The Great Exhibition of the North

The Great Exhibition of the North opens on 22 June in Newcastle-Gateshead. It lasts until 9 September. It's a "summer-long celebration of the North of England's pioneering spirit and the impact of our inventors, artists and designers", says the exhibition website. "It's a chance to show how our innovative spirit has shaped the world and is building the economy of tomorrow." To mark the launch of the Exhibition I've put together a selection of some of my favourite images of the North East that I've taken down the years.

I'm sure everyone at this end of England welcomes this opportunity to put the North back on the map. Having worked in the northern Province of the Church of England for exactly two-thirds of my working life in public ministry, I've seen how the large parts of the North can fall into despondency at the decline of its traditional industries, its economic challenges and how far away it can feel from the centres of decision-making in London. For example, the North East receives only one tenth of London's share of the nation's investment in public transport infrastructure. During the Great Exhibition, we shall continue to watch Pacer trains rumble in and out of Newcastle Central Station and squeal round the curves on the Gateshead loop across the river. Our southern guests might be intrigued to see these archaic trains still running up here, a phenomenon to make them wonder whether the Northern Powerhouse is reality or fantasy.

I believe it can and must be a reality. We should be glad that throughout the summer, the North of England will be girding up its loins to accentuate the positive. It will present itself to the nation and the world as a forward-looking place of enterprise, originality and innovation where people love living and working in its resilient, lively and colourful communities. When we consider how the North has influenced, changed and enriched the world's industry, enterprise, heritage and arts, it is out of all proportion to the narrow geography on which we sit here in England. Its achievements are truly astonishing - and let me emphasise the tense - it's not that these achievements were once astonishing, it's that they still are today. Newcastle and Gateshead will demonstrate this in abundance this year in all kinds of ways. It's good news that heralds a great summer of celebration.

However (there was bound to be a but), I hope this ambitious vision of a Great Exhibition of the North is big enough. Let me explain.

First, I hope that words like "innovation" and "enterprise" are understood as referring to a history that long predates the twentieth and twenty first centuries, indeed the industrial revolution whose cradle this part of England largely was. For instance, the Roman Wall that runs right across the far north of what we now call England was in its time (and still would be today, Mr Trump) a huge project that called for topographical, engineering and construction skills of the highest order. Antiquity has left its visible mark on our northern landscapes in a way that is unique on this island. I hope many of our visitors find their way into Tynedale to admire the Wall and thereby set modernity into a larger context. Every generation has made its contribution and left its imprint on our landscapes, towns and cities. It's good that history puts us in our place.

Secondly, Northumbria's "Golden Age" of Christian civilisation in the seventh and eighth centuries is an essential part of the North's heritage. You can't really "get" the North's rich character and identity if you airbrush out of its legacy the profound Christian influences that shaped it and gave it the strong sense of place that endures today. Spirituality comes into things. In 2013, when I was Dean at Durham Cathedral, we welcomed back to the city the Lindisfarne Gospels for the first residency of what is hoped to be a regular cycle of visits to the peninsula where that "Great North Book" once lived. That summer, we all learned a great deal about how precious this Christian inheritance from Saxon times still is, and how it has the power to inspire and motivate people of faith even to this day. Will all this feature in this summer's activities? I hope so. Once again, I hope our guests will find their way to Lindisfarne, the "cradle of English Christianity", or if that's too far from Tyneside, venture inside our cathedrals at Newcastle and Durham, or Bede's churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow, or Wilfrid's at Hexham Abbey. They are full of design innovation, full of spiritual enterprise. All this belongs to the North's spiritual and cultural capital.

Thirdly, I hope that the many poor and marginalised communities of the North will feel that this Exhibition is for them too. The North East has some of the most needy and deprived communities in the country, many of them within a stone's throw of the beautifully developed Tyneside waterfront. Parts of Tyneside and Wearside, as well as South East Northumberland and East Durham, are severely challenged in terms of economic growth, public services, housing, education, community facilities and, less tangibly but no less importantly, in their sense of collective wellbeing, confidence and hope.

These places of poverty and need, where people are "just about managing" or not managing at all, are often hidden from public sight and attention. These are the worlds of the TV series Broken, and films like I Daniel Blake, Billy Eliot, Purely Belter, Brassed Off and The Full Monty - all set in the North of England. I am sure that the Great Exhibition is intended to be a genuinely popular event, a ten week celebration for all the people of the North. Tyneside knows how to party like nowhere else in the country! The question is, how to take the Great Exhibition out into these communities and create events that affirm the local and the particular, that say loudly and clearly: this is for us all?

You can't do everything of course. But unless there's a strong sense of inclusion, even the best of intentions can have the effect of reinforcing the perception, no the experience, of disadvantaged people that they are on the edge of developments that are not really for them. I want to believe that this summer's events could be a wonderful way of invigorating and empowering fragile communities by offering visions of a better future. What will count is how the Great Exhibition of the North is followed up, what its long-term legacy turns out to be. It could be hugely positive. But it needs to be more than midsummer feel-good if it's to make a real and lasting difference to human lives.

Let me conclude on a personal note. I first came to live and work in the North more than half my lifetime ago when I became the vicar of a Northumberland market town in my early thirties. It was challenging to find myself in a culture so different from the one I'd been brought up in, that of suburban north London. But how enriching it was! It shaped me in ways beyond my imagining at the time. And when I went south again for a few years, I couldn't shake off my newly acquired feeling for "North". And didn't want to. I took groups annually up to Holy Island to introduce them to Northern Christianity. In due course, I returned - first to Sheffield for eight years, and then to Durham for nearly thirteen.

Now my wife and I live in retirement in rural Northumberland once more. I wouldn't live anywhere else now. I shall always be a Londoner, of course, and recognise that however much I want to "go native", we are always children of our origins. But the North has been extraordinarily good to me. Which is why I'm delighted that the Great Exhibition of the North will display the best of the North to people who may never have ventured into these (to them) far-distant lands. In today's Guardian a travel feature suggests some of the best places in the North East to enjoy a day out during the Exhibition. When I read it, I felt proud and glad to have lived and worked in this great region, and still to be a part of it. I've come to care deeply for it in all its variety. I want to champion it if I can. Hence my tribute in photographs. Hence this blog.

Come and see us. Discover the riches of the North. Bring your friends and make new ones. Experience living in a different way. Celebrate. Share our life for a while. Be inspired!

The North East in Twelve Favourite Places 10: Where the Roman Wall Ends (or Begins)

No-one in this village needs to be told about the Roman Wall that strides above us along the crest of the Whin Sill. Sycamore Gap is beautiful, but we don’t need yet more pictures of it. The same goes for the outstanding Roman sites at Chesters, Housesteads and Vindolanda. (But it’s worth putting a word in for the newly opened National Park Centre “The Sill” at Once Brewed on the Military Road. It’s worth a visit, and there’s a nice shop and a good café-restaurant there too.)

But the antiquities in urban Tyneside offer something a bit different. I’m thinking of Wallsend north of the Tyne and Arbeia on the south bank opposite. You don’t expect to come across Roman remains where there were once shipyards and the tangle of heavy industry, or in the midst of long streets of red brick Victorian houses. Just as the lonely upland setting of the Roman Wall in our area is a great part of its appeal, so it is, for me anyway, in the gritty townscapes where the Tyne nears the sea. What they lack in scenery they more than make up for in urban atmosphere, especially on the sort of grey overcast days the North East does so well.

Let’s focus on Wallsend. If you can, get there by Metro from the city centre. I suggest this for the sake of getting off at Wallsend station. It’s nothing special to look at, but it has the distinction of being the only railway station in the world that has signage in Latin (and in English too, should you need it). A short walk under the tracks brings you to the site itself.

Segedunum (does it mean strongly fortified place?) is dominated by an unlikely looking 1960s tower bearing the inscription “Where Rome’s great frontier begins”. This is the observation tower and it’s worth starting the visit at the top (there’s a lift as well as stairs). From here you can take in the entire excavated site and its setting. You are looking west, up the Tyne that flows alongside the fort. Upstream you can see the remnants of the legendary Tyneside shipyards and beyond, the city-centre where the Roman bridge Pons Aelius once stood. This was the lowest crossing of the river, a key strategic location, and it’s likely that Segedunum was built to protect it.

The Roman Wall has a long history, but what matters at Wallsend is that it was at Pons Aelius that Emperor Hadrian began to construct his wall in 122AD. (Aelius is derived from Hadrian’s family name.) The short four-mile section eastwards, running under what is now Byker and terminating at the fort also included a spur running down to the river. This was completed a few years later. When you walk the site and gaze at the two short chunks of wall that survive, you can’t help pondering this extraordinary monument that stretches all the way to the Solway via our parish about half way along. What was this edge-of-empire wall for? Probably not to defend the empire or attack enemies. More likely it symbolically marked the extent of empire, with its many gates serving as points at which to control traffic and regulate trade between the empire and the peoples beyond it.
 

But I left you at the top of the observation tower. Come down and visit the galleries on the two floors at the bottom. There are good interactive displays about the history of the Wall, exhibits of excavated artefacts and (what school children especially enjoy), resources to help you imagine what it would have been like to live in a Roman garrison. You are also told something about the history of Wallsend after the Romans left in about 400AD. Its key role in Tyneside’s heavy industry, particularly mining and shipbuilding, is rightly made much of. This characterful area is all part of Newcastle’s hinterland.

There isn’t actually a lot to see above ground when you walk round the site. I’ve mentioned the short sections of wall that survive. The reconstructed Roman bath house is the most prominent building (not open at the time of writing). But as I’ve said, it’s more a case of setting and atmosphere. This close to the river, you appreciate its significance for this part of England, and the strategic importance of a crossing point as near to its estuary as you can. You see why Segedunum was necessary. And if it all feels a little forlorn, think what it must have felt like to soldiers from Syria, north Africa or Spain whose legions served on the Wall at different times. They would have wrapped themselves up against the keen east wind blowing off the North Sea and wondered how they ever came to exchange their azure Mediterranean skies for this bleak and lonely place.   

That’s why I say that atmosphere is everything. If you want to feel the authentic North East in all its ancient, sharp and uncompromising character, Wallsend offers plenty of scope. So does Arbeia, when it opens again in the spring. And if you want to know more about the Wall and those who served on it, the Roman Army Museum at Carvoran and the excellent exhibitions at Vindolanda will give you plenty to think about.