Daring to Dream: My Vision for Gateshead High Street

I have a dream. It’s a dream for Gateshead High Street.

I have a dream that Gateshead High Street will come to be known as the Camden of the North, a place where creativity and community are celebrated. There will be colourful murals covering the walls; flowers and herbs in raised beds and pots; a local market for local people selling locally grown produce and handmade local products; secondhand clothes shops for men, women and children; a secondhand toy store/library and secondhand bookstore/library with a reading room; a zero waste cafe where delicious vegan food is the norm; a community space for cooking and eating together; a creative space for yoga and wellbeing, dance and live music; a lending library of household appliances as we shift from needing our own to having access to shared items; a repair workshop; studios/a creative making space for artists and upcyclers; a community bank and car sharing scheme; a co-working space with internet cafe and meeting rooms. 

I have a dream that all of this will be done for the benefit of the community by individuals from the diverse communities that live in Gateshead and have a heart for Gateshead. We will listen to and learn from each other, creating a safe space for a community-based process of continuous conversation. There will be regular festivals and events where all will be welcomed and celebrated.

I have a dream that this place will be a place of abundance, brought into being through collaboration and sharing, where there is no place for privilege, scarcity or competition. This will be a place where the current ‘business as usual’ approach to consumerism is dismantled and a better, more sustainable way of being in this world is modelled. I dream of a community in which we prove day after day that between us, we have everything we need.

I have a dream that Gateshead High Street will become known as a beacon of hope, a joyful, co-creative and meaningful response to the current crises we are facing in our world. Gateshead High Street will be seen as a gateway into a new way of living, a transition into a new world order, where people and planet are valued above self interest and profit.

I have a dream that together, we will support each other in love, joy and peace, building bridges and celebrating all that unites us, rather than focusing on what divides us. We will foster a mutual respect and compassion for all living beings, human and ‘more than human’. ‘DO NO HARM’ will be the intention at the heart of all that we do, in the present and for generations to come. Together, we will learn to live in harmony with the natural world, learning from the natural world. And we will discover the fullness and joy that come from living in this way. 

I have a dream. And that is why I am here.

Wind back four years to my studio space in my back garden where the original dream for Green Heart Collective started to materialise. I needed to find a way to align my passion for clothes with my serious concern for the state of the planet. I needed to remove myself from a working world built on growth and consumerism. I needed to find a more sustainable way of living and working.

As Daniel Christian Wahl puts it in his book ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’, we have to “refit the human presence on earth into the planetary boundaries”, rather than the current system of infinite growth on a finite planet (Earth Overshoot Day for 2024 is 1st August, marking the day that we move beyond the Earth’s annual regenerative capacity for this year - very bad news for the planet).

I started Green Heart Collective because me buying no new clothes was not going to make enough difference - I needed to encourage others to buy no new clothes too.

From our first day in our first business premises in Perth Court on Team Valley Trading Estate, we committed to building a regenerative culture in all of our business practices. As the team grew, we committed to an equality of pay based on the living wage for all employees. We valued wellbeing. We bought nothing new where possible in terms of office and shop equipment and we never bought new packaging for our online orders, relying instead on donated recycled packaging.

We made mistakes. Of course we did. But we always kept asking the right questions, always brought a curiosity to every decision, always kept adapting our solutions and answers as we explored what a truly regenerative culture could look like in practice.

Sustainability is not a destination. No business can claim to have arrived when it comes to sustainability. It’s a journey, a process, and we are all always learning and adapting.

When we came to visit our new premises for the first time, I fell in love with Gateshead High Street. I loved the wide street, the beautiful buildings, the stunning view across to Newcastle, the whisperings of a past where this High Street was thriving and bustling. Of course, I could see what everyone else sees - the street as it is now with many shuttered shops and not many signs of life. But right from that first day, a dream for this place fired up my imagination and that dream, as outlined above, lives on in my heart to this day.

After nearly a year on Gateshead High Street, I still hold onto that vision. I love being here, getting to know such a diverse range of customers and hearing their stories. Green Heart has become a special place to many, the opportunity to shop in a way that supports and celebrates this beautiful world in which we live. Our volunteers enrich our everyday life with their enthusiasm and unique contributions to the work of Green Heart. 

Our recent change to open up the back of the shop as a workshop space for customers to come and sew and repair and upcycle is the next stage of moving forward with the dream, inviting local people to dream with me and have the conversation of how we could together do things differently.

We can’t do this on our own. We’re beginning to make connections with the Town Centre Manager at Gateshead Council, local arts organisations such as Vane Gallery, Orbis Community and Gateway Dance Studio, community groups including the Integration Station, Oasis and the Gateshead Foodbank, faith groups such as St Edmunds Church and Redeemed Christian Church of God, the Job Centre with its Access to Work programme and other charities in the area like Age UK.  Together, we can co-create a future worth living in. Together, we’re engaged in a practice of transformative innovation, where we ask “What future do we want for humanity and how will we have to change individually and collectively to create this future right here in this place?” 

It’s hard, really hard, but without active hope, we have nothing.

I have a dream. You may think I'm crazy. Perhaps I am. But this dream has taken hold of me.

I don’t know if this dream will become reality in my lifetime or during what is left of my working life. In a strange way, that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that this dream informs the decisions I make today. This dream is what I choose to give my life to. This dream is what I choose to invest my energy and creativity in.

Will you join me in making this dream a reality?