Newcastle: capital of what?

Bill Lancaster

Newcastle upon Tyne has recently attracted much media attention with its joint bid with Gateshead to be European Capital of Culture in 2008. Eyebrows have been raised at the prospect of the coaly Tyne playing host to an event that has often appeared as the destination of the year for the cultural tourist. Glasgow, Stockholm and Antwerp all have recognisable cultural pedigrees of long vintage. Newcastle’s treasures are less well known. The city’s architecture – predominantly late Georgian – surprises many visitors by its scale. The Laing Art Gallery has several works of national importance in the midst of a mainly provincial collection and the city centre has some outstanding pieces of early twentieth century public sculpture. Many of the city’s buildings are the product of the ambition of Richard Grainger, a self-made builder and developer, who had to flee the city when his shaky method of funding was called to account. The Laing Art Gallery was a turn-of-the-century gift by a beer bottler and pub owner of Scottish birth, Alexander Laing, who responded to the unease expressed by some that Newcastle was one of the few northern cities not to possess a municipal gallery. When the Laing opened, paintings had to be borrowed to cover the absence of a civic collection.

History was not very kind to Newcastle. Described by poets as ‘England’s Peru’, the King of Denmark even tried to buy the town and river in the seventeenth century. In tonnage terms Newcastle was the world’s largest port and the Tyne and its environs pioneered the transition from a biological to a mineral-based economy, arguably the most important transition in human history. Yet the coal trade was a relatively simple one. Extraction, transportation and marketing did not require the facilitating skills of a large class of merchants. A small cosy circle of owners and merchant ‘hostmen’ formed the ‘Vend’, the first cartel of the modern period. During the eighteenth century, this lean organisation allowed the elite to move away from the town. Country estates, London palaces and salons in St James’s were funded by Newcastle coal. Tyneside was a plantation economy. There is a stark contrast to Britain’s other great ports during this period. Slaves, tobacco, sugar and cotton made Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow rich. Newcastle extracted and exported rather than imported – though fruit and flowers sometimes came in with colliers returning from the Dutch ports. The merchant princes of the Atlantic ports operated from home and their often ill-gotten wealth helped to establish local civic infrastructure. Bristol and Glasgow have their eighteenth century merchant quarters and – together with Liverpool – were centres of arts patronage. Liverpool’s inheritance of painting is of such importance that it is designated as part of the ‘National Collection’. Sure, Newcastle produced Thomas Bewick, but this former artisan’s reputation was largely based on his ability to produce and sell his books himself.

Wealth flowed from, rather than into, Newcastle. The richest cargo ever to enter the Tyne was a shipful of butter from southern Sweden in the 1930s. Lacking a sizeable wealthy middle class, Newcastle followed an unusually distinctive cultural trajectory. A major turning point was the Queen Caroline riot of 1821 when ordinary townspeople disrupted an official Corporation-funded celebration of the coronation of George IV. This disturbance was followed by a series of carnivalesque parades and mock coronations that won control of the streets for plebeian Newcastle. Bonnie ‘Pit Laddies’ and ‘Fish Lassies’ defined the culture of the streets and made the Quayside their own. Bright clothes, hilarious songs sung in the rich local dialect and a propensity for excessive drinking reached its apogee in the 1860s milieu of the Blaydon Races and Cushie Butterfield – both popularised in song, the former were riotous horse races and the latter a mid-nineteenth century beer loving heart-breaker from Gateshead. Numerous Irish immigrants joined this social brew and Irish songsters such as Ned Corvin helped to create Geordie culture. These nineteenth century developments remain central to present day Tyneside. The conurbation is distinguished by a value system that is staunchly working class. Middle class hegemony does not rule here and metropolitan and global trends are subject to local filtration. Newcastle remains a city whose citizens have not had their cultural weapons confiscated.

Geordie is a culture that lives largely on the tongue and can be witnessed travelling in crowds through the city centre. The dialect is a language-within-a-language as well as a delightful surviving example of near authentic Old English. It is central to local identity and its ever-changing utilisation is a cultural treasure. The past remains amongst Geordies in other ways. Visitors often singled out the bonnie Pit Laddies and Lassies’ clothes for comment and the silver buckles on Bobby Shaftoe’s knees were known throughout nineteenth century Britain. Geordies still dress with flair – Bigg Market minimalism is as well-known as Mr Shaftoe’s buckles. The colours are as bright now as they were on the Quayside in the early nineteenth century.

Testimony to the tenacity of local culture is its ability to enter a dialogue with new forces. Newcastle is not a cultural museum. The post-modern Quayside – with its confection of Farrell’s masterplan, a gallery of bridges, Sunday market and Victorian pubs – has quickly become an extension to Newcastle’s nightlife. We will soon see the crowd crossing the stunning Gateshead Millennium Bridge to BALTIC, The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Sage Music Centre. This promises to be a different experience to its London equivalent. The ease with which the Grands Projets of postmodernism have been absorbed into the local scene is in strong contrast to similar developments elsewhere. Newcastle and Gateshead’s bid to be European Capital of Culture 2008 is brave. If victory were to come it would be deserved – not least because it is a culture represented by people rather than things. Europe needs reminding of the importance of the connection between people and place and if any people can do this it is the Geordies.

Bill Lancaster has published widely in the field of urban history including studies of Leicester, Coventry and Newcastle upon Tyne. He was the founder and editor of Northern Review, a Journal of Regional and Cultural Affairs, and was Director of the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University from 1997-2007. He was co-editor of Newcastle upon Tyne, A Modern History, 2001, published by Phillimore & Co Ltd, ISBN 1 86077 167 X.