Inside the Grainger Market, tucked near one end, there is a Marks & Spencer roughly the size of a single stall. It opened in 1895 as one of the first six M&S Penny Bazaars, and it is the only one of the six still standing. The sign above it still reads "Don't Ask The Price, It's A Penny." It is the smallest M&S in the world, and most people walk straight past it on their way to buy dumplings.
The market around it opened in 1835. John Dobson designed it, Richard Grainger built it, and when it first opened it contained 180 butchers' shops, which tells you something about what Newcastle ate. The vegetable-market roof you stand under now went up in 1901, replacing the original. Trade has thinned since the butchers' heyday, but a surprising amount of it is very good. Pumphrey's has been selling coffee here since it was established in 1750 — 221 years before Starbucks — and has a "Best Cappuccino in the UK 2014" certificate on the wall to prove the head start counted for something. Agostino at Slice sells 18-inch Neapolitan slices and refuses to let the price climb above a fiver. The French Oven does breads, scones, pasties and pies fast enough that one of its regulars described the place by the sound of a hundred brown paper bags being snapped up at closing. Nan Bei makes Chinese dumplings by hand in front of you, steamed and then pan-fried if you ask. Matthew's Cheese sells cheese by the gram. Somewhere in here is also the Weigh House, the market's original 1835 facility for checking that goods weighed what the trader claimed, which has outlasted most of the butchers.
Step out of the market and you are in Grainger Town, the classical heart of the city, and specifically onto Grey Street, which curves downhill from Grey's Monument towards the river. Betjeman wrote of it: "As for the curve of Grey Street, I shall never forget seeing it to perfection, traffic-less on a misty Sunday morning. Not even Regent Street, even old Regent Street London, can compare with that descending subtle curve." Pevsner called it one of the finest streets in England, Gladstone called it the best modern street in the country, and in 2002 BBC Radio 4 listeners voted it the best street in the UK, so the field of famous men praising this street is now fairly crowded. Grainger and Dobson laid it out in the 1830s and it was finished in 1837. Grey's Monument at the top honours Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, the Northumbrian prime minister behind the Reform Act, and the tea. Partway down at number 100 is the Theatre Royal, whose façade is often called the finest in the country. Its original interior burned down during a performance of Macbeth in 1899, and the auditorium you see today was rebuilt by Frank Matcham in 1901.
For dinner, the city has form. On Queen Street, Khai Khai cooks over coals and wood fires on a josper grill and in a tandoor — Old Delhi butter chicken, Kashmiri lamb roganjosh — and has been described locally as Newcastle's answer to Dishoom. It was opened in 2021 by the people behind Dabbawal, whose own street-food menu runs to the Bombay Bomb, the Vada Pao, and paneer makhani masala. If you want to know what the fuss is, order the Vada Pao, which is a Bombay burger of spiced mashed potato and is exactly as good as that sounds.
Walk downhill from Grey Street and Dean Street drops you onto the Quayside, which is the Newcastle of postcards: the river, and the bridges. The Tyne Bridge, the green through-arch that everyone pictures, was built by Dorman Long of Middlesbrough and opened by King George V in October 1928. Its arch was a test bed for the cantilevering methods later used on the Sydney Harbour Bridge — the myth runs the other way round, but Newcastle came first. Beside it, Robert Stephenson's High Level Bridge of 1849 stacks a railway on top of a road, and further along the tilting Gateshead Millennium Bridge — the "blinking eye" — opens for boats and carries you across to the BALTIC gallery and The Glasshouse concert hall on the Gateshead bank.
The drinking on the Quayside is older than the bridges. The Bridge Tavern sits directly beneath the Tyne Bridge; it was an ale house for nearly two centuries before the original building was pulled down in 1925 to make room for the bridge and then rebuilt, and it now pours nine rotating cask lines. Round the corner is the Crown Posada, a tiny Victorian pub with a mahogany bar, etched glass and an ornate tiled floor, listed on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. For food, the Broad Chare next to Live Theatre is Terry Laybourne's gastropub and a regular on the UK's Top 50 Gastropubs list; its Scotch eggs — runny soft egg in meaty sausage — get singled out again and again, and there are hand-raised pork pies, potted shrimps, crab on toast, fish pie, and a steak-and-kidney pudding on Thursdays. On Sundays the whole waterfront fills with the Quayside Market, over a hundred stalls of crafts, food and odds and ends, roughly half nine to four, all year round.
Follow the river a little further east and the Ouse Burn comes down to meet the Tyne through a former industrial valley that has become the city's creative quarter. Time Out named Ouseburn one of the coolest neighbourhoods in the world, which is the kind of thing that usually kills a place, though this one seems to have survived it. Artists moved into the derelict buildings when they were cheap, and it is now breweries, galleries, live-music venues and studios, thick with murals and paste-ups. The first industry recorded here was glassmaking — three glasshouses set up in 1619 where the burn met the Tyne — and later the Maling potteries, which Robert Maling started in 1817 and which grew into the largest pottery on Tyneside; the 1879 works covered the area of about eight football pitches and was the largest pottery in England.
You can eat and drink well in Ouseburn without spending much. The Tyne Bar, under a bridge and a step from the water, has been here since 1994 and does meals under a tenner. Cook House, an industrial-looking place with a terrace and garden owned by the chef and food writer Anna Hedworth, changes its small-plates menu constantly — bacon sandwiches with Cook House Ketchup at brunch, tempura cauliflower with coconut curry sauce and braised ox at dinner. For beer, the Free Trade Inn is one of the city's best-loved real-ale pubs, with a beer garden that has some of the finest views of the Quayside and the bridges anywhere in Newcastle and a running list of nine cask and twelve keg lines plus six ciders. The Cumberland Arms has superb cask ales and a sun-trap terrace, and a calendar packed with live music, comedy and poetry. The Cluny is a pub and music venue with a plaque on its wall to Eric Larkham, a local described as "a man of many hats and it seems a carrier bag." There is also Ouseburn Farm, a city farm, and Seven Stories, the national centre for children's books, for anyone travelling with children who would rather look at goats than beer taps.
North of the centre, Jesmond is the leafy, well-off end of town — Georgian and Victorian houses, boutiques and cafés, with Osborne Road as its eating and drinking spine — and it is a calmer, more residential base a few minutes from the middle by Metro. Its great asset is Jesmond Dene, a steep wooded valley of the Ouse Burn that William Armstrong, the arms and engineering magnate, bought up by 1862, landscaped with waterfalls and a grotto, and then handed to the people of Newcastle in 1883. It has had a free petting zoo, Pets' Corner, since the 1960s. The name Jesmond, incidentally, just means "mouth of the Ouseburn."
Armstrong left his mark on the rest of the city too. He built the Swing Bridge, and his Elswick works started building and arming ships in 1882 and employed around 25,000 people by the end of the century. His name is on the parks — Armstrong Park and Heaton Park sit alongside the Dene. The city keeps a great deal of open ground: the Town Moor, common grazing land right in the centre where the freemen still hold grazing rights and the Hoppings funfair sets up each summer, and Leazes Park, the city's oldest, beside St James' Park. The stadium is Newcastle United's and stands in the middle of the city rather than out by a ring road; you can tour the changing rooms, dugouts and pitchside. For wet afternoons there is the Life Science Centre, whose planetarium is the biggest in the North of England, the free Great North Museum: Hancock with its life-size T. rex and a working model of Hadrian's Wall down to every milecastle, and the Discovery Museum's maritime and industrial collections.
A little way south, on a hill above the A1 at Gateshead, stands the Angel of the North: Antony Gormley's weathering-steel figure, 20 metres tall with a 54-metre wingspan and 208 tonnes, based on Gormley's own body and put up in four days in 1998. The design caused uproar when it was announced and is now about as beloved as public sculpture gets, seen by an estimated 33 million people a year from the road and the East Coast Main Line.
The city is old under all this. There was a Roman fort here, Pons Aelius, on Hadrian's Wall, named for the emperor after Hadrian's visit in 122 and now mostly buried under the medieval Castle Keep. The castle that gave the place its name was a "new castle" built in 1080 by Robert Curthose, the Conqueror's eldest son; the stone keep went up in the 1170s. Coal made it rich — "carrying coals to Newcastle" was already a saying by 1538 — and beneath the streets the Victoria Tunnel, dug in the 1840s to move coal down to the Tyne, later served as a WWII air-raid shelter and can now be walked with a guide.
Getting here is easy: Central Station, under John Dobson's great curved train shed, sits on the East Coast Main Line straight to London and Edinburgh, the Tyne and Wear Metro runs to the coast and across the river from Monument and Central Station, and the airport is a 24-minute Metro ride from the middle of town.
Newcastle has been voted the friendliest city in the UK, ahead of Glasgow and York, which the people here would tell you about if they weren't so busy telling you everything else. They call themselves Geordies, a name a local comedian named Billy Purvis is on record using back in 1823, and, as one of them put it, Novocastrians only when they are trying to be posh.