NewcastleGateshead

Indeed, it is said that the name ‘Geordie’ applied to the people of Newcastle comes from the city’s role in repelling the Jacobite Rebellions against George I in the 1700s. Long before this, Newcastle had grown into a city of some 10,000 people and was a major centre for trade in wool and coal, a centre of religion and a seat of learning. Its bridge, having been rebuilt on a number of occasions, was now lined with houses, three towers and a chapel. A disastrous flood in 1771 swept this bridge away and it was replaced with a stone bridge. However, the real problem was the steep winding streets squeezed between huddled buildings that led from either end of the bridge. The solution came in 1849 when the High Level Bridge, designed by Robert Stephenson, was opened. This was an engineering marvel, a bow-string girder bridge more than 26 metres above the high watermark that carried both the road and the new railway line high over the gorge. A few years later the low level bridge was replaced by the Swing Bridge, opened in 1876. This was funded by William Armstrong, who owned the Elswick arms factory. Using technology that he had developed to pivot large cannon, the bridge was the largest swing bridge in the world and allowed ships to reach the western part of the river (and his factory) for the first time. He would soon expand his business so that rather than just arming ships he started building them and would become one of the main shipbuilders on the Tyne.   The Tyne Bridge, designed by Mott, Hay & Anderson Engineers (now Mott MacDonald) has become the iconic bridge across the Tyne. It was opened in 1925 when the city was perhaps at the height of its powers. It had grown into a northern industrial powerhouse based upon heavy engineering, shipbuilding, glass and ceramics. It had also grown to dominate its surroundings, including the more impoverished Gateshead. By the 1960s, under its charismatic council leader T. Dan Smith, the city set out to transform itself into the ‘Brasilia of the North’. The planning department became the most important

part of the council and set about clearing the city’s slums, building extraordinary multi-level road systems and clearing ‘outdated’ parts of the city centre (see Grey Street page 174). Gateshead joined in with enthusiasm, sacrificing its town centre to elevated road schemes and the Get Carter Car Park, otherwise known as the Trinity Square scheme, a Brutalist shopping centre and multi-storey car park on the most prominent site in the town, with a restaurant on its top floor that was never occupied. The vacant unit was however used in a scene from the icon 1960s film ‘Get Carter’ staring Michael Caine.   Meanwhile, down in the gorge the riverside wharves had fallen into disuse and dereliction. This brings us to the final bridge in the NewcastleGateshead story. The Millennium Bridge, opened in 2001 and designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, completed the drama of the bridges of the Tyne. It was built as part of the NewcastleGateshead Quayside regeneration that has taken place over the last two decades. The Quayside won the Great Place award in the Academy of Urbanism’s second year and is written up in the Academy Book Urban Identity. It has once more shifted the focus of the city to the riverside, which has become the cultural heart of the city. The key developments include the Sage Gateshead, a concert hall and music venue that opened in 2004 and is home to the Royal Northern Sinfonia. Further down the quayside is the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, opened in 2002 in a former flour mill. This has grown into one of the most important contemporary arts spaces in the UK and hosted the Turner Prize in 2011, when the exhibition attracted more visitors than it does in London. Both of these institutions are in Gateshead and have for the first time in 2,000 years of history given Gateshead claim to equal billing with its upstart neighbour. So henceforth Gateshead will no longer be subsumed as a district of its neighbouring city like Westminster or Salford but, like Buda and Pest, will become one place. NewcastleGateshead may not be quite as poetic as Budapest but the joint billing has allowed both to thrive.