NEWCASTLE & GATESHEAD, by Grace McCombie. A Pevsner Architectural Guide published by Yale University Press (www.yalebooks.co.uk). £9.99. Softback.

THIS expert survey of buildings on Tyneside includes all the architectural highlights of the area from Newcastle’s St Nicholas Cathedral, medieval castle and Grainger Town (the first planned 19th century city centre in Britain) to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, the spectacular buildings spearheading the renaissance of Gateshead and the country’s most celebrated council estate in and around the Byker Wall.
Both urban centres are explored in a series of walks, together with excursions to Anglo-Saxon Jarrow and medieval Tynemouth. In 1953 Pevsner stated: “No-one would choose to investigate the sights of Gateshead for fun.” And in Newcastle four years later, he saw: “thickets of factory, warehouse and slum”. The superb photographs in this book emphasise how much has changed for the better in the past half-century.