The Bigg Market in the 1990s: What Happened and What Changed

In the mid-1990s, a photograph of the Bigg Market on a Friday night became one of the most circulated images in British tabloid newspapers. Young women in short skirts, young men in shirtsleeves, both apparently oblivious to temperatures that would have driven anyone with a coat inside. The image of Newcastle nightlife as aggressive, excessive, and oblivious to consequence lodged itself in the national imagination. Twenty years later, Newcastle has one of the most respected hospitality and cultural scenes in the north of England. What happened in between is worth examining.

What the Bigg Market Actually Was

The Bigg Market is a historic square in Newcastle city centre, named for the bigg – a type of barley – that was traded there from the medieval period. By the twentieth century it had become a market and pub district. By the 1980s it was concentrated with bars and pubs at a density that few city centre locations in Britain matched.

The 1990s saw the growth of vertical drinking establishments, cheap drinks promotions, and a style of pub and bar that maximised throughput at the expense of almost everything else. The Bigg Market was not unusual in this – every large British city had equivalent districts. What Newcastle had that other cities did not was a combination of genuine warmth and sociability on the part of the people using these spaces, set against an increasingly predatory business model from the operators. The reputation that resulted was not entirely fair to the city but it was not invented from nothing.

The Problems

The issues that came to define the Bigg Market’s reputation in the 1990s were real. Alcohol-related violence, public disorder, and the visible distress of a nighttime economy built around getting as many people as drunk as possible as quickly as possible were documented in police statistics and in the hospital admissions that spiked every weekend. The photographs of people in distress became a story that newspapers returned to year after year, often with the implication that Newcastle was uniquely chaotic. It was not uniquely chaotic. It was visibly chaotic in ways that lent themselves to photography.

The Reinvention

The change that transformed Newcastle’s nighttime economy happened through several overlapping processes. The development of the Quayside as a hospitality destination from the late 1990s drew trade away from the Bigg Market and established a different model – riverside bars and restaurants oriented towards food, mixed-age crowds, and a different pace of consumption. The growth of the Jesmond and Ouseburn areas extended the options further. Meanwhile, planning policy tightened the concentration of late-night licences and the cheap drinks promotions that had driven the worst of the excess were curbed.

The Bigg Market itself did not disappear. It changed character. The density of pubs and bars reduced slightly and the quality improved considerably. The mix of operators broadened. The culture shifted as a new generation of Geordie drinkers discovered that there were more interesting options than packing into a sticky-floored bar at 10pm on a Friday.

What Remains

Newcastle’s nightlife culture retains its authenticity and its warmth – the things that were always there underneath the tabloid version. The city still knows how to enjoy itself, and it does so now with considerably more sophistication than the 1990s Bigg Market suggested. The reputation was always reductive. The reality, then and now, was a city with a genuine culture of sociability that deserved better than the coverage it got. It has earned better coverage since.