Housing estate which hit big screen
RELEASED in March 1971, the gangster flick Get Carter quickly became a low-key hit before, over time, gaining huge iconic status and lasting appeal.
Starring Michael Caine as Jack Carter – a tough, cynical London mobster who returns to Newcastle to avenge the murder of his brother – the film is today recognised as one of British cinema’s most influential and enduring classics.
It also manages to be an important time capsule, capturing our region, vividly and sometimes uncompromisingly, on the cusp of change.
Filmed almost exclusively on Tyneside and the wider North East during the summer of 1970, and frequently using local people as extras, Get Carter is a work of unrelenting gritty realism, showcasing areas of our region as they were at the dawn of a new decade.
Well-known scenes include those filmed among the dilapidated Victorian terraced streets of Benwell, in Newcastle’s West End, and at the Brutalist multi-storey car park in Gateshead town centre. Both locations have since been transformed.
Another location that perhaps isn’t as well-documented in the context of the film is St Cuthbert’s Village in Gateshead.
Gangster’s moll Glenda, played by Geraldine Moffat, has a flat there.
After a steamy bedroom romp, we see the unfortunate Glenda being dragged outside and slung in a car boot by Jack who has just uncovered
a dark secret. The recently built housing estate’s external cameo appearance in Get Carter lasts a mere 27 seconds.
It is a brutal scene accompanied only by the sound of a howling Tyneside wind.
Situated to the west of Gateshead town centre, and overlooking the River Tyne, St Cuthbert’s Village replaced sloping Victorian-era streets straddling Askew Road, which by the 1960s were deemed as slums and earmarked for demolition.
Gateshead Council contracted Stanley Miller to build the new £3.5m estate – a self-contained complex of 39 low and medium-rise concrete-built housing blocks linked by a maze of walkways and stairways around open communal areas.
The focal point was a 17-storey tower block. The estate, it was claimed, would provide the ‘most up-to-date council houses’ for 3,500 Gateshead folk.
The village enjoyed a high-profile formal opening by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson on April 17, 1970 – but multiple problems soon surfaced and the estate’s lifespan would be short and often notorious.
A report by English Heritage (Historic England) later pointed out how “the houses were occupied long before any amenities were provided and residents said they felt marooned”.
It added that the close proximity of flats led to “squabbles and feuds while much of the estate became a haven for rats and vandals”.
The cheaply-built mass-produced homes were often “cold and damp”, while in some properties “there was no ventilation in the sculleries so food rapidly went bad”.
By the 1980s, St Cuthbert’s had a reputation as a location rife with anti-social behaviour and deprivation.
In 1995, the last of the 470 flats was demolished, although the central tower block remains.
St Cuthbert’s Village lasted a mere 25 years.
Private Persimmon homes today occupy the land where the troubled estate once stood.