Click to enlarge

NEWCASTLE CITY COUNCIL has produced this lavish 60-page booklet on how to amuse kids over the summer hols. However, the cover slogan couldn't have been more tastless.	NORTH TYNESIDE, on the other hand, has pretty much summed up Whitley Bay's nightlife - especially on Bank Holiday weekends - with this sign outside the Metro station.
THE RABY, on Byker's Shields Road, sends out a clear message that the pub is moving upmarket. From now on, it's burglars only.	THIS SAFETY sign on a Quayside building site may offend Mackems - as it's an accurate description of most people from Sunderland.

NATIONAL HOTEL chain Travelodge has compiled a completely useless guide to the Geordie ‘lingo’, to help their guests “fit right in with the locals” during their visit to the city. So newcastle stuff has responded with a short selection of phrases that will help visitors fit right in at the local branch of Travelodge.

Official version:

newcastle stuff's version:

AMBITIOUS PLANS for a massive exhibition of scaffolding in the centre of the city have been scuppered, leaving the organisers £200,000 out of pocket. Art gurus at the Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative had planned to obscure Grey’s Monument with the metalwork for several weeks and also place a temporary hotel room at the top, but the scheme was thrown out when it was run past some normal people at the council.

A committee vetting the plan voted nine-to-one against it, with one councillor stating it amounted to an act of cultural vandalism. Unfortunately, Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative hadn’t bothered to seek planning permission before shelling out for the scaffolding.

They maintained that the ‘artwork’ - entitled Hotel Monument - would bring in tourists and greatly boost the local economy, with a figure of one million pounds being plucked from the air. Most of the outlay will come from their own coffers, but the public will be hit with a bill of £35,000.

Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative were criticised last year when they paid some Aussies quarter of a million pounds to sling some lumps of wood from a rope over the River Tyne for a couple of days. But they’d hoped the city centre location of Hotel Monument would mean the ‘artwork’ would be appreciated by more than the couple of hundred people who turned out to see the ‘Bamboo Bridge’.

However, their plan seems to have stumbled over the assumption that people would rather gaze at a construction site, than a bona fide piece of public art. Grey’s Monument was sculpted by the same bloke who did Nelson in Trafalgar Square, and is a Grade I listed building. People seem to like it as it is.

Waiving aside any consultation fee, Newcastle Stuff has some advice for the art boffins at NGI: next time, put a bail hostel or - better still - some student accommodation at the top instead of a hotel, and the council will bite your hand off.

FIRED UP BY THE success of the Angel of the North and the Baltic, council chiefs have decided to make Gateshead easier to find on the map by applying for city status.

Apparently it’s up to the Queen to decide which town becomes a city, which she does every few years by means of a ‘competition’. The traditional qualification of having a cathedral is no longer necessary - which is just as well, because Gateshead does not have one of these. Nor will it have a city centre, if the bid is successful.

Tesco have acquired much of what was the heart of the town and are busy demolishing it to make way for a superstore, surrounded by smaller shops and businesses that are ‘sympathetic’ to their masterplan. Gateshead will soon become Tesco upon Tyne and unless the Queen can be bribed with points on her loyalty card, the bid would appear to be doomed.

You can’t fault the council for their optimism, because aesthetic qualities clearly don’t matter. Sunderland was granted city status in 1992 after winning a competition to celebrate the Queen’s 40th year on the throne, so by that reckoning a builder’s skip by the side of the road would be in with a shout.

But Gateshead has had city status on Tyneside at least, since the outbreak of World War II. Many older locals still refer to the town as ‘Soap City’, thanks to the activities of the Luftwaffe during the early months of the conflict.

This period was known as the ‘Phoney War’, because few shots were fired in anger and the Royal Air Force dropped leaflets rather than bombs on Germany, urging its citizens to give up before anyone got hurt.

The Germans responded by dropping their own leaflets on the UK, singling out Gateshead as the place that would benefit most from life under Nazi rule. They promised the locals free bars of soap so they could wash themselves properly - much to the amusement of the people of Newcastle.

Come to think of it, Tesco’s extensive range of toiletries could actually stand the town in good stead, with its bid for real city status.

ALMOST TWO YEARS of disruption and misery for regulars at the Tyne pub have come to an end, with the completion of a barrage and lock at the mouth of the river Oueseburn.

The contraption - which looks like an upended Thunderbird 2 - is intended to control the tidal flow of the river and maintain its level at 2.6 metres. However, the construction work has also caused extensive flooding outside the pub, making acccess difficult - and leaving the place even more so after a few drinks.

It has caused further controversy by coming in a million pounds over budget. But the council has shrugged off criticism, saying it is an important part of the regeneration of the Lower Ouseburn Valley.With the river stabilised from its mouth near the Tyne pub, upstream to the Cluny, they’re hoping a Little Venice-style community of barges and houseboats will emerge; replacing the decrepit colllection of tubs currently moored on its banks.

However, whether stagnating the already aromatic water is the answer, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the good news is that there’s no longer any need for wellies, when visiting the Tyne.

MANY WORDS have been written in the local press about plans to accommodate thousands of students in the east end of the city, and the one repeated most is ‘fury’. It has appeared in several headlines and claims to sum up the feelings of most locals, who are apparently opposed to these developments.

The council has approved plans for a 2,000-capacity student village (pictured below) behind Shieldfield’s Biscuit Factory and there are schemes to house a further few hundred on land opposite the gallery and on nearby New Bridge Street. The media - particularly the Evening Chronicle - claim that local residents are furious at the prospect of being swamped by students.

However, as far as Newcastle Stuff can establish, the council has received a total of eleven letters of complaint. In fact local traders in Shieldfield are delighted at the prospect, as half the shops in the area are boarded up and two of the three pubs have closed down.

The locals are well used to students as there have been a couple of halls of residence there for some time, although the Chronicle’s claim that they make up one-third of the local population is a ridiculous exaggeration. And as for being ‘swamped’: the word from the streets is that the local charvers have thus far refrained from wearing rugby shirts or Uggs and seem to derive a great deal of pleasure from shouting playful abuse at them.

But the real reason for the council’s decision to house so many students in that part of town should cause concern in some quarters. It has committed a huge amount of money to regenerating the Ouseburn Valley, which it refers to as the city’s ‘cultural corridor’. So far it has seen little return on its investment.

It now hopes that positioning several thousand students in an area stretching from the new Northumbria University campus to the top of the Ouseburn will finish off the job. Which is scary news if you enjoy the Ouseburn’s many fine pubs, and don’t want it turn into another Osborne Road.

That’s something to really get furious about.

ONE OF THE CITY'S best-known club and pub operators is the latest victim of the recession: Michael Quadrini’s Absolute Leisure group has called in the administrators.

The company - which owns the legendary floating nightspot, the Tuxedo Princess - has seen turnover halve in the past four years and now several of its businesses are up for sale, including Cocomo’s Restaurant and The Lounge, opposite the Central Station. ‘The Boat’, which was towed away to Greece last year to be converted into a casino, is also on the market.

The smoking ban and cheap supermarket booze are also being blamed for poor trading conditions in the licensed trade, which is seeing one pub close every ten days across the region.

Quadrini revolutionised Newcastle’s nightlife in the early 1980s when he opened the upmarket Tuxedo Junction, on Market Street. Following that, the success of The Boat paved the way for other similarly ‘classy’ establishments, although it was almost inevitable that such places would be among the first to feel the pinch in the credit crunch.

In fact a whole swathe of Newcastle’s top-end bars and nightspots are under threat, as troubled operator Premium Bars and Restaurants is also up for sale, having racked up debts of £45m. The company runs a host of the city’s best-known venues, including Blu Bamboo, Sea, Chase and Jimmyz, as well as the Living Room restaurant, on Grey Street.

It seems a bit disingenuous blaming cheap supermarket booze for their predicament, as it’s unlikely that customers who were sticking the extortionately-priced drinks on their credit cards are now tanking up on cans of Ace lager instead. People are simply prioritising their spending, and a hundred quid for a night out doesn’t come near the top of the list.

However, some smaller operators are still thriving, mainly those who cater for the cash-in-pocket drinker. So one advantage of the recession might be that when it ends, a few prime spots may become available to the independents, such as the Head of Steam/Cluny group, which has just acquired Shamrocks, near the Haymarket.