The inner-city riding club serving Newcastle’s youth

At Stepney Bank Stables, there are 20 horses. Each day, they trot around a dirt track, with tiered seating overlooking the large rectangular space, lit by the overhead skylights in the ceiling. It’s a scene that could easily be mistaken for a stables in the American Midwest, or the deep south, but it’s in fact located in the heart of Newcastle, in the North East of England.

Over the years, the Byker-Ouseburn site has become a key community hub, especially for sections of Newcastle’s youth. A legacy of the de-industrialisation of the Thatcher years, the North East remains one of the UK’s most deprived areas, with the North East Child Poverty Commission finding that 31% of all children in the region were living in poverty in 2023/2024 – a number that is on the rise.

On top of its regular programming, the Stepney Bank Stables is also a young people’s charity, running youth projects such as their Alternative Provision programme to support children who are struggling in mainstream education, while providing them with equine skills and a place to go away from school.

Now, the space and initiative forms the subject of a new experimental documentary by filmmaker Harry Lawson. Named Stepney Western, it follows some of the young people who frequent the stables, while providing a vision of its importance as a community space. Yet on top of its content, as its name suggests, Stepney Western is also shot and themed like a classic Western film.

“I went to school in Newcastle, so I knew of Stepney, but it was always from a distance – I didn’t set foot inside the stables until 2022,” Lawson explains. ​“I got in touch with them and said: ​‘I’d love to make a Western with the kids that you work with.’ It was also a cinematographic challenge – to make a Western in a tight space, without the expanse [that you would typically get in the USA].”

In preparation for the film, Lawson sat down to watch ​“40 or 50” classics of the genre and found certain threads running through them. Aside from the classics and clichés – revolvers, cowboy hats, bourbon, etc. – he saw thematic consistencies, which he realised lined up with the story of the Stepney and its community.

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“There are these thematic pillars to the Western, and if they don’t have them, it’s not a Western anymore,” he says. ​“They all have a frontier narrative, so the idea that land is up for grabs and they tussle over it – typically it’s a racist version of that historically, but the way I’ve mapped that onto Stepney Western is a gentrification story, so it’s the coffee shops instead of rancheros on horses.”

Throughout the film, there are visual hints towards the changing urban landscape in the centre of Newcastle, with an early scene featuring an archive voiceover that lays out plans for the ​“Ouseburn Development Strategy”. The area has been circled as a site for regeneration plans for decades, but it’s not only the types of businesses or properties springing up that are different, but also the people. Last year, Stepney Bank itself was saved from closure after launching a fundraising campaign, as costs have soared and income has tightened.

“Byker specifically is a place that’s gone through several cycles of regeneration – there was a notable one in the ​’70s and ​’80s where you have the knocking down of terraced houses and the building of the Byker Wall,” Lawson says. ​“It was a real cultural shift, but then today you have a way more subtle, and you could argue more insidious, form of gentrification – there isn’t one day the bulldozer comes in, just slowly but surely people are priced out of the area. With Ouseburn, kids from all over Newcastle come there, but it’s getting more and more expensive to go to restaurants and cafés, so there’s a tension there.”

On top of the shifting physical landscape, Lawson found that the Western theming also applied to the characters of the films. ​“Another pillar would be the idea of the outlaw,” he continues. ​“You pretty much always have got people living on the fringes, so typically that’s someone who’s a bandit or something like this. When I got to Stepney and got to grips with how the community operates and what they offer as a charity, there’s a clear mapping of the alternative provision to outlaws – you’re an educational outlaw because you have been cast aside from mainstream education.”

In Stepney Western, Lawson focuses the lens particularly on Ella, who had struggled with fitting in both at school and away from it. ​“She wasn’t getting GCSEs, and had run ins with the police, but then through a love of horses got equine care qualifications – on a deeper level, boiling the impact down to qualifications feels way smaller than I feel about it – but it gives exiled kids an opportunity to have a love affair with these horses that they have never had before.”

The film is currently showing at Newcastle Contemporary Art as the centrepiece of Lawson’s exhibition of the same name. Alongside a screening, it also features archive photography of Newcastle and the surrounding North East region. Hung at a deliberately lower height than usual to make the pictures accessible to children, there are images exploring local people and their relationships with horses from the past century, made by famous documentarians of the region including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tish Murtha and Chris Killip, alongside lesser known photographers such as David Pearson. Altogether, they situate Stepney Western within the long history of the North East, and in particular, its horse riding history.

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And like many of those photographers, Lawson’s film projects a lesser-seen side of the region. ​“The North East is a place that’s quite misunderstood in terms of its outside perception,” says Lawson. ​“There’s a Geordie Shore-esque image that does exist, but there’s so many other parts to it. The coast is completely beautiful, and I don’t think that beauty is people’s immediate image of the North East.

“And that’s one of the main goals of this project, which was to not add to what I call ​‘it’s grim up north’ aesthetics, which features so heavily across archives and implies that because there’s less money in the North East, life is shite,” he continues. ​“And that’s just not the experience I’ve had with these kids – they are completely bursting with life and enthusiasm.”

Stepney Western by Harry Lawson is on view at Newcastle Contemporary Art until April 26.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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