Michael Batson

I once spent time living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the very north of England. What is today the city of Newcastle and the surrounding area of Northumbria has history going back centuries. It was under Roman occupation for 300 years marking one of the northern most extremities of Roman rule, the remains of which can still be seen today. Later came the Vikings and then later the Normans. The city is a mixture of mediaeval, Georgian and neoclassical architecture and street planning. It was a place of innovation. It was once one of the world's largest ship building and repair centres during the industrial revolution. Newcastle was one of Britain’s largest print centres, and also became a glass producer with a reputation for brilliant flint glass Newcastle was one of the first cities in the world to be lit up by electric lighting. Rail and the invention of the steam turbine for maritime propulsion were innovations from Newcastle. Stephenson’s Rocket was designed and built in Newcastle. In the 19th century, shipbuilding and heavy engineering were central to the city's prosperity; and the city was a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution. Ships built in Newcastle shipyards went all over the world. When I was there though much of what had made Newcastle the city it once was, was in decline or gone.

Growing up I’d been aware of Newcastle in England first through television with a programme called “When the Boat Comes In” which was set in post-World War One Tyneside. Later came the “Likely Lads” followed by “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” both the work of well-known comedy writing duo Ian la Frenais (a local) and Dick Clement who penned plays, shows, film and television. I watched the screening of the second series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet when I was living in Newcastle. At school I had a mate from Newcastle. His accent wasn’t that strong, but that of his parents was. Then there was music. Lots of musicians I was aware of came from that area of England. There were films too like “Get Carter” (the original). The opening credit sequence is a driver’s eye-view from the front of a train accompanied by a heavy bass beat. The train was taking the lead character, a gangster played by Michael Caine, “home” to Newcastle, though he’s a Cockney and never employed the distinctive Geordie accent for the role; but then neither did most of the other characters, except for some in minor roles.

Then came football. When I first went to England my uncle took me to a local match at Fulham, whereby chance they were at home to Newcastle United. The away fans were penned in, as they invariably are, in the far corner from where I watched. It finished 2-2; Newcastle was then featured Kevin Keegan in the twilight of his playing career, along with some bright up and comers. The match was in the old Second Division, and Newcastle soon after were promoted. The club in the black and white stripes, was known historically for its centre-forwards, the tone set by Jackie Milburn, where it was said if you ever needed another like him, you’d only go to the local coal mine (another thing the city was famous for) and get one. Sadly, though prodigious its forward line could be, it wasn’t matched by ownership; the club suffering from directors who seemingly knew nothing about football. Later I’d stand on the Gallowgate Terrace at St James’ Park packed in with the locals.

Newcastle is England’s northernmost city just 40 miles from Scotland. The city’s origins go back to Roman times when it was called Pons Aelius before becoming Munucceaster (modernised to Monkchester). Conflicts with the Dames left Tyneside settlements in ruins. Then William the Conqueror’s son built a castle in 1080. The castle was made of wood being given the title Novum Castellun or “New Castle”, which is when the name was first used. The first wooden castle was replaced with a stone one in 1087, rebuilt again in 1172 and in the 14th and 15th centuries before falling ruinous only to be refortified during the English Civil War. Much of the keep can still be seen today. Pons Aelius means Hadrian’s Bridge, after the emperor Hadrian (ruled 117-138 CE, it was named for his family) whose eponymous wall built to “separate Romans from barbarians”, those being Scots (or then Picts or Gaels), ran for 73 miles ending or beginning at Wallsend (the wall’s end), the Newcastle suburb on the banks of the Tyne (further north was the Antonine Wall built by Agricola). The city’s Westgate Road is the line of the original wall and the wall’s remnants are regarded as a British icon. The first bridge across the Tyne was built by the Romans. The modern city of Newcastle marked the northern extremity of the Roman Empire beyond which even their legions rarely ventured.

Much of Newcastle still retains a mediaeval street layout with narrow alleys or 'chares', most of which can only be traversed by foot, still exist in abundance, particularly around the riverside. Stairs from the riverside to higher parts of the city centre remain intact in places. The city has an extensive neoclassical centre referred to as Tyneside Classical, largely developed in the 1830s by local builders Richard Grainger and John Dobson. More recently, Newcastle architecture considered to be Tyneside classical has been extensively restored. Newcastle has been described by some as England's best-looking city and Grey Street with its eponymous monument (English PM 1830-34) and the Central Arcade, described as one of the finest streets in England. The city’s iconic Tyne Bridge was completed in 1928. It was designed by the same firm who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and both modelled on the Hell Gate Bridge in New York. Other distinctive Newcastle bridges include the dual-purpose High-Level Bridge, King Edward VII Bridge, and the Swing Bridge built probably on the site of the Roman bridge, and once the largest swing bridge ever built.

My first visit to Newcastle was because a mate had been accepted to study (or “read” as they say in the UK) at Newcastle University. I went for a weekend visit and stayed over a year. I travelled north to Newcastle on the Stagecoach which left from Euston Station. The “coach” was a blue double-decker bus crossed with multicoloured stripes that purred northbound on the A1 motorway, which before the advent of the M1 was England’s premier motorway. The former road connected the southeast with the northeast, and the latter connected London with the northwest. Travelling up the A1 the landmarks of Newcastle were once only the bridges spanning the Tyne River. Since 1998 the entrance to Tyneside at Gateshead has been marked by the Angel of the North. Perched on a hill 75m high weighing in at 208 tonnes with a 54m wingspan as big as a Boeing and 20m high and is believed to be the largest statue of an angel anywhere in the world. Gateshead is on the south bank of the river and Newcastle sits opposite on the northern bank.

I stayed in Dilston Road in Fenham, a working-class area off the Westgate Road, once home to a sprawling military barracks. The area was home to young families and increasingly, because of the low rents, students from the rest of the UK. Our landlord was from the south Asian continent and his children all spoke English with broad Geordie accents (there are differing origins of the term “Geordie” but it’s thought the main one goes back to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745). Around the corner was Ali’s, the corner shop which always seemed to have some new order in of something you’d been craving. One day we thought we’d like some good lager beer and entered Ali’s to find he’d had an entire pallet full of 500ml cans of prime German lager, as if he’d read our minds. Across the road was his store and video shop which he’d called imaginatively “Alivision”.

The nearest pub was The Mill on Westgate Road. The students, being from out of town, sat at one end, the locals at the other, and in the middle was the bar, a sort of neutral zone. I quickly learned that the locals weren’t well disposed to southerners, especially if they were from London, but took to me as I was an outsider and therefore unclassifiable. I recall public transport in London where nobody spoke, to each other but in Newcastle old ladies you’d never met would strike up conversation; it was inclusive. “What are you doing sat there on your own, pet” they’d say. If you asked someone for a cigarette, they’d give you two, “one for now and one for later”. Newcastle has a reputation as being a great place to go out, and the Mill was just the tip of the iceberg. I frequented the Barley Mow, the Baltic, and the Trent House, the latter having one of the best jukebox selections I’ve ever come across in a pub. The Trent House was two terraced houses with the walls knocked through. The toilets were the old family bathrooms so there wasn’t much room. On Friday nights after shooting the latest episode of the iconic music show The Tube, Jools Holland would sometimes turn up with a minder for a drink, ignoring all the insults.

Birmingham has the Bullring, Manchester the Arndale, Liverpool the One, and Newcastle Eldon Square, the city’s shopping centre. Completed in 1976 as part of reinvigorating inner cities across Britain, especially those that had become economically deprived, it was built on the site of the original Eldon Square, an area of Georgian architecture. It was at the time it opened the largest shopping centre in the UK. To build it, the local council employed a Danish architect though it had its detractors. Journalist Christopher Brooking, the founder of Private Eye, called Eldon Square ‘"perhaps the greatest single example of architectural vandalism in Britain since the war’, having destroyed ‘this most handsome piece of old Newcastle.’

Newcastle at that time, like many other former centres of British industry, was experiencing what could best be called economic depression, with all its flow-on social effects. Of the five areas in England then with the highest rates of unemployment, three were in and around Newcastle. The other two were in Cornwall and Liverpool. The causes of all this were the global shift in manufacturing and industry away from traditional powerhouses to the developing world; Asia mainly. It had another cause and that was the neo-liberal policies of the then government, called after its leader; “Thatcherism”. I sat on the Metro one day and behind me were a couple of blokes in their fifties. As the train travelled the line that ran along the northern bank of the Tyne one gave the other a high-level summary of the economic decline of Newcastle in the numbers of closures and laid off workers from ship building which went something like; “five thousand worked in that yard. Two thousand worked in that yard”, and so on it went all the way down the river. One empty shipbuilding yard I remember had a crane so large that they had another crane on its gantry to move the workings of the larger one beneath.

Recession in Newcastle had devastating consequences. Dole queues at the DHSS (acronym for the Orwellian Department of Human and Social Services) unemployment offices were out the street and down the road. Entire families of two and sometimes three generations would “sign on” together for the unemployment benefits. I remember seeing the queue on Westgate Road down the street for about 50m. I’d heard a statistic that in one part of Newcastle there were 5,000 unemployed welders. For the few jobs on offer on offshore oilrigs hundreds of these skilled workers would undertake trials to assess their levels of skill in the hope they’d get one of these prized jobs. The queues in the afternoon at the local chain of Greggs bakeries (founded in Newcastle in the 1970s the chain had expanded to some 2,300 locations) were also long, as after lunch the products baked early that morning and unsold were sold at bargain prices. One of the local treats you should sample in Newcastle are stottie cakes or “stotties” flat round bread with different fillings; bacon and egg is particularly tasty and a good breakfast in itself.

Local regional television channel Tyne Tees produced the music series The Tube in Newcastle for Channel Four. The Tube began in 1982 and was a showcase for many emerging 1980s bands who played live on Friday nights, the series had many hosts but it was the aforementioned Jools Holland, a kind of vaudevillian character with some considerable musical talent and the peroxide Paula Yates (much less talent). This was before she starred as the other half of one Bob Geldof and then later the INXS lead singer who, ironically enough, she’d roasted on the show for his tight leather trousers thinking him a “bit of a tosser”.

After student accommodation in Fenham I moved to High West Jesmond, an altogether more upmarket area on the other side of the Town Moor. Much of the area was owner-occupier. I had the downstairs part of a corner terraced house. The landlady was a Jemima or Jennifer (something beginning with “J”) who drove around in a Volvo station wagon (called an estate in the UK) with a golden retriever, and wore green Wellingtons and a Barbour coat, seemingly the dress standard and accessories of the English country gentry. Like much of Tyneside Jesmond (my station was West Jesmond) was well serviced by the PTE, the Public Transport Executive, the city’s excellent network of trains and buses all interlinked with their timetables synchronised and then rated then as one of the best public transport systems in Europe. The government’s contribution to this excellent system was to privatise it with dire consequences for most services. British Rail connected Newcastle by rail to the rest of the country and the central station is famous among rail buffs for the number of rail intersections (77) – where rails intersect and cross over forming a diamond pattern.

Newcastle United, known as the Magpies for their distinctive black and white shirts, have been English champions four times, won the FA Cup six times among other English titles, and had a solitary European title with the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (now the Europa League) in the late sixties, as well as some lesser titles. The club was formed in 1892 through the merger of two local sides and found a home at St James’ Park where they still play. For its first years the team was, rather unusually, selected by committee. From the late 1930s to mid-1950s the club was dominated by one man: Stan Seymour, a Scot, who played for them for nine seasons as a winger and then managed them in three stints over the next 20 years (he never managed another club).

In the eighties when I was watching the stadium hadn’t changed much since the Depression, and being pre-Hillsborough, still had large standing areas. My Saturday ritual was a pint at the Strawberry pub outside the ground where Saint and Greavsie (ran from 1985-92) would be on the television at lunchtime before kick-off. Back in those days being short of money you could get into St James’ Park at half-time for free so I’d stand at the Gallowgate end with the masses packed in like sardines. It was free, and probably didn’t say much for crowd safety, but I got to watch the second-half. Amazingly, the police used to move about in the crowds with the spectators seemingly being able to move aside to allow them to squeeze past. When I was watching them, the club was managed by Willie McFaul, a Northern Irishman, who had played for Newcastle in goal. Newcastle was the only major team he managed; a job he got first as caretaker after his predecessor Jack Charlton, resigned in protest at the sale of Chris Waddle to Tottenham.

When Keegan retired from playing for Newcastle, he allegedly said to the board “whatever you do don’t sell these three players: Waddle, Peter Beardsley, and Paul Gascoigne” (all were known to the faithful was “one of us” meaning they were local), as they’re the players which will see the team succeed. After Waddle was sold Beardsley went to Liverpool and “Gazza” as Gascoigne was known, followed Waddle to London. Following the sale of these key players they were relegated, so Keegan’s words were somewhat prophetic. Gascoigne went on to become one of the best midfielders of his generation until a serious knee injury in a cup final interrupted his upward career trajectory. His career recovered but in the interim he acquired addictions that would lead him to rack and ruin. Many young local players were the product of the Wallsend Boys’ Club (65 players from there went on to be professionals including Alan Shearer) but not Gazza who was from south of the river.

In one match I saw Newcastle hosted Birmingham City then managed by John Bond, an experienced campaigner. During the match Gascoigne, the club’s young star, suffered a facial injury caused by an opponent and much to the anger of the watching faithful had to go off. For the rest of the match the culprit was loudly booed every time he came near the ball to the point where he retreated to the touchline in the hope his teammates would not pass to him. Birmingham lost the match 4-1 and afterwards Bond said he’d never seen a professional team under his leadership so intimidated by a crowd. Loyalty was one thing, racism another. Like much of Britain at that time sport was blighted by ugly racism. Clyde Best had played for West Ham in the 1960s and in the 1970s came the “Three Degrees” at West Bromwich Albion, pioneering black players in an almost entirely white sport, on and off the field. Black players at Newcastle were subjected to ape chants and pelted with fruit. There was enough fruit around the corner flags to start a greengrocer and it went on unabated at every match.

Dominating the city skyline near St James’ Park is the Scottish and Newcastle brewery makers of the iconic Newcastle Brown Ale. Overseas I was surprised to see this ale sold on tap whereas at home it’s only available in a bottle. Scottish and Newcastle was built through acquiring other breweries and in the way of things was eventually acquired itself by Heineken and by Carlsberg and in 2004 the Tyne brewery was closed switching off the big blue star with the Tyne Bridge etched on it and for years it was also on Newcastle’s shirts, as sponsors.

The next time I saw Newcastle United play was in 2004 in Bangkok, on one of their pre-season tours. It was the only time I saw Alan Shearer in a Newcastle shirt. They played Thailand at Rajamangala Stadium, the national stadium of Thailand. Crowd estimates were 30,000 according to some, 40,000 according to the Thai FA. I was then staying in Banglamphu, where most of the backpackers stay when in Bangkok. All day I’d seen Newcastle supporters about many drinking. The were invariably male, with pasty white skin which looked like they’d never seen the sun. as they were getting about shirtless and in shorts, I could only assume many would be soon sunburnt, drunk followed by hungover. I went to eh match by boat, a water taxi along the canals. The taxi was along boat with seating arranged like on a bus. There were curtains on the side you pulled up when another taxi went by so you weren’t soaked with polluted river water. I bought a ticket outside the stadium off a scalper that was cheaper than the advertised price. The match ended 1-1 and wasn’t much of a spectacle. The playing surface looked a bit like the elephants had just left before kick-off. After the match on the bus back two Thais told me that Newcastle was the fourth most popular English team in Thailand, though some say it’s the third most popular. I once saw a Thai woman who had the NUFC emblem tattooed on over the whole of her back. When I asked why she had it done and why Newcastle she said she was a fan. Thais are mad football fans and especially about the English Premier League.

Under the Tyne Bridge back then was moored the Tuxedo Princess, a former Irish Sea ferry which served as a floating nightclub until 2007 when it was sold to Greece. The Newcastle Beer Festival, once called the real ale festival, is held on Quayside every year in April. Beer in England is sold in strengths measured by original gravity (1030-1034 is standard beer strength or about 3-4% alcohol). I’ve still got my handle from the real ale festival I attended which included sampling a brew called “Blackout”. The original gravity for that ale was about 1090 or over 10% alcohol, hence the name. It wasn’t much to taste leaving a sensation in the mouth like having a glassful of Polytar shampoo, but the real ale buffs thought it wonderful.

Rugby union is a minority sport in England as it is nearly everywhere it’s played. I saw Northern, one of the local semi-professional sides (there were dubious amateur rules for rugby in place) play Waterloo at a park with a small solitary grandstand with about 300 people watching. Later I saw Gosforth play at a ground with even less facilities where we stood about in the rain with some “Hooray Henrys”. Largely the reserve of public schools and the well-to-do, efforts to grow the game in Tyneside have largely fallen flat.

The northeast is famous for its music. Bryan Ferry hailed from the original village of Washington, Brian Young of AC/DC, Paul Rodgers of Free (and later Bad Company), Sting was from Wallsend, the Animals, Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, Martin Stephenson, Dire Straits (“Local Hero” was played before every home match at St James’ Park), Andy Taylor of Duran Duran, among others. Local entertainment was at a premium, and especially so in times of economic hardship. Newcastle’s pub scene is vibrant. An easy way to spot the locals is that they are the ones dressed for summer, but in winter. While visitors go about in overcoats and scarves; local men are in shirt sleeves and women in miniskirts often with sunbed tans.

Guide books to Britain like Rough Guide have placed Newcastle's nightlife as Great Britain's number one tourist attraction and Tripadvisor Travellers' Choice Destination Award awarded Newcastle third place in the whole of Europe for Nightlife destinations, (behind London and Berlin) and seventh place in the world. As recently as 2023 Newcastle was voted the best city in the UK for food, fashion and nightlife. Aside from Quayside there are many bars on the Bigg Market and its adjoining streets. Dating back to the Middle Ages, “bigg” was a word for barley but lately having a good time as crossed over into disorderly behaviour. When I was there Newcastle University had seven bars and sold more beer per head of student population than any other tertiary institute in England.

One day I went to the beach at Newcastle and it snowed. I remember there was a guy out windsurfing which brings a whole new meaning to dedication. It was a nice beach with light coloured sand but when I turned back and looked behind there was a giant slag heap left over from coal mining. Further south in County Durham, Blackhall Colliery is featured in Get Carter in the final scene. The film shows the beach black with coal spoilings, dumped there by mine's conveyor system which extended out to the North Sea.

Where ever I am now I always keep an eye on how Newcastle United are faring, now back in the English Premier League and under new ownership (Middle Eastern) and in a revamped St James’ Park. I never had much money when I was in Newcastle, it was cold much of the time, but my memoires of the city and its people are always warm.