From flour mill to iconic arts centre
THIS week marks 20 years since the opening of the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
Looming over the River Tyne, the imposing building’s unmissable presence alongside the Millennium Bridge, the Sage Gateshead, the Baltic Campus of Gateshead College, as well as modern hotels and private housing apartments make the location largely unrecognisable from how it was in the 1980s and ‘90s. A £260 million arena, hotel and conference centre complex, currently under construction, will further transform Gateshead Quays.
It’s a far cry from how the area was 30 years ago. There were memories and echoes of former industrial and maritime glory everywhere, but by then the place was faded and downat-heel.
The Baltic, at a cost of £46m, opened on July 13, 2002. More than 30,000 would visit the repurposed venue during its first week, The Chronicle would report. If the Sage music venue, opened two years later, was a new addition to the layout of the Quayside, the Baltic had been part of the scenery for much longer.
As most will know, the spectacular art gallery is housed in what was for decades a working flour mill.
The Baltic Flour Mill was built for Joseph Rank Limited. Construction work began on the factory in the late 1930s, was discontinued during the Second World War, before the flour mill was finally opened in 1950.
The complex was a dual-purpose factory for the production of both flour and animal feed. The silo building that remains is only part of what was once a much bigger Baltic operation. Hundreds of people were employed there until it closed its doors in November, 1982.
As the Quayside fell further into decline during the 1980s, the deserted Baltic factory was threatened with demolition as successive schemes were mooted to breathe new life into the run-down riverside area. In 1989, for example, e reported on plans to pull the building down and replace it with a £20m block of luxury flats. The plans never came to fruition. In 1992 an advert in The Journal announced the site was for sale and there was planning consent for residential, office or restaurant use.
It was in 1994 the first reports emerged that the building could become a venue for the arts. And in 1997 it was confirmed a new project overseen by the Arts Council had received a £34.4 million grant to turn the site into a “world culture centre” and “the biggest international visual arts centre outside London”.
Building work started in 1998. The North and South faces of the mill were retained, with six floors and three mezzanines amounting to 3,000 square metres of exhibition space created inside, while a glass lift offering stunning views of the Quayside was installed. Under the moonlight, the new gallery opened its doors at midnight on July 13, 2002, and thousands of people who had queued over the Millennium Bridge and along the Quayside filed in to see work by five contemporary artists, including a 15ft-long Meccano model of the Tyne Bridge.
Our selection of photographs from The Chronicle/the Journal/the Sunday Sun archive reflect the Baltic building in its different forms and uses down the years.