City of Newcastle upon Tyne
Geography
Status:	Metropolitan borough, City (1882)
Region:	North East England
Ceremonial County:	Tyne and Wear
Area: - Total	Ranked 229th 113.44 km²
Admin. HQ:	Newcastle upon Tyne
ONS code:	00CJ
Demographics
Population: - Total (2002 est.) - Density	Ranked 31st 260,268 2,294 / km²
Ethnicity:	93.1% White 4.4% S.Asian
Politics
Arms of Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council Newcastle-upon-Tyne City Council http://www.newcastle.gov.uk/
Leadership:	Leader & Cabinet
Executive:	Liberal Democrats
MPs:	Nick Brown, David Clelland, Jim Cousins, Doug Henderson

Newcastle upon Tyne, often called just Newcastle, is a city in North East England in the metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear. The city has a population of around 259,000 (2001 census), making it the second largest city in North East England after its neighbour Sunderland. Before 1974 the city was in Northumberland.

The new castle which gave the city its name was constructed by the Normans in 1080. Its keep and one of its gates still exist, though they are oddly separated from each other by the nineteenth-century railway tracks that the rest of the castle was demolished to make way for. In an odd way, for once, it is rather appropriate that the city fathers valued the railway above the castle.

Newcastle's development as a major city owed much to its central role in the export of coal from the Northumberland coalfield – the phrase "taking coals to Newcastle" proverbially describes a self-evidently pointless task. In the nineteenth century, shipbuilding and heavy engineering were central to the city's prosperity; and the city was a powerhouse of the nation's prosperity. Innovation in Newcastle and surrounding areas includes:

• George Stephenson and/or Humphry Davy's safety lamps, which made possible the opening up of ever deeper mines to provide the coal that powered the industrial revolution.
• Stephenson's early work in railways, prior to The Rocket, including The Blucher, a locomotive working at Killingworth colliery in 1814, leading to the railways and a step change in the economics of transportation.
• Joseph Swan's first demonstration of his electric light bulb – like Davy's lamp, the subject of some controversy since Thomas Edison also laid claim to the invention.
• Charles Parsons' invention and commercialisation of the steam turbine, leading to his Turbinia, a turbine-powered ship that literally ran rings around the British Fleet at a review at Spithead in 1897.
• William Armstrong whose company was famous for the production of best-of-breed heavy armaments, used in the Crimean War, the American Civil War – by both sides – and the First World War
• Moseley Street, in the centre of Newcastle, was the first in the world to have electric street lighting.

Heavy industries declined in the second half of the twentieth century; office and retail employment are now the city's staples; a short distance from the flourishing city centre there are impoverished inner-city estates, in areas whose original raison d'être was to provide working class housing for the shipyards or other heavy industries.

The city has an extensive neoclassical centre, largely developed in the 1830s and recently extensively restored. Grey Street, which curves down from a monument to the parliamentary reformer Earl Grey towards the valley of the River Tyne, has a claim to be one of England's most beautiful urban streets.

Immediately to the northwest of the city centre is Leazes Park, a park established in 1873 after a petition by 3,000 working men of the city for 'ready access to some open ground for the purpose of health and recreation', and in one corner of which is St James' Park, the stadium home of Newcastle United F.C. which dominates the view of the city from the south.

Another green space in Newcastle is the vast Town Moor, lying immediately north of the city centre. The hereditary freemen of the city have held the right to graze cattle on the Town Moor since the Middle Ages – a reward for defending the town against the marauding Scots!

The wooded gorge of the Ouseburn in the east of the city is known as Jesmond Dene and forms another popular recreation area.

The development of the city in the 1960s and 1970s was marred by a corruption scandal involving, especially, T. Dan Smith, a local politician and John Poulson, a property developer. Echoes of the scandal were revisited in the late 1990s in the BBCTV mini-series, Our Friends in the North.

The Tyne itself passes through a gorge between Newcastle and Gateshead (the administratively separate urban area south of the river), which is famous for a series of dramatic and notable bridges such as the Tyne Bridge and High Level Bridge. Large scale regeneration of the Tyne Gorge has replaced former shipping industries with imposing new office developments; an innovative tilting bridge, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge has integrated the Newcastle quayside more closely with major cultural developments on the Gateshead side of the river, including the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and the Norman Foster designed The Sage Gateshead music centre.

Newcastle has an international airport at Ponteland, some 15 minutes from the centre by car or metro. Its railway station has a fine classical frontage and is a principal stop on the East Coast Main Line, providing a half-hourly service of trains to London (under 3 hours) operated by GNER as well as trains to Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Carlisle plus local services.

The North Eastern Railway built an electric suburban railway serving both banks of the Tyne, and the northern suburbs. This system has been transformed into the Tyneside Metro which extends as far as Newcastle Airport, Tynemouth and Sunderland.

Newcastle is part of an area called Tyneside, whose people are commonly known as geordies and famous for their distinctive accent and sense of humour.

Newcastle has a reputation of being a fun-loving city with many bars, restaurants and night clubs. The City also has a strong sporting tradition, being home to Premiership football giants Newcastle United, and Premiership Rugby side Newcastle Falcons, for whom England's World Cup winning hero Jonny Wilkinson regularly stars. The City also hosts the annual Bupa Great North Run, the world's largest half Marathon in which partcipants famously race over the Tyne Bridge towards the finish line 13.1 miles away on the coast at neighbouring South Shields.

The city has two universities, the University of Newcastle, and Northumbria University.

• River Tyne, England
• University of Newcastle upon Tyne
• Newcastle Brown Ale
• Gateshead Millennium Bridge

• Tyne and Wear Metro
• Nexus - Public Transport information in the Newcastle area.
• Aerial photo of the bridges over the River Tyne at Newcastle, from Multimap