The Tyne Bridges and the Sage Concert Hall

An Ambitious City Region

The Tyne that divided Newcastle and Gateshead for centuries now joins them and has created an ambitious city region. The Millenium bridge that links the Baltic Gallery and the Sage Music Centre on the south bank with Newcastle’s bustling Quayside is a spectacular symbol of this integration. Newcastle Gateshead was originally a brand name coined in 2000, it was associated with the joint promotion of culture, business and tourism for the two councils. Although the joint bid for the 2008 European Capital of Culture lost out to Liverpool, there was no going back and in June 2009 both councils agreed to prepare a joint Core Strategy looking forward to 2030.It is a remarkable narrative and the most dramatic example in England of how arts investment can transform a post – industrial city.

During much of the latter part of the twentieth century Tyneside  was typical of the blighted post – industrial urban landscape found in many of England’s cities. In the 1960`s I worked in an ugly, modern office block (subsequently demolished to make way for the Sage) on the Gateshead bank of the river, by the Tyne bridge, and the whole area had a feeling of neglect and decay. Architecturally there is a huge difference between the two banks. Pevsner’s Buildings of England has more than ten times the number of pages devoted to Newcastle as Gateshead. Despite the municipal vandalism of the 1960’s the medieval and victorian character of Newcastle is very much evident. Much of Gateshead’s medieval heritage was destroyed by a catastrophic explosion in 1854  and the south bank was dominated by iron and coal production, locomotive works and cable manufacture. J B Priestley writing of Gateshead in his “ An English Journey “ ( 1934 ) said that “no true civilisation could have produced such a town “ adding that it appeared to have been designed  “ by an enemy of the human race “.Other than the charming old  town hall, the only significant building was the infamous brutalist Trinity Centre car park designed by Owen Luder and opened in 1967 as part of an abortive shopping precinct at it’s base. It gained iconic status in 1971 featuring in Michael Caine’s film Get Carter where it is the location for the scene where a corrupt property developer is thrown to his death off the top of the building. Despite Owen Luder’s best efforts to get the building listed, it was demolished in 2010 to make way for another shopping centre. This time it was to be developed by Tesco’s development arm Spenhill. They built a new town square, including shops, offices, a student village and a large new Tesco store, hotel and cinema- all of which were opened there years later in 2013. Imitating the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the enterprising council subsequently sold small pieces of the car park building as a souvenir for five pounds each.

 

The transformation of Tyneside

The transformation of Tyneside originally came not from arts investment but from the success of the Metro Centre. Located in Gateshead on a former industrial site close to the river, at the southern end of the Team Valley Trading Estate, the shopping centre, now the largest in the European Union, opened in 1986. The brain child of a local property tycoon (and a chairman of Newcastle Football Club) Sir

John Hall, who was financially backed by the Church of England Commissioners, it benefited from the land having been designated an Enterprize Zone in 1981. The tax breaks and freedom from planning controls gave it the impetus it needed. Despite it’s name it is not connected to the Metro, which was probably the single biggest public investment that boosted Tyneside, and the centre contributes to enormous traffic jams on the roads in the vicinity, particularly the Gateshead Western By-Pass, although this does not seem to lessen its commercial appeal.

 

Building on the success of the Metro Centre, and the Athletics Stadium pioneered by the former athlete Sir Brendan Foster, Gateshead Borough Council in 1990 embarked on the National Garden Festival spread over large tracts of former derelict land, but unlike previous festivals , this included a huge array of public art which proved enormously popular. This was to set the scene for the visit to Gateshead of the sculptor Anthony Gormley. His previous large project The Brick Man in Leeds had failed because the local council had got cold feet and failed to give it planning permission, but in Gateshead he found councillors as determined as he that is should go ahead. Facing down the criticisms, the 20 metre high sculpture was erected on a prominent site by the A1 trunk road. The statistics are impressive. Weighing some 200 tonnes of weather resistant steel containing copper , it was built at Hartlepool and towed on an enormous low loader to the site. The wing span at 54 metres wide is not far short of that of a jumbo jet, and the sculpture is visible from both the A1 and the East Coast mainline railway  from London to Edinburgh. Symbolically it is important because before it’s construction, a traveller first became aware that he was entering Tyneside when crossing one of the bridges over the Tyne. Now it is when the Angel of the North is first glimpsed.

Envious of Newcastle’s cultural icons, the Northern Sinfonia, the Theatre Royal and the Laing Art Gallery, Gateshead’s councillors decided to make a bid for the one billion Heritage Arts Lottery fund administered by the Arts Council . After all they now had a track record. The Gateshead Quays cultural quarter was the result. The Millenium bridge erected in 2001, and designed by Wilkinson Eyre Gifford & Partners won the James Stirling Prize for Architecture in 2002, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art was established in a converted flour mill to the design of the Ellis Partnership, and the Sage Concert Hall by Sir Norman Foster opened in December 2004.It’s curvaceous, bulbous shell like form replicates the curve of both the Tyne Bridge opened in 1928 and the Millenium bridge. Standing on this latest bridge viewing the panorama of the Gateshead Quays and Newcastle’s quayside is one of the finest urban experiences in England and a powerful demonstration of what inspired civic planning and iconic architecture can achieve. A further accolade was the recommendation in 2018 by travel publisher Rough Guides that Newcastle was named the world’s number one place to visit that year.

Brasilia of the North

For much of their history Newcastle and Gateshead rubbed along in a similar vein but in the early nineteenth century arms manufacture, ship building and coal exporting along the northern bank of the river Tyne grew in a dramatic manner. Britain’s empire was expanding together with its navy and merchant fleet. Newcastle’s population grew in response to this. With this wealth came the need for office building , hotels, a new railway station and the other hallmarks of an expanding economy. Fortunately Newcastle in the form of three men the architect John Dobson, the speculative builder Richard Grainger and the city’s town clerk John Clayton worked together to create what was quite novel at the time – a town centre from the start; the only one of its kind in England. While other examples of fine town planning such as in Bath or Bristol were for residential building, in Newcastle Grainger in the grounds of what had been a nunnery and a friary, created squares and avenues for commerce and an enormous covered market. The new town centre was built with great energy  in the course of five or six years by 1839.The architecture is classical and the tawny stone used solid and impressive. By not being a grid , it exploited the dramatic possibilities of the steep slope to the river and being set within an existing network of medieval and eighteenth century streets , if feels reassuringly part of the city’s history. Grey Street sweeping down from the Grey Monument past the Theatre Royal to the Tyne is one of the finest street scenes in England.