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Newcastle's medieval buildings rise straight up from the River Tyne, the castle that gives the city its name among them. Gateshead sits directly opposite on the south bank, close enough that the two work as one destination, and the quayside between them is where much of the city's regeneration has taken place. The useful thing to know before you arrive is how compact the centre is: the castle, the Georgian streets, the covered market and the river all sit inside it.
We at Travelmyth, the hotel search engine that ranks stays by your interests and needs across 60 stay categories, have put together this guide to what is worth your time in Newcastle upon Tyne. It covers the castle keep and the cathedral, Grainger Town and the covered market, the bridges along the Quayside, the museums and galleries that charge nothing to enter, the Ouseburn valley, and the Gateshead bank across the water, where BALTIC and The Glasshouse sit under a different council, with the Angel of the North a few miles inland.
Newcastle stands on the northern bank of the River Tyne, opposite Gateshead on the south side, and is England's northernmost city. Seven bridges link the two around a busy quayside.
The city grew around the Roman fort and crossing of Pons Aelius, was known as Monkchester, and then took the name of a castle built in 1080 by William the Conqueror's eldest son, Robert Curthose. City status came on 3 June 1882.
Newcastle was one of the world's largest shipbuilding and repair centres during the Industrial Revolution, and coal mining ran alongside it. The phrase "taking coals to Newcastle" was first recorded contextually in 1538.
An estimated 331,420 people lived in the Newcastle upon Tyne local-authority area in 2024. The centre is compact and easy to cross on foot, large parts of it still follow a medieval street layout, and narrow alleys called chares survive in abundance around the riverside. People from the city and the area around it are known as Geordies.
The nightlife is renowned throughout Britain, bolstered by a 42,000-strong student population. Sitting in the rain shadow of the North Pennines, Newcastle is among the driest cities in the UK.
From 1530 a royal act funnelled every coal shipment from Tyneside through Newcastle Quayside, handing a monopoly in the trade to the Hostmen, a cartel of Newcastle burgesses.
The Quayside runs along both banks of the Tyne, Newcastle on the north side and Gateshead on the south. Seven bridges cross the river within a one-mile radius, and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge sits between the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art on the Gateshead bank and the Malmaison on the Newcastle bank.
This was a working dockside, with a regular street market on the Newcastle side. The docks fell into disrepair after the Second World War, and in the late 1980s the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation redeveloped the East Quayside to a design by Terry Farrell & Partners. Close, Sandhill and Quayside still hold structures from the 15th to 18th centuries, among them Bessie Surtees House and the Cooperage.
It is about a ten minute walk down from the city centre. On Sundays the main riverside street closes to traffic and market and food stalls take it over.
The Tyne Bridge is a through arch bridge linking Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead, designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson and built by Dorman Long of Middlesbrough. Work started in August 1925, and King George V and Queen Mary opened the finished bridge on 10 October 1928, crossing in their Ascot landau as the first to use the roadway. The ceremony was watched by 20,000 schoolchildren given the day off. Three men died building it.
The deck runs 389 metres, the arch spans 161.8 metres and rises 55 metres, and it has a clearance of 26 metres. It took 7,010 long tons of structural steel and 777,124 rivets. At its construction it was the largest single-span steel arch bridge in the British Isles, and around 70,000 vehicles cross daily.
The towers are Cornish granite, designed by local architect Robert Burns Dick as five-storey warehouses; the inner floors were never completed, so the storage space was never used. Hundreds of pairs of black-legged kittiwakes nest on the bridge and the structures near it, the furthest inland colony in the world. It was Grade II* listed in 2018, and the restoration begun in September 2023 is due to finish for the 2028 centenary.
The Gateshead Millennium Bridge was the first tilting bridge ever to be constructed. It carries pedestrians and cyclists across the River Tyne between the Gateshead arts quarter on the south bank and Newcastle's Quayside on the north, spanning the river between the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and the Newcastle Law Courts, so the far end of the crossing is in Gateshead rather than Newcastle.
It stretches 126 metres, stands 50 metres high and takes four and a half minutes to tilt. At night it is lit in changing colours.
Gateshead Council ran a competition in 1996 for a new bridge to link Gateshead to Newcastle, the first opening bridge built on the Tyne in over 100 years. The first tilt took place on 28 June 2001 in front of 36,000 onlookers, and the bridge was completed that September, opening for public use in 2001. It has since won 25 awards for design and lighting, and WilkinsonEyre, the practice that conceived and designed it with engineers Gifford, took the 2002 RIBA Stirling Prize.
The Swing Bridge crosses the Tyne between the Tyne Bridge and the High Level Bridge, joining Newcastle to Gateshead. It stands on the site of the Old Tyne Bridges of 1270 and 1781, and probably of the original Roman crossing, which the Romans built here around 122 and called Pons Aelius, "bridge of (Publius) Aelius (Hadrianus)", after the emperor Hadrian.
Its predecessor was demolished in 1868 so that larger ships could reach William Armstrong's works upstream. Armstrong designed and paid for the hydraulic replacement, work began in 1873, and the new bridge was first used for road traffic on 15 June 1876 and opened for river traffic on 17 July 1876.
In its busiest year, 1924, it rotated 6,000 times. The bridge still carries road traffic and pedestrians and is Grade II* listed, although its swinging mechanism has been out of use in recent years while restoration work is carried out.
Robert Stephenson's High Level Bridge is the oldest of Newcastle's bridges and the world's first combined railway and road bridge. The Hawks family built it from 5,050 tons of iron, and George Hawks, Mayor of Gateshead, drove in the last key on 7 June 1849. Queen Victoria inaugurated it that September, passing through by train.
The railway deck runs about 37 metres (120 ft) above high water. The road deck below opened in 1850, and the railway company charged tolls on it, a halfpenny for a pedestrian, until 10 May 1937, when Newcastle and Gateshead corporations paid the London and North Eastern Railway £160,000 to end them.
The upper deck still carries the Durham Coast Line, the East Coast Main Line and the Tyne Valley Line. The lower deck is restricted to buses and taxis, with cyclists and pedestrians alongside, so you can walk across it. It was classified Grade I in 1950.
The castle gave the city its name, and the ground held the Hadrian's Wall fort of Pons Aelius before that. In 1080 Robert Curthose, William the Conqueror's eldest son, built a wooden motte-and-bailey here, the New Castle upon Tyne. Henry II replaced it with a rectangular stone keep, commissioned in 1168 and built between 1172 and 1177 at a cost of £1,144.
Henry III added the Black Gate between 1247 and 1250: two towers with a passage between them, a guardroom on each side, drawbridges front and rear, and a portcullis. By the early nineteenth century it was a slum tenement housing up to sixty people, and the Society of Antiquaries leased it in the 1880s, restoring it between 1883 and 1885 and adding the top floor and pitched roof.
The keep is Grade I listed and a scheduled monument, roughly square, 19 by 17 metres and 25 metres tall. Only 23 metres separate it from the gatehouse, and the railway viaduct carrying the East Coast Main Line fills almost all of it. From the top there are 360-degree views across Newcastle and the Tyne.
Both reopened on 21 March 2015 as one attraction, Newcastle Castle. At the time of writing adult entry is £13.65 and children aged 5 to 15 pay £8.95.
Bessie Surtees House stands at 41-44 Sandhill, overlooking the River Tyne. The name covers merchants' housing built in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the property is in fact three distinct buildings: Bessie Surtees House, Milbank House and Maddison House, names given to them by their 20th-century owner, Lord Gort.
The house is best known for an elopement. Bessie Surtees, later Elizabeth Scott, Countess of Eldon, left through an upper window with John Scott, who went on to become Lord Chancellor.
It was divided up and sublet through the 18th and 19th centuries until John Clayton bought it in 1880, along with Milbank House next door. The ancient wood-panelled Jacobean frontage is what to look at from the street.
It has been closed to general visitors since the pandemic, opening only occasionally for events, so check before you walk down to Sandhill.
The site of Newcastle Cathedral has been a place of Christian worship since around 1091. The present church is largely medieval, with most of the surviving structure dating from the 14th century, and it became a cathedral in 1882. It is named after Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and boats.
The lantern spire was constructed in 1448 and for hundreds of years served as a navigation point for ships on the Tyne. Gilded statues stand on each corner of the lantern: Adam eating the apple, Eve holding it out, Aaron dressed as a bishop and David with a harp. During the nine-week Siege of Newcastle in 1644, Scottish invaders threatened to bombard the tower and were deterred when the mayor, Sir John Marley, put his Scottish prisoners in it.
Inside, St Margaret's Chapel holds the only known fragment of medieval stained glass in the building, a roundel of the Madonna feeding the Christ Child. The Thornton Brass, which dates from at least as early as 1441 and is now fixed vertically beside the High Altar, is believed to be the largest Flemish memorial brass in England. Entry is free.
The Dominican priory was established in 1239 in the north west of the town, on ground the town wall would later enclose. The priory and its grounds covered seven acres (2.8 hectares). In 1334 Edward III and Edward Balliol met at Blackfriars.
At the Reformation the church, the sacristy, the eastern half of the chapter house and the cloister walk were all demolished. The convent was sold to the Mayor and burgesses, who leased it in 1552 to nine of the town's craft guilds as their headquarters, which probably explains why it is the only one of Newcastle's religious houses whose building survives.
Only the cloister buildings remain. The cloister was an open garth about 21 metres (69 ft) square, and the outline of the demolished priory church can still be read in the grass at its north end. Restored between 1973 and 1981, they now hold craft workshops, an exhibition on the site's history and a restaurant believed to be the oldest dining room in the UK.
The castle did not protect the merchants' properties well enough, so from 1265 a tax called murage, from the Latin murus, paid for a wall around the town, built through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries against Scottish invasion. Finished, it ran about 3 kilometres, stood at least 2 metres thick and up to 7.6 metres high, and had six main gates: Close, West, New, Pilgrim, Pandon and Sand.
Seventeen towers projected from it, set within bowshot of one another so anyone scaling the wall took fire from both sides as well as the front. An outer ditch, the King's Dyke, ran over 11 metres wide and 4.5 metres deep in front of the Herber and Morden Towers. David II of Scotland besieged the town in 1342 and failed.
Large stretches of the wall came down in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The longest continuous stretch runs along Back Stowell Street in Chinatown, taking in Herber, Morden and Ever Towers; Morden Tower has hosted poetry readings since 1964. Plummer, Corner and Sallyport Towers stand on the eastern side.
Grainger Town is the historic commercial centre of Newcastle and covers roughly 36 hectares, or 89 acres. Richard Grainger, a builder and developer, laid out its classical streets between 1835 and 1842, and Grainger Market, the Theatre Royal, Grey Street, Grainger Street and Clayton Street all sit within it. Earl Grey looks down on Grey Street from his monument.
The buildings are predominantly four storeys, with vertical dormers, domes, turrets and spikes, in a style dubbed Tyneside Classical. Of 450 buildings here, 244 are listed, 29 of them at grade I and 49 at grade II*. A medieval 13th-century Dominican priory and pieces of the historic Town Walls survive among them.
It has not always been looked after. In the 1960s and 1970s about a quarter of Grainger's original scheme was demolished for projects including the Eldon Square Shopping Centre, and by the early 1990s the resident population had fallen to 1,200 with around 100,000 square metres standing vacant. A regeneration project that commenced in April 1997 restored 121 buildings and won the Europa Nostra Award in 2003.
Richard Grainger built Grey Street in the 1830s, with several architects involved including John Dobson; its entire western side was designed by John Wardle and George Walker of Grainger's office. It was first called Upper Dean Street; in 1836 the town council agreed it would be renamed Grey Street, with Grey's Monument at its head.
From the monument it runs south along the buried course of the Lorke or Lort Burn, curving east as it descends to the river, and ends at the Mosley Street junction. On it stand the Theatre Royal by John and Benjamin Green, the southern entrance to Monument Metro station and the Central Arcade.
Nikolaus Pevsner called Grey Street "one of the finest streets in England", and BBC Radio 4 listeners voted it Best Street in the UK in 2002. John Betjeman said: "As for the curve of Grey Street, I shall never forget seeing it to perfection, traffic-less on a misty Sunday morning."
Grey's Monument rises 41 metres (133 ft), a fluted Roman Doric column carrying a statue of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, Prime Minister from 1830 to 1834 and the man the tea blend is named after. Built in 1838, it marks the passing of the Great Reform Act 1832.
Public subscription paid for it: £700 for Edward Hodges Baily's statue, with the column costed at £1,600. The architects wanted it taller; subscriptions set the limit. A time capsule went in during construction: a sealed glass bottle holding a drawing of the structure, coins, local medals and the subscribers' names.
A 1995 survey found shallow foundations and a column that can sway up to 30 cm in the wind. A helical staircase of 164 steps reaches a viewing platform, open only occasionally on pre-booked tours costing about £5 at the time of writing. From the top, on a clear day, you can see all seven bridges and inside St James' Park. Monument Metro station, opened in 1981, runs directly beneath.
The Theatre Royal on Grey Street is one of only nine Grade I listed theatre halls in England. Newcastle's first Theatre Royal opened on 21 January 1788 on Mosley Street, demolished when Grey Street was driven through. John and Benjamin Green designed the replacement as part of Richard Grainger's plan for the city centre, and it opened on 20 February 1837 with The Merchant of Venice.
A fire in 1899, after a performance of Macbeth, destroyed the interior. Frank Matcham redesigned it and the theatre reopened on 31 December 1901. A £4.75 million restoration returned it to that Edwardian scheme, gold-leafing the proscenium arch, tiers and boxes, and it reopened on 12 September 2011.
There are 1,249 seats over four levels, and in a typical year 30 to 35 visiting shows come through, almost all of them on national tours: ballet, dance, drama, musicals and opera. The Royal Shakespeare Company has brought a season here for over 25 years.
The Grainger Market was completed on 24 October 1835, designed by John Dobson for Richard Grainger, replacing older markets pulled down for Grey Street. It is Grade I listed, in the heart of the city centre.
It was built as two halls covering over two acres. The eastern one was a meat market of four avenues, each 338 feet (103 metres) long, with 360 windows and 180 butchers' shops. The western hall was the open-plan vegetable market, its foundations of local Kenton stone shaped to resemble those of the Borghese Palace in Rome. A grand dinner for 2,000 guests marked the opening.
The Grainger Arcade's wooden roof burned down at the turn of the 20th century and was replaced in steel and glass. Air raid shelters were built beneath the market during the Second World War.
Over 100 businesses trade here now, among them the historic Marks and Spencer Original Penny Bazaar, which opened in 1895 and still trades from its tiny original-style stall. Seventeen food stalls sell food from around the world; a stottie is the local order. The weighing room is still in use, at 50p a go, and a £9 million upgrade finished at the start of 2026.
The Central Arcade cuts between Grey Street and Grainger Street through the Central Exchange, a triangular building Richard Grainger put up in 1836-38 to designs by John Wardle and George Walker. Meant as a corn exchange, it became a subscription newsroom instead; in 1870 the Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts turned it into an art gallery, concert hall and theatre, replaced by a Vaudeville theatre in 1897.
Fire destroyed the interior in 1901, and the present Edwardian arcade was built inside the original walls in 1906 to designs by Oswald and Son of Newcastle. Under the glass barrel-vaulted roof are mosaic flooring, stained glass, ornate lighting and dark wood fittings; the faience tiles on the walls came from Burmantoft's of Leeds. It has been Grade II* listed since 14 June 1954.
Sparkie, Newcastle's talking budgie, was stuffed after his death in 1962 and is still on display, alongside a life-size cast of an African elephant, the Egyptian mummy Bakt-en-Hor and a full-size replica of a T-Rex skeleton.
The museum was purpose-built as a natural history museum in 1884 and renamed in the 1890s after the local Victorian naturalists Albany and John Hancock. Its roots run back to the Lit & Phil, and its first specimen was a wombat, acquired in 1800. It closed in April 2006 and reopened in May 2009 after a £26 million refurbishment and extension by Terry Farrell and Partners.
The Living Planet gallery spans the ground and first floors, with the Hadrian's Wall gallery on the first. It drew 228,024 visitors in 2025.
Entry is free, donations welcome, and last entry is 15 minutes before closing. At the time of writing it opens Monday to Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The planetarium carries a small extra charge. Haymarket Metro station is a six-minute walk; apart from four accessible bays there is no public parking.
Walk in and Turbinia is in front of you: 104 feet 9 inches, or 31.93 metres, of hull, built by Charles Algernon Parsons to test the advantages of using a steam turbine to power ships. It could reach 34 knots. Parsons' 1894 creation was the world's first steam turbine powered ship and, when launched in 1897, the fastest ship in the world.
The museum started in 1934 as the Municipal Museum of Science and Industry, housed in a temporary pavilion built for the 1929 North East Coast Exhibition in Exhibition Park. It moved to Blandford House in 1978 and re-launched under its present name in 1993, the year Turbinia was moved in.
Beyond Turbinia the collections cover Tyneside's industrial history, from railways to shipbuilding and the discovery of the electric light bulb, along with maritime, social and regimental history and one of the UK's finest collections of ship models. Entry is free, donations welcome, and no booking is required. The museum stays open during the roof restoration works.
The Laing Art Gallery opened in 1904 as the city's first art gallery, named after Alexander Laing, a Scottish wine and spirit merchant who wanted to give something back to the city where he had made his fortune. Cackett & Burns Dick designed it in the Baroque style with Art Nouveau elements, and the Blue Carpet lies in front of it.
The collection runs to paintings, watercolours and decorative historical objects, including Newcastle silver. John Martin's The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is here, along with work by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edward Burne-Jones's Laus Veneris and William Holman Hunt's Isabella and the Pot of Basil of 1868. The watercolours and drawings include work by J. M. W. Turner, and local artists such as Thomas Bewick and Ralph Hedley are featured too.
The gallery is on New Bridge Street, a few steps from Northumberland Street and the city library. Entry is free and no booking is required.
The Hatton Gallery was founded in 1926 by the King Edward VII School of Art and is now part of Newcastle University.
It sits on Kings Road, reached through the university grounds, and its collection runs to more than 3,000 works spanning the 14th to the 20th centuries. Francis Bacon, Prunella Clough, Richard Hamilton, Palma Giovane, Patrick Heron and William Roberts are among the artists represented.
The gallery forms part of the Great North Museum Project but did not relocate to the Hancock; it stays in Newcastle University's Fine Art Building.
The Queen opened the Centre for Life at Times Square in May 2000. It is a registered charity, governed by a board of trustees, and receives no public funding.
Scientists based here were the first people in Europe, and only the second in the world, to be granted a licence for stem cell research on human embryos, and in 2005 they were the first to successfully clone a human embryo.
For visitors, the Experiment Zone runs laboratory-style experiments such as DNA extraction, the Brain Zone covers how the human brain works, and the Wow Zone has a "Big Machine" that catapults plastic pellets up to six metres into the air. A planetarium and a Science Theatre sit alongside the changing exhibitions.
It is a five-minute walk from Newcastle Central Station. At the time of writing a ticket is £13.60, or £15 with the optional donation, for anyone aged three and over, and free for children aged two and under. In winter the city's seasonal ice rink fills Times Square outside.
Seven Stories occupies a converted Victorian mill in the Ouseburn Valley, close to the Quayside. It opened in August 2005 after a £6.5 million conversion from a former granary building, and the building has seven levels, which is where the name comes from.
It is the UK's National Centre for Children's Books, a museum and visitor centre dedicated to children's literature. In September 2010 it bought several original Enid Blyton typescripts, making it the largest public collector of Blyton material, and in October 2015 Michael Morpurgo donated manuscripts, notebooks and letters. Philip Pullman, Michael Rosen, David Almond and Dame Jacqueline Wilson are among its current patrons. The Collection is stored at Newcastle City Library and can be accessed by advance arrangement.
Seven Stories curates its own exhibitions and many go on to tour nationally. Entry is free and no pre-booking is required, and there is a bookshop too. Manors and Byker are the nearest Metro stations.
The Victoria Tunnel runs from the Town Moor down to the River Tyne, up to 85 feet (26 metres) below the streets of Newcastle. It was built between 1839 and 1842 to move coal from Leazes Main Colliery at Spital Tongues to the riverside staithes.
Lined in stone under a double brick arch, the bore is about 7 feet 5 inches by 6 feet 3 inches, just large enough for the custom-built chaldron wagons, which ran down under their own weight and were rope-hauled back by a stationary engine. Named after the young Queen Victoria, it was opened by the Mayor on 7 April 1842, cannons firing at one o'clock as a train of eight wagons emerged, four carrying coal.
It cut the cost of moving coal to the river by 88%, and after two and a half years of building it was in use for just eighteen years. The colliery closed in January 1860 and the tunnel lay abandoned until the Second World War, when £37,000 turned it into an air raid shelter planned to hold 9,000, with about 500 bunk beds.
The Ouseburn Trust has run guided tours since 2010, entering from Ouse Street in Byker with a hard hat and torch. Booking ahead is usually needed.
The Ouseburn Valley is the valley of the Ouseburn, a small tributary of the Tyne running south through the east of Newcastle, just east of the city centre. Three high-level bridges span the urbanised lower valley: the Ouseburn railway viaduct, the Byker Viaduct carrying the Metro and the Byker road bridge.
The lower Ouseburn was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in Newcastle. Coal came down from the Town Moor along the Victoria Tunnel, and the tidal water let wherries, the local barges, load at low tide for the collier brigs waiting in the Tyne. By the mid-twentieth century the valley had fallen into disuse and dereliction.
Industry left behind large buildings, and from the 1970s artists, musicians and performers took them over as workspaces; since 1996 the Ouseburn Trust has led the regeneration with the local authority. The valley now holds the Biscuit Factory, Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books, and pubs and music venues including The Cluny.
The Ouseburn Viaduct, designed by John and Benjamin Green, opened on 18 June 1839 and runs 360 yards (330 metres); its timber arches were replaced thirty years later by near-identical wrought iron spans. Ouseburn Farm was founded in 1976 to give children green space and experience with animals and plants, on ground Hadrian's Wall is thought to have crossed, though no trace of it shows above ground.
The building was a working biscuit factory before 2002, trading over the years as The Tyne Biscuit Factory and then Newcastle upon Tyne Biscuit Manufacturers, which is where the gallery's name comes from.
It is a Victorian warehouse built in 1870, and it reopened as a gallery in 2002 after major renovation work. It is an independent art gallery spread over two floors in Ouseburn, and it shows work by more than 250 artists at any one time.
Exhibitions change quarterly, and the gallery runs workshops as well as shows. There is a cafe with a rooftop terrace.
St James' Park has been Newcastle United's ground since 1892 and has had football on it since 1880, when Newcastle Rangers played the first match. The site was sloping grazing land bordered by Georgian Leazes Terrace, and it sat near the city gallows, last used in 1844, which is where the Gallowgate End gets its name.
Newcastle played in red and white here until 1904. Capacity was doubled to 60,000 in 1905, with a main stand on Barrack Road that is now the Milburn Stand, named after the 1950s footballer Jackie Milburn and opened in 1987. The Leazes End closes the north, the Gallowgate End the south, and the East Stand is the smallest. The 1998 steel truss cantilever roof over the Milburn and Leazes stands reaches 64.5 metres and is described as the largest cantilever structure in Europe.
The ground holds more than 52,000. It carried the name Sports Direct Arena from November 2011 until St James' Park was restored in October 2012, and it hosted football matches at the 2012 Summer Olympics and the Super League Magic Weekend in May 2015. Weekday tours run at 12:30pm and 2:30pm, with additional times sometimes available; at the time of writing tickets cost £24 for adults, £19 concessions and £13 juniors.
Jesmond Dene is a public park in the east end of the city, in the steep-sided valley of the Ouseburn, which flows south to the Tyne. In north-east England such valleys are known as denes, and Jesmond means 'mouth of the Ouseburn'. Lord Armstrong built the park in the 19th century and gave it to the city.
It is under two miles from the city centre. From the cast iron Armstrong Bridge it is a mile along the Ouse Burn to the small waterfall, twenty minutes' walk past old mill buildings.
Pets' Corner, a free petting zoo with goats, rabbits, chickens and ponies, has been a family fixture since the 1960s. You might spot a kingfisher or a red squirrel among the trees. The springtime dawn chorus at this latitude has been described as one of the best in the world, and has been recorded for use in workplaces and hospital rehabilitation.
A food market takes over Armstrong Bridge, closed to road traffic, on the first and third Saturday each month. The Metro to Jesmond or West Jesmond leaves a ten to fifteen minute walk.
Leazes Park lies west of the city centre, next to St James' Park and the Royal Victoria Infirmary, and covers 17.5 hectares (43.21 acres). It is the city's oldest park and is Grade II listed.
It began with a petition. In September 1857, 3,000 working men asked Newcastle Council for "ready access to some open ground for the purpose of health and recreation". The park opened on 23 December 1873, when Alderman Sir Charles Hamond performed the ceremony, and became the first public park created on Tyneside.
John Fulton, the Town Surveyor, laid it out around the lake, which sits above the course of the Lort Burn. A bandstand followed in 1875 and a balustraded stone terrace in 1879. A second lake, dug in 1893, was filled in by 1949 and the ground given over to a bowling green and tennis courts.
In 24 weeks in 1929, 4,373,138 people came here for the North East Coast Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, opened by the Prince of Wales on 14 May.
The park adjoins the south-eastern corner of the Town Moor, on land the Town Moor Improvement Act 1870 set aside for recreation. It was to have been laid out on the Bull Park, where the city's bull was penned for stud; that land became the site of the Hancock Museum. The name dates from the Royal Mining Engineering Jubilee Exhibition of 1887, which drew 2,000,000 visitors.
The grade II listed bandstand, dating from 1875, is the only item left from 1887. The Palace of Arts is the only building left from 1929; since 27 May 2016 it has housed Wylam Brewery.
A £3 million Heritage Lottery Fund programme restored the park, reopened in July 2015. A skatepark sits at the main entrance, and the Tyneside Society of Model and Experimental Engineers runs a miniature railway. Northern Pride comes every July, and a mela over the August bank holiday weekend since 1993.
The Town Moor is around 1,000 acres of common land north of the city centre, larger than Hyde Park and Hampstead Heath combined and larger than New York's Central Park. It reaches Spital Tongues and the city centre in the south, Gosforth in the north and Jesmond in the east, where it meets Exhibition Park. Freemen of the city still hold the right to graze cattle on it, and it is open 24 hours.
Horse racing ran here from 1721 on a triangular course about two miles round; a stone grandstand went up in 1800, and the road in front of it is still Grandstand Road. In 1873 a demonstration in favour of full male suffrage drew 200,000 people, the largest recorded gathering on the moor.
The Hoppings takes over the moor in the last week of June, one of Europe's largest travelling funfairs, drawing around 300,000 people over nine days. It has its origins in the Temperance Movement of the early 1880s. 'Hoppings' was a word for a mediaeval fair usually held at Whitsuntide, recorded in 1828 as a Durham and Northumberland term for a feast, merry-meeting, dancing or parish wake.
Newcastle's Chinatown lies in the north-west of Grainger Town, centred on Stowell Street. A Chinese arch, or paifang, gives it a landmark entrance: it was a gift from Newcastle's Chinese community, covered in traditional decoration, and was handed over to the city at a ceremony in 2005.
The quarter is a diminutive one. Chinese lanterns strung along the street and a smattering of restaurants and shops are what mark it out, and the most intact sections of the old town walls stand right next to it, a short walk from Blackfriars.
The Tyneside Cinema opened on 1 February 1937 as the Bijou News-Reel Cinema and was commonly known as the News Theatre, its programmes mixing travel, sport and news films with cartoons. Dixon Scott, great uncle of the film directors Sir Ridley and Tony Scott, designed and built it, decorating the interior with his own take on Art Deco shaped by travels in the Middle and Far East.
That same year the building became home to the Tyneside Film Society, which by the late 1950s had grown into the largest film society in the UK outside London. Television thinned the audiences, the cinema closed in 1968, reopened as a film theatre under the BFI, and closed again in 1975.
A £7m restoration ran from November 2006 to May 2008, uncovering a pair of original stained glass windows and mosaic floor tiling. The Grade II listed building on Pilgrim Street is the last remaining newsreel theatre in full-time operation in the UK and the city's only full-time independent cultural cinema.
The Lit & Phil became famous as the site where Joseph Swan demonstrated his pioneering incandescent electric lighting, and it is regarded as the first public room to have been lit by electric light.
The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Lit & Phil to everyone who uses it, has been operating since 1793, and its current premises, designed by John and Benjamin Green, were built in 1825. It is the largest independent library outside London, holding more than 150,000 books, and the music library alone runs to 8,000 CDs and 10,000 LPs.
It began as an informal group of inventors, pioneers and visionaries. Entry is free, so you can walk in off the street in the centre of the city and read.
St Mary's Cathedral on Clayton Street was designed by Augustus Welby Pugin, built between 1842 and 1844, and paid for largely by halfpenny subscriptions from Tyneside's poor immigrant community. It is Grade I listed and became a cathedral in 1850. Outside, in the Monument Garden opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, stands a monument to Cardinal Basil Hume.
The City Baths on Northumberland Road, built in 1927, have reopened after restoration with their original wooden booths, brass radiator covers shaped like mermaid tails, a glass domed roof, heated chambers and plunge showers, and a pool, gym and spa upstairs. They are one of only eleven operational Turkish baths in the country.
The Guildhall of 1655 was the town council's headquarters until 1863; the Civic Centre in Haymarket, the council's base today, opened in 1968 by King Olav V of Norway. St Andrew's is traditionally recognised as the oldest church in the town: its present building was begun in the twelfth century, and its last addition apart from the vestries was the main porch of 1726.
BALTIC sits on the south bank of the Tyne, in Gateshead rather than Newcastle, across the Millennium Bridge from the Quayside. There is no permanent exhibition: exhibitions, events and educational programmes change frequently, and entry is free.
The building was a flour mill, operating from 1950 until a fire closed it in 1976, though the silos held European Economic Community grain until 1984. Known locally as 'the pride of Tyneside', it employed 300 people at its height.
Removing the grain silos left the brick façades unsupported, so a 1,000 tonne steel frame holds the shell up. The north and south elevations were kept, with the original BALTIC FLOUR MILLS lettering and red and yellow brick; the east and west sides were fully glazed. The converted mill contains several gallery levels, with elevated views over the Tyne, and its upper level gives indoor and outdoor views across the city.
Baltic opened at midnight on Saturday 13 July 2002, the hour chosen by founding director Sune Nordgren as a dramatic gesture. The target was 250,000 visitors a year; a million came in the first. In 2011 it became the first non-Tate venue to host the Turner Prize, and the first venue outside London to do so, and 149,770 people saw it. Kittiwakes nest on the building each year.
The Glasshouse International Centre for Music is in Gateshead, not Newcastle: it stands on the Gateshead bank of the Quayside, across the Millennium Bridge.
It opened over the weekend of 17-19 December 2004 as Sage Gateshead, a name honouring a patron, the accountancy software company The Sage Group. On 13 September 2023 the venue announced its present name.
Foster and Partners won the building through a competition launched in 1997 and managed by RIBA Competitions, chosen unanimously from a shortlist of six. The curved glass and stainless steel result was engineered with Buro Happold, Mott MacDonald and Arup on acoustics, and looks out over both Quaysides, the Tyne Bridge and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.
Structurally it is three separate buildings, insulated from one another so that noise and vibration do not travel between them. Sage One, seating 1,640, was modelled on the Musikverein in Vienna; its ceiling panels can be raised and lowered and curtains drawn across the ribbed wooden side walls, changing the room's sound profile. Sage Two seats 600 and is possibly the world's only ten-sided performance space. The Royal Northern Sinfonia, founded in 1958, is based here.
The Angel of the North stands in Gateshead, not Newcastle, on a hill at Low Eighton in Lamesley parish overlooking the A1 and A167 and the East Coast Main Line.
Antony Gormley's sculpture was completed on 15 February 1998. It stands 20 metres tall, weighs 200 tonnes and has a 54-metre wingspan, its wings angled 3.5 degrees forward to create what Gormley called "a sense of embrace".
Gormley gave it three functions: to remind us that coal miners worked in the dark below the site for two hundred years, to express the transition from the industrial to the information age, and to be a focus for hopes and fears. An estimated 33 million people see it each year, thanks to its position beside the A1 and A167 and the East Coast Main Line.
Read the full guide to visiting it - where it stands, how to reach it, and why the wings tilt forward: The Angel of the North.
Segedunum sat at the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall, on the Tyne four miles east of Newcastle, and gave Wallsend its name; the Wall's western end is at Bowness-on-Solway. The fort was in use from around 122 AD to almost 400, and measured 138 metres north to south by 120 metres east to west, covering 4.1 acres.
Cohors II Nerviorum was stationed here in the second century and the Fourth Cohort of the Lingones in the third and fourth, each 600 strong: 120 cavalry and 480 infantry. The fort was abandoned around 400 and by 1884 had vanished under terraced housing. It is the most thoroughly excavated fort along Hadrian's Wall and part of the Hadrian's Wall UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The museum opened in June 2000 in converted Swan Hunter shipyard buildings, with a reconstructed Roman bathhouse modelled on those at Vindolanda and Chesters and an observation tower over the site. A stretch of the original Wall stands across the street. At the time of writing entry is £7.75 for adults and £5.50 concessions, each including a £1 voluntary donation, and free for under-21s and NE28 residents. Wallsend Metro station has some of its signs in English and Latin.
Hadrian's Wall was begun in AD 122 under the emperor Hadrian and ran 80 Roman miles, or 73 modern miles, west from Segedunum at Wallsend on the Tyne to the Solway Firth. It has been a World Heritage Site since 1987. Housesteads is Britain's most complete Roman fort, Chesters keeps a well preserved bath house, and Birdoswald has the longest remaining stretch of wall. At Sycamore Gap the tree was illegally felled on 28 September 2023; the stump has since sprouted.
Durham is under twenty minutes by train from Newcastle Central, £6 to £8 return; its cathedral and castle, both World Heritage Sites, stand on a hill inside a loop of the River Wear. Beamish, technically in Durham, is an open-air living museum set in 300 acres, recreating life in the 1820s, 1900s, 1940s and 1950s with costumed staff and vintage vehicles to ride; adult tickets were £27.50 at the time of writing.
Tynemouth is 25 to 30 minutes on the Yellow Metro line from Monument, covered by the £6.10 two-zone Metro Day Ticket: a Victorian coastal town with Long Sands beach, the ruins of Tynemouth Priory and Castle at one end and a weekend market of over 150 stalls in a former Victorian station. Whitley Bay, up the coast, has a longer beach and the Spanish City building.
Alnwick, in Northumberland, has its castle, used in the Harry Potter films, and the Alnwick Garden. Bamburgh Castle, an hour and a half away, sits right on the coast, its beach the filming location for The Last Kingdom. Getting there is easiest by car or organised tour.
The Tyne and Wear Metro opened in stages from 1980 and was one of Britain's pioneering modern urban rail systems. It now runs to 60 stations across Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, North Tyneside and South Tyneside, and reaches the airport in 23 minutes.
The Green line runs to the airport, and the Yellow line makes the loop through the coastal stations. Trains come roughly every 10 to 15 minutes during the day, and the system operates from about 5:30 a.m. until around midnight. Fares depend on the ticket type and zones travelled; using Pop Pay As You Go, adult journeys are currently capped at £2.50 for a single trip and £5 for a day’s travel.
Newcastle Central station is a principal stop on the East Coast Main Line, with up to three trains an hour to London King's Cross, taking between two and three hours. From the platforms it is ten minutes on foot to Grey's Monument, five to the castle.
The Metro station beside the football ground is signed St James Metro station, without the apostrophe in the stadium's name; its ticket hall carries a timeline of Newcastle United's history. Newcastle International Airport lies around seven and a half miles (12 km) from the city.
Where you base yourself decides how much walking you do. The city centre keeps the castle, Grainger Town and the Quayside within walking distance of each other, which is the case for staying central even if you are driving. The Quayside itself trades a little distance from the shops for the river views.
Travelmyth lists stays across Newcastle upon Tyne ranked by the things you actually care about rather than by star rating alone. If you want a boutique-style property, somewhere family-friendly, or a stay near nightlife, you can filter for any of those and combine two of them at once.