Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  It's still pretty funny, though. Viz's stock in trade has always been obscene and anarchic parodies of DC Thomson's prim house style, windingly accurate spoofs of tabloid inanities and general mockery of celebrity and media figures. If they could step from the page, many of Viz's characters would make straight for the bars of the Bigg Market. Sid the Sexist, the eternal gamma male, would try and fail to lose his virginity here, no matter how much of his dole money he spent on turbo-charged ciders. The Fat Slag's have long since relinquished their virgin status but would stalk the fun pubs in search of scrawny men like boyfriend Az to have physically improbable sexual congress with. Biff Bacon will drink here if he ever attains the age of majority and isn't killed by his sadistic, hyper-violent parents. The above are all Geordies and all cretins; violent, pathetic, sexually loose cretins to boot. Add to that other Viz stalwarts such as Eight Ace and Brown Bottle, who are essentially hopeless drunks, and it's a vision of the citizenry that only local lads poking fun at their own hometown could hope to have got away with. Of course, it was actually funny, which is why Geordies enjoyed it more than Rod Idle's article. Viz has won some unlikely allies too. Writing of its lefties strips Millie Taint and the Modern Parents (the least funny things in it, significantly), the Daily Telegraph said that 'Viz offers an honest subversiveness which a conservative newspaper can admire' and talked of it possessing the 'iconoclastic Toryism of Swift'.

  Swift, a lover of the grotesque, would adore the Bigg Market on a Saturday night. Then it's 'rammed' with hair-gelled lotharios in short-sleeved Ben Shermans and shrieking lasses teetering on gold stilettos that would be unmanageable even if you hadn't drunk a vat of Archers. This tide of alcohol is stemmed and soaked up by lardy mountains of junk food. In the Bigg Market, if it isn't a bar, it's a take-out offering pizzas, burgers, baked potatoes, chicken wings and kebabs, any kind of food that you can eat on the move while weaving unsteadily along a pavement crowded with other ambulatory diners. If it contains some kind of gelatinous scarlet sauce you can get all over your new white shirt, so much the better. As the Today programme would no doubt tell us in its school ma'amish way, none of the above are essential food groups or the cornerstones of a healthy diet. But then who wants a slice of kiwi fruit and a courgette medley when you've been drinking pints of Stella with a dash of vodka for two days straight?

  John Betjeman was too busy getting all moist-eyed about Suffolk beach huts and waiting rooms on the Metropolitan Line to write much about the north but he did manage one sentence on Newcastle. He called Grey Street the finest crescent street in England and praised 'that descending subtle curve' which links the old and new parts of town. Ian Nairn, editor of the Architectural Review, thinks it better than Regent Street and has called it 'one of the great planned streets of Britain'. In fact, Nairn has described walking through Newcastle generally as 'an ennobling experience'.

  At the top of it on Eldon Square is Grey's Monument where Earl Grey, more famous now for poncey tea than electoral reform, gazes down on the late-night revellers, not all of whom seem significantly ennobled at this hour. There are the girls falling from the vertiginous heels of their fuck-me shoes, the haggard men with their Asda bags clinking with tin and glass, the vomiters both quiet and forlorn or loud and proud and the couples making their way from the brightly lit foyer of the Theatre Royal to their cars or houses or, like us, to the very special hotelish pleasure of crisp laundry, fluffy towels and an absurdly big bed.

  The next day I took what we now thought of as Colin's itinerary and something occurred to me instantly. A city really does need a river. The Thames elevates London from stinking megalopolis to seat of empire. The Tiber and the Seine add romance to cities that already have their fair share. Birmingham and Manchester have their canals but, as Liverpool will tell you with a haughty smirk, they are nothing compared to the roguish glamour and breezy adventurism of the Mersey.

  The broad, muscular Tyne runs right through the heart of Newcastle and turns a fine city into something quite breathtaking. On that brisk morning, tucking into my bacon baguette in a pavement cafe overlooking the water, I could only wonder why more people don't bang on about Newcastle. Not about its economic renaissance or its passionate football supporters or its burgeoning status as UK's science and technology capital but just about how bloody good-looking it is. You get a crick in your neck from gazing up at the stunning and lofty architectural wonders. You do really feel a bit ennobled, pet, especially by close contact with its fabulous bridges.

  Fans of early seventies progressive rock will know that Newcastle had five iconic bridges since Keith Emerson's first band The Nice – two-thirds of whom were Geordies – made a long concept suite about them, commissioned by the Newcastle Arts Festival. It took up one side of an album and was the sort of thing bearded heads called Trevor would listen to on headphones in a crashpad while mung bean curry simmered on the hob. It was called, though, with admirable succinctness for prog, 'The Five Bridges Suite'. On an album called Five Bridges. So you see it wasn't all Tales From Topographic Oceans.

  The High Level Bridge is my favourite of the original five. It's a proud relic of the days when train companies actually fought like demons to outdo each other in speed, reliability and directness rather than let safety and passengers and everything go hang and merely line their pockets with share options. Can you tell I use the trains a lot?

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the UK rail network extended up the eastern and western sides of Britain. But the operators of the eastern line worried that unless they could offer passengers an unbroken journey from London to Edinburgh the western route would get all the custom. A rail crossing of the Tyne at Newcastle seemed unworkable and the railway authorities were seriously considering bypassing Newcastle until along came local genius Robert Stephenson. He came up with a daring and elegant three-tiered road/rail solution completed in 1849, the first major example of a wrought-iron tied arch or bow-string girder bridge. I have no idea what that means. But it looks ace.

  Over a century and a half later, though, like an ageing starlet, you can see wear and tear if you look closely enough. Cracks have appeared everywhere and it has been closed to road traffic since 2005. While I was in town Newcastle City Council admitted that the bridge would be closed 'at best expectations until 2008, but realistically until 2010 and even then with no prospect of traffic ever using the bridge again'. Stephenson would hate this loss of a practical thrust but aesthetically it doesn't matter. Until it falls down, which is surely a long way off, it will always have for me a lordly, almost autocratic might, the same silencing and silent authority as the Grand Canyon, secure in its own potency'.

  But the newest and sexiest addition to the Newcastle waterfront is the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. Permit me a moment's crassness; if the High Level Bridge is Greta Garbo, the Millennium Bridge is Scarlett Johansson, one a timeless beauty from an earlier age, the other sexy, modern and dazzling. It takes the form of a slender arc, strung like a harp and rising above the water. It was built to a brief by Gateshead Council that the bridge should not obscure the quayside or overshadow the original landmark bridges and that it could open to allow ships to pass. Wilkinson Eyre/Gifford & Partners' winning design succeeds on the first, classily augmenting an already superb riverscape and on the second count, well, it is elegance in metal. The bridge has just one moving part and that is the bridge itself, which opens like the lid of a beautiful eye to allow the ships to pass beneath. In a neat touch, this also sends all the accumulated litter cascading down special traps.

  The bridge has already become as loved by Geordies as their old favourites. It acts as a physical and metaphorical link between Newcastle and Gateshead, traditionally two proudly independent entities but increasingly marketed as one brand: Newcastle Gateshead. Maybe one day they'll merge like Budapest, that other great river-rent city that unites across the Danube, and Steve Cram and Paul Gascoigne will embrace tearfully halfway across the bridge.

  Gateshead lad and Newcas
tle lass alike is rightly proud of the bridge, particularly after London made such a song and dance about their Millennium Bridge – Norman Fosters' 'blade of light', which had to close after one day because it wobbled so much pedestrians feared for their life. I walked across that bridge hard-hatted from St Paul's to the Tate Modern for a Radio 4 programme before it was opened to the public and I felt nowt, mate, because I'm from the north. By the way, that radio programme was one of several on national media devoted to London's Millennium Bridge, its design and commissioning, its ignominious close and muted reopening. I never saw one mention of Gateshead's.

  The north's Millennium Bridge leads to the door of the Baltic Centre, another of New Newcastle's gems. It's one of several superb arts spaces in the city, from the Vine to the Workplace to the Biscuit Factory, but it's the Baltic that really takes that biscuit; a disused 1950s grain warehouse mouldering on a largely forgotten bank of the river until a flourish of civic imagination and forty-six million quid or so transformed it into one of Europe's leading modern art venues.

  It's a colossal brick edifice which speaks of past commercial glories and days of empire. But sheer cliffs of glass, exposed lifts and dazzling lighting make it feel thrillingly contemporary. Geordies have always prided themselves on their love of art and when the Baltic opened on 13 July 2002, 5,000 people queued to get in. At midnight, if you will, which makes even more fatuous Brian Sewell's remark that 'all the really important pictures should simply be brought down south . . . where they would mean more because nothing is made of them in the north'.

  Granted, there were a few less than 5,000 waiting to get in on a blustery morning in February but the ones who were there – tourists, kids, genteel Geordie ladies of advanced years – seemed as thrilled with it as I was. The Baltic seems to have a thing about the human body. Its great opening statement was Anthony Gormley's 'Domain Field', where casts were made of thousands of naked forms. On the day I visit the most striking exhibit is a film of Spencer Tunick's celebrated installation of summer 2005 when 1,700 Geordies got their kit off and were choreographed in differing settings and arrangements around the city. The resulting images are startling and strangely moving, a kind of living sculpture where the vulnerability of the naked body is contrasted with the severity of the urban landscape. I'm pretty sure that this or something like it is what the guide was telling two of those aforementioned genteel Geordie ladies of advanced years. Unfortunately, at the first sign of a dangling male member, they threw their hands up in front of their stricken faces and dashed off crying, 'Oh, no, pet, I don't want to see THAT.' I did notice, though, that some others of their number were made of sterner stuff and spent some moments in quiet appreciation.

  A little further down the Gateshead Bank is the Sage Centre. It's a state-of-the-art concert hall and exhibition centre that was seemingly playing host to some world gathering of insurance men when I was there so I popped back across the Swing Bridge and said my goodbyes to Kirsty, as I had a date on the outskirts of town with another lovely local girl.

  The Angel of the North may not be a girl any more than Gabriel and Michael were but whatever gender, the people it watches over have truly fallen in love with it. I'm a real fan of Antony Gormley's work which, whether it's the hundred silent figures partly submerged in the tide at Crosby or the Iron Man on Birmingham New Street, all seems to have both intelligence and humanity and grace. Of course, those who don't think art has or indeed ought to progress any further than painting some bananas in a bowl will disagree.

  But northern folk know what they like and they know about art. They have taken this angel – twenty metres of steel high above the Al with wings wider than the Statue of Liberty is tall – to their collective heart. They know what it means. To thousands, it's now a landmark that says 'you're home'. A star to navigate by, a friend, a strangely affecting totem of what the north means to us: lonely, loving, free. From Newcastle city centre you can be at the feet of the angel in half an hour, less if you can get past PC World without stopping. (Richard Ingrams said all male writers become fixated with stationery in middle age. Add random computer accessories to this now.) When I get there, the lay-by is full. There's an ice-cream van doing a roaring trade in 99s and Soleros and three generations of an entire Sikh family is piling out of a people carrier to have their picture taken beneath its spreading, protective wings. Some lads are having a kickabout around it and I'm sure all of this is just what Antony Gormley wanted, just what he meant when he said it should have 'a sense of embrace'.

  North and east and west of that guiding angel is the wild north, the Beautiful North, if you like; where the cities almost disappear and even the towns thin out, leaving a few gems dotted here and there of which writer Simon Jenkins said, 'The small towns of the far north are unequalled in England.' But Newcastle does have two sizeable neighbours we should mention, both of whom exist in uneasy truce with their grand big brother on the Tyne. They couldn't be more different, one a town of spires and plainsong, the other a town of cranes and football chants, one steeped in incense, the other soaked in diesel, one revered, the other scorned. Durham and Middlesbrough.

  I spent a night in Middlesbrough with the pop trio St Etienne once. We couldn't get over how empty it was. The streets seemed utterly deserted and the area around our hotel was so quiet and depopulated it was like we'd walked into Teesside's very own Day of the Triffids. At this point readers from Newcastle and Sunderland will surely make a joke about germ warfare or nerve gas or how everyone must have been waiting for the all-clear sirens. Middlesbrough has a reputation as a dirty, polluted, petrochemical eyesore. Mark E. Smith of The Fall, speaking about East Germany in the NME in 1984, said, 'You've got to see it. It's a horrible, horrible way to live. It's like Middlesbrough.'

  There's a kernel of acid truth in all this poison cloud of insults. My friend Paula lived here for several years and on her very first morning in Middlesbrough she was woken by the muffled boom of an explosion, the moaning of a warning siren and the barked command via loudhailer: 'CLOSE ALL WINDOWS AND STAY INSIDE YOUR HOUSE UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD IT IS SAFE TO DO OTHERWISE!'

  The reputation for ugliness is partly deserved. The town wasn't planned but thrown up in a frothing zeal of commercialism over iron, ships and steel. That can make a city rich but not necessarily good-looking. The town's best feature, by a long way, is the famous Transporter Bridge, one of only a handful left in the world and by far the longest. There must have been a craze for these oddities once; every one was built was in the twenty-three years between 1893 and 1916.

  Middlesbrough's bridge is still going strong, moving passengers, cars and minibuses across the Tees in a travelling gondola in ninety seconds. The 'car' can carry 200 people, nine cars or six cars and one minibus and makes the journey every quarter of an hour for eighteen hours a day. Try it; you haven't lived till you've been swung 170 feet above 'The Gallant Old Lady' herself.

  Some people think it's rather tragic that the town has become so proud of the bridge, even adopting it as its civic symbol. Not me. The north should be as proud of its civil engineering as the south is of its thatched cottages or almshouses. It's what we do, and we do it rather well. If you visit Sydney and look up at its magnificent Harbour Bridge you will see the words 'Made In Middlesbrough' stamped on the side. The Transporter Bridge itself was recognised as a Grade II listed building in 1985. That man Pevsner said that it was, 'in its daring and finesse, a thrill to see from anywhere'. In 1993 floodlights were installed. You can spot it in the movie Billy Elliot. Middlesbrough is justly proud of it; when my friend Paula left BBC Cleveland, they gave her a framed picture of it which hangs above her fireplace.

  The bridge was built in the glory days of steel. When that industry foundered, ICI and the chemical moguls came and ringed the town with huge plants from which gas and smog plumed skyward day and night. Because of them, Middlesbrough has its very own version of the Northern Lights – great blotchy sunsets of ultramarine and crimson. If you don't think too hard about w
hat's making the sky that colour, they're really quite beautiful.

  The city's pollution is legendary. It has entered the folklore, even the folk music, of the area. Local act The Teesside Fettlers have a song called 'Gallant Old Lady', which personifies the River Tees. When she begins in the Pennines and jinks through High Force and Teesdale, she's a sparkling, beguiling creature. By the time she reaches Middlesbrough and the sea, she's a filthy, wheezing hag. The football rivalry feeds on these perceptions too. Newcastle and Sunderland fans call Middlesbrough supporters 'smog monsters' and turn up at Middlesbrough's Riverside Stadium wearing gas masks and anti-radiation suits.

  Middlesbrough has been easy to mock. Twenty-seven per cent male unemployment in the mid-eighties, years of decline, widespread derision over its lack of beauty. But of late the town has begun to walk with a swagger, and that has much to do with Middlesbrough FC now being established as a decent Premiership side and UEFA Cup Finalists in 2006 after years of relative mediocrity. Ask anyone in a Middlesbrough pub or bus stop how this happened and they'll answer with two words: 'Steve' and 'Gibson'.