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 5: Wallington

Hexham-Wall-Chollerton-Thockrington-Kirkharle-Rothbury-Alnwick-Alnmouth. It sounds like a list of stations on some sleepy Northumberland branch line before Dr Beeching’s axe fell. In fact, these places all sit on a historic road that linked Tynedale to the coast. It was called the Corn Road because in the eighteenth century, maybe before, the harvest of Tynedale was carried along it to the port of Alnmouth from where it could be transported up, down or across the North Sea. It was also known as the Alemouth Road, a street name that still exists in Hexham.

If you want to avoid the main roads, it’s a pleasant scenic way to drive to the north of the county. And among many points of interest along the route is Wallington Hall. It’s one of my favourite places in Northumberland, famous on no fewer than three counts: the house itself, its marvellous garden, and the family who lived there.

Let’s start with the family or more accurately, families. There were two big Northumbrian names associated with the estate’s early history: the Fenwicks, and then the Blacketts who acquired it in the late seventeenth century. It was they who created the house as we now know it. But the name that is indelibly linked with Wallington is not theirs but that of Trevelyan. Originally from Cornwall, the Trevelyans came into ownership as a result of a marriage into the Blackett family. The nineteenth century saw them rise to a position of remarkable political and intellectual dominance in the nation. Many will know the name of G. M. Trevelyan (George Macaulay T who died in 1962) through his writings on history and biography. I remember the four volumes of his English Social History in their colourful dust jackets lining my parents’ bookshelves in my childhood. I still have them.

And what is so enjoyable at Wallington is the sense that this is still essentially a family home. The Trevelyans bequeathed it to the National Trust during the war, and it was opened to the public in 1968. It is undeniably a grand house, but it is modest with it, genuine, humane. It feels lived in, hospitable and for me anyway, the kind place you not only admire but love. This may be to do with the Trevelyans’ politics. They were a forward-looking family who believed that inherited wealth and privilege should not be used selfishly but should benefit wider society. Which they did in support of a number of important social and political causes such as the universal franchise.
They also had a strong sense of their place in history, not least in North East England. One of the best of the many splendid rooms at Wallington is the arcaded sitting room created by the Tyneside Victorian architect John Dobson by roofing over the central courtyard. To decorate the walls, the Trevelyans commissioned a series of eight murals by the Pre-Raphaelite painter William Bell Scott. They depict scenes from Northumbrian history including the Roman Wall, St Cuthbert being offered his bishopric, the death of Bede, Grace Darling’s heroic sea-rescue, and heavy industry (“iron and coal”) on Tyneside. The colours are as fresh and vivid as when they were painted.  The saloon, dining room and library are splendid too, as is the famous collection of dolls’ houses upstairs.

But for many visitors, best of all is the park that surrounds the house. A good way of getting a sense of it is to follow the waymarked path that takes you right round it. It includes extensive woodland (with snowdrops and bluebells in profusion if you time it right), a stretch of the infant River Wansbeck complete with James Paine’s beautiful little hump-bridge that you will have crossed if you approached from the south (“sound your horn” warns the sign: this elegant bridge is steep-sided and narrow by any standards). Not far from the house is a hide, popular with bird-watchers. And if you are lucky, you may glimpse red squirrels too (though I haven’t yet).

Even if you don’t visit the house, or do the long-ish walk, on no account must you miss the much-loved walled garden. It is the star of the show, possibly (Alnwick notwithstanding) the best garden in Northumberland if you treasure naturalness and a sense of intimacy. You reach it by walking back from the house under the beautiful cupola gateway to the courtyard, crossing the road (carefully) and following the signs through the wood. What makes this walled garden so beautiful is not simply the array of colour that adorns it throughout the year, but how it has been cleverly landscaped to follow the contours of the land as it drops away from the house. A stream flows from west to east down the centre of the garden. This provides south-facing slopes that in this sheltered environment support a marvellous variety of plant life.

The terrace above is overlooked by an owl perched on top of a pavilion. Inside the conservatory is a marble fountain with an inscription drawn from a Roman sarcophagus: “When wearied or overwrought by study and affairs of business, repair to these haunts and refresh your mind by a stroll amidst the flowers”. It’s good advice for anyone looking for physical and spiritual renewal amid the stresses and strains of twenty-first century life. We are fortunate here in Tynedale to have it so close at hand. And our very own Corn Road to get us there.
 
Wallington is a National Trust property. For opening times, consult the NT website.