Newcastle upon Tyne

Tourist Information and Travel Guide

ABOVE: The Tyne Bridge, Newcastle's longtime symbol, was joined in 2001 by the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, a £22 million "tilting bridge" that carries pedestrians and cyclists to new museums and other attractions on the Tyne's south bank.

Until recently, Newcastle upon Tyne wasn't the most obvious of tourist destinations. In A Tale of Five Cities, published in 1980, John Ardagh described the city as "in some ways an archetype of the great blackened cities in the northern half of England." He writes:

There are many things I like and admire, even find inspiring, about Newcastle, and I do not deny that it has a stronger personality than any other big English town. But there are other things I find objectionable, even frightening. Sometimes, in the back-streets of slums, amid football crowds, or in dismal pubs with their beer spilt on the tables, and workers talking a language I could not follow, I even felt something of that Angst in the presence of an alien, vaguely menacing culture that I have felt in Moslem lands such as Iran or Algeria. (After all, Geordies treat their women in an almost Muslim manner!)

...The city looks distinctive, too. Its old mediaeval nucleus clambers up a cliff on the north bank of the Tyne, to surmount the brown, swirling, polluted river. Here, linking Newcastle to its historic rival on the south bank, Gateshead, are five bridges at different levels: the best known is the Tyne Bridge with its curving arch of steel rising to 170 feet, which served as a model for the similar-shaped but larger Sydney harbor bridge. Rising thus in tiers above the river, Newcastle gives a dramatic impression of elevation: it is one of the more imposingly situated of large English towns and sometimes dares compares itself with Edinburgh. The impression is also of blackness. As Toulouse and Bologna are pink, so Newcastle is grey-black; its older stone buildings, such as the mediaeval castle and the fine churches, are most of them darkened and grimed by two centuries of industrial smoke and coaldust. Some have recently been given a clean. But the blackness is considered so much a part of the city's male Nordic persona that façades of new offices are required by the planners to include black or grey parts.

In the nearly 25 years since Ardagh wrote his book, Newcastle (pronounced "Newcastle") has undergone many changes--from the wrenching economic hardships of the Margaret Thatcher years to recent investments of more than £3 billion in buildings, infrastructure, and culture. Yet several things remain constant: the warmth and un-English liveliness of its population ("Geordies," in local parlance), and the city's role as the metropolitan center of a region dotted by moors, castles, fishing villages, offshore wildlife sanctuaries, and the ancient Roman remnants of Hadrian's wall.

Next page: Practical advice for Newcastle

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