Newcastle has always had a reputation as a party city, of big nights out on the town. But behind the boisterous merrymaking lurks another place, rich in history, where sections of Hadrian’s Wall run through medieval ruins beneath elegant Georgian streets and disappear into modern shipyards. This is an industrial powerhouse with a proud tradition of innovation. It’s home to wonderful pieces of engineering (the great sweeping roof of Central Station, the Tyne bridges), as well as some of the widest urban green spaces on the planet – Town Moor is larger than New York’s Central Park. Since 2015, partly because of the work of fêted local chefs Terry Laybourne and Kenny Atkinson, the town has undergone a gastronomic revolution, with a food and bar scene that evolves so fast it’s hard to keep track. There’s an increasing celebration of art and culture, too – and all of it is done with the Geordie Nation’s celebrated egalitarian gusto and cheerfulness.
The Essentials
1. Visit the world’s most decorated farm building
In 1947, shortly before his death, the German artist Kurt Schwitters worked on the inside of a stone barn in Cumbria. When The Merz Barn began to deteriorate, a campaign was launched to have it moved somewhere safe. None of the big galleries in London stepped forward, so it was picked up by Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery, which provides an intimate setting for this great work by one of the giants of 20th-century art.
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2. Explore the Ouseburn
A few miles to the east of the city centre, Ouseburn is a microcosm of all the finest things about Newcastle’s modern food scene. Pick up great bread and cinnamon buns from Northern Rye, some serious patisserie from Dreamworld Cakes (the owners trained with much-respected pastry chef Michael Nadell), have a hipster brunch at The Kiln, sample fresh, inventive food at Anna Hedworth’s superb Cook House, drink at a couple of craft brewery taps and try a classic gelato at Di Meo’s.
3. Walk in a fantastical Victorian park
Jesmond Dene might have sprung from the imagination of JM Barrie. It was landscaped and planted in the 1860s by local munitions manufacturer Lord Armstrong, who imported sequoias, Atlantic cedars, Lombardy poplars and Spanish chestnut trees, and created pools and waterfalls by blasting the stream bed of the Ouseburn with his own explosives. He gave his extraordinary three-mile-long fantasy valley – home to kingfishers, nuthatches and woodpeckers – to the city in 1883.
4. Experience the buzzing quayside from a distance
Sometimes on a Saturday night in Newcastle you can feel like you’re the only person not wearing a pink cowboy hat or L-plates. To enjoy the deafening glory of what may be the world’s biggest stag and hen party without the need for ear plugs, walk across the low-level bridge to Gateshead and take a seat at an outside table at By the River Brew Co, a fabulous container-based bar right under the Tyne Bridge.
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5. Update your wardrobe in a leading menswear store
A decade ago the sales assistant in Stockholm’s Acne Studios reacted to news that I lived in Newcastle by saying, ‘I used to buy all my clothes from a shop there – End Clothing, do you know it?’ Back then, End was a secret for the sartorial cognoscenti. Lately word has got around, but it’s still one the best places in the world to discover the brands everyone else will be raving about in 18 months’ time.
6. Visit the market
Easily accessible by Metro, Tynemouth Market is open at weekends in a restored Victorian train station, selling crafts, plants, books, old postcards, curios, toys and bric-a-brac. If you get hungry, there are food stalls and an open-fire pizzeria, or you can head for the beach and have fish and chips at Riley's Fish Shack.
The Local Secrets
6. Have a cup of tea in a place of invention
Founded in 1793, The Literary and Philosophical Society was a centre of the industrial innovations that characterised Newcastle in the 19th century. George and Robert Stephenson were prominent members (the Stephenson’s Rocket locomotive was built a few hundred yards away from the Westgate Road premises) and the lecture theatre was the first public room in Europe to be lit by electricity – using member Sir Joseph Swan’s incandescent light bulbs. Today, the public are free to wander in, buy a cup of tea and sit in the leather armchairs among the burnished-wood bookshelves.
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7. See the city in black and white
The tiny Side Gallery is tucked away down an alley off Dean Street, almost in the shadow of the Tyne Bridge. It’s home to one of Britain’s finest collections of social documentary photography. You’ll find work here by Chris Killip, Graham Smith, Tish Murtha, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and others whose images chronicle life in the North East from the 1970s to the present day – a wonderful, often tough, always tender reflection of life in the region.
8. Go to the movies
Tyneside Cinema, built in 1930s as a newsreel cinema, has been restored in all its Art Deco glory. It has three screens and several good cafés and bars. Another great little independent is the Star and Shadow Cinema, which has a Compton Electrone organ among its attractions.
Pictured: the bar at Tyneside Cinema
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9. Climb the stairs with a film star
At one time there were more than 50 vertiginous flights of stairs linking Newcastle’s commercial centre to the quayside. Today three remain. Dog Leap Stairs, which run from Castle Garth to the Side, are the best used – though unlike the 18th-century Lord Eldon, nobody these days gallops up them on a horse. Castle Stairs lead from the Black Gate down to Sandhill. Long Stairs – from the Moot Hall to the 15th-century Cooperage – are well known to cineastes as the ones Michael Caine trots down in the 1971 film Get Carter.
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10. Try a brew in a tiny car-park coffeeshop
Over the past five years Newcastle has seen a rise in great coffee bars, with Pink Lane Coffee, Flat Caps and Ouseburn Coffee Co leading the way. None, though, is better – or tinier – than Hatch, a bijou temple of caffeine located in an old car-park attendant’s wooden hut on Ellison Place. The cheery owner and chief barista, Mark Briston, learned his trade in Melbourne and makes the best flat white in the city.
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11. Sup a pint with a view
The Free Trade Inn is a classic red-brick street-corner pub straight out of Our Friends in the North. There’s a great selection of local craft beer and on Wednesday nights the brilliant Scream For Pizza van parks up outside. The big draws, though, are the picture windows and garden looking out west along the river. Come here in the evening and you can watch the sun setting behind the Tyne bridges – surely one of the greatest sights in England.
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