London to Newcastle isn’t rated among the world’s great train journeys, but for any returning native of the northeast there are sights along the line that will elevate the spirits. I start to feel my heart lift as the train passes the modest brick HQ of North East Granite Co—maybe because I find something nearly poetic in that plain trading name, but mainly because I know we’re now at Langley Moor, County Durham. (Two miles east over green fields is High Shincliffe, the suburb where Tony Blair spent his boyhood.) In short order thereafter come some of the major landmarks of the region—Durham city’s magisterial Norman cathedral, then Penshaw Monument, a homage to the Reform Act of 1832, blackened down the decades by industrial cinders. From these sights the curious stranger may get some sense of how heftily church and industry have left their mark on the territory.

A few minutes further on and Gateshead is announced by Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. And this is where I gather up my bags, for we are now approaching Newcastle. Presently the view opens out on to the River Tyne, and the traveller is met by the splendid panorama of Newcastle’s Quayside, its fulcrum the great radial green-steel arch of the Tyne Bridge. Throughout the early 20th century, visitors would be struck by their first sight of this waterfront, and the way it had been blackened by the clanking, grinding industries—coalmining, shipbuilding, heavy engineering—that had helped Tyneside prosper. Lord Armstrong’s Elswick works alone turned out cranes, bridges, warships and ordnance, and there was something compelling in this colossal display of carboniferous capitalism. The rest of the century was a tale of industrial decline—first by degrees, then leaps and bounds. Now when fresh eyes alight upon the Tyne they will see a rather arty-party sort of town, albeit one eager to say it is still open for business.

If many of our great northern cities have been polished up for the post-industrial age, none shines quite so brightly as Newcastle. The Quayside—now a landscaped leisure sector of raucous bars and gleaming apartment blocks—has been crucial in reimagining Newcastle for locals and tourists alike. I can still recall my surprise on seeing it in 1992 after a gap of three or four years. In the interim, the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, a thoroughly Thatcherite project in this Labour “heartland,” had attempted to jumpstart a form of “regeneration” by enticing private developers with public funds, and some prime river-fronting industrial sites had been turned into office space and luxury flats.

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