Don't Waste Your Life.

Wasteland and Newcastle with Rax, Tim, Defty and Ryan from Ryan Hendry on Vimeo.


The wasteland's future looks pretty grim, on Sunday the council diggers had been digging right up to the concrete perimeter. The step up/step down and sub of the day mud banks of old have been plowed, the student accommodation in Sandyford is like an aggressive and terminal disease and it's zeroing in on our little concrete skate and bike haven. The wasteland could have days or it could last another 12 years. The diggers got this close a couple of years ago when they demolished the hip and filled in and flattened the flatbank side of the wastey but it some how seems more ominous this time. There's a shit load of demolition and remodelling going on in the area but largely on redundant and useless sites, the wasteland has a purpose, it gives kids somewhere to go and something to do and if it gets plowed it'll be nothing short of a tragedy. If you can't stand the influx of micro scooters and shit craic at Exi park there is no better meeting or session spot in town than the wasteland. Sunday summer barbecues, beer drinking and chilling, old faces and new, blunt smoke and bluntslides, barspins and peg grinds all now face being lost to the man, with his digger, his sour pyatt and his insatiable and disgusting lust for money. I kinda hope when they do dig up the precious concrete of the wasteland, that when the first jack hammer goes in it hits an unexploded ww2 bomb and the whole place gets blown clean off the face of the earth, it would be poetic justice, we've loved, looked after, policed and built that place into a central hub of the community; It's something that has grown organically and supported a couple of generations of BMX and Skate kids:

If we can't have it no one should have it.

Don't let it go just for money, don't let it go to house more students who in themselves are nothing more than farmed and processed cookie cutter copies of their previous generation now enslaved to the system by way of debt formed early in life by the loans for education mentality, don't let it go and become an anonymous block of low cost high turnover housing for the disenchanted youth, don't let it go to the man. Especially not the fucking man.

Community hubs that evolve from nothing should be preserved, respected and revered, real spaces engineered and built by the people are of much greater importance to those people who really use them everyday than some designed and well thought about but utterly alienating public space generated by a disconnected and out of touch office bound architect. The wasteland came about by way of a singular need in the hearts of many that manifested itself in concrete and steel and good will. Many friendships have been formed over days of hard work-sweeping painting or laying concrete at the wasteland. That's why the place is so special and that's why it means so much to so many people and that's why it shouldn't go.

I just don't want to see it go.


Oh yeah, rad new edit above by Rax and crew.