Gateshead: past and present

The forecast wasn't brilliant again today, but as the rain was expected to stay to the north, we decided to head south to Newcastle and Gateshead where we hoped we'd stay dry.

You can't visit Gateshead without being impressed by the Angel of the North which dominates the landscape. At 65ft high it is Britain's largst sculpture and the information board at its location claims it to be one of the most-viewed works of art in the world, seen by more than one person every second or 33 million a year.

In the ten years since its construction, despite some initial criticism it has become a powerful and universally accepted symbol of the North East. It also acknowledges the old industries of coal mining and steelmaking which once made the area famous - it is constructed entirely of steel and stands on the site of the Lower Tyne Colliery.

The light for our visit was poor and didn't do it justice, but as well as the family album snaps, I did manage another which pleased me - see this link to my photos blog: Stature

We then headed down the Old Durham Road into the centre of Gateshead, to an area of town called Saltmeadows. Admittedly not the most picturesque of places, but significant for my family as it was here in the 1920s that my great grandfather lived and worked in the chemical industry.

The new houses on Cemetery Road replaced a much older terrace of tiny houses, where gran says their family (then of six, including my grandma), had moved to. We did find an alleyway which still had its original cobblestones - who knows, perhaps grandma played on these same cobblestones as a little girl eighty-odd years ago?

By the river, the area where the old chemical works used to be is now full of smaller industrial units. Before moving to Cemetery Road, they'd lived closer to the dockyards in a street called South Row, which still exists, although the houses have long gone. I had't realised that the newest symbols of Gateshead's regeneration, the Baltic Centre and the Millennium Bridge, were literally just round the corner from here.

The bridge is the only one of its kind in the world, relying on a tilting mechanism to allow ships to pass beneath - a very simple yet quite elegant design.

Of course, no visit to the Tyne would be complete without taking in the view upriver of the five famous Tyne bridges. In the foreground is the Tyne Bridge (1928 - so this was being built at the time my family were there), the next is the Swing Bridge (1876), followed by the High Level Bridge (1849), the blue Metro Bridge (1981) and the King Edward Bridge (1906).