Half-baked hotel

AMBITIOUS PLANS for a massive exhibition of scaffolding in the centre of the city have been scuppered, leaving the organisers £200,000 out of pocket. Art gurus at the Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative had planned to obscure Grey’s Monument with the metalwork for several weeks and also place a temporary hotel room at the top, but the scheme was thrown out when it was run past some normal people at the council.

A committee vetting the plan voted nine-to-one against it, with one councillor stating it amounted to an act of cultural vandalism. Unfortunately, Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative hadn’t bothered to seek planning permission before shelling out for the scaffolding.

They maintained that the ‘artwork’ - entitled Hotel Monument - would bring in tourists and greatly boost the local economy, with a figure of one million pounds being plucked from the air. Most of the outlay will come from their own coffers, but the public will be hit with a bill of £35,000.

Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative were criticised last year when they paid some Aussies quarter of a million pounds to sling some lumps of wood from a rope over the River Tyne for a couple of days. But they’d hoped the city centre location of Hotel Monument would mean the ‘artwork’ would be appreciated by more than the couple of hundred people who turned out to see the ‘Bamboo Bridge’.

However, their plan seems to have stumbled over the assumption that people would rather gaze at a construction site, than a bona fide piece of public art. Grey’s Monument was sculpted by the same bloke who did Nelson in Trafalgar Square, and is a Grade I listed building. People seem to like it as it is.

Waiving aside any consultation fee, Newcastle Stuff has some advice for the art boffins at NGI: next time, put a bail hostel or - better still - some student accommodation at the top instead of a hotel, and the council will bite your hand off.