It’s a city that’s changing and evolving, but award-winning architect Adam Haddow says Newcastle knows who it is.
Raised in country Victoria, he now divides his time between Sydney and the city he openly admits he has fallen in love with.
In fact, the talented director at SJB says he is proud to be witnessing the growth of what he affectionately refers to as his other home.
“I love Newcastle so much. I didn’t come from a big city and I think that’s what I love about Newcastle – it doesn’t have that big city feel,” he said.
“How do you explain Newcastle to somebody who’s not from Newcastle?
“It’s like the perfect mix of Melbourne and Sydney. It has the restaurants and bars of Melbourne and it has the lifestyle and beaches of Sydney. It really has got it all.”
Haddow has been splitting his time between Sydney and Newcastle for 11 years now.
The change he has witnessed in that time, he says, has been dramatic.
“Newcastle was debilitated when BHP shut down, but it’s almost like the city is coming out of its hard times and it’s better for it,’ he said.
“Newcastle knows who it is. There’s a strong sense of community here.
“The people are engaged and want to know what’s going on with developments, and they’re always passionate about it.”
Haddow’s firm was one of three last month to win the Premier’s Prize at the 2022 NSW Architecture Awards for their design of Newcastle East End Stage 1.
They also took home the Lloyd Rees Award in the urban design category.
“Now that Stage 1 is complete we’re getting messages from people saying they appreciate what we’ve done. They say what we’ve done has been respectful to Newcastle, and that’s really nice to hear,” he explained.
Shaking off its former status but honouring its past is the goal for his designs, Haddow admits.
“The steel city reputation has gone, it’s something of Newcastle’s history but it’s still an industrious city, it’s a hardworking city and that’s a good thing. The capacity to do something for yourself is what still exists in Newcastle.
What has changed, he told the Newcastle Weekly, is the lifestyle.
“I’m always surprised by how many people are on the harbour walk. Newcastle is such a sporty, fit city. There’s a lot happening here.”
So, what remains and what must go moving forward?
“It’s interesting, there are always risks when you have change. It’s about what to hold on to and what to get rid of and where to make space for new things and where to not make space for new things.
“Even the recanting of the rail line was controversial, but I think you’d be hard pressed to say now that that was a bad decision,” Haddow says.
“The connection that the city has back to the harbour, that renewed connection where you can actually touch the harbour – you could never really do that. It was a challenging interface. That’s a good example of taking a bold move.”
Brutalist buildings may be the next controversial architectural style to go under the hammer Haddow predicts.
“I think there’ll be some pressure on the city in the next couple of years around some of their old brutalist buildings,” he said.
“Newcastle has a bevy of them, so it’ll be interesting to see whether they’ll be able to keep hold of those because they’re not the most loved buildings of the community.”
He refers to an architectural style that emerged during the 1950s and was generally characterised by its rough, unfinished surfaces, unusual shapes, heavy-looking materials, straight lines, and small windows.
“The Police building, the old council building that’s been transformed into the five-star hotel – they’re amazing buildings, there’s about a dozen of them in the city,” he says.
“They’ll come under pressure but it’s important to think of them as a fashion of the time. Some people can’t see the value in them because they haven’t grown to love them, they can’t read them, but brutalist buildings will come back.”
The challenge, Haddow says, is keeping enough old buildings to acknowledge and celebrate the past and make sure it’s there for future generations.
“But, also, how do you change the city enough that it serves its purpose which is being a city for people to connect with?” he added.
“It’s a challenge, especially in Australia where our European history is quite young. It is easier and cheaper to start again but then you lose the grain and texture of a building.
“If you lose the grain and texture it just becomes like a big shopping centre, a Morpheus, there’s no articulation, there’s no history. You want the messiness of the city.”
Haddow says the Newcastle East End project included working with both the council and the client in a bid to retain the facade of surrounding older buildings, while looking to encourage future inner city living.
Just like the buildings, the city he says is about blending younger with older.
“I think the interesting thing in Newcastle is it’s quite a young population demographically,” he said.
“However, you’re now getting people who are getting to an age where their kids have moved out of home, they don’t want a big house and they want to be able to leave on a Friday afternoon and go away for a month on a boat, or go on a cruise, and they don’t want to worry about their home.
“So, you’re getting a lot of people wanting to ‘rightsize’, not downsize.
“They want to change the way they live, they want a more dynamic life than living in the suburbs, because the suburbs suited them when they had kids, and dogs, and weekend sport, and now they want to come into town and have a Negroni at the bar before they go out for dinner.”
University students, singles, corporate couples are now blending with those that are reluctant to enter retirement homes but don’t want to have to maintain a house, Haddow explains.
“In an inner-city apartment someone does stuff for you. The building is looked after. The gardens are looked after, the ground level is cleaned, the lobby is cleaned and you don’t have to worry about that.
“It’s kind of nice to close your door on a Friday and come back a month later and it’s all still there.
“I also think the ability to walk to the gallery and walk to Town Hall to see the Chamber Orchestra and the Victoria Theatre, that’s being revamped – the ability to be able to walk to those kinds of things is very appealing.
“And, there are amazing restaurants in Newcastle.”
Judges at the 2022 NSW Architecture Awards said Haddow and his team had delivered on “connecting communities with their local environment”.
“In cities, there used to be an array of little shops, and everyone owned a little shop, they lived above it and they all got to know each other because they dealt with each other every day,” he said.
“And, then the modernist period came and we all moved all our shopping out to Charlestown, for example, and the inner city died because everyone wanted the simplicity of driving their car to Charlestown, getting out, doing all their shopping, and going back out into the suburbs.
“What’s happening now is by everyone coming back into the city we have that grain happening and what we have to do is reintroduce the grain both from a retail point of view and also from a pedestrian point of view.
“People will rarely walk down a street if there’s nowhere to go.
“What you want to do is to enable people to wander.
“You want a city where people are wandering, they’re not really going anywhere, they’re just going somewhere. But, you’ve got to have them thinking there’s something to see along the way, so you’ve got to have design networks.
“In old cities, like London, people wander and they get lost because they think ‘oh that looks interesting’, so you go left, or right.
“In a smaller city like Newcastle where there was only Hunter Street, the shopping strip, where else do you go? You start connecting places, like the foreshore to the beach.
“It’s about making new lanes, so the new lanes become a part of that connection so you’re never walking down and back the same street. You can walk down and do loops and that’s very important.”
Haddow says the masterplan for Newcastle included establishing more of those “loops” to encourage more people back to the city centre.
“Rather than walking down a street you want people to be able to cross over, take shortcuts, engage with people, stop at a coffee shop, and have those little moments,” he said.
“Before mobile phones you could say to someone ‘I’ll meet you at the clock at Flinders Street Station’, and you always got there. You’ve got to provide those spaces for people to do that.
“The local people will always know where to meet – they know Newcastle – but when you move from somewhere to somewhere, like from outer suburbs to the city, you’re learning a whole new language, you’re finding your new coffee shop, a new dry cleaner, so you need to provide those.”
Urban revitalisation does involve commitment, Haddow adds.
“People hate traffic, they want to drive to a location, park right out the front, and do what they came for.
“But, in order to have that, you have to create those spaces where people can walk everywhere, but if you don’t have enough people [moving into the city] than there will never be those services right on your doorstep.
“It’s a reciprocal arrangement.
“It’s like those birds on the backs of buffalo in Africa. You can’t have one without the other. To have the services in the city, you’ve got to have the people, to bring the demand for those services.”
