Back lane geography: in praise of worlds behind

Abstract

‘Gateshead’, the Tory playwright Samuel Johnson said, is ‘the dirty back lane leading to Newcastle’. What his derogatory dialectic misses is the significance of the back lane as a place in and of itself. Although not written about much, at least not in geography, I believe that these streets are important places to understand neighbourhoods and communities in the Northeast of England. Without the lives and places of the back lane a Northern town is only nominally northern. Sticking to the limitations imposed by the COVID lockdown restrictions at the time of writing, which asked people to remain indoors whenever possible, I chose to travel and explore the significance of these streets digitally. Using both autoethnographic reflections from memories of walking in these streets and Google Street View, I explore the hidden geographies of back lanes in Bensham, a neighbourhood of Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England, where I live.