’s what makes something feel like home. Like you feel like you can place yourself inside of it and do something there and it’s fine.
What I’d like to see for the future of Shields is that the development of Shields and places around it doesn’t just develop in the interests of one group of people or one group of tastes or one group of businesses. It is a beautiful town of intersections between the fishing communities and other historical communities. I’d like to see it develop with a sense of what makes it unique while empowering all the different communities that live here to work together, to create stuff that’s new and unique and also speaks to what’s so amazing about this community. Something that’s led by all the groups of people that live here.
I’m very lucky in that I live in a lovely house with a lovely partner and a lovely dog, and I’m very lucky in that I have a lot of foundation to work with. I think that if there was one ambition that I had for the future, it’s to continue to learn how to do things. There’s a word that I always kept coming back to and it came to me when I saw people like the good folks of the Engine Room and some of the others from Baba’s to Three Tanners putting on live music and stuff like that and people putting themselves out there to help people create. The word that I keep coming back to all the time is, “possibility” and I think my ambition for myself is to always keep that sense of possibility active in my life. That ability to meet a new person or to learn a new skill or to discover a new thing, to discover something that surprises me or inspires me. At a time when there is so much to be pessimistic and fearful and unsure about, there is so much out there to feel inspired and there are so many places or things that you can do with yourself to grow and change and discover new bits of yourself that you didn’t think existed.
John was interviewed as part of the North Shields 800 Voices project.