Wide Wednesday: "Something New"

When I spotted the theme of "Something New" for today's WidWed challenge (hosted again this week by steveng) I decided to pop into town and take some photos around the big new campus area (the "Newcastle Helix Regeneration Site") being developed near the city centre by Newcastle University. I'd seen this area several times from a distance and have been intending for a while to go there with my camera, so this seemed an ideal opportunity for a first visit. I'll certainly be back - there's a big variety of modern architecture and I surprised myself somewhat (being a bit of a traditionalist) by quite liking it. The area is also much larger than I'd realised and more building is still in progress.

I ended up with a number of shots to choose from, all taken with my fisheye lens (so the buildings don't really lean over like this!), but this is my favourite.

I was particularly interested in the building on the left with the gold girders on the outside. It's called "The Catalyst" and houses the "National Innovation Centre for Data" and the "National Institute for Health Research Innovation Laboratory" - neither of which I'd heard of. The latter looks for health technologies (Horizon Scanning) that are up to 10 years from being publicly available: the difficulty of course is that not all of these technologies will make it to clinical use. For that reason, they're constantly tracking technologies as they evolve, from patent to patient. Exciting stuff! The building on the right is the "Urban Sciences Building".

So, contrary to what many of the London-centric politicians seem to think, the northeast isn't full of barbarians running around in woad wearing very little, centuries behind the times...well, except perhaps in the centre of town at the weekends...!

(As usual, the photo looks best viewed large.)