Gateshead

A circular bus route – uniquely relaxing – is a great way to recce a new town. The 51 and 52 (one route, two directions) is known as the East Gateshead Orbital. In just over an hour, I will be able to say I have been to all the places I can see on my map. There’s Felling and Deckham, Wrekenton, Low Fell, High Fell, Sheriff Hill, Leam Lane, and Windy Nook. There will be those who never made it to Sheriff Hill, for one reason or another. I can tell them about it.

On the top deck at the front, I get a rolling tour of social stratification and architectural styles – terraced rows, Tyneside flats (houses with two front doors, one for each flat), redbrick semis, older stone houses, prefabs. Front gardens are like family confessions, curiously moving seen from above. It’s been a welcome hot day in a non-starter summer, and the early evening is sultry. Neighbours lean on fences talking. Two children splash as much as possible in a paddling pool. A man prunes his privets. Someone sucks on a hookah on a driveway filled with family members. We stop a lot. Teens split from groups and get on the bus to go home. Only I ride all the way, the safely lost tourist, scanning the houses, looking for what – clues?

This is estate-land, laid out where slums were cleared. From the bus it’s confusingly, endearingly human. But look at a map and Gateshead contains the evolutionary history of street patterns, from the straight rows north of Saltwell Park to labyrinths of crescents and cul-de-sacs obeying the rubric of the garden suburb (with street names like Gorsehill, Harebell Road and Celandine Way) to council estate Lego-land – full of right angles and hard edges, rigged with zigzags, doglegs and quasi-communal areas.

JB Priestley, passing through, asked: “How is it that a town can contain one hundred and twenty-five thousand persons and yet look like a sprawling, swollen industrial village?” Being a Yorkshireman, he didn’t wait for a reply. “The answer is that this is a dormitory for the working class.” The most quoted lines in the Gateshead section of his English Journey are “the whole town appeared to have been carefully planned by an enemy of the human race”.

Commentators say Priestley was in a foul mood due to too much travelling, a nasty cold and medicines that left him feeling rough. But slagging off has long been the prerogative of the metropolitan travel writer – and insults stick.

Gateshead faces Newcastle across the Tyne, shares the bracing bridges, musical accent, fierce local identity. On the posts of the High Level Bridge are terse graffiti, sentences in a flicker book. One says “North East or Nowhere”. Newcastle looks civic and cluttered with churches and offices and a castle and the huge stadium on its summit. Gateshead is residential, suburban, a town with a centre like everyone else’s: the big Tesco, the bookies, boozers, transport interchange.

Roads and rail dominate, budging things out of their way: trains into and out of Newcastle use different lines. Fast, four-lane A-roads, including the A167 – laid out over the medieval Great North Road and still named “High Street” – have left gaping canyons flooded with toxins. But off the highways and under the ironwork there’s hope.

A new wine bar, a lovely old wedge-shaped pub, a horror-themed cafe. From Vane Gallery, housed in a long-dead pub called the Dun Cow on said High Street, art trickles up to grant-hogging showcase museums such as the Baltic. The ground floor has been hung for the town’s first Pride. “Gateshead is a place of potential,” says director Paul Stone, who co-founded Vane and its umbrella non-profit community organisation Orbis in 1997. “I’ve been through several cycles of funding and regeneration. I’m feeling optimistic. For the first time ever, we’re being listened to. Gateshead has challenges, but grassroots arts projects are the way to ensure its revival has longevity. Gateshead can be like Brooklyn.” But art is a strange world; “Probably more people know us outside Gateshead than in Gateshead,” he says.

Things to see and do: Prism Coffee; walk the Tyne Derwent Way; Dunston Staiths, Glasshouse International Centre for Music (ex-Sage); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Angel of the North