Introducing Lort Burn Specials
A new event, platforming 'good writers, thinkers and public intellectuals' debuts in Newcastle at the weekend. Its co-founder - and editor of The Teesside Lead - Leigh Jones offers an introduction.
A new radical books night at Alphabetti Theatre is hoping to add some countercultural spice to the North East’s cultural mix.
Put together by the authors Alex Niven (The North Will Rise Again, 2023) and Peter Mitchell (Imperial Nostalgia, 2021), and me - journalist and editor of The Teesside Lead, Leigh Jones - the first event will be on Saturday, March 1 at Alphabetti, Newcastle at 7pm.
We all live, work and write in the North East, and we wanted to reconnect with some of the spirit of Modernist adventure and countercultural vim that has animated Newcastle at various points in its modern history.
Richard Hamilton codifying Pop Art at Newcastle University in the 50s and 60s, Basil Bunting reading with Allen Ginsberg at the Morden Tower, T. Dan Smith’s grandiose plans for ‘the Brasilia of the North’: these are the moments of cultural optimism and political openness that we’re inspired by.
More prosaically, we wanted to bring good writers, thinkers and public intellectuals to Newcastle, get them to talk about what they do, and share some local culture while we’re at it. If we also get to put on a decent social night for the bookishly or politically inclined, bring people together, and drink some beers, that’s good too.
And the name? The Lort Burn is a lost river of Newcastle, springing in Leazes Park, running down past the RVI, under INTU Eldon Square and then down Grey and Dean Streets to the Tyne.
‘Lort’ means ‘dirty’, and it was – it picked up the offal and rubbish from the backs of butcher’s shops, and by the time it was fully culverted over in the late eighteenth century it was described as “a vast nauseous hollow… a place of filth and dirt”. Make of that what you will.
Our first event plays host to Helen Charman, one of Britain’s most important emerging radical writers. Her first book, Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood, came out last year and was immediately acclaimed as “at once a sorely needed politicised history of motherhood… and a tender love letter to her own mother’s knees”.
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As a writer on the politics of sex and gender, as a critic and activist, and as a fantastically original poet, Charman has drawn comparisons with the likes of Jacqueline Rose, Angela Davis and Denise Riley.
Charman will be joined by our own Alex Niven to discuss motherhood, family, the welfare state and the state of things now, and to read some poetry, too.
Other poets include Sam Telford and local titan and counterculture veteran Tom Pickard, with music in the bar from art/noise/drone purveyor and guitarist Lucy Valentine.
Our second event will be announced very soon, but the first has a lineup that’s hard to top!
Tickets for Saturday’s event are available from the Alphabetti website. For updates on future events, follow Lort Burn Specials on Bluesky
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