Small interventions on Newcastle’s streets

In Byker, Newcastle, there is a route between the estate, Shields Road and the Metro, that passes through a set of underpasses that had become so practical, so familiar, that they were easy to overlook. They got people where they needed to go, and little more. Now, tiles catch the light where concrete once dulled it; murals stretch across the walls; thermoplastic patterns pull colour underfoot; children’s drawings decorate the route.

It is a small piece of public realm work with a rare immediacy. Through consultation, residents can recognise their own words and decisions in the place. This is economic development at walking speed: improvement measured through the school run, the trip to the shops, the walk home from the Metro. For Izzy, it is the project she has been able to watch come into use fairly early on in her new role at Newcastle City Council. “For what feels like quite a small intervention, [the underpasses have been] quite a complicated process, with lots of problem-solving along the way,” she says. “You can definitely see it brings a bit of playfulness. It’s a fun intervention that has good practical solutions, but also brings that little bit of joy in the day.”

As part of Public Practice’s 2025 autumn cohort, Izzy Lezcano works as an Economic Development Officer in Newcastle’s Capital Investment and Growth team. Her team is focused on high street improvements in east and west Newcastle, outside the city centre. Izzy arrived with a background in landscape architecture, masterplanning, urban design, exhibition design and fabrication, and brings that spatial training into the language of economic development. A high street, in her work, is the route to the bus stop, the edge of a crossing, the bench outside a takeaway, the planting beside a car park, the moment a street starts to feel safe enough to linger. “When people think about high streets, they think specifically about the shops, the businesses, parking,” she says. “What’s been really nice about this process is thinking about it holistically, creating better spaces for people. Changing how people perceive an area encourages people to want to spend time, encourages businesses to want to invest or grow, and makes it more accessible and pleasant for residents.”

Izzy’s work focuses on smaller projects that can bring early impact. They don’t carry the burden of regeneration alone and work in parallel with larger schemes, which move through long timescales, big budgets, multiple stakeholders and complex approvals. Sarah Carr, Economic Development Officer in Newcastle City Council’s Capital Investment and Growth team, describes the High Streets project as part of a broader body of work that reaches from economic development to major projects, place-based regeneration and neighbourhoods. The value of the smaller intervention is its delivery speed. Seating, rain gardens, planters, safer routes, underpasses and street ends allow the council to respond while consultation is still fresh, testing ideas so they can inform strategy. “Often we’re all building on the same ideas,” says Izzy “but we’re able to deliver things on a shorter timescale.”

For Asia Lompart-Chlasciak, Economic Advisor in the same team and Izzy’s line manager, this sits within a “place-based approach and whole place approach”: “Even though our team is focused on economic development, we never look at a place purely from [the] business side of things.” Smaller public realm improvements, she says, make sense because they are “about changing perceptions of the place”, “improving footfall” and proving to the residents that these local places are important. This matters in places where residents have been asked for their views many times before, and where the gap between listening and doing can calcify into distrust. “We can respond to feedback and consultation quite quickly,” she adds, “and it allows us to test ideas as well.” In the language of economic development, this is about investment and confidence.

The Byker underpasses, even though small pieces of infrastructure, hold a disproportionate amount of daily movement: residents going to the shops, children moving through the neighbourhood, traders relying on the estate’s connection to the high street. Consultation on Shields Road had found that people felt unsafe and disconnected from the high street, despite living within walking distance of it. Izzy joined the project midway through, as design work was beginning, and carried it through design development, site work and delivery. By that point, Sarah explains, the project had already involved “a lot of engagement and consultation at the very start”, reaching residents and community partners to understand priorities for particular neighbourhoods, informing the wider vision for the project developed alongside architects Harper Perry. The team had a list of projects identified through the consultation still to deliver, and Byker became one of the places where Izzy could take a more direct lead. Children from the Lighthouse Project and older residents from Tom Collins House contributed drawings and ideas, which local artists translated into tiled walls and murals. Later, children returned to see their own drawings fixed along the route. “The underpasses came out of feedback about people feeling unsafe and disconnected to the high street,” says Izzy. “With it being community-led, there’s less guesswork involved in what people do and don’t want.” The result is practical, making routes safer and easier to read, but it is also emotional: pride, playfulness, the small pleasure of recognition. Sarah says the aim is for people to feel “proud of where they live”, with enough ownership to encourage stewardship of these spaces.

At Adelaide Terrace, the same logic is being tested through what the council calls street ends: the blocked-up ends of residential streets where they meet the high street, often given over to parking or left as leftover space. “We’re looking at taking those spaces back and making them small pocket parks,” Izzy says. The model has already been tested in the east end, where the Chillingham Road Rain Garden turned an empty street end by Chillingham Road Primary School into a pocket park with rain gardens, tree planting, permeable paving, seating, habitat features and informal play. It has since won a Pineapple award for ‘Child-Friendly Place’, and is now being used as a pilot project to roll out in different areas, adapting the design to suit the specific needs of different high streets.

As ever, these projects inevitably have conflicting elements in their briefs, which is where someone with a rich background of design, and therefore an innate ability to hold competing needs in their mind at once, can have the biggest input. For example, concerns about anti-social behaviour should not mean there are no places to sit or gather. Rather, these concerns should influence the placement of seating, its visibility, lighting and the routes around it. “It’s just about thoughtful design,” says Izzy. “It’s thinking about where seating is best placed, why certain areas become problem hotspots, whether the space is overlooked, too dark, or hidden by overgrown planting.” At the street ends, the constraints are different. Consultation has shown a clear appetite for greening, but underground utilities limit where trees and planting can go. Rain gardens offer a way through this awkwardness: making small pockets of public space where the ground allows. The council now has to make those limits legible without removing ambition from the project, shaping expectations around what can actually be built.

This is where in-house design capacity starts to change the process. Izzy’s role does not replace external designers; it gives the council more confidence in asking the right questions of their consultants. “My role isn’t necessarily as a designer,” she says. “I try to let the designers design, but give direction.” The team would previously commission design work and trust external partners to lead on the detail. Izzy’s background allows the council to challenge and check that detail more closely. “It’s been a collaborative process,” says Izzy. “We’ve had interesting discussions on design or technical details, how to deliver things, even down to snagging on site.” Sarah adds that, “what Izzy has been doing, and what other Public Practice Associates have done and has been helpful, is challenging some of that and doing that checking”.

Inside the council, Izzy’s placement has also shifted how design sits within economic development. The High Streets work is not a formal team in the neat organisational sense. Sarah describes it as a group of colleagues within Capital Investment and Growth, formed around a particular programme of funding, but also bringing together other council teams with a shared interest in neighbourhood high streets. Asia sits across the same work, which touches economic development, major projects, place-based regeneration and neighbourhoods. In that mix, Izzy’s landscape architecture background has given the team a different kind of capacity. “It worked out really well because we’ve managed to secure more capital funding to actually do some further public realm improvements,” says Asia. “Izzy’s skills are perfect for that.”

Having Izzy in the team has also changed the way the team talks about the purpose of the work. Sarah says Izzy arrived towards the end of a long project, at the point when delivery can become a matter of getting things over the line. Her questions brought fresh energy: “What’s been useful is having Izzy ask those questions of actually why we’re doing this and what is this?” she says. “It just validates what we’re doing because I think what’s been really interesting is to revisit that core purpose.” The strength of the team, Izzy adds, is that those skills sit among others. “The team all have different perspectives because we all have quite different backgrounds. It’s a really nice balance to bounce ideas and hear quite different perspectives.”

Across Public Practice placements, change often begins with something small. In Derby, Suki Sehmbi helped officers and applicants develop a shared language for talking over drawings, and as a result, designs. In St Helens, Jack Richards used his experience in housing design to give planners a firmer basis for negotiating with housebuilders, helping colleagues describe specific concerns about layout or materials. In Canterbury, Jason Tsang’s work through design surgeries and live applications has similarly built confidence inside the planning team, giving officers a way to voice concerns before they are fixed in planning consents. Izzy’s placement sits in this legacy, where new skills and fresh perspectives can kickstart a new way of thinking inside the council.

For Izzy, who grew up in Newcastle, there is a particular satisfaction in seeing the Byker underpasses finished and enjoyed in ways that were planned and ways that could not have been predicted. “To see something so positively received by the local residents that helped design it,” she says, “it’s the best part of it.” The underpasses are one route through Byker, but they have given the council a method that can travel much further.