Newcastle Arts Centre

What is it?

Newcastle Arts Centre is all sorts of things – craft shop, cafe, gallery, the barn-like art materials shop, Details and a venue upstairs which is the new home to the Jazz Café.

Represented in the craft shop are makers from across the North East and further afield. The perfect place to find an appealing and distinctive gift, jewellery, ceramics, wooden tableware and various textile creations are displayed with home-made candles and soaps. Some of the city’s most attractively arty cards and wrapping paper are to be found here. As for Details, if you’re an artist, professional or amateur, and you can’t find it here, it possibly doesn’t exist.

Newcastle Arts Centre is a treasure trove in the city centre

Newcastle Arts Centre is a treasure trove in the city centre

Why is it smashing?

The quirky, labyrinthine layout of the place, perhaps best understood as several places under one name, is one answer. Another is the inspiring story of its creation.

Mike Tilley and his late wife Norma took on the challenge posed by 67-75 Westgate Road in the early 1980s, buying the blighted site and setting up Newcastle Arts Centre Ltd.

With funding from the city council and various other bodies, they breathed new life into the run-down group of buildings, some listed as being of historic significance. During lengthy and painstaking conversion work, archaeological relics, including the foundations of a Roman milecastle and medieval wells, were uncovered.

Newcastle Arts Centre is a treasure trove in the city centre

Artists supervised the creation of mosaic floors and walls and when Prince Charles opened the place in 1988, he was presented with a hand-made wooden toilet seat.

Never bolstered by public subsidy, Newcastle Arts Centre has made its own way, providing a home for many artists and creative groups and presenting gigs, talks, workshops and a host of events.

The arrangement of the buildings around the arts centre’s Black Swan Court hints at its richly chequered past.

And what, you might ask, is that huge scrap metal robot doing leaning against one wall? The monster’s a stage prop, made in 1993 to appear in The Iron Man, a rock musical by Pete Townshend, lead guitarist of The Who, and inspired by the poem of the same name by Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate. With the blessing of Hughes’s widow, Carol, it was brought to the Arts Centre in 2001 to feature in a children’s book exhibition – and there it remains.

Website: www.newcastle-arts-centre.co.uk

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Address: 67 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1SG

Tel. 0191 261 5618

Words and images: @DavidJWhetstone