Posted this a few years ago, on this theme:
I could go on and on about the good the bad and the ugly of Newcastle as a place, its people and its future. I work away a lot, i.e. on the road, and visit London a lot due to my sister living there and the more time you spend away from Newcastle and its people the more you realise that despite our fine architecture, jovial and friendly nature as people and everything else, the place itself is becoming a shit hole and the people ever so insular and somewhat fucking backward. Not mackem backward but backward all the same. The place is blighted by charvers and casual racism and outside of the actual city itself, most areas are becoming ever more bleak and dark.
The Town on a night-time is cringe-worthy from the Gate to the Quayside, places full of people out on stag and hen nights, charvers and fucking Geordie Show wannabees. The pubs lack character and characters. Our stunning architecture is becoming lost in a sea of new-build type nothing buildings. Everywhere is dominated by bookies and kebab shops. The streets are getting dirtier, greyer and more miserable by the day. There is far too much city centre traffic and far too many people all squashed together going nowhere other than to Primark or if you're a taxi to the central to pick up another group of halfwits who in their collective wisdom thought a trip from Nottingham or wherever to Newcastle is a wicked weekend away. Its not, its fucking shit, and people like this have helped make it so to the point where the likes of me, born and bread here, can't fucking wait to get away.
I was in London at the weekend enjoying a few pints at the lovely White Swan in Twickenham down by the Thames and if that was Newcastle, it would have been overran with charvers with fights and slappers galore. I was shocked that I could take my GLASS pint out of the pub and onto the green with me. Hundreds of people, families with kids, all mingling and enjoying a bit of rare sunshine.
Meanwhile back home in Newcastle some cunts from Nottingham or wherever were pissing in our streets, puking their guts up and acting right bellends while tanked on drink.
And if wor lass gets racially abused on public transport again, which has happened 5 fucking times now, always on the fucking number 1 or 38, I'll end up in jail for killing some twat!
Just look at the idiots before, during and after the mackem game man. Its getting worse.
I wouldn’t put it quite so vehemently as yourself (and it's extremely true that people always get sick of where they live quicker than anywhere else) but there’s a lot I agree with there sadly. The city centre economy has built itself on people drinking themselves stupid and this has created a very unpleasant place to be at times. Large areas of the centre (Collingwood St and Mosley St, right up from outside the Job Centre up through the Bigg Market, most of the middle portion of Grainger St and the whole of Newgate St) are basically no-go zones after about 9pm for anyone who hasn’t had ten pints of lager, especially on a weekend.
The Gate’s a classic example and HTT has nailed it. There’s a very similar place in Edinburgh, the “Omni-Centre” and it’s the same old chain rubbish you expect from a place like that, it’s got a cinema, a Pizza Hut, a Frankie and Benny’s etc etc, and that’s all fine, we all like a night at the cinema and some cheap and easy food now and again. However what it doesn’t have is nightclubs on the ground floor, a 24 hour casino or a further array of nightclubs and putrid trebles bars right outside the front door. The planning for the Gate is dire. Who on Earth thought that was a good mix of businesses? Sometimes I feel a bit intimidated coming out of there at half ten with my missus so it must be really off-putting for a parent wanting to take their kids for a late weekend treat, or an older couple, or some 14 year olds on a cinema night. I find town planning very interesting and everywhere I go, I always come back thinking that Newcastle is a mess in comparison in terms of how the city is laid out and that's a perfect example.
The city council have sold their soul in allowing so many places selling cheap drink to be so tightly packed together. We only have a tiny centre compared to many British cities so it should be the opposite of what it is, we shouldn’t need to pack them into an area of less than one square mile. This didn’t used to be the case even just ten years ago, of course there were nightclubs in the centre but there was also Foundation on Melbourne St, Stereo in the old Barley Mow, loads of places on the Quayside, World Headquarters, plus two Student Unions spreading the people looking to have a good time around to the fringes of the centre.
However as the city centre opened more and more late bars selling booze for next to nothing within that tiny zone, a lot of these places either saw their clientele reduce dramatically or simply wither and die. Even somewhere like the succession of bars that have attempted to open in Swan House have shut down, not just because they were terrible (even though they were but that’s never stopped plenty of other very similar places from thriving), but because it was seen as too far out despite being about two minutes’ walk from the bottom of the Bigg Market but across the natural cut-off point of the roundabout. I’ve even noticed that places round by the Central Station and the Haymarket are noticeably quieter than they were a few years ago, but that Grainger St/Newgate St junction is a permanent cattle grid of students and charvers.
There used to be a statistic that Newcastle had more pubs per square mile than any other city in the UK – whether that was true or not I don’t know, but I’d certainly bet that it’s true now, only now they’re not pubs, they’re cheap tacky bars selling paint thinner. Unfortunately this is a trend that would be incredibly difficult to reverse even if there were any will to do so, which there isn’t. I look at Edinburgh and if you put Edinburgh stag dos into Google, it throws up a vast amount of results and suggestions – yet I go to Edinburgh quite often and never see any evidence of it. That’s because not only is Edinburgh bigger than us (not a lot we can do about that in the short term) but because the late bars and clubs are so spread out – some on George St, some at the Grassmarket, loads just randomly dotted here and there. It’s not vastly bigger but there’s no square surrounded by cheap hovels for hundreds of them to stand in, be sick and chin each other. Why have we let that happen? The answer is because we have neither the affluence and tourism base that Edinburgh enjoys but that doesn’t make it right. And what has this conviction to pander to the party city reputation, put bars on top of bars and pile the students into the city left us with, in answer to the question “What to do in Newcastle?” – not an awful lot to be honest, particularly during the day. If you want to drink or shop, you’re laughing, beyond that we’re severely lacking in things that will bring in visitors, but have plenty things that will put them off coming for a weekend, which is a great shame really.
I sound like I really hate the place but I don’t at all, I love it and I’m very happy living here but I definitely feel like there’s a lack of ambition, we’re happy to trundle along propped up by students hoying drink down their necks (staggering amounts of student accommodation being built at the moment) when we could be doing so much more. Inochi’s right when he says that there has been a transformation in the city over the last twenty years and we do still have a lot going for us (good restaurants, fantastic theatre, superb independent cinema etc) but we need to be very careful that we don’t get to a stage where normal people don’t want to come to Newcastle because of what the city centre can be like after dark, or because there’s little to do in the city itself. This is especially true now that we seem to be stockpiling hotels in the city in the last few years – if the only people to fill those rooms are stags and hens, our reputation is really going to start to suffer but at the same time, we don’t want them standing empty and eventually shutting down.
Won’t pretend for a second that I know the solution to all this, but I know that I really don’t like Newcastle city centre these days and I dread having to go there for a night out, and that’s not a feeling I like in my own home.
Not sure how much of it I still agree with really but I very rarely venture into town after dark anymore (and I only live ten minutes walk away). Think I got really soured by walking from Central Station up Grainger St a few times in quick succession having got a late train back. That stretch is fucking awful during the day and much worse at night.
