The scaffolding that built me

The gentrified “development” of city wide infrastructure is eating us alive,  impeding our ability to form relationships and consuming our personalities in line with the quick to consume, rent-to-never-buy model of stereotypical urban life. 

I’ve always grown up with scaffolding. It feels almost omnipresent, in a kind of post, post (post?) war way. Can it be that we’re still in a process of rebuilding ourselves since then? If so, are we trying to reconstruct our history, or are we still concealing even the slightest evidence of our wrongdoings? Replacing buildings with stories with big, obsidious blocks of storeys. The very definition of “in the box thinking”. 

During my childhood my first primary school (divided into two: infants and juniors) was bulldozed to make way for a shiny new building. This, the first “new build” I can remember being acutely aware of, was completely unfit to be a school. Looking back, it was a wonder that no one threw themselves from the mezzanine floor during my time there. They did from the stairwell though. 

During its construction I was still in the infants’ school on the other side of the hill. I have vague memories of time spent in the junior school hall, traipsing up in adolescent pairs to decide the new school uniform colour, or applauding as the newly elected head of Friarside house did a victory lap around us cross-legged pupils. I have vague memories of school discos too, but apart from a grazed knee gained in my excitement to get out of our front door, these are relatively non-formative. 

My brother, only a year-ish older than me, would have attended the junior school pre-demolition. But, to tell the truth, I don’t remember much about our time together in primary education at all. We weren’t as close then as we are now. Like I did with my brother, I knew the junior school was there without having an awful lot to do with it. Unlike him, it was like a looming presence through the trees which rendered the two sites asunder, cleared away over the summer under the pretence of a fresh new start. 

Later, during the years of my adolescence spent, unfortunately, at secondary school, the “old build” where I spent the first couple of painful pubescent years was deemed unsuitable. It was, as a result, completely demolished. With it went most but not all of the portacabins that passed for outdoor classrooms, a temporary solution which had been there longer than I had. Longer too than my father who taught in them. Whether due to a lack of funding, the actual size of the school building, or my teenage sense of time passing, the process this time around seemed to take an awful lot longer. 

For months, maybe years, we lived with scaffolding. We would weave in and out of metal poles as we passed between old and new, wandering beneath wooden planks which signified the end of the old library, and with it the comfort sought in the reading nook. Instead, we were forced into the glaring lights of the study room, like baby chicks bumbling around and bumping into each other, all of us exposed to the world for the first time. This initially innocent bumbling evolved into confrontations and conversations. A whole array of interactions I had been fine not being a part of and which, ultimately, caused far more harm than good. A quiet reminder that real people who are not yet fully formed are often boring and self-indulgent. And that genuine happiness can lie out of the way, hidden in a corner, between the pages of a book. 

This scaffolding prohibited us from crossing the rickety blue bridge which had been our passage from the world of science to the wonder of humanities - and back again. In the end it had been riddled with asbestos, posing a danger to children whose lives were still in the processes of beginnings. Yet, although the bridge was killing us, it also provided a brief moment of freedom between the politics of the classroom and the demands of the teachers and students. Much like the cigarettes of the bike shelter smokers, and later those poised between our own fingers, did. An escape from people who I no longer know anything about, nor care.  

After my beloved library had been taken away, and I’d managed to make it out of the scaffolding that still stood on my final day there, came the eyesore of the shiny new student accommodation in London. No need for scaffolding there. The walls there were expensive but lifeless, modern in a garish, depressing sort of way. The rooms were made to be long-lasting, but built in a style that made you wish you weren’t. 

Luckily, at least for me, this necessary escape was conveniently facilitated by a covid pandemic which sent me back to my scaffolding free home in the North East. I had only been 6 months into my first year of university. In general, as anyone who lived through it will know, the Lockdown had a purgatorial effect on half finished building or reparation projects. Construction workers were confined to their homes like everyone else, and all plans were placed on hold. 

Months later and I was back out into the world again, kind of. Almost completely starting again, in another city, in another university, in accommodation much older than the last, and full of much more character, both architecturally and sociologically. It was designed, according to the rumours, by the same man who had drawn up the blueprints for the city’s prisons. The breeze blocks and the absence of any kind of natural light definitely brought to mind some cell-adjacent imaginings.

Certainly, this new living situation was a far cry from my sunflower painted bedroom walls, or the north facing window which looked out onto my cherry tree. A marker of the seasons, almost my whole life I’d watched this tree blossom into pretty pink clusters in the spring, only to rejuvenate into a fiery mass of golds and reds and browns. This was how I had left it.

Nevertheless, at least while we got ourselves on our feet, this place was the next best thing I'd found to a home of sorts. Just as we were getting used to this newly temporary place, after several bonding periods of isolation and the coming and going of less protagonistic flat members, then too, almost inevitably, came the scaffolding. 

It just appeared one day. One moment we were huddled in front of the entrance, the orange glow of cigarettes disappearing into the hoods of borrowed jackets. We would try to smoke quickly, but in the end our desperation for nicotine would always win out over our desire to stay warm and dry. Then suddenly, as we gathered outside around the only lighter we could summon between us, we no longer had to cover the flame with our palms. Upon this realisation we looked up to discover that we had unintentionally found ourselves beneath a shelter. There was no prior warning. No explanation as to what it was doing there - or why. Something to do with the roof, I expect, but still to this day I couldn’t say for certain. There was never any email sent out. No one came to our door to offer any kind of explanation. 

Ours was the only building subjected to the scaffolding, but everyone seemed equally in the dark about why it was there, or what it was for. None of us were ever told to be careful around it, or not to treat it like a mere extension of our flat. 

So, naturally, quite drunk one night, we did what any group of twenty-something students who’d woken to find scaffolding attached to the front of their home would do: we treated the thing like a playground. 

Hoisting ourselves up, half lit cigarettes etc still dangling from our lips, this quickly became a regular occurrence. Why would we stand shivering when we could sit high up and survey our surroundings? 

The scaffolding constructed just so, provided a convenient view into the room of our friend, Simeon, the guy who lived above us. On starry nights he’d serenade us on his keyboard with the new songs he’d recently taught himself from YouTube videos. 

We’d sit up there until the early hours of the morning, when the rest of the accommodation was quiet, empty. Most of the other residents sleeping or still out at one of the illegal parties taking place on another part of campus. 

Eventually, but before we’d grown tired of the novelty, we got caught. Of course. One of the student wellbeing officers - or some similar title which similarly meant fuck all - approached us one night whilst we were high and chatting. He didn’t seem angry. I suppose the minimal age difference meant he still knew what it felt like to be like us. His expression, I still remember it, was more of genuine bafflement that we’d have thought to go up there in the first place. 

The “ban” he tried to impose, and his accompanying warning, lasted all of a few days until the following weekend. A few of my friends happened to be visiting, and therefore, quite incidentally, the customary drinking recommenced. 

So back up the scaffolding we went, with only minimal convincing after an evening spent at a restaurant we’d chosen because it was a brewery. And everything was fine, until my too hasty descent meant that temporary joy marked itself on my body forever. 

Clambering down between the pipes, in response to the sound of my name called out by a friend still inside, one of the screws protruding from the structure punctured my inner elbow, perforating several layers of skin. Then came the heavier than anticipated slam as the rest of my body collided shortly after with the bar to which the screw belonged. This, as well as the small cry of pain which escaped my lips, elicited a chorus of concern from those still above. 

Yet, at the time, predictably, I was too drunk to notice. Even sober the next day, I was still having too much fun to really care. For the weeks that followed the wound served as a painful reminder. The memory has since morphed into a raised cluster of scar tissue, a nod to the lasting impact of what now feels like a moment of carefree-dom.  

Although these experiences of scaffolding are personal, I wonder if they can be read as a symptom of something bigger. Are they a marker of our quest for improvement, of a reinforcement of structures which cannot otherwise sustain the human lives they house? Is the omnipresence of scaffolding a commitment to repair what once was, or symbolic of a willingness to abandon the foundations we’ve lived in and amongst, which have formed the landscapes and cityscapes of the places we call home? Or, do these intentionally temporary structures convey something more insidious? 

Right now for instance, the centre of Newcastle, the place I grew up, is submerged in scaffolding. The main shopping street lies overturned by road works and sectioned between flimsy fences. Most scaffolding isn’t protecting old structures. Rather, it signifies the implementation of something new. Something quickly constructed and easily replicated, a homogenisation of cities and streets where once a building’s purpose could be identified by its facade. 

These days, the scaffolding seems ominous. As we watch it go up, and watch as the metal pipes are screwed together in the formation of a cross, between planks laid aside planks, the buildings it serves seem to go up almost as quickly. They fill with residents before the rooms are even furnished. Before long the scaffolding is taken down and rebuilt somewhere else in the city, made to support yet another apartment block or student accommodation that creates yet another eye sore imposing itself upon the forgotten nuances of each city scape. 

In cities and places like my home, people are always told to look up. You’ll find the real beauty in the stonework, we say. You’ll see it in the ornate carvings that adorn the upper floors of our bookshops, or in the tudor beams that run across one of the oldest buildings in the city. If you’re lucky enough to know about Summerhill you’ll find masonry delights on almost every corner. 

To look up is grand advice. To take a stroll through the streets and indulge in the history, to appreciate the buildings for what they once were rather than what they have been repurposed as now. To take a moment to read the plaque of whoever may have once lived there is to appreciate that a city, any city, is more than just a building’s capacity to hold people. 

Instead it is the stories of those people which bring the bricks and mortar alive. And, most importantly, they, and the new stories that we make ourselves, are what make places like this our home. Not, forgive my language, a fucking plastic wrapped apartment block that is about as full of life as a gibbet done up in chains.