As anyone who has ever arrived in Newcastle by rail from the south will know, the city is instantly recognisable by the distinctive bridges that come into view as the train, having passed through Gateshead, takes a final sharp turn and crosses the river to reach the main Central Station on the north side of the Tyne.

In a one-mile stretch from the Redheugh Bridge [Mott, Hay and Anderson, 1983] in the west to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge [WilkinsonEyre, 2001] in the east, there are seven bridges in total. Two of these move: swinging and tilting to allow for the passage of watercraft, while the other five soar high above the river itself, leaving space for ships to pass beneath without disrupting the flow of vehicles and trains that criss-cross the valley. The north quayside mainly comprises eighteenth- and nineteenth- century buildings in golden sandstone, once shipping offices and warehouses, many now converted into apartments, hotels and bars. These are interspersed with some late 20th century additions, including Newcastle’s Law Courts. The south quayside is architecturally quite different, characterised by contrasting large structures, including the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in a converted 1950s flour mill; the low-rise Royal Navy Reserve Unit called HMS Calliope, and the jewel in Gateshead’s architectural crown, the glass and steel undulating curves of the voluminous Sage Gateshead music centre, designed by Foster and Partners, and opened in 2004.

Despite a background rumble of roads and railways of the bridges above, the banks of the river are themselves primarily places of calm these days, save for a few hours of revelry on a Friday and Saturday evening. The main town centres of Newcastle and Gateshead are further up the banks on either side of the Tyne. Yet their Quaysides are densely layered with history, for there has been concerted human presence in this riverside area – industrious, assertive and often noisy – for nearly two millennia. At any point in this history, the people who lived and worked there could never have prophesied how this waterfront might transform, sometimes overnight.

Today, the river ebbs and flows swiftly, rising and falling with the North Sea tides in a deep channel between hard embankments. In the first century BCE, however, it would have been a braided channel of shingle banks, reed beds and small eyots. At the bottom of a steep wooded gorge was the point closest the sea – albeit still around 10 miles away – where it would be possible for Roman military engineers to cross the Tyne using the same technology that spanned the Tiber and the Thames.

The settlement that grew to the north of the crossing was a different proposition to Rome or London, however. Rather than a central seat of governance, this was a frontier point, at the edge of the civilised world. To the south of the bridge was a smaller settlement whose name at that time is now lost. Crossing the river northwards would mean… going where, exactly? The first Tyne Bridge, roughly where the low-lying Swing Bridge is today, and the small garrison that rose above it to the north were named Pons Aelius after the family of Hadrian. It was possibly declared open by the Emperor himself when he visited to inspect the new fortifications that crossed the narrowest part of Britannia [Hadrian’s Wall] and which demarcated the limits of Rome. One imagines the sounds of these Roman Army troops, perhaps marching to keep warm, stationed at the farthest northern edges of the vast Roman empire. But what would come next?

After the Romans. a small Saxon town called Munuccaester [‘Monkchester’] evolved on the steep north bank, while the few dwellings to the south were sustained by forestry and farming. The first recorded mention of Gateshead is in the writings of the Venerable Bede who referred to an Abbot of Gateshead called Utta in 623. Bede was based a few miles further east along the Tyne in the monastery at Jarrow, which, along with nearby Monkwearmouth monastery, was the centre of Anglo-Saxon learning until it was destroyed in a ninth-century Viking raid.

Monkchester was itself destroyed shortly after the Norman conquest of England, but its geographical logic as a crossing point of the river could not be denied. By 1172, the Castle Keep [the oldest structure visible from the Quayside today] replaced the wooden Norman fort with an imposing stone structure, which became the central landmark and gave its name to a growing fortress town: Newcastle. By 1250, the makeshift and often short-lived bridges that had crossed the river since Roman times were replaced by a structure in stone. Similar to Old London Bridge, it was inhabited, with haphazard dwellings and a chapel above its arches. One span opened as a drawbridge, not for defence but to allow the passage of larger boats upstream. 

Newcastle, and increasingly Gateshead, grew as thriving commercial towns, with their centres of gravity directly on the river. It is still possible to imagine old textures of trade and entertainment in the winding streets north of the river – Sandhill and Side – if not the sounds of industry: hammers, furnaces, looms, and the shaking of ships rigging in the breeze. South of the river, almost nothing remains to suggest the same clamour, Gateshead’s urban heart having long shifted further south. The large parish church of St Mary, [now a heritage centre], is the only trace of a once-densely inhabited neighbourhood of tall tenements, courtyards and narrow, steep lanes running down to the river known across the North East as ‘chares’.

If Newcastle and Gateshead owe their existence to the bridge, their prosperity largely stemmed from the Quayside itself. Coal was mined throughout the region from ancient times, and various settlements along the river to the coast sprang up to export it by sea, chiefly to London, which came to rely on the Tyne as its power source. By a Royal Command of 1530, Newcastle gained a monopoly over this trade. Henceforth, coal exported from the Tyne could only be loaded at the Quayside, which included staiths leased on the Gateshead bank. Four years later, the largest mine owners – the monasteries – were dissolved, their assets passing to the merchant class who already controlled their export. Although mining was not done within the ancient town walls themselves, vast amounts of coal now passed exclusively through Newcastle’s jurisdiction, hence the proverbial futility of carrying it there. Coal was carried in small rowing boats called keels out to the waiting coastal colliers, a trade recalled in a popular folk song, ‘The Keel Row’. Aside from its material traces in the landscape, Tyneside’s rich industrial heritage is recalled strongly in music.

As well as powering London, a ready supply of fuel brought industry to the Quayside itself. Raw materials arrived as ballast in the returning colliers: iron ore, lime and sand. On Gateshead Quays, archaeologists are currently excavating traces of an iron works dating to the middle ages. In subsequent centuries, Newcastle became renowned for high-quality flint glass, while Gateshead developed engineering and chemical industries and, in 1831, a locomotive factory which was to become the town’s largest employer. Great dynasties of the Industrial Revolution – the Stephensons who designed the High Level Bridge in 1849, the Hawks who supplied its 5050 tonnes of cast iron, the Newalls, whose submarine telegraph cables launched a global communications revolution – all projected their might from the Tyne’s scrubby slopes. Perhaps the epitome of innovation was William Armstrong, whose commercial empire began with his invention of a hydraulic crane on the Quayside, before his inventions in arms and artillery ushered in a world-changing epoch of industrialised warfare. His most tangible legacy on Tyneside is arguably the Swing Bridge [1876], which is thought to cross the river at the same point as the Roman’s Pons Aelius.

Gateshead’s industrial dynamism was reflected in rapid urban transformation. Where the Sage Gateshead now stands was once the rectory of the parish church, described in 1834 as ‘commodious… with gardens and a fine view across the river’. Five years later, the gardens had become a gasworks. The rector moved out, the house later becoming a pub, then Gateshead’s first Co-op store and eventually a railway storeroom. By the mid-nineteenth century, the winding streets around Gateshead Quayside – Oakwellgate, Hillgate, Pipewellgate and Bottle Bank – were heavily populated slums, cheek by jowl with factories and warehouses. Two of these buildings, located where the south eastern tower of the Tyne Bridge rises today, were to prove fateful.

Just after midnight on 9 October 1854, a fire broke out at Wilson’s Worsted Manufactory. Wool and oil fed the flames and soon the mill was an inferno. Next door stood Charles Bertram’s Bonded Warehouse, a robust structure designed to store combustible and explosive materials safely. Its proximity to the first fire caused sulphur in the building to melt and ignite, sending vivid blue flames and molten brimstone pouring from the windows. By three o’clock, large crowds had gathered to witness the eerie glow and to observe the efforts of firefighters and Bertram himself to contain the blaze. A series of small explosions were heard, followed suddenly by a cataclysmic detonation that was heard forty miles away in Alnwick and by miners deep underground at Monkwearmouth. Fifty-three people, the youngest aged six, died in the blast and falling masonry damaged buildings up to half a mile away. St Mary’s Church was wrecked, the graveyard torn up and the tower clock stopped at ten-past-three. Most of Hillgate was razed to the ground, as were most buildings across the river, on the shore directly opposite the blast.

What remained of the heart of old Gateshead disappeared in the early twentieth century. Factories could not expand on the confined site by the river, with the locomotive works closing for this reason in 1910. Construction of the New Tyne Bridge [Mott, Hay and Anderson, 192] cleared what remained of Hillgate. Housing legislation in 1930 gave the borough new powers to demolish slums and whole areas of housing were levelled. Even today, nothing but woodland remains where Pipewellgate once stood, and until the turn of the 21st century, most of the Gateshead Quayside had a similarly deserted appearance. A large flour and animal feed mill was built by J. Arthur Rank in the 1930s [Gelder and Kitchen, completed 1950], one of a number of such structures along the Tyne, but the industrial character of this section of the river had fundamentally changed, in parallel to the North East’s economic decline as a mining and manufacturing centre. Thatcherism left much of the town as a wasteland, a crisis so deep that by the mid-1980s there was an impetus for targeted reinvestment and revival. A few miles upstream, Gateshead became home to Europe’s largest shopping centre in 1986 – The MetroCentre – a development that, foreseeably enough, sapped further strength from the old town centre. Apart from a few pubs and the ‘Tuxedo Princess’, a famous floating nightclub in a decommissioned ferry, the Quayside was not a place most people cared to venture.

In 1967, the architectural historian Ian Nairn had written of ‘superlative’ Newcastle in his survey Changing English Towns. He saw in the city what he termed an architectural polyphony of ‘steps, Quay market alleys, smooth classical buildings, railway bridges, all in the same view’. Despite being relatively prosperous compared to its southern neighbour, Newcastle also faced challenges to evolve and prosper in the late twentieth century. Nairn saw development of Newcastle’s Quayside as essential to any revival, the success of which would depend on a similar juxtaposition of strong forms. His prophecy was to be taken up from the 1990s, with a series of new buildings such as the Law Courts [Napper Collerton, 1990] and the Pitcher and Piano bar [Panter Hudspith, 1997], and conversions of existing structures such as the Cooperative Society’s imposing warehouse [Louis Gustave Mouchel, 1902], the oldest surviving ferro-concrete building in Britain, which became a Malmaison hotel in 1996. The construction of a new footbridge, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, would link these developments to even more ambitions schemes across the river.

Like much of the North East of England, Gateshead still identifies closely with an industrial past that visibly informs Geordie culture and geography. Pride and nostalgia are connected, by many, with an understated mourning for lost working-class identities. But it was clear for decades that the region would no longer be synonymous with coal, nor with steel and shipbuilding. Through times of great economic adversity, a vision of a possible future began to reshape Gateshead’s public face. Tyneside’s local authorities and their combined public transport network came to prioritise art as a tool of renewal. Gateshead Council especially, with its Art in Public Places programme, began to install numerous public art works ‘as a symbol of confidence in its landscape, its people and its future’.

Public art featured extensively at the 1990 National Garden Festival in Gateshead and in 1993, future Turner Prize-winner Antony Gormley exhibited his installation Field for the British Isles at the old locomotive works. Five years later, Gormley’s Angel of the North sculpture was erected on the southern edge of the town on an old mine shaft, fabricated at a steelworks in nearby Hartlepool, an ambitious statement of cultural intent. Initially attracting controversy for its cost and appearance, the Angel is now a source of immense local pride – an icon of the North East that visually represents the whole region, living up to its claim to be the most recognisable public artwork in the UK.

The next phase of Gateshead’s cultural vision was to transform the Quayside itself. The derelict Rank flour mill was transformed into the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art [Ellis Williams, 2002]. While Tate had opened an outpost in Liverpool in 1988, Baltic was a milestone in establishing a cultural brand on this scale independent of London’s art establishment. It also marked Gateshead’s conscious self-assertion as a cultural equal [if not superior] of its larger, richer, more famous neighbour across the Tyne.

Meanwhile, plans were well in progress for a new concert hall. The region’s premier orchestra, the Royal Northern Sinfonia had performed at Newcastle’s City Hall since its inception in 1958, but now sought a permanent home. This aspiration soon led to a partnership with the regional music agency, Folkworks, and a vision was conceived of a musical venue in a very broad sense. It was to be a home for participation as well as performance and would consciously cross boundaries of genre in ways intended to overturn the elite monoculture often associated with concert venues. The idea was of simultaneous recitals, gigs, classes and workshops, of multiple music-making under one roof: in a more literal sense, a polyphony.

A grant from the National Lottery, the largest for a cultural project outside London, and sponsorship from local accountancy software company Sage, led to an open competition to appoint an architect in 1997, which was won by Norman Foster and Partners. Attracting an architect of such international calibre and reputation was a clear sign of Gateshead’s ambition in the heady days before the Millennium, and the resulting structure, opened in 2004, truly deserves the description ‘superlative’. While the building’s outward form has its detractors, there is no denying the deliberate rhythm it adds to the waterfront landscape. Its sinuous roof, whose steel panels would span two football pitches, echoes the iconic curves of the Tyne, Swing and Millennium bridges. Despite the roof outwardly ‘being’ the Sage Gateshead, it is in fact not part of the performance spaces themselves, but merely a shield against the weather. Beneath it are three distinct buildings acoustically designed to enable simultaneous performance without sound interference between them – a 1,700 seat auditorium based acoustically on Vienna’s Musikverein, a 450-seat decagonal ‘theatre in the round’, and between the two, a smaller multipurpose hall – all connected by a central terrace with an uninterrupted gallery some 200 metres long, looking down over the river and across the Tyne, offering a panoramic view of the Newcastle skyline. Despite its scale, the terrace was conceived by Foster as an ‘urban living room’ and is significant for being a public space that can be entered and enjoyed free of charge, much like Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. Architecturally, and in terms of its programme of classical, folk, popular and world music, Sage Gateshead has attempted to break down barriers to ‘culture’. Arguably it has been successful in doing so, and perhaps Sage has been embraced, along with the lifts and viewing platforms at the Baltic or the grassy hill around the Angel, as a place of welcome, where people can feel confident in the presence of art and be around it on their own terms.

What might the next prophecy be for Gateshead? The Millennium era that produced Baltic, Sage and the eponymous bridge already feels distant after further economic upheavals. Future planned developments – a concert arena and hotel – are decidedly commercial and likely to be functional in a narrower sense than Baltic or the Sage, yet are seen as key to the town’s vitality. Architecturally, a fuller occupation of the waterfront is probably to be desired, although whether what is built will enhance a polyphony or bring banality remains to be seen.

And then there has been Covid. Perhaps all that can be prophesied right now is that urban environments will look and feel different. Retail spaces that anchored the centres of Newcastle and Gateshead further away from the river have fallen silent, with many maybe gone for good. Meanwhile the Quayside has offered a place for socially-distanced promenading over the past year that is likely to be valued more than ever as we move past the crisis. It has provided a place to see people and simply hear voices, and occasionally music, the human sounds that have woven through almost two millennia of history here. We know that we need them, more than ever.

– Rebecca Morrill [March 2021]

– Rebecca Morrill + Guy Tindale, March 2021

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