Echoes of Erskine: reflections on the working life of a citizen architect in Byker

This is an extract from the daybook kept by the architects working in the on-site project office which Ralph Erskine and his partner Vernon Gracie established in a former shop during the redevelopment of the Byker area of Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1970s [2]. About the office, Erskine wrote:

People, kids, the chief planner – they all come in and out. We often took in kids who had been ‘chucked out’ from home and it was raining […] We exhibited plans, drawings and models in the window – but also local notices. ‘Anyone lost a tricycle? Ask the architect’. “Guinea pigs …’ and so on.

In his influential review of the redevelopment in Byker, Peter Malpass claimed that ‘the office represented an unusually thorough attempt by architects to immerse themselves in the culture of a particular set of clients’.