NewBridge Gallery is now closed until Friday 16 October.
You can join us on 5 September and 3 October for Saturday Social. You can still shop NewBridge Books throughout the weekdays!
A Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden is a programme exploring our relationship to plant-life and land.
Join us for guided walks, skill-sharing with queer gardening club TopSoil, and study with artist and geographer Sage Brice.
Before its current name of ‘Northumbria’, in the 6th century Bernicia stretched from the River Forth to the River Tees. Today Bernicia’s Garden is a speculative, imagined land, an allotment plot, a hillside, a moorland, a river, a forest garden, filled with microbial kin, people, plants and animals. There are no enclosures. There are no landowners.
A Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden is a programme initiated by artist Holly Argent with The NewBridge Project’s Programme Committee, in which you are invited to walk, garden, and study with the land. Entangled with questions of intimacy, access, ownership, land rights, queer ecology and food sovereignty; these acts are always political.
The programme is intentionally slow and shaped around three public walks, a season of skill-sharing workshops with queer gardening group TopSoil; and a long-term research commission.
Poster design by Benji Spence.
Coming soon!
A Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden is inspired by the work of queer theorist Jack Halberstam and the idea of a ‘co-conspirator’ or collective study as a form of co-conspiracy not limited by discipline, specialism or institutional ideas of ‘success’. Our group of co-conspirators include gardeners, ecologists, walkers, queer folk, growers, herbalists, trespassers, and artists.
Co-conspirators are not limited by time or place and so may be found in the present or the past, and as both human and more-than-human forms. The plant-life and soil are also our co-conspirators, from which we have much to learn.
A time before enclosure, and before industrialisation, if a new Bernicia existed, how would we tend to it with care and curiosity, feel intimacy with it, act as its steward, and learn from its garden?
How might we manifest a reciprocal and connected relationship of care with our soil, gardens and plants?
Can we have intimacy with the land, know it deeply, and is this queer?
What does a culture of belonging and solidarity to land feel like today?
Departing from these questions we arrive at Bernicia’s Garden – our site of unlearning.
Like the library, archive or school, this site is shaped by the Enlightenment Project. The garden is not exempt from imperialist and capitalist drives for control, order, exploitation, speed, sterility, hierarchy and ‘achievement’. Take the lush green perfect British lawn, its design dictates it needs to be weed-free, neat and uniform. The Lawn is not only overly thirsty and lacking in wildlife and food but is a historic symbol of the wealth and nobility for landowners of the 18th Century, such as the Duke of Northumberland. Although now ubiquitous across homes in the UK that have the luxury of a garden, the lawn is a token of British colonial wealth, historically imposed around the world, dictating notions of the ‘wild’ and the ‘tamed’, destroying natural habitats, growing sites, and cultural practices of colonised lands.
With histories like these still shaping our physical landscapes and connections to land and plant life, can we un-learn dominant practices and attitudes, and find non-capitalist and non-heteronormative ways of relating to green spaces and plant life?
A Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden hopes to be a process of learning new skills, to study with the land, learning through the lens of ecology, food growing, horticulture, cultural history, and from current political movements and campaigns such as the Right to Roam, Rewilding, and Food Sovereignty.
Following in the footsteps of peasants’ revolt against landowners and conditions of work, we choose to work slowly over three seasons, prioritising embodied learning and ephemeral activities, over fixed projects and outcomes.
Join us as a co-conspirator to unlearn by walking, skill-sharing and gardening together.
NewBridge has additional funding for access, to support people delivering and taking part in our programmes.
We have small access bursaries available to support people to take part in the public walks. This is a no questions asked process and we can support requests of up to £50 per person.
This fund can cover costs towards circumstances that might otherwise make it difficult for you to attend. For example: travel costs within Tyneside and the surrounding area to get you to and from the event, child-care costs, percentage toward loss of income for the time period of the event. You don’t need to share any evidence with us, just let us know that you need support to attend the walk. To claim the bursary you will then need to provide an invoice.
A Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden is taking place outside, specific details about what to expect, access, and practicalities will be shared on each event page soon. Please get in touch with us on admin@thenewbridgeproject.com to make a request for support or if you have any questions.
NewBridge has a Safer, Braver Spaces policy. Everyone here treats each other with respect and consideration. Transphobia, misogyny, racism or harassment of any kind is not welcome.
A Revolt in Bernicia’s Garden at The NewBridge Project, a programme exploring our relationship with plant life and the land. Developed by artist Holly Argent with The NewBridge Project’s Programme Committee.
September 2025 – April 2026
Free
The NewBridge Project
Shieldfield Centre
4-8 Clarence Walk (off Stoddart Street)
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 1AL
The NewBridge Project is accessible. You can find out more here, or feel free to contact us prior to visiting if you require additional information regarding access and facilities.
The NewBridge Project is a charity, registered charity no. 1173849.
We are grateful to our funders, including Arts Council England, Newcastle City Council, Garfield Weston Foundation, Jerwood Foundation, Community Foundation North East, Newcastle University and the The North East Mayoral Strategic Authority.
We are proud to be a Gallery of Sanctuary.
