Unexpected Wonder
"Proud Romans left their footprints there,
Quite visible to all"
- James Anderson
You may, if you’re one of the very few waiting for such things, have been surprised not to receive this on Friday afternoon. Well, I have been told that Bunking Off is far more of a Sunday morning read and so, for the rest of this year at least, that is when to expect it. Of course, if you feel differently, let me know in the comments at the end of this post or in the reader survey which was sent out on Friday. While we’re on surprises, Newcastle came as a big surprise to me.
Once again, my TV education had fallen far short of reality and it seemed that the twenty-seven episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? did not, despite the views of Newcastle and the docks in the titles, quite tell me the whole story of this magnificent city. It seems that the picture it had painted for me was as short of reality as was Rodney Bewes’ acting. I still remember the closing credits telling me that the Film Cameraman was Alan Featherstone over a picture of kids playing on the crumbling remains of some old building with blocks of flats in the distance. To me, this was Newcastle. This is not Newcastle.
Newcastle is full of beauty and grandeur and history. I knew that the city had a quayside that had been the centre of the coal trade for centuries and, in my mind, this was run-down and dilapidated. However, I discovered that it is, in fact, a sleek pedestrian thoroughfare past chic apartment blocks and the wonderful, curving Millennium Bridge.
Okay, I can’t blame the Likely Lads for my expectations surrounding the quayside. Forty years had passed since that programme and a lot had happened in Newcastle in that time but why did they never show the city centre? They never showed the sandstone Victorian crescents topped with cupolas and clock-towers. They didn’t even show how the 1960’s brick blocks seemed to slot in neatly between the older buildings. All of these are now joined by sleek, twenty-first century glass constructions that, somehow, look right at home amid the nineteenth century splendour and mid-twentieth century utilitarianism.
I caught the Metro into the city centre and, being used to the London tube and its prices, was gobsmacked to learn that, for the price of a one-way trip in Zone One down south, I could buy a ticket which allowed me to travel on all trains and ferries for the rest of the day. Even given the hour at which I finished work, it still seemed like a bargain and, as we know, I’m a right tightwad.
I got off at Haymarket; the station sits in the city centre like a shy, four-headed tortoise, its curved roof and rounded exits looking roughly north, south, east and west. The northerly exit takes you out onto St Mary’s Place and a huge column surmounted by, what has become known as, the “dirty angel”. The war memorial was erected in 1908 to remember three hundred and seventy soldiers from Northumbrian regiments who died in South Africa between 1899 and 1902. The angel on top is actually Nike, the Greek goddess of victory and training shoes. Her wings are 1970’s fibreglass replacements for the original bronze ones.
From here, I walk down Northumberland Street, a wonderfully wide and predominantly pedestrianised thoroughfare where the modern and the classical seem to live side-by-side without chafing against one another. From the vertical gardens of Marks and Spencer to the Ionic columns of McDonalds and from the glass-fronted JD Sports to the Art Deco building shared by Barclays Bank and the jewellers, H. Samuel. Concrete, sandstone, white Portland stone, plate glass and pargetting. There is just about every material and style imaginable in the space of around four hundred yards but it all somehow works together.
Then I turn right and head towards a huge column in the middle of a square, it’s rather reminiscent of Nelson’s Column. This part of the city is sometimes referred to as Grainger Town after Richard Grainger who was said to have found Newcastle built of bricks and timber and left it built in stone. So, it is largely he who is responsible for the grandeur I mentioned earlier. Richard was born in 1797 right here, in the middle of Newcastle on High Friar Lane, about sixty yards from where I am now standing. His father was a porter on the quayside, his mother a seamstress. Richard became a builder and would go on to build terraces and crescents of houses for the well to do of the city as well as large parts of the city centre. Eldon Place, Blackett Street, Grey Street, Grainger Street, Clayton Street, Hood Street, Shakespeare Street, Nelson Street, Market Street and the Central Exchange are all his work, as is the Royal Arcade which was, unfortunately, demolished in the sixties. A great deal of his work survives, though, and forms not only the best part of Newcastle but the finest part of just about any English city.
The tall column that I had spotted in the middle of Grainger’s streets is slightly shorter than Nelson’s column, at one hundred and thirty-five feet. It commemorates Charles Grey who was Prime Minister in the early eighteen-thirties between the Duke of Wellington and Viscount Melbourne. His biggest achievement, except, perhaps, his ability to fade into relative obscurity, was the Great Reform Act. This act of parliament effectively removed the so-called “rotten boroughs” where members of parliament were essentially elected, as with William Currie of Horsley Towers, by their brother, their cousin Algernon and his dog. Even though Grey comes in at number fifty-three in the list of most memorable Prime Ministers, this probably shouldn’t be the case as not only has he got this great monument but the street leading away from it is Grey Street; Durham University has a college named after him and he gave us Earl Grey tea. Somehow, though, he seems utterly forgettable, a real grey man.
J.B. Priestley saw a busy and prosperous city when he visited as part of his English Journey in the 1930s and whatever the intervening decades had wrought on the city, it looks the same way today. When, on a warm summer’s afternoon, I visited the square which lies between the monument and the Corinthian columned Pret a Manger, it was filled with deckchairs and there was a huge cinema screen set up. The evenings brought outdoor cinema to the streets, free to come and watch. Have I mentioned what a wonderful city Newcastle is? The films weren’t showing yet but there was still entertainment in the form of some kind of Latin American brass band. A group of six gentleman who seemed to be of Cuban or Mexican or Puerto Rican descent were playing the kind of music that I had only previously heard in Speedy Gonzales cartoons. Huge gaps in cultural knowledge like this happen when one is raised and educated by TV. Perhaps it was Banda music, it was certainly lively and upbeat and uplifting and not quite what I expected outside Waterstones in Newcastle.
Speaking of which, Waterstones in Newcastle is one of the most amazing branches of Waterstones I’ve ever seen anywhere, surpassed only by Bradford. It is housed in the seven-storey Baroque and Art Nouveau Emerson Chambers building which was built in 1903. The ground floor is faced in granite with grey columns at the doors and windows and the rest in black and white. The four floors above this and the chimneys are in blonde sandstone and the rooms of the top two floors are contained within steeply sloping slate rooves, their white-framed windows peeking out at odd places and angles. One corner has a clock tower and another corner has a verdigrised sort of pagoda on top. It was designed by Benjamin Simpson of the architects Simpson, Lawson and Rayne and I don’t believe that his brief was to hold back at all. It’s a magnificent building. It sits on the opposite side of Grey’s giant column to the Monument Metro station and, as it seemed as though I could travel anywhere in north-east England for about the price of a packet of crisps, I hopped back on the train for five stops to get to Wallsend.
If Newcastle is not imaginatively named, it being the place where Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror, built a new castle in 1080, then Wallsend is just as prosaic being the spot at which a wall ended. Which wall they are talking about is made clearer at the next stop on the line, which is called Hadrian’s Road. Wallsend was the site of the fort, known as Segedunum, which sat at the easternmost end of that famous frontier. As you step off the train you are reminded of the town’s genesis by the fact that someone has taken the time and trouble to have some of the warning signs at the station printed in both English and Latin. You are informed that the penalty for trespassing on the railway is that eris CC libris multaberis and that there is noli fumare on suggestus II.
The fort of Segedunum is the most excavated fort on the wall and you can walk among the foundations of many of its buildings. There is also an excellent museum which takes you through the whole history of this area on the banks of the River Tyne. It is less than a fiver to get in and for two millenia of history, I reckon that’s pretty good value. As well as the story of the invasions by the Romans and later the Danes, the museum also tells tales of the coal mining and shipbuilding which dominated this area for much of the last two centuries. The RMS Mauretania was built here at the Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson shipyard, as was the RMS Carpathia which rescued survivors from the Titanic.
The shipyard survived until 2007; the actor Robson Green worked here in the early 1980s when thousands were still employed on the banks of the Tyne and Lucy Gannon had yet to write Soldier, Soldier. The seven coal mines which had been here since the late eighteenth century had already gone by the turn of the millennium. One of the most prominent managers of the pit was a man called John Buddle who introduced Humphry Davy’s safety lamp to the mine. His name lives on today in Buddle Street, the name for the A187 as it passes through here, cutting the Roman fort in two.
You can still make out the playing card shape of the fort, though, and individual rooms within the buildings which were created here nearly nineteen hundred years ago. The fort was abandoned when the Romans left in the fourth century and the area returned to farmland. Every last trace of it had disappeared beneath terraced houses for the miners and their families by the end of the nineteenth century. Those houses were demolished in the 1970s and over the next twenty years or so the footprint of the fort was revealed. There’s a good three hundred yards between the fort and the water’s edge today so either the river has moved and its banks have been reclaimed over the years or the Romans ran out of stone and all of the pesky Celts just tiptoed round the end of the wall every night. I know it’s the former but the latter paints a more interesting picture.
Next week, for my paid subscribers, we’ll have a look at some more of the Roman history around this part of the world. For everybody else, there’s a trip down to Southampton in two week’s time.