ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I’m a Gateshead boy, born and bred. I’m proud of the place where I live. I’m proud of being from the North East as a whole, and from Gateshead specifically, and I think I’ve got lots of reasons to justify this. But it’s a lot easier to justify now than it used to be…

When I was a child in Gateshead and going to school, it gave the impression of being a run-down backwater, a deprived area of high unemployment and little hope and Saltwell Park, pitched as the “People’s Park” when it opened in the 19th Century, was and the park was an unpleasant litter-strewn environment, and not somewhere you’d want to be after dark.

When I was a student, I’d tell people I was from Newcastle, because they hadn’t heard of Gateshead. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of being from Gateshead; I never have been — if I thought someone was from the North-East, then I’d say Gateshead, but in general, Newcastle is the city people have heard of.

But over the last twenty years, Gateshead has come a long way, despite still being one of the more deprived regions of the country — in 2000, Gateshead was ranked as the 37th most deprived area out of 354 measured areas in England (source: Gateshead and Tyne & Wear summaries of IMD 2000), but despite this, we’ve still managed to come an awful long way, overcome a lot of the problems facing us. For example, despite having been ranked in the 15% of the country that is considered the most deprived, we’ve improved exam results every year for the last ten years, and have been achieving higher pass rates than the national average.

So we’re doing a lot of things right at grass roots level, and as well as that, we’re continuing to put Gateshead on the map for all of the right reasons:

• Saltwell Park was voted the best park in Britain in 2005 and is a wonderful, safe and welcoming environment for me to take my small children
• The Sage music centre is a fantastic venue, both in terms of the eye catching design and in its specially designed acoustic qualities
• We now have the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary art, which hosts frequently changing exhibitions from internationally reknowned artists
• We’ve seen the sheer graceful beauty of the international Tall Ships Race gliding down the Tyne river three times in the last twenty years
• We’ve got that enormous great shopping complex called The Metro Centre, which some people seem to like, but personally I can’t bring myself to be proud of a shopping complex
• We’ve got the iconic image of The Angel of The North, which has attracted visitors from across the world

Obviously, despite all that, we still didn’t win the nomination for the European City Of Culture award in 2008, but that’s bloody politics for you, isn’t it?

On top of that, I’ve just discovered last week, that the breathtaking Gateshead Millenium Bridge — one of the many jewels in our cultural crown — which has already won something like twenty-five different awards at last count, is to feature on the British One Pound Coin next year.

Like I said, we’ve come an awful long way in the last twenty years: Gateshead is now a town that’s very easy to be proud of…

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 26th, 2006 at 9:42 am and is filed under Life, Local Interest, The Pickards. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.