High Bridge

This is the building I work in. The photo was taken from the Baltic 39, so it's the rarely-seen ass view to High Bridge. It's where I worked when I got my first job in Newcastle, about six years ago. I returned in November last year and currently I rent a satellite office adjacent to the one I used to work in. I was a graphic designer with all the confidence of an earthworm on the sidewalk.

What the place lacks (level surfaces, security, functioning plumbing, ceilings that stay put) it makes up for with cheap rent.

Really though, our offices seem to have survived in tact. We don't use a shared entrance. Based on what you'd see on the trip from our door to the loos, you'd think the place was just a bit neglected as opposed to falling down.

We never find occasion to move around in the building and so didn't realise that most days, we're the only people in it. That if you work late on the weekend, you're doing it all alone. There are no cleaners rattling around. You're alone. And while I sort of understood the "nobody" factor, I didn't realise the extent of "nobody":

It's less "nobody else is here today, on this floor" and more "nobody else here, at all, anywhere in the whole building"

When summer came (and the rain with it) we were given notice to look for new premises. They're turning the building into a hotel. And their timing couldn't be better since the place seems to be renovating itself.

We decided to have a look around upstairs, BEYOND THE BOGS and what we found were signs of decay that made me wonder just why it hadn't reached us yet. It seems like the building is rotting for lack of life within it, not the other way around.

We couldn't go far; parts of the second floor are falling in on the first- which is probably due to the fact that it has the ceiling of the third scattered wetly upon it.

I hope they can salvage part of its basic structure, because what's left still has some charm. That is, if you can look past the headless pigeon and the sound proofing (carpets) the musicians (junkies) secured (stapled) to the walls of their studio (crack den) upstairs.

Fuck alone knows what the floors above look like. Even my manliest men-folk won't go up there, what with their inability to hover weightless, above sodden, lumpy floors.