Unlike the old Co-Op building on the Newcastle bank of the Tyne, which has rebranded itself the Hotel Malmaison, Gateshead’s new Centre for Contemporary Art has kept the name of Baltic Flour Mills. The original 1950s tiles forming the giant black letters have been scrupulously cleaned of decades of kittiwake droppings and the culprits – a protected species – rehoused in a kittiwake tower downwind. The Baltic is proud of its industrial heritage. Clad in the dignity of past labour, it stares down its poncy new neighbours across the water in their ludicrously over-designed office blocks auditioning as stage sets for Aida. When the Romans came they settled first in Gateshead, and once again it’s the smart side of the river.
The ‘winking eye’ may be a bridge too far for the critic Brian Sewell, but even he would find it hard to fault its elegance or the effortless way it takes rhythmically marching feet in its stride. As far as quayside regeneration goes, Gateshead could teach London a thing or two. The fact that the whole place is a vast building site only adds to the fun. Downstream from Baltic, enormous yellow cranes hover over Norman Foster’s Sage music centre, a giant groundnut awaiting a glass shell; upstream, posh riverside flats are going up and, behind, a Hilton rises from the mud. From the viewing terrace on Baltic’s Level 4 you can see beyond the construction sites to distant landmarks: St James’s Park, Gazza’s home ground, and, still more historic, the multi-storey car park from Get Carter which the Get Carter Society is struggling to preserve.
It should be the perfect spot for the launch of the new national touring exhibition of the work of Cobra, the post-war group of radical Danish, Dutch and Belgian artists and poets who saw themselves less as a movement than as a train journey: ‘You fall asleep, you wake up, you don’t know whether you’ve just passed Copenhagen, Brussels or Amsterdam’ (hence the name Co-Br-A).

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