Newcastle was hosting the Super League Magic Weekend in 2016 when we spent a weekend in the city. Indeed, that was the reason for our visit and it was the second year in a row that we’d driven the long distance up north to experience the delights of mingling with Geordies.
On our previous visit we’d explored a bit of Newcastle, popping into museums and looking at the old castle there on the mornings of the games, but for this year’s trip we were a bit more relaxed about things and mostly contented ourselves with some general ambling around the streets instead. This gave us a chance to really soak up the huge variety of architectural styles of buildings that had survived to the present day.
While Newcastle was a target for air raids during the second world war on account of its industrial centres, it was not hit anywhere near as bad as our home city, Portsmouth, which suffered six times as many injuries and deaths (the heaviest night of bombing in Portsmouth alone almost cost the same number of lives as Newcastle’s entire losses in the war) and the destruction of thousands of buildings. It’s always nice, therefore, when we’re travelling elsewhere in the United Kingdom, to see buildings from a wide range of historical periods and in a wide range of styles since what we might have had was mostly turned into rubble in the 1940s. Newcastle does not disappoint in this respect.
This post, then, can be considered a photowalk around Newcastle city centre on a Saturday and Sunday morning in May 2016 with some occasional information about some of the sights we saw if they have any significance or historical or architectural interest to us. You can expect to see Baroque, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Jacobean, Brutalism, and Modernism represented.
We were staying at a hotel north of Newcastle – the Holiday Inn, Gosforth Park (not the hotel we’d meant to book; a story I won’t bore you with right now; farther away from Newcastle than we’d planned on being; but fabulous staff and a very nice hotel overall) – and there was a nearby, regular bus service that ran to and from the city centre. We started our wander around Newcastle close to Eldon Square, a wide space hosting a war memorial. This memorial was unveiled in 1923 by Field Marshall Douglas Haig who knew a thing or two about war, having overseen the two million British casualties under his command in the First World War. The thing or two he knew didn’t include protecting lives.
The Pearl (formerly Pearl Assurance House, as you can see from the photo below) is a pleasing piece of brutalism dating from the 1970s. The small building next to it has some wildly contrasting plasterwork that feels like a mix between Art Nouveau and Tudor, but this decoration dates from the early 1950s. Just along from these buildings was the Laing Art Gallery that we felt compelled to pop into and take a look around; at the time this was housing an absolutely fantastic Alice in Wonderland exhibition.
A couple of nice examples of Art Deco lines in the following photos. The DEX Garage was opened in 1931 and it’s the oldest, straight-ramped multi-storey car park in the country outside London, originally sporting a turntable and elevator to take the cars to spaces. It’s sadly due for demolition at the time of writing this. The building with the faded “Northern” wording is somewhere I can’t place on a map, nor find any information for, but the design clearly dates it to around the same period.
Not far from late-thirteenth century St John The Baptist church is a monument to the engineer George Stephenson, designed by John Graham Lough, and unveiled in 1862. The main statue is of Stephenson himself while around the base of the stone sit four figures representing some achievement of Stephenson’s life.
The attractive Victorian-style theatre is the Tyne Theatre and Opera House and was opened in 1867. The wording Stoll Picture Theatre comes from its 1919 transformation into a cinema, and the first film it showed to audiences was Tarzan of the Apes. The Stoll Picture Theatre was the first cinema in Newcastle to show “talkies”. Nearby are some remnants of the old wall built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to defend the city from Scottish invaders from the north.
The conclusion of our first day of the weekend in Newcastle from a photographing the sights perspective saw us arrive at St James’ Park where the fans were gathering for the afternoon kick-off. You can see photographs of the Magic Weekend action from both days by clicking on 2016 Newcastle Magic Weekend Rugby League Photos.
The games for Sunday kicked off a little earlier so there was less chance to explore Newcastle but we still had another stroll anyway.
While Art Nouveau isn’t my favourite – a little too decorative for my simpler, cleaner tastes – there’s no denying that the Emerson Chambers building has some lovely elements of the style with some Baroque and Jacobean flairs too. I particularly like the copper corner domes and the clock faces are just fabulous on this very early twentieth century building.
The tall column in the public square area of Newcastle that we frequently found ourselves crossing through or catching sight of on our pre-match wandering is Grey’s Monument. This monument was raised in 1838 to give thanks to Earl Grey (he of the tea fame) for introducing the Great Reform Act in Parliament.
Another of many listed buildings in Newcastle, and a very attractive one too, is the Central Arcade in the Central Exchange building. This style of shopping arcade came to prominence in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, and Central Arcade dates from 1906.
Anyone who’s read other architectural-based posts of mine on this site will know that I am a lover of modernist and brutalist architecture. The Commercial Union Building in Newcastle is thoroughly modern, dating from 1971, built from pre-cast reinforced concrete blocks. While it can never claim to be a beautiful example of the style, most definitely preferring function over form in this instance, and perhaps jarringly so with little consideration to the surrounding aesthetic, the presence of supporting pillars in the manner of Le Corbusier‘s Five Points of Architecture is always a joy to see.
The sixteenth and seventeenth century Jacobean buildings not far from the bridges and riverside in Newcastle are former merchant houses. This part of the city had been a centre for trading since the Roman period. In 1772 the daughter of a tenant living there, Bessie Surtees, climbed down from a window in order to elope with the son of a coal merchant. They fled to Scotland and were married. In time, Surtees’ husband, John Scott, would become the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, and so the building became known as Bessie Surtees House and a plaque now commemorates her elopement.
The final bit of architecture to note, spotted on our last walk up towards the football stadium on the Sunday, is the former Newcastle Co-op building on Newgate Street. You hardly need me to tell you that this is an iconic example of Art Deco, of course. The building was opened in 1932 but the site on which it was built had formerly housed another of those Victorian and Edwardian shopping arcades dating from 1902, and during exploratory work for refurbishment in 2012 the original ornate iron piers from that arcade were rediscovered.
