In Every Dream Home a Heartache – Roxy Music, 1973
Arnold Schwarzenegger lived down my street when I was a child. This isn’t a joke, so don’t wait for a punchline.
I grew up on Garden Farm Estate in Chester-le-Street, a relatively new housing estate and like many in the North East at the time it had a mix of people —not too posh, not too poor. There was a concrete parade of shops and a couple of typical flat-roofed estate pubs.
Two vivid memories stand out from my time there. The first is of the Red Lion, where my mum, her sister, and my gran would drink what I now know to be Cinzano Bianco, always served with a glacé cherry on a plastic sword. I ate the cherries, savouring their sweetness mixed with the bitterness of the Cinzano.
The other memory is of the police coming to our street.
I had a toy police car that I treasured, and I would sit at the living room window, pushing it along the ledge while watching real cars—mostly Vauxhall Vivas, Ford Cortinas, and Austin Allegros—drive past. One day, as I moved my toy police car, an identical real-life police car rolled up the street in perfect synchronisation. It felt magical, as if I had summoned it into existence.
Then, to my delight, a real policeman stepped out. He went into our neighbour’s house, handcuffed him, and led him away.
This was the beginning of the Poulson scandal. For those outside the North East or from a younger generation, it was a massive political corruption scandal—one that inspired the TV show Our Friends in the North and played a part in shaping Get Carter.
The key figures were John Poulson, a developer and owner of Systems Building Ltd, and T. Dan Smith, the former Labour leader of Newcastle City Council. The North East was undergoing a building frenzy, replacing old slum housing with entire new communities—Newton Aycliffe, Peterlee, and Killingworth were meant to be the Brasília of the North, ultra-modernist towns of the future. But behind it all was a web of corruption and backhanders. Garden Farm was one of theirs.
Poulson and Smith went to prison, as did my neighbour, who had been the chair of the planning committee that approved the Garden Farm development in exchange for a bribe. Not only was he arrested in a building he had been bribed for, but he was tried in one too. Even Conservative Home Secretary Sir Reginald Maudling would have faced prison had ill health not spared him.
To be fair to Poulson and Smith, their business model wasn’t so different from the one that later earned plenty of architects and developers OBEs in the Thatcherite ‘80s.
In Every Dream Home a Heartache was released just as we were leaving Garden Farm. Bryan Ferry was from nearby, and his dad worked in the collieries with my grandad. Ferry studied at Newcastle University under pop artist Richard Hamilton—who inspired the song’s title—and Victor Pasmore, who contributed artworks to the very developments shaped by Poulson and Smith’s corruption. Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee remains a true work of genius, even if the locals don’t always appreciate it as much as visitors do.
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Victor Pasmore, The Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee (photo taken during Lumiere light art biennial)
Ferry’s dad was in charge of the pit ponies, and many find it odd that a miner’s son ended up dressing like a space-age French duke. But to people from my background, his tailoring made perfect sense. Many of my relatives had worked in service, and for generations, the best-dressed people in England weren’t the upper classes, but the working-class men and women who laundered their clothes and dressed them. The upper classes were eccentric, the middle classes neurotic—agonising over the right cummerbund for a Rotarian dinner dance—while the working classes simply got on with dressing right.
And Arnie? How did he end up on Garden Farm?
At the end of our street lived the Citrone family, who ran an ice cream parlour. I was friends with one of the sons—an easy friendship, given his dad owned an ice cream shop. The father, Tony Citrone (yes, really), had made his fortune as a circus strongman. He could even blow up a hot water bottle like a balloon—apparently an incredibly dangerous feat.
In the early ‘70s, when Schwarzenegger first entered elite bodybuilding competitions, there were very few big muscle gyms. He came to Garden Farm for a few months to train with Tony and learn the secrets of the old-fashioned strongmen.
I am sure, looking back, it all makes perfect sense.