Newcastle upon Tyne

From Pons Aelius to the New Castle

The Romans built the first bridge across the Tyne here, Pons Aelius, named for the emperor Hadrian's family. But it's a much later structure that gave the city its name: in 1080, Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror, raised a timber castle on the same high ground to secure the river crossing against the Scots. Newcastle — the "new castle upon Tyne" — has carried that name ever since, long after the original fortress was replaced in stone.

Around the castle grew a walled medieval town that made its fortune first from wool, then increasingly from coal, shipped downriver by the boatload to London and beyond. Newcastle's town walls, parts of which still survive, were once reckoned among the strongest in England.

Grainger Town and the coal city

By the 1600s, Tyne coal had made Newcastle's merchant "Hostmen" extraordinarily wealthy, and the city grew into the undisputed capital of North East trade. Its most elegant chapter came in the 1830s, when builder Richard Grainger and architect John Dobson replaced a warren of medieval streets with the sweeping Georgian terraces of Grainger Town — Grey Street, Grainger Street and the covered Grainger Market among them.

At the top of Grey Street stands Grey's Monument, honouring Earl Grey, the local aristocrat and Prime Minister behind the 1832 Reform Act — the same Earl Grey whose name is more famously attached to a blend of tea.

Bridges, the Quayside and a city that keeps rebuilding

Few skylines in England are as defined by their bridges. The green steel arch of the Tyne Bridge (1928) is the icon most people picture, but it shares the gorge with the swinging Victorian Swing Bridge and Robert Stephenson's two-tier High Level Bridge of 1849, one of the earliest combined road-and-rail bridges anywhere. The Quayside beneath them, once lined with working wharves, has been rebuilt since the 1990s into one of the city's most popular places to walk, eat and drink.

Newcastle's twentieth century produced its own exports, too — the beat group The Animals and the light bulb pioneer Joseph Swan among them — and today the city balances that heritage against two universities, a growing digital economy, and the enduring pull of Newcastle United and St James' Park on a hill above it all.

A note of apology (sort of)

No history of Newcastle would be complete without a word about Byker — and no word about Byker is complete without Byker Grove, the BBC youth-club drama filmed at Benwell Towers and set in the area, which ran for eighteen series between 1989 and 2006. Its real legacy wasn't the storylines; it was two teenage cast members, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, who met on set, formed a pop act called PJ & Duncan, and went on to a presenting career that has dominated British Saturday nights ever since. On behalf of the North East, this is traditionally where we apologise to the rest of the country for Ant & Dec. We're not going to. A primetime reboot, simply titled Byker, is already in the works, with the original pair back on board as executive producers — so you have not, in fact, heard the last of them.

Global light-entertainment stardom around the corner from a high street trying to find its feet — it's the kind of contradiction that turns up again and again across Tyne and Wear, and it's a fair bit of why this site exists.