Newcastle’s Night Economy After the Bigg Market: A City Reinventing Itself

The Bigg Market in Newcastle city centre was, from the 1980s to the early 2000s, one of the most notorious nightlife districts in Britain. The concentration of pubs and bars in the medieval market square and the surrounding streets drew drinkers from across the northeast. The culture that developed was famously uninhibited – the Newcastle cold weather drinking culture, the matching outfits, the scale of consumption – and it became both a local institution and a national cliche. Television programmes were made about it. Hen and stag parties planned trips around it. It was genuinely distinctive, in the way that things built on genuine popular enthusiasm rather than marketing concepts tend to be.

Why the Bigg Market Changed

The Bigg Market model peaked in the 1990s and began declining from around 2003 onwards. The reasons were multiple. The city centre pub trade nationally contracted as licensing laws changed and the supermarket alcohol market grew. The hen and stag trade, which had been a significant driver of the Bigg Market economy, spread to other cities and eventually to European destinations. The violence and disorder associated with the district attracted negative attention and policing responses that made the trade more difficult to sustain. And the demographic that had built the Bigg Market culture began aging into different consumption patterns.

More importantly, Newcastle developed new nightlife districts that offered different experiences. The Quayside waterfront, developed from the late 1990s onwards around the Gateshead cultural quarter and the Baltic, offered a different kind of night out – restaurants, wine bars, the concert venue at the Sage. The Ouseburn valley, a mile east of the city centre, began attracting independent music venues, arts spaces and bars that served a different audience with different expectations.

The Ouseburn Valley

The Ouseburn is a small river that runs through a steep-sided valley just east of the city centre before entering the Tyne at the bottom of City Road. The valley was heavily industrial in the Victorian period – lead works, pottery, glassworks, cooperages. By the 1980s the industrial activity had largely gone and the Victorian buildings that remained were either empty or housing precarious creative businesses at low rents. The same pattern that produced the creative districts of other British post-industrial cities – cheap space, proximity to the centre, tolerated bohemianism – produced the Ouseburn.

The Cluny opened in 1996 in a former flour mill and became the anchor of the Ouseburn music scene. The Cumberland Arms, a Victorian pub on the steep road down to the valley, became a folk and roots music venue. The Tyne Bar at the bottom of the valley has live music running throughout the week. Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books, arrived in a converted Victorian warehouse in 2005. The Free Trade Inn, on the City Road above the valley, is one of the best pubs in Newcastle for views and for beer. The area now supports a night economy that has no precedent in its industrial history and that could not have been predicted from the state of the valley twenty years ago.

The Quayside

The Quayside restaurant and bar district developed in parallel with the Gateshead cultural investment that produced the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the Sage Gateshead (now Glasshouse International Centre for Music). The two developments are inseparable – the Baltic and the Sage created a reason to be on the south side of the river, the Millennium Bridge connected it to the Quayside on the north side, and the whole waterfront became an evening destination in a way it had not been since the Victorian trading era.

What Newcastle Has Now

The current Newcastle night economy is more varied than the Bigg Market era, less coherent as a single image, and probably more resilient as a result. The Bigg Market still exists and still draws crowds, though at lower intensity than its peak. The Ouseburn still has the independent music venues and arts spaces, though the rents have risen with the neighbourhood’s reputation. The Quayside has restaurants and bars and the cultural institutions that anchor it. The Grey Street area has cocktail bars and restaurants at a different price point. The population is not going to one district to perform one activity. It is moving between a set of options that reflect the city’s actual diversity of tastes and incomes. That is a healthier night economy than the one it replaced.