Cultural Rehab

Newcastle and Gateshead are the poster cities for cultural renewal. “Gone is almost all the industry – steel, coal, warehouses, shipyards, docks – that made this one of the world’s great manufacturing centres. Instead of a culture based on the dignity of labour and trade is a theme park of heritage sites and palaces of art, liberally sprinkled with restaurants and cafés. Nineteenth-century industry has been transformed into 21st-century leisure. They call it urban regeneration, and here they’ve invented a new civic identity to characterise it – NewcastleGateshead.”