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 Joy of Pacers: Our Trains in the North

I am sitting in Costa on Newcastle Central Station, looking out at the noble curve of John Dobson's great train shed. It is lost in the darkness but all who know this station will agree that it's a glorious achievement of nineteenth century industrial architecture.  

But it is a filthy night. The tail end of Storm Angus has alighted over North East England. A fierce rain borne on a north east wind is driving across the exposed platform in the distance. Even on the concourse a light drizzle drifts down from a not-quite-weatherproof canopy. There is a bitter cold that I can feel on the glass that contains this capsule of a cafe. The brightly lit interiors of Virgin East Coast trains passing through suggest warmth and comfort, or maybe that's just the effect of their brilliant red livery. 

I love railway stations, but there's something forlorn about them at this time of night. I've been to Leeds to see my children and grandchildren. We've had an enjoyable day. But the return train journey has not been the most pleasant of experiences. Everything at Leeds seems to be running late. It may have been owing to the poor weather. Well, there's no point in railing against the elements. Stuff happens. I am going to miss my Newcastle connection, I realise with a sigh. And that means a nearly two hour wait for the next train up the Tyne Valley to home. It's the last train of the day. No room for mistakes then.

But as so often, my late running TransPennine Express is made up of a three-car diesel multiple unit. It's rush hour. Hoards of commuters travel this east-west route that connects Liverpool and Manchester with Leeds, York and Newcastle. So it's standing room only. I'm told this is normal. The cheerful Scouse voice of TPE apologises for the delay, but warns that because we are following a stopping train, we can expect to be even later into York. I think wistfully of the Carlisle train at Newcastle that I won't get to catch. Then our conductor says pleasantly with a touch of regret, "Fingers crossed, after York there shouldn't be any more problems." On the whole they are nice people, train conductors. They are doing their best and hate it when things go wrong.

I like that "fingers crossed" because it feels honest. It seems to sum up how, once you get off the main lines, the North of England's railways seem to be run. It is ridiculous that services connecting the major cities of the North are served by such tiny trains. Investment in new rolling stock to increase capacity is an urgent priority, to say nothing about the need for the lines themselves to be upgraded to take high(er) speed trains. We are promised that TPE has already committed to launching longer trains and that is welcome. But how long, O Lord, how long? Will we ever see our northern east-west rails electrified? Or will HS2 see off any further investment in the North?

As another example, take the Tyne Valley line that I live on. (I mean this almost literally as our home is within sight of the level crossing a full 50 yards from the station - a bit further if you are crossing the line to the up platform.) The Newcastle and Carlisle is the oldest east-west route in England, running for its entire length parallel to Hadrian's Wall a few miles to the north. It's an important artery that not only connects the East Coast Main Line with the West, but gives tourist access to the Wall, the Northumberland National Park and the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The operator is Northern Railways, a new Arriva franchise. 

On this line run two species of train, both two-car diesel units: Sprinters and Pacers. These, too, rapidly fill up with commuters, schoolchildren, tourists and shoppers by the score getting on and off at the stop for the Metro Centre. It's good to see how well this line is used. Like cinemas, trains have surprised us in the past few decades. When it was once confidently predicted that both risked becoming obsolete, they have seen a remarkable and welcome revival of fortunes.

Let me say something about Sprinters and Pacers. Sprinters are respectable trains, pleasant enough to travel on even if they are showing their age (up to 30 years old). Pacers are quite another matter. If you live in London or the south of England, you may never have heard of them, though you may have seen a recent Panorama programme that mercilessly exposed these ageing four-wheelers that lurch and squeal their way across our northern rails. They are unaffectionately known as "Nodding Donkeys" by longsuffering passengers. They are not real trains at all, but buses fitted with flanged wheels, made in their hundreds on the cheap in British Rail days in the 1980s. BR tried very hard to export them. Only the Iranians were interested, and theirs, once used on local services around Tehran until 2005, now lie rusting and abandoned in the middle of some desert - a very proper place for Pacers. (The wrecked hulk of Shelley's Ozymandias comes to mind: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!") I can confidently say that southern commuters would not tolerate these trains for an instant. The Panorama presenter believed that if anything symbolised the North-south divide, it was the unloved Pacers we are forced to ride up here. That's a telling comment. They are a disgrace to a modern railway.

When George Osborne was in office, he spoke with some warmth about creating a "Northern Powerhouse". Central to the development of the North was, he rightly said, vastly improving its infrastructure and transport links, especially its railways. That aspiration remains on the table, notionally at least, of government thinking. Our leaders in politics, industry and commerce in the North have been banging this drum for all the years I have lived and worked in this part of England. There's not been much progress. But until there is the will to get something done, we shall be living with indifferent rail services for many years to come. The train operating companies are only free to invest in new rolling stock on the Government's say-so. Keeping our fingers crossed will be a good policy. And saying our prayers.

We should all remember where the railways were born. Here in the pioneering land of the Stephensons where the industrial revolution would make the North East the most productive and prosperous region in the kingdom, we shall be celebrating the bicentenary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 2025. What state will our northern rails will be in by then? Will the Northern Powerhouse have begun to be a reality?

I must soon cross the tracks to platform 7 where my Pacer will, fingers crossed, convey me up the Tyne Valley and home. Note on surviving Pacer travel: never, ever, sit above the wheels. Not only will it be a rough ride, but you will experience fierce freezing updraughts and downdraughts from poorly fitting doors. Aim for the middle of the bus and lose yourself in nice music through the earphones (if you can hear it above the ambient roar). And think longingly of your nice warm bed. We need eschatology and hope to keep us going at times.

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PS Things looked up on platform 7. To my surprise, the last train up the Tyne Valley wasn't a Pacer but a Sprinter, bedecked with imagery that suggested it had strayed from its usual tracks on the Settle and Carlisle line. So the railway had the last laugh after all.