Gateshead: Angel, Bridges and the South Bank of the Tyne
Gateshead spent most of the twentieth century being treated as Newcastle's less glamorous neighbour. Then Antony Gormley's Angel of the North appeared beside the A1 in 1998 — twenty metres tall, with a wingspan wider than a Boeing 767 — and the perception began to shift. The Sage Gateshead, a Norman Foster-designed music venue of curved glass and steel, opened on the quayside in 2004. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, converted from a 1950s flour mill, opened in 2002. The Gateshead Millennium Bridge, a tilting pedestrian and cyclist crossing that opens to let ships through, connected the regenerated south bank to Newcastle's quayside in 2001.
These four interventions — the Angel, the Sage, the Baltic, the bridge — changed Gateshead's identity within a decade. The quayside area now draws visitors in its own right, and the view across the Tyne from the south bank, taking in the succession of bridges from the Tyne Bridge to the Swing Bridge to the High Level Bridge, is one of the most photographed urban panoramas in England.
Away from the river, Gateshead is a borough of contrasts. The Metrocentre in Dunston was the largest shopping centre in Europe when it opened in 1986 (it has since been overtaken). The Team Valley trading estate is one of the oldest planned industrial estates in the UK. Whickham, Ryton, and Rowlands Gill sit in pleasant countryside above the Derwent Valley. The south of the borough rises to open moorland. The population is around 200,000.
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Gateshead spent most of the twentieth century being treated as Newcastle's less glamorous neighbour. Then Antony Gormley's Angel of the North appeared beside the A1 in 1998 — twenty metres tall, with a wingspan wider than a Boeing 767 — and the perception began to shift. The Sage Gateshead, a Norman Foster-designed music venue of curved glass and steel, opened on the quayside in 2004. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, converted from a 1950s flour mill, opened in 2002. The Gateshead Millennium Bridge, a tilting pedestrian and cyclist crossing that opens to let ships through, connected the regenerated south bank to Newcastle's quayside in 2001.
These four interventions — the Angel, the Sage, the Baltic, the bridge — changed Gateshead's identity within a decade. The quayside area now draws visitors in its own right, and the view across the Tyne from the south bank, taking in the succession of bridges from the Tyne Bridge to the Swing Bridge to the High Level Bridge, is one of the most photographed urban panoramas in England.
Away from the river, Gateshead is a borough of contrasts. The Metrocentre in Dunston was the largest shopping centre in Europe when it opened in 1986 (it has since been overtaken). The Team Valley trading estate is one of the oldest planned industrial estates in the UK. Whickham, Ryton, and Rowlands Gill sit in pleasant countryside above the Derwent Valley. The south of the borough rises to open moorland. The population is around 200,000.
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