City Games

NewcastleGateshead Quayside

Delight. Astonishment. Disbelief. People returning to their native Newcastle or Gateshead after a long absence are liable to react with one or all of these.

Actually, you wouldn't have had to be away too long - a decade would do it - to be struck by the changes that have taken place. The chances are that you will have heard of The Angel of the North, Antony Gormley's Gateshead sculpture whose impact on the fortunes and perception of the region has dwarfed even its own ample dimensions.

But its bold outline, if you are driving past it on the way into Gateshead or Newcastle, is a signal of more amazing things to come.

It is beside the River Tyne that jaws tend to drop. In the memory of many Tynesiders, Newcastle Quayside is black, grimy and hanging on by its finger tips to a vanished era of shipbuilding and heavy industry.

On the Gateshead bank of the river, the recollection is the same but without the residue of fine 19th Century architecture. An ancient church, St Mary's, survived seemingly against the odds.

What do we see now? A busy scene for which the word 'stunning' is no exaggeration.

On Gateshead Quays - a new name for a new age - the curves of The Sage Gateshead reside alongside the angular BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. World class music venue and visual arts showcase sit side by side representing £120m of capital investment in the arts. Beside them rests a gloriously restored St Mary's Heritage Centre.

Newcastle Quayside is now a popular and fashionable place for nights out. Buildings have been restored, restaurants and bars established. Live Theatre, set up when few ventured here for fun, now has a wonderfully restored home worthy of its widely admired work.

Linking both banks of the Tyne is the crowning glory - the £22m Gateshead Millennium Bridge. It's a new crossing place and a new vantage point, a product of modern engineering equal to the public art which now proliferates.

What has happened here can seem like a miracle. Thirty years ago the prospects for this area seemed grim. Twenty years ago there were stirrings of activity, new developments beginning on Newcastle's East Quayside and dreams of a better future. But few people could have imagined what we see today.

Ten years ago Newcastle and Gateshead were conjoined for marketing purposes as NewcastleGateshead. For traditionalists it might have grated but around the world the NewcastleGateshead story is cited as an example of culture-led regeneration par excellence.

When the World Summit on Arts & Culture took place here in 2006, 550 cultural leaders from 77 countries came to see what had happened and, in many cases, to see if the same thing would work back home. The theme was 'Transforming Places, Transforming Lives' and lives have been transformed. The Angel of the North was a catalyst for further change, allowing the ambitions of a strategy, The Case for Capital, to be realised, bringing huge benefits for the North East as a whole.