Lovaine Place is lovely where we have the community garden
Wendy Young © Helen Plater
I came here to live in about 1998. My dad was from a mining village. His dad didn’t want him to go down the pits so, he tried to put him on a farm and he hated it and he decided he was going to go to North Shields to make his fortune. He met a young lad from Sunderland in a similar position, and they worked here living at the Fishermen’s Mission until the pair of them saved up enough money to buy their own boat which they did in the early 70s. They decided to go and fish out of Amble, so I was brought up in Amble. Obviously, my dad had that connection to North Shields and he was always coming through here for fishing bits and bobs so, he quite often used to bring us with him.
I moved away to Birmingham when I was quite young and did college stuff down there. When I came back, I thought Amble’s a little bit small when you’ve come from Birmingham. But North Shields is a similar town, it’s bigger, but you can be a little bit more anonymous if you know what I mean, so it just seemed like ideal.
I got myself a job, I’ve always worked in health and social care, and I’ve brought all my children up here. My husband’s from here so I think North Shields is home now.
Lovaine Place is lovely where we have the community garden. If I had to pick one place, I’d probably have to choose the garden. There are just some absolute architectural gems in this town there really are, you don’t have to look very far.
The history of the garden is that it belonged to the school opposite. Lovaine Place came to be around 1850. 1850 to 1860 was when they started to build up that area of the town. The train line as it was is right there, so the land that garden is on belonged to a private girl’s school which came to be in Edwardian times and stayed as a private girls’ school as I understand, right up until at least the second world war.
In the second world war the garden which is across the road from the school was requisitioned for the war effort. We don’t really know why, some people claim it was to put an air raid shelter on and although there’s no record of one actually being there and it’s not on the list.
We do know that a bomb fell on it, I think in September of 1941. I think it was the same night that the QV got hit, the goods yard and the Gaumont Theatre which is also on Lovaine Place and a few other things around there. It was one of the heaviest nights of bombing in the whole of the UK as in the amount of bombs that dropped. A bomb fell on the garden and one person died called John Patrick Lydon he’s buried in the cemetery.
After that, the garden fell into I think the council’s hands. Once it was requisitioned an old guy rented it and then it basically became overgrown, it quickly became unfortunately like an anti-social behaviour hot spot. In sort of 2007, the residents around got fed up of the anti-social behaviour so they approached the council and said can we rent it as a community garden. It went through the red tape and set up by around 2008 to 2010, and it’s been run as a community garden ever since.
Mostly it’s people in the street, but in the pandemic, we opened a bit more to the wider community. It is a community garden, but we can’t pay all of our bills just by gardening. We do have a lot of fruit trees, and we grow veg and we’ve got chickens and ducks. But we can’t quite sustain the bills just by doing that and have produce for our members, it’s a balance isn’t it. So, it kind of operates as an events space now as much as it does a garden where we try to promote nature as a venue for culture really, for music for art, other kinds of therapy and stuff like that. So, a lot of people use it for other groups or other charities use it.
I got involved about 10 years ago so probably about 2014-15. The person that had it got a caravan and he was starting to go away a lot. My children all went to St. Cuthbert’s which is three gardens along from the community garden and we were setting up an eco-garden in the school and that was how I first got involved and then we moved into Cecil Street and I became more involved in the garden by helping the guy that had it before until he moved away and then it sort of just fell to me to be in charge.
I’m there every day, there’s livestock there, so they need seeing to in the morning and in an evening. When my kids were at school, I was there 7 days a week, now I’m probably only there about 4 days a week. We tend to have scheduled things on those days like a coffee morning or a gardening club. Music tends to be on the weekend, or it will be booked for someone else’s events.
So, it’s just making it accessible to other people, and you know when we took it on it was just to preserve the space, to save the garden from wrack and ruin and making the community benefit in that way. But over time it’s lent itself to a lot more especially in the pandemic it was really busy, we had to come up with a booking system and everything and we have a lot of musicians and things involved now.
One of the ways we keep our bills ticking along is to have musicians. It’s every other Saturday through the summer and we can fit about 25 audience but you don’t talk over the music it’s very much sit and listen, it’s very calm and people can bring their own food and drinks and it’s a way of making folk music accessible to people who might not actually want to go to a pub. We have people on the gates greeting people to come in, it’s just a nice community project. Some of the group from the Friends of Northumberland Park like wildlife group started coming down doing different studies or having shared supper things while they do a study and that’s been really nice to link up with those other groups.
When I first got involved, I thought it was like a little slice of the good life. It’s a really difficult thing to achieve nowadays. But over time you know I’ve met a lot of good people. I’ve made good friends through the garden, I always say the garden brings the right people, it attracts the right people somehow for itself. It’s really nice to be able to have that private green space. We are an industrial town, there are beautiful houses here, there’s some lovely architecture. But a lot of people also don’t have a garden, don’t have a private outdoor space and it’s nice to be able to provide that for people. People appreciate it as well you know.
I think the new building and everything looks much better it really needed to happen. Honestly, I just think it needs to keep going the way it is going. I know a lot of people bemoan the fact that there’s not so much industry nowadays, but I think if you just look at other towns you know we are heading that same way. If you look at other cities, other towns that have been working class industrial towns or cities that is the way it’s gone next, all those industrial buildings they tend to go to offices then after that it tends to be like leisure venues you know like restaurants, pubs or whatever you know. I’m all for it I’d rather see that than empty disused buildings needing repair. I love the past, but you know we do need to move with the times as well don’t we and I think fingers crossed I think they have. I think we’ll get there.
I’ve got four children, I hope we can all stay here, I hope we can all keep doing what we do, and I hope there’s plenty jobs for them you know just more of the same as far as I’m concerned.
Wendy was interviewed as part of the North Shields 800 Voices Project.