London to Newcastle isn't rated among the world's great train journeys, but for any returning native of the northeast there are sights along the line that will elevate the spirits. I start to feel my heart lift as the train passes the modest brick HQ of North East Granite Co—maybe because I find something nearly poetic in that plain trading name, but mainly because I know we're now at Langley Moor, County Durham. (Two miles east over green fields is High Shincliffe, the suburb where Tony Blair spent his boyhood.) In short order thereafter come some of the major landmarks of the region—Durham city's magisterial Norman cathedral, then Penshaw Monument, a homage to the Reform Act of 1832, blackened down the decades by industrial cinders. From these sights the curious stranger may get some sense of how heftily church and industry have left their mark on the territory.
A few minutes further on and Gateshead is announced by Antony Gormley's Angel of the North. And this is where I gather up my bags, for we are now approaching Newcastle. Presently the view opens out on to the River Tyne, and the traveller is met by the splendid panorama of Newcastle's Quayside, its fulcrum the great radial green-steel arch of the Tyne Bridge. Throughout the early 20th century, visitors would be struck by their first sight of this waterfront, and the way it had been blackened by the clanking, grinding industries—coalmining, shipbuilding, heavy engineering—that had helped Tyneside prosper. Lord Armstrong's Elswick works alone turned out cranes, bridges, warships and ordnance, and there was something compelling in this colossal display of carboniferous capitalism. The rest of the century was a tale of industrial decline—first by degrees, then leaps and bounds. Now when fresh eyes alight upon the Tyne they will see a rather arty-party sort of town, albeit one eager to say it is still open for business.
If many of our great northern cities have been polished up for the post-industrial age, none shines quite so brightly as Newcastle. The Quayside—now a landscaped leisure sector of raucous bars and gleaming apartment blocks—has been crucial in reimagining Newcastle for locals and tourists alike. I can still recall my surprise on seeing it in 1992 after a gap of three or four years. In the interim, the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, a thoroughly Thatcherite project in this Labour "heartland," had attempted to jumpstart a form of "regeneration" by enticing private developers with public funds, and some prime river-fronting industrial sites had been turned into office space and luxury flats.
1992 also saw the publication of Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, a thoughtful volume of essays on northeast identity co-edited by local academics Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster. In his own essay, Colls sounded the sad note of time's passage: "The landscape which first signified the region as a labour region—cranes, hulls, factory chimneys, pit winding gear—has all but vanished. The day is not far off when only the Tyne Bridge will remain."
But when that bridge went up in 1928, the great depression was at the door, heavy industry increasingly associated with ill health and economic precariousness. Eighty years on, if coal and ships have gone for good and more Geordies work in shops than in factories, is that such a sorry plight? Are things not in relatively clean and serviceable order? Or is there some sense that Newcastle ought to be more than this? And if so, what?
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For my part, I was just a child when my father's work took our family from Durham to Northern Ireland, where I grew up. In those years I was only an occasional visitor to the northeast, but Newcastle was always the main attraction—there was something engaging and impressive about the city, its people and its past. I continued to feel this even as Newcastle began to change, far faster than I could comprehend.
This feeling of slightly confused homecoming probably fed into the protagonist of my recent novel Crusaders—John Gore, a thirtyish Anglican clergyman from Durham who travels to Newcastle in the autumn of 1996 with the task of "planting" a new church congregation in the city's deprived west end. Gore's mission is a sort of return engagement with a place he (wrongly) believes he knows well, and some sharp exchanges with local people soon make him appreciate that Tyneside has a limited tolerance for dewy-eyed exiles. Political economy has exacted a price on the city in recent decades, and behind Geordie pride can be detected notes of great disillusionment and bitterness. "Most of the people who bang on about the wonders of the northeast read the Guardian and have jobs to match," is how a shipyard welder called Terry Telford phrased it for the Daily Mirror in 2006, as the once great Tyneside yard of Swan Hunter was shut down. "If I were in my twenties," Telford said, "I'd move south." And yet for the new Newcastle there seems to be a good deal of traffic in the opposite direction.
My latest trip to Newcastle is for the purpose of giving a reading from Crusaders in the august setting of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. The institute's Neville Hall is an Edwardian lecture theatre styled after the wood-panelled gravitas of the Royal Society of Medicine. There, standing at a gargantuan lectern, a heavy gavel by my hand should order need restoring, I chat away to 60 or so bookish Geordies who have given their Saturday afternoon to hear about my novel. Around the walls of the chamber, a gallery of whiskered and high-collared gentlemen stare down at us from their portraits.
The Mining Institute is now a world away from the post-industrial city outside its doors. Robert Colls has written glowingly of the rich "associational life" formed in the late 19th century out of the fellowship of working men—"from the co-operatives to the trade unions, from the chapels to the friendly societies, from the institutes to the sports clubs." The traces of this tradition are still evident in unlikely spots round the region. Last December I chaired a literary event at Sunderland FC's Stadium of Light, a big modern ground built on the site of Wearmouth Colliery. Passing through the fancy main reception I was surprised to see up on a wall the old colliery's marching banner, depicting men in black suits debating around a table, and inscribed with the legend "Let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18).
That banner in Sunderland reminded me that the northeast was once a hotbed of the self-educated working man, drawn to good books and culture in whatever spare time he could find. T Dan Smith, the crooked Trotskyite painter and decorator who ran Newcastle city council in the 1960s, often cited his miner father's keen study of Plato, and lamented that with a bit more encouragement he himself might have been a concert violinist.
This theme found a popular expression in Billy Elliot, in which a Durham miner crosses a picket line during the strike of 1984-85 so that his son can get to London and train as a ballet dancer. The film's creator, Lee Hall, claimed inspiration in a comment of Arthur Scargill's that works of "music, poetry, writing, sculpture" were lying "dormant" in working people because of the grind of their lives. Once coalmining and shipbuilding had been killed off in the northeast it was felt that Newcastle had to find a new productive hub—it had to be a City of Something—and arts and culture were a good bet to start filling the void. In Newcastle today, you can no longer move without tripping over publicly funded art.
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My reading done, I take a stroll down to the Tyne and cross by the footway of the Swing Bridge to Gateshead, where "regeneration" has been managed a bit more artfully than on the opposite bank. Gateshead can boast the cultural crown jewels of the Baltic art gallery, the Sage music hall and the elegant Millennium Bridge. The construction of the Norman Foster-designed Sage alone received £47m in subsidy from the Arts Council. To Gateshead's chagrin, all of this still tends to be perceived as "Newcastle Quayside," but the borough has pulled off a neat rebranding, and a riposte to JB Priestley's infamous characterisation of the place as "a dirty little back lane out of Newcastle."
At the Sage café I have a nice latte and a bacon sandwich while savouring the panoramic view of the Tyne. Flicking through its musical programme, I note that the Northern Sinfonia offers recitals of Haydn and Mozart, but there is popular fare too: the left-wing country rocker Steve Earle passes by en route to rehearsal, swinging his guitar case. Clearly there is an effort to meet a wide range of tastes. I discussed how successful this has been with Jonathan Blackie, an affable Scotsman who is director of the Government Office for the North East and doubles up as chairman of the literary body New Writing North. Blackie told me a rueful tale of how in 2005 David Miliband was visiting a secondary school in Walker, a working-class suburb of Newcastle. "Miliband asked the pupils, 'Hands up who goes to the Sage?' Not one hand. The attitude was 'It's not for us, it's for them.' And he turned to us and said, 'I think you've got a bit of work to do…'"
Next door to the Sage is the Baltic gallery, whose programming, on the evidence of my few visits, tends to favour conceptual art and installation pieces. It is an old quip already, but I've always felt that the view from the gallery's stairwell is the best thing on display: more stirring than a video installation I once wandered through, based on looped images of bored kids trashing a parked car, and some wall-projected comments about the deprivation of Newcastle's west end—Elswick, Cruddas Park, Benwell, Scotswood. This terrain is where the priest protagonist of Crusaders comes to start up his urban mission. The action of my novel concludes in 1997 and although in recent years Newcastle's regeneration has enjoyed some success, parts of Elswick, Benwell and Scotswood, Byker—and all of Walker—still rank among the most deprived areas in Britain.
There were youth riots back in 1991 in Meadow Well, North Shields, which spread westerly to Scotswood. Subsequent regeneration efforts have been strongly refocused on these areas of multiple deprivation: it is reckoned that £500m has been spent on the west end alone over the last 25 years.
For a long time, the debate around urban regeneration in Newcastle has weighed the question of what new industry could truly replace the old. A dark-horse contender would be urban regeneration itself, which employs a lot of people these days. The process has been controversial at times, as one would expect when the powers-that-be decree that backward areas are in need of forward thinking, whatever the people who live there think.
Two and a half miles out of the city centre, Scotswood feels eerily sparse and depopulated, though it has a long-standing core of residents. But bulldozers have been busy here of late. The council hopes to bring an international housing exposition ("Expo 2010") to Scotswood: the plan is for 2,000 new properties, earmarked for both buyers and renters and it is hoped that these will attract young working families seeking an attractive new home at a better price than is available in the plusher parts of North Tyneside. Some people don't like these efforts to import the middle class, and the phrase "social cleansing" gets bandied about. Then again, there's a lot to be gained from being middle class. Newcastle's director of public health, Danny Ruta, recently advised the council that men born in Byker have an average life expectancy of just 66.7 years. Only a few miles north in affluent South Gosforth, that average shoots up to 79.3—the highest in the city. This is not because of something favourable in the water.
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Those who imagine Newcastle to be "mono-class"—a bastion of the white proletariat—can be disabused in a trice by taking a tour through well-heeled North Tyneside, South Gosforth and West Jesmond, where the lawyers and accountants and senior public servants live. The city's two universities are the gateway to this belt, nestled happily at the foot of the civic greenery of Town Moor. Head further north to Ponteland and you will observe the great estates of Newcastle United's priciest-ever players, Alan Shearer and Michael Owen. It's because of such scenery that Newcastle is increasingly touted as a beacon for that mobile cohort of the educated workforce seeking "quality of life."
But sober analysis says there has been no real restructuring. While the northeast economy has improved since 1997, it remains rooted to the foot of the English league table. This is a place where people in work generally prefer to work for somebody else and the public sector accounts for 30 per cent of employment. All those shiny new flats on the Quayside were expected to house an army of young urban professionals, but they are rumoured to be 70 per cent vacant at any time. Small business and entrepreneurialism are meagre here. The Sunday Times's recent list of the 100 fastest-growing British companies numbers not one from the region. And yet the two key targets of regional economic strategy are 20,000 more new businesses, and 70,000 more jobs. To echo Miliband, there's more work to do here too.
Twelve months ago, Newcastle could boast three local FTSE 100 firms: Sage the software designer, whose funding put the cap on the music hall; Barratt the housebuilder; and the then-expanding mortgage lender Northern Rock, an amalgam of small building societies that de-mutualised back in 1997. But then last autumn saw the financial crisis that led to a run on the Rock, and the humiliation of a board that boasted some of the grand old names of Northumbrian gentry: Fenwick, Pease and Ridley (in the shape of Matt Ridley, eminent zoologist, free marketeer and heir to a viscountcy).
Northern Rock's debacle has dented the idea that key-pushing can supersede metal-bashing on Tyneside. Local pride in the Rock masked the fact that Newcastle is otherwise weak on financial/professional services and far stronger on call centres. (If your mobile phone is Orange, you probably talk to a lot of Geordies.)
Where Geordies do top national league tables is in rates of smoking, binge-drinking and obesity (most alarmingly in children). Newcastle is mad for sport, but evidently not enough of the populace will take exercise. Meanwhile, Geordie hedonism has become fabled; Newcastle is Britain's city of choice for stags and hens. The downside of this knees-up image is the spectre of problem drinking, though Newcastle's weekend binge is hardly so different from that indulged in across the length of the land. The Quayside simply offers a fancier backdrop against which to throw back those cut-rate pints and spirits.
***
In the course of a recent visit to some regeneration projects in Walker, I met Betty and Brian Cheetham, an affable pension-age couple on a redeveloped housing estate. Brian used to work in the great engineering firm of Parsons, north of Walker in Heaton, polishing blades for steam turbines. ("Parsons was massive, man. You'd six hundred men just in the blade shop, two on every machine.") He took retirement only after three brain haemorrhages, one heart attack, a mild stroke and then a bad one. "So I had to chuck it, but"—and he makes an open-handed gesture—"I'm still here." As Brian offered me a smoke, Betty took up her husband's story: "All the men round here either worked in the shipyard or Parsons. Then as the years went by the mothers started going out to work. Now you've got a generation that's never worked—young fit lads sitting on their backsides."
Betty's analysis reminded me that the industrial glory of the northeast was founded on male labour. Nowadays women comprise a full half of the Geordie workforce. But as Elaine Knox put it politely in Colls's and Lancaster's Geordies, the mores of the region remain "distinctly masculine."
Metropolitan scholars can be tough on the white working class, and in private conversations I have heard it argued that Newcastle has suffered too long for a want of diversity—for being a male-dominated culture without ethnic minorities. (The northeast is more ethnically homogeneous than most places: at the 2001 census, its proportion of white British residents was greater, at 96.4 per cent, than any other region.) If Newcastle's economic fortunes are to be revived, there is perhaps a case for a diversification of the Geordie nation. After all, even coalmining in its late 19th-century heyday didn't find a readily available Geordie workforce: mining was itinerant labour. Today new labourers arrive from eastern Europe, though their integration is not always seamless.
Jonathan Blackie agrees that diversity is a desirable economic driver. His daughter lives on Newcastle's legendary Byker Wall housing estate, among 34 different nationalities. "She's learned a lot about Eritrea," Blackie says. But in Newcastle the ghosts of a more settled past do linger, and periodic bursts of euphoria suggest that they might live again. (Kevin Keegan's return to manage Newcastle United is one such fantasy that soon collided with reality.) Even after shipbuilding was finished on Tyneside, there were hopes that ship outfitting, repair and conversion could extend the life of the yards into the future. But the mothballing of Swan Hunter put an end to that aspiration. Then last Christmas the Newcastle Journal reported on "Coal's great comeback" speculating on the potential of the "clean coal" technology of carbon capture and storage (CCS)—sometimes known as carbon sequestration. But CCS won't reopen the old pits or require the hire of a vast workforce. Just as Keegan's Newcastle will not storm the summit of the Premier League in the foreseeable future, King Coal is not about to redeem the Geordie economy.
That said, there are sources of employment by the river that have more permanence to them than call centres. Walker now has a thriving riverfront technology park given over to the offshore oil and gas sector, hosting Shepherd Offshore management, Wellstream pipe systems and Duco umbilicals. All three firms are expanding, and offer a better bet for a steady job in the marine business than having to rely on the ministry of defence for a big shipbuilding contract. But the offshore sector is unlikely to be a major player any time soon, at least in terms of long-term employment prospects.
***
To return to my original question—is Newcastle really in need of some grand new productive vision for the sake of its future growth? Or could it not just get by on the strength of proven local resilience and the fact that it was as quick to come to terms with deindustrialisation as it was to spearhead the industrial revolution? I would like to think the latter. But since culture and nightlife can't sustain a local economy, Newcastle may just have to become a City of Something Else, whether its inhabitants like it or not. Any takers for biotechnology?
It was in December 2004 that Gordon Brown, as chancellor, designated Newcastle a "science city," the inspiration being certain US cities where science quarters sited in central locations develop commercial applications of research. Newcastle University is already an acclaimed centre for research in stem cells, genetics, and ageing and health and was a willing partner with the council and the regional development agency in a new venture labelled "Science Central," to be built on a 22-acre site that was formerly home to the Scottish & Newcastle Brewery. The wager here is that Newcastle can become the nation's cutting-edge home of bio and nanotechnologies, those prospective sunrise industries of 21st-century capitalism.
Can Science Central really create scores of science-based businesses and thousands of hi-tech jobs in Newcastle? Newcastle's secondary schools will have to brush up their science results if this workforce of the future is to be locally sourced. Nevertheless, just beyond the Science Central site are the deprived wards of Elswick and Cruddas Park, and you can imagine them waiting for the regenerative tide to roll out a little further west. Newcastle will manage, one feels, if it can forge new kinds of living while hanging on to the ones it already has in the service sector. And if a shining citadel of the knowledge economy can also offer prospects to people less skilled or educated, then that would certainly merit a measure of Geordie pride.
