1076 Newcastle City of Culture 0 Liverpool 1

I had only been once to Newcastle before 1974, representing Cheshire County Council at a meeting of local authority councillors in the Northern Region concerned with the welfare of either the blind or the deaf. Cheshire did not nominate Councillors so as an officer I was there as an observer. I cannot remember if I travelled by car or train, if and where I stayed and my only memory is that meeting was held at an old building which involved a climb of stairs between levels of the city. I should be able to find the documentation and remember more in a box of memorabilia from when I worked for the County Council, 1971-1973.

Nor can I remember when I first viewed the Michael Caine 1971 Gangster film Get Carter, based on situations in Newcastle, Gateshead and Tyneside and where Michael Brady has created an internet site which includes about 80 stills from the film and his own photographs of the present day locations.

http://www.aouq09.dsl.pipex.com/getcarter/list.htm

From 1974 I had direct contact with councillors and officers who were active during the dark days of the Dan Smith John Poulson corruption scandal, and I also met Dan after his release from prison when he worked for ex offenders and I was to my knowledge the only local authority chief officer who had been to prison before his or her appointment. What has to be said is that Dan did transform Newcastle, although those of us who prefer the sight of old buildings and detest the concrete still shudder. But he meant well and those who worked with him retained the highest regard.

The most important portrayal of life on Tyneside and its criminal and political post war past is the TV series, Our Friends in the North, set between the sixties and nineties, and those wanting to savour the authentic flavour of 1920's Tyneside, there is the James Bolam staring series of When the Boat Comes In.

All this is Newcastle past, and if you look up T Dan Smith on the internet he comes after Art prints, a comedian and a jet set bachelor. Newcastle has and is being regenerated with three buildings acting as beacons. The first is the Sage on Gateshead, externally far short of the Sydney Opera House, but this is a building to experience on the inside and look out, and its second auditorium is the most wondrous place, a modern day Globe for individual musician singer or small group, although my first experience was in the audience for a genuinely impressed Jonathan Dimbleby's Any Questions. The second building is the European world wide quality stadium of St James Park, alas the football does not match, and I know, I was there, echoes, of Max Boyce, in the old stadium and in the era of Kevin Keegan when it was in the process of rebuilding. The third is its Millennium Bridge linking the comparatively new law courts, and the Quayside world of bars and restaurants which attract the more mature and sophisticated nightlight party goer, along which those which you will expect on any weekend night you in any town and city, with the developing south bank of the Baltic Contemporary Art Centre, the Sage and other developments in the making.

There are ghosts of time past all over the city with the most spectacular the stretch of John Dobson architecture from Grey's monument down to the quayside and which rivals Georgian Edinburgh and Regency London. There is the Castle, and the Wall, the coal carrying tunnel and several marvellous individual buildings, and quaint nooks and crannies, for me there are three areas which sum up what Newcastle has become, for better and worse. There is the Bigg Market extending up to St James where on your back to a car park from an evening match you may be challenged to pick up from the gutter a scantily dressed drunk sixteen year old lass, or later still bundled the same child into a taxi the worse from whatever concoction of drugs and alcohol she has embraced, while the city army of bouncers look on gleefully while trying to look like something from Get Carter or Our Friends. Then there are the newer developments with the refurbished China Town, the less well known haunts for homosexuals and lesbians, and the Gate, the new complex of cinema, international restaurants and sports bars, with Casino. Spread now throughout the city but concentrated on both side of the Civic Centre are the two universities of Newcastle and Northumberland with a combined student population of some 30000 (number to verified) and with the new Northumbria complex for over 9000 to be opened this autumn and the students are adopting some pubs and restaurants as their own.

For me however, in addition to the football, Newcastle has been a place of culture, and for food, and where you can eat as expensively as in most great cities of the world. My spiritual home is the Playhouse which has combined a broad array of new theatre productions with an annual visit of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and where the main productions of the company are at the refurbished yet again even grander Theatre Royal. Not to be forgotten in terms of traditional theatres is the Tyne Theatre and Opera House, or for popular music concerts, the City Hall. For the big jamboree there is the 10000 or is it 11000 Metro centres and the new 2000 holding pop and rock band venue of the Carling academy. There is the new Dance City and venues for comedy Tyneside and contemporary, and for jazz, salsa, for Goths and for heavy metal.

Then there are the art galleries, art centres and living museums with the Discovery Museum, the Life Centre, the Museum of Antiquities and the Shefton on Greek Art and Archaeology, the centre of children's books, the military vehicle museum, the Stephenson works, the Laing Art Gallery, the University Gallery, the Side Gallery, Vane, Globe City, the Hatton, the Opus, plus the Lime Street and Biscuit Factory centres and Waygood and Harkers due to be opened again in 2008. There are the developing programmes of Public Art, especially Riverside Art with 70 individual projects on the banks of the Tyne and the Sunderland Wear.

And if course there is shopping, although in this respect the one place to visit is the biggest indoor complex of the Gateshead Metro centre and its external sites including for every household and Furniture outlet including the expanded Ikea alongside its Scandinavian rival Ulva. So all in all how did they dare give the 2008 European City of Culture to Liverpool?