Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind

Nieuwenhuis, Marijn

doi:10.1177/14744740231161561

Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind

Nieuwenhuis, Marijn

Authors

Dr Marijn Nieuwenhuis marijn.d.nieuwenhuis@durham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor

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.

Citation

Nieuwenhuis, M. (2024). Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind. Cultural Geographies, 31(1), 137-144. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231161561

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Feb 14, 2023
Online Publication Date	Mar 14, 2023
Publication Date	2024-01
Deposit Date	Mar 14, 2023
Publicly Available Date	Apr 17, 2023
Journal	Cultural Geographies
Print ISSN	1474-4740
Electronic ISSN	1477-0881
Publisher	SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	31
Issue	1
Pages	137-144
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740231161561
Keywords	Gateshead, back lanes, Northeast England, hidden geographies, alley
Public URL	https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1178686

Files

Published Journal Article (Advance Online Version) (902 Kb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).