Newcastle-upon-Tyne

One February night I found myself standing on the bank of a wide, dark river. Pastel coloured lights melted across the surface of the water. The rainbow arch of one great bridge was echoed downstream by the blue-green span of another. The glass of great buildings glimmered and a cool wind blew from the east. I felt as I had in other great cities at night - sitting on the roof terrace of the Ceylan Hotel in Istanbul gazing across the Bosphorus to the Asian shore, or in the Operakallaran restaurant in Stockholm as the sun set behind the masts of the ships along the waerfront. I felt as if I was in a timeless and magical place. It took some while to reconcile this with the knowledge that I was in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

I say this not from lofty metropolitan disdain. Newcastle is the nearest city to where I was born, the nearest city to where I live now. I have been visiting it for long enough to remember when it looked like it does in the film Get Carter – all brick, slate and smoke. I have come here to watch football and bands and eat and drink and shop for the objects most necessary for my happiness from the era of plastic aeroplane kits to the age of prams and pushchairs. But until that Winter evening I had never really noticed Newcastle. Familiarity had bred indifference. It was like that moment in a corny Hollywood movie when the frumpy girl next door takes off her glasses and – Oh gee! – It’s Grace Kelly!

Four months later I am standing on the Quayside at night again. It is Friday and Newcastle is full throttle. The booming thud of dance music jolts your stomach. The queues for the ATMs are endless. Tans and tattoos are de rigueur. Men so big when they stand in the road traffic treats them as a roundabout pass at the brisk clip in transit for merriment. Women on hen nights totter by on heels in white mini-skirts and crop tops in Mekon death ray green. One wears a bridal veil and a wire headdress featuring a bright red arrow pointing at her forehead.

The new castle to which the city owes its origins and its name was built by Henry II in the second half of the 12th Century. On the roof of the Keep a sloping 17th Century sundial carries an inscription that might serve as the motto of the Quayside crowds: “Times tide doth waist, therefore make hast, we shall die all”.

As I walk along the riverbank toward the Baltic art gallery a fight erupts on a street corner. One lad in a stiff collared shirt patterned with diagonal double stripes like wallpaper in a 1970s Playboy swings a haymaker. The intended recipient ducks and the puncher’s momentum sends him into a graceful pirouette that ends with him lying on the pavement receiving a half-hearted kicking. Men on stag weekends in matching t-shirts with their nicknames – Cider Sponge, Streaker and so on – emblazoned across the back and on the front the legend “Benjy’s Staggers 2003”, or in nurses uniforms or brandishing inflatable sex dolls, march past oblivious.

It reminds of a few years ago when I was a guest on a phone-in on a Newcastle local radio station. There had been trouble involving football fans at an England match. An old lady from Wallsend called in not to voice her disproval, but to inquire what all the fuss was about, “When I was a lass,” she said, “And a load of big, strapping young fellas wanted to have a bit set-to in the street people just said, “Let ‘em get on with it and may the best man win””. Another pensioner phoned in shortly afterwards to endorse this view adding, “I’m not saying anything against the young fellers of today, mind, but in them days there was some lads around that really could fight”.

The Quayside was a rambunctious place even before the battling grandparents were born . When John Wesley came to preach from the steps of the Guildhall in 1742 he was set upon by an angry mob and only saved from a hiding by a local fishwife, Mrs Bailes, who reportedly put a brawny arm around his shoulders and threatened to floor anyone who laid a hand on his “bonny heed”.

The lights are still twinkling on the black waters of the river and the Julian Opie nudes recline languorous and undisturbed on the control houses of the Millennium Bridgem but the noise and th scrapping makes me reconsider my opinion, slightly. Newcastle may have been a beaten favourite in the contest to become European City of Culture, but the culture here is definitely more earthy Chaucer and Breughel than refined Poussin and Schubert. Stunning, brash and boisterous, it’s Grace Kelly with a big dash of Mae West and a inch of Klondike Kate.

On Saturday morning you might expect to find a scene of carnage – broken teeth and naked bridegrooms handcuffed to lampposts. In fact there is no evidence of the previous night’s Mardi Gras. Newcastle like its inhabitants lives hard and bounces back.

Over the centuries it has had to learn how. The first recorded ship built on the Tyne was a galley made for Edward the First. By the 1950s the shipyards along the river were producing more vessels a year than the entire United States. At that time Newcastle was also the biggest coal exporting port on the planet. Half a century later there are no coalmines and no shipbuilding and yet Newcastle is a boomtown.

In Nelson Street, opposite a vast red Dr Marten’s boot that marks one of the entrances to the Grainger Market, the Café Royal is doing a roaring morning trade in apple, celery, beetroot, carrot and ginger smoothies. The clientele is all stressed Levis and Fruit of the Loom white t-shirts; Gap and FCUK rather than vertical tanning and body piercing parlours. Talk is of re-investment limits, tax breaks and the property market. House prices in the North East continue to rise at 17.5% a year, yet the locals still have the sort of disposable income the average Londoner can only dream of. The per capita spending on clothes is higher than in any city in Britain. There is Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North, the Baltic and Biscuit Factory art galleries, the winking eye of the Millennium Bridge, public art on every street corner ranging from a traditional bronze sculpture of the footballer Jackie Milburn to the whimsical Blue Carpet that surrounds the Laing Art Gallery.

Newcastle has enjoyed such cultural transformations before, of course, and not always happily. In the 1960s controversial mayor T. Dan Smith (who ended up in jail for corruption) set about turning the city into “The Venice of the North”, apparently oblivious to the fact that: a) title was already claimed by Stockholm and St Petersburg and b) Newcastle had nowhere near enough water for the job (When this latter point was put to Smith he replied that Newcastle’s canals would be its proposed system of ring roads and by-passes. Frighteningly he was serious). In the name of progress town planners did more damage to the city’s architectural heritage than the Luftwaffe. The celebrated Royal Arcade was demolished to put in one of the mayor’s beloved dual carriageways, while the Regency elegance of Eldon Square was crushed beneath a monolithic shopping centre. Nowadays, the only building from this illustrious era of transformation that stands much scrutiny is the Civic Centre with its crown of – a distinctly Venetian touch - blue-green sea horses.

Some things thankfully survived the reformer’s onslaught. Central Arcade with its elaborating tiling of Saturday night tan and Sunday morning green, so heavily glazed that even now 120 years since it was stuck into place it still glisters like a skating rink stands at the top of Grey Street, a great Regency sweep of golden brown Kenton stone described by Sir John Betjeman as the finest street in England. Like many of the best buildings in the city most of those on Grey Street were the work or architect John Dobson and builder Richard Grainger.

Dobson, a workaholic who was at his desk at 5am each morning, relaxed by painting watercolours (some can be seen in the Laing) and numbered JW Turner amongst his friends was one of a trio of gifted Tyneside Georgians who refused to drift south to the capital. Another was the great engineer George Stephenson, builder of the world’s first passenger railway, born upstream at Wylam. And just behind the Cathedral is a plaque to mark the place where the great engraver Thomas Bewick had his workshops. Bewick, like Stephenson came from up the river in Northumberland. He too was a man of humble background whose brilliance brought him to the attention of the world. As a boy, Bewick said he never heard the word “drawing” and the only paintings he knew were the signs of the local pubs, yet the wood engravings that illustrated amongst other works the History of British Birds, The Fables of Aesop and A General History of Quadrupeds brought him such fame that the great American naturalist Audubon travelled across the Atlantic specifically to meet him. After Bewick died one of his pupils, Ebenezer Landells decamped to London and founded Punch.

Close to where Bewick once works are some of the oldest buildings in the city. Newcastle was settled by the Romans, but Hadrians Wall, once tramped by the hobnailed boots of the 6th Legion (“Victorious, Loyal And Faithful”), is mainly invisible - just off the New Bridge Street a short section of the foundations can be seen disappearing into the garden of a council house. But bits of the new castle are still standing, notably the Keep and the Black Gate. During the reign of Henry VIII John Leland noted that the walls of Newcastle “In strength and magnificence far passeth all the walls of the cities of England. There is not much evidence to support that assertion now. The longest and best-preserved stretch can be found between Bath Lane and Gallowgate. The old moat is still visible, the water long gone and the trench is now green and speckled with daisies and the dustings of elderflower petals blown off in the easterly breeze. The narrow alleyways that run between the wall and the Chinese restaurants of Stowell Street still look and smell authentically medieval, though.

Nearby in the quiet courtyard of Blackfriars are the ruins of the Dominican priory. Newcastle was once a town of two monasteries, the Dominicans and the Capuchins. The former wore black, the latter white. This is said to be the origin of Newcastle United’s black-and-white striped shirts, so popular with the locals that the Saturday shopping crowds in Northumberland Street often resemble a herd of zebra or a gigantic barcode. Their place of devotion, St James’s Park towers above the city, bigger than any cathedral.

It was the fortifications that gave Newcastle its name but the river that gave it its fortune and for all the excellence of Dobson’s work on Grey Street and Central Station it is here that the real structural glory of the city lies. In the industrial North East engineering has always outranked architecture and the bridges of the Tyne show why. The Swing Bridge, built in 1871, which swivelled aside so the warships that were made and repaired up stream at Elswick (conveniently close to the Vickers-Armstrong armament plants) could pass through; the High Level Bridge with its encased, serpentine arches, designed, by George Stephenson’s son, Robert, to carry trains on the upper tier and road traffic on the lower and, best of all, the Tyne Bridge, itself opened in 1926 by George V. The top of the vast arching span stands nearly 200 feet above the river. And if it looks a little like the Sydney Harbour Bridge then that is not so surprising, the same company Dorman Long of Middlesbrough built both.

In the antique shop at the bottom of the precipitous Dog Leap stairs (once the work place of cloggers, now a lung-bursting fitness test for middle-aged writers) there is a photo of the Tyne Bridge under construction. The vast stone pillars that tower above the north and south banks of the river are in place and the steel girders are starting to reach out toward each other across the dark and murky river. Moored close by the Guildhall is a submarine.

Practical, unadorned and handsome the Tyne Bridge epitomises the muscular and ingenious endeavour for which Newcastle was once known. It’s baby brother, the Millennium Bridge, is good looking too, but smaller, less serious, a creature of our times. The bridge swings upwards to admit shipping, but in truth there is little traffic and no submarines now. Not that the crowds who flock across it to the south bank developments such as the Baltic (The nearby Sage music centre will be completed soon) seem concerned by that.

Even in the worst of times - and there have been many of them, from besieging Scots to economic collapse - the people of Newcastle remain remorselessly up beat. There is such apparently endless supply of optimism and good humour here it’s tempting to believe that the local drinking water must be naturally impregnated with Prozac. Maybe it’s just a faith in their city’s power to regenerate.

The belief is often justified. The Tyne was once heavily polluted. My father recalls coming up on business from Teeside in the 1960s and asking a railway porter the quickest way to get down to the river, “Gan in the Gents over there, “ came the reply, “jump in the toilet and flush”. Nowadays that grim waterway is one of the finest salmon fishing rivers in Britain.

Writing in the 1950s the historian Arthur Mee noted that Newcastle is “a city that should be admired not for its appearance but its achievements”. You can check those off from the bridges to the shipyards to the fact that the reading room at the Literary and Philosophical Society was the first in the world to be lit by electric light, but in the end, if I may turn a little sentimental, the city’s greatest achievement of all are its people – self-confident, unpretentious, friendly and quite often almost as funny as they think they are. Though admittedly sometimes late at night on the Quayside or in the Bigg Market you really have to keep repeating that to yourself just to stop from screaming and running away.