Introduction

In Buildings Must Die, Cairns and Jacobs (2014) write with a great intensity about the many processes that make up buildings, from the materials themselves to their environmental surroundings and the ideas that govern them in particular ways. Citing Brand, for example, they remind us that ‘Because of the different rates of change of its components, a building is always tearing itself apart’ (Brand, 1994, quoted in Cairns and Jacobs, 2014: 125, emphasis added). However, that does not mean that buildings die. For many reasons, buildings do not go away easily or quietly. These long durations of buildings also grabbed the attention of Walter Benjamin (1999), who saw in the Paris arcades a powerful spatial form in crisis. For him, Honoré de Balzac came to mind, as ‘[N] othing dies; all is transformed’ (on page 62 Benjamin [1999] cites Honoré de Balzac, Pensées, sujets, fragments [Paris, 1910] page 46). As Buse et al (2005: 54) put it: ‘Benjamin believed that his own era also stood at a threshold, the end of the commodity form: “With the destabilizing of the market economy, we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.” ‘ Yet, today, nearly a century later, we experience a layering of retail crisis and ruination, as the commodity form, it seems, had in fact survived Benjamin's era and was now, again, facing a new era of volatility and crisis. The ‘monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins’ are again on our minds as our cities and towns are bespeckled with vacancies – voids that have proliferated across the landscape. While ruins may signal tension and contradiction, and while telling their tale may be ‘impossible’ following Edensor (2001), they are powerful thinking devices because they can also open new horizons. As Hell and Schönle (2010: 8) put it: ‘Ruins emancipate our senses and desire and enable introspection.’ The following account tries to remain open to these multiple demands around how to best conceptualize this kind of ruinous space, experienced in central Newcastle upon Tyne (see Figure 1).