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Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind

Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind ‘Gateshead’, the Tory playwright Samuel Johnson said, is ‘the dirty back lane leading to Newcastle’. What his derogatory dialectic misses is the significance of the back lane as a place in and of itself. Although not written about much, at least not in geography, I believe that these streets are important places to understand neighbourhoods and communities in the Northeast of England. Without the lives and places of the back lane a Northern town is only nominally northern. Sticking to the limitations imposed by the COVID lockdown restrictions at the time of writing, which asked people to remain indoors whenever possible, I chose to travel and explore the significance of these streets digitally. Using both autoethnographic reflections from memories of walking in these streets and Google Street View, I explore the hidden geographies of back lanes in Bensham, a neighbourhood of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England, where I live. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cultural Geographies SAGE

Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind

Nieuwenhuis, Marijn
Cultural Geographies , Volume OnlineFirst: 1 – Jan 1, 2023
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Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2023
ISSN
1474-4740
eISSN
1477-0881
DOI
10.1177/14744740231161561
Publisher site
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Abstract

‘Gateshead’, the Tory playwright Samuel Johnson said, is ‘the dirty back lane leading to Newcastle’. What his derogatory dialectic misses is the significance of the back lane as a place in and of itself. Although not written about much, at least not in geography, I believe that these streets are important places to understand neighbourhoods and communities in the Northeast of England. Without the lives and places of the back lane a Northern town is only nominally northern. Sticking to the limitations imposed by the COVID lockdown restrictions at the time of writing, which asked people to remain indoors whenever possible, I chose to travel and explore the significance of these streets digitally. Using both autoethnographic reflections from memories of walking in these streets and Google Street View, I explore the hidden geographies of back lanes in Bensham, a neighbourhood of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England, where I live.

Journal

Cultural Geographies – SAGE

Published: Jan 1, 2023

Keywords: alley; back lanes; Gateshead; hidden geographies; Northeast England

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