T. Dan Smith

A cowboy cold cocks a spy. "Wey-aye, my name is Bentley, ma'am. I'm from Newcastle, that's the Fort Worth of the north."

This is an inspiring episode. I've listened to it through a couple of times and I am enraptured not only by the unbridled hope November seems to have for Mr. Smith, but just how much he seems to have legitimately cared for the community he lived in. He's a quirky guy and really gives a glimmer of something greater—even if it is brought screaming back to Earth with the demolitions, the corruption, the highways.

Let’s start a petition for November to begin reading audiobooks, so we can listen to her while falling asleep *without* giggling and waking ourselves up 🤣

Thank you, November. A masterful episode. Toon Toon.

By the way, if you're intersted in the social context in which all this was happening, there is a brilliant bbc drama called Our friends in the north, which tracks the post war social transformation through the lives of a bunch or northerns, and intersects with practically everything they talked about in the podcast

speaking as someone from Newcastle myself, the descriptions of what all this could have been towards the start make me really fuckin depressed and despite it all, a city that is routinely said to be the friendliest in the country. christ this feels like reading those old soviet time capsules, mixed with the knowledge that every person who could possibly give a shit has completely forgotten that the place exists

CAR PARK RESTAURANT

AND I SAY AGAIN, T–GIRL DAN SMITH

okay there's one thing I keep getting back to tho, what was a *mayor* supposed to have accomplished to further the cause of Socialism? I guess in context, build 15% more public housings and not caused a corruption scandal that blocked the path of a number of hypothetical socialist mayors? I just don't really get what's the big tragedy here. I don't know the numbers but whatever number of public housings he got done sounds like it barely compensated for the demolishing of old terraced houses that could have been better once refurbed anyways and minus the hit of the highways. I have a lot of sympathy for the ideology of this show but this just ... doesn't math out to me

my wife and i agree that this is one of y'alls best episodes

Anyone know what the hell a Patreon Mailbox is? Is that just the Patreon DMs or is there an actual email address associated with No Gods No Mayors that's tied in with Patreon that we're supposed to use?

I feel like I got fucking sniped by that line about the Pink Peacock, and I'm not even Scottish Also, I also live in a place where, in order to get to basically anything, I have to get to a bridge or tunnel to cross over a large highway to get to the city center. Of course, a bunch of Black people's homes were bulldozed to build it.

89th

I swear, sometimes it feels like the entire history of this planet was precision-made to break my spirit. HOW DO THEY ALWAYS FUCK IT UP.

Trans Dan Smith

In call the midwife one family complains of sea sickness being on the like 19th floor and the state gave them essentially Dramamine. Great education for an American on how this whole council housing thing worked.

the artist Richard Dawson makes so much more sense now

MOOMIN MENTION YAAAAAAAAAAY

Making myself un-bribe-able (passing a law that giving me money is never legally a bribe)

I love my city

E. Vrart Claire

I would hug that Pavarotti

There are Coppolas everywhere for those with the eyes to see

God, I love this podcast

Thank you so much for the pictures.

this is really the most WTYP-like of those you've done, all it needed was a 23 minute Roz digression about concrete reinforcement to bring it up to a respectable 2hrs

i am howling at the picture of the statue

Really didn’t expect a Newcastle debate. Loving it. You guys should do just a Newcastle ep. wallsend mentioned!! I’m there rn

HR stands for Horned-up Robomeat

it's crazy how much this guy reminds me of Jean Drapeau in Montreal except our guy centered the big fuck-off Brutalism around a heavy subway system and got the urbanism overall about 27% better

phenomenal episode. will be recommending as a starter ep to friends 💝

“Ok, so the North of England is a spiritually evil place—“. Nova, how dare you come to me, a Yank with a fetish for the ever dying Sean Bean’s accent, with this drop

Around 55:00 Nova's exposition revealed to me the parallel between the automobile and 'AI'. For so long the former was pushed and taken as an inevitability, and yet here we are 100 years later repedestrianising city centres. I can only hope it doesn't take us as long to reject the inevitability of the latter, and not too much of society gets “run through” before we do.

no pressure but i have had the worst 10 days of my life and i now really need a laugh

The image of the skyway is actually pretty accurate to how it is. I walk home across it a fair bit

NEWCASTLE MENTIONED! But for real I dearly love the brutalist architecture and it's a real shame the sky ways are due to be demolished sometime soon

the pink peacock bit did indeed cause me blunt force trauma

I genuinely don’t know how you look at those renderings and think anything other than that they look absolutely class. This is so reactionary lmao, lots of the Georgian buildings were awful 😭

I haven't even gotten into the full episode but please know I'm in the office DYING stifling my laughter at the Entombed Pavarotti

I want to stress that Brasilia is an abomination of a city, built around the worst modernist, architectural and social ideas of the 20th century. Psychological studies have shown that it actually hurts to live there, the city is that hostile to humanity and its needs. There is an exellent book on the subject called "Seeing like a State", which uses Brasilia and Chittagong as case studies in ailenating city design.

Festoonable

TOON TOON

the thing non-Scots need to understand about the Duke of Edinburgh traffic cone thing is that it has by this point been completely co-opted by kitschy marketing for tourism and services, like you'll see ads for Coke or whatever where they reference the statue traffic cone and it's always the cringiest thing ever

Also, correction: Helsinki has one full mayor and then the vice-mayors who aren't actually mayors, and the vice-mayor who got done for graffiti is the former head of the Left Alliance party and an avid fan of football who is known to have done some videos on Facebook and Instagram where he despair over football swearingly

Torille

surely the only vaguely horny thing anyone has ever posted on Threads dot net the nothing app is, like, "Your breasts are not just voluptuous -- they're also inspiring"

I want to write a proper comment after I’ve had a real sit-down listen, but I want to first pop into the comments and say the typical consolatory meal in Newcastle is from a Scottish-owned breakfast place called Pablo Eggsgobao. I wish I was joking.

My city! Newcastle is a quite nice place to live in spite of the poverty. I appreciate the efforts to point out that northern cities like Newcastle are underappreciated and not nearly as shit as they're supposed to be. Also, the elevated pedestrian walkway basically still exists. The transport and road system of the city is admittedly mental.

Congratulations Nova, this one's an all time great. I love a story about a mayor that helps examine a wider social context. Of course, stories about mayors who are just weird little guys are great too.

the “t” is so he’s not confused with the guy from Bastille

The Boston West End Museum (a fantastic 2-room museum) describes how a vibrant, if poor, neighborhood was declared a slum, which resulted in the city cutting services, which in turn made the neighborhood more slum-like in order to manufacture consent for the clearance and demolition.

mattie here. SORRY the pavarotti photo has been ADDED. please gaze upon Him

[corrections and addenda jingle] in the divine comedy, judas is one of the three sinners in cocytus not encased in ice - he is the central chew toy in the three mouths of satan (who was trapped in ice)

I will say, increased interaction with statues must be managed carefully. At my alma mater, there were two bronze statues of longhorn cattle, kept in a poorly-lit facility adjacent to campus. Late at night, some students were running around there, and one of them got impaled on the horns of a bronze bull. Can't always trust people around statues

All I keep thinking of when hearing Nova say "The North" is: there's gotta be a British version of "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis"

I think it’s important to mention the 11+ is still very much a thing in parts of the U.K. I had to sit it and was given no accommodation for my dyslexia it’s an awful experience

whenever theres a geordie who's not doing some light entertainment bullshit in the wider consciousness its never good, this city's cursed man

Ah, how insane to determine at 11 what kind of education opportunities you will get in your future life. Here in Germany we do it the more sensible way, at 10 instead of 11.

This is the nightmare/ over the border/ on a night out/ in fuckin west-yorkshire! Leeds is a dump, yeah, but not the source of all evil (that is london).

there's a REASON statues are built on PEDESTALS

Oh no. Its one of mine.

show us the entombed tenor!!

Where is my entombed Pavarotti? I was promised an entombed Pavarotti.