If it’s been a while since you were in the North East, you might not recognise the cultural vibrancy and excitement that has become the way of life for those who live there. It's not just lip service that is being paid here to the national 'regeneration' catchcry – and it is happening in a big way. Cities across the region are flourishing, but perhaps none more so than Gateshead.
9 Nov 2004
Judi Jagger
[This is archived content and may not display in the originally intended format.]
Performing Arts
If it’s been a while since you were in the North East, you might not recognise the cultural vibrancy and excitement that has become the way of life for those who live there. It’s not just lip service that is being paid here to the national ‘regeneration’ catchcry – and it is happening in a big way. Cities across the region are flourishing, but perhaps none more so than Gateshead.
Take a walk along the Gateshead Quays these days and all preconceptions of industrial decline vanish. Yet less than 20 years ago, the area was a depressed shadow of a once great industrial past.
Judi Jagger is a freelance writer who lives on 15 acres of rural isolation overlooking an island. She loves how the Internet can bring the world to her. When she does venture out, it is to the theatre and cinema and to visit galleries and bookshops. In a previous life she has been a teacher, a librarian, a cleaner (very, very briefly) and a hospital admissions clerk. The nicest thing anyone has told her was that she was “educated, not domesticated”. It was meant disparagingly. She will get round to putting it on a T-shirt one day.
