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Grainger Town

Grainger Street, circa 1906

The historic heart of Newcastle is the Grainger Town area. Established on classical streets built
by Richard Grainger, a builder and developer, between 1835 and 1842, some of Newcastle upon
Tyne's finest buildings and streets lie within this area of the city centre including Grainger
Market, Theatre Royal, Grey Street, Grainger Street and Clayton Street.[100] These buildings are
predominantly four stories high, with vertical dormers, domes, turrets and spikes. Richard Grainger
was said to 'have found Newcastle of bricks and timber and left it in stone'. [101] Of Grainger Town's
450 buildings, 244 are listed, of which 29 are grade I and 49 are grade II*.

Grey's Monument

Grey's Monument, which commemorates Prime Minister Earl Grey and his Reform Act of 1832,
stands above Monument Metro Station and was designed and built by Edward Hodges
Baily and Benjamin Green. Hodges, who also built Nelson's Column, designed and built the statue,
[102]
 and the monument plinth was designed and built by Benjamin Green. [103]
The Grainger Market replaced an earlier market originally built in 1808 called the Butcher Market.
[104]
 The Grainger Market itself, was opened in 1835 and was Newcastle's first indoor market. [105] At the
time of its opening in 1835 it was said to be one of the largest and most beautiful markets in Europe.
[105]
 The opening was celebrated with a grand dinner attended by 2000 guests, and the Laing Art
Gallery has a painting of this event.[105] With the exception of the timber roof which was destroyed by a
fire in 1901 and replaced by latticed-steel arches the Market is largely in its original condition. [105] The
Grainger Market architecture, like most in Grainger Town, which are either grade I or II listed, was
listed grade I in 1954 by English Heritage. [104]
The development of the city in the 1960s saw the demolition of part of Grainger Town as a prelude to
the modernist rebuilding initiatives of T. Dan Smith, the leader of Newcastle City Council. A
corruption scandal was uncovered involving Smith and John Poulson, a property
developer from Pontefract, West Yorkshire, and both were imprisoned. Echoes of the scandal were
revisited in the late 1990s in the BBC TV mini-series, Our Friends in the North.[106]
Chinatown[edit]
Newcastle's thriving Chinatown lies in the north-west of Grainger Town, centred on Stowell Street. A
new Chinese arch, or paifang, providing a landmark entrance, was handed over to the city with a
ceremony in 2005.[107]

Housing[edit]
The Tyneside flat was the dominant housing form constructed at the time when the industrial centres
on Tyneside were growing most rapidly. They can still be found in areas such as South Heaton in
Newcastle but once dominated the streetscape on both sides of the Tyne. [108] Tyneside flats were built
as terraces, one of each pair of doors led to an upstairs flat while the other led into the ground-floor
flat, each of two or three rooms. A new development in the Ouseburn valley has recreated them;
Architects Cany Ash and Robert Sakula were attracted by the possibilities of high density without
building high and getting rid of common areas.[109]
In terms of housing stock, the authority is one of few authorities to see the proportion of detached
homes rise in the 2010 Census (to 7.8%), in this instance this was coupled with a similar rise in flats
and waterside apartments to 25.6%, and the proportion of converted or shared houses in 2011
renders this dwelling type within the highest of the five colour-coded brackets at 5.9%, and on a par
with Oxford and Reading, greater than Manchester and Liverpool and below a handful of historic
densely occupied, arguably overinflated markets in the local
authorities: Harrogate, Cheltenham, Bath, inner London, Hastings, Brighton and Royal Tunbridge
Wells.[110]
Significant Newcastle housing developments include Ralph Erskine's the Byker Wall designed in the
1960s, and now Grade II* listed. It is on UNESCO's list of outstanding 20th-century buildings.[111]

Climate[edit]
Data in Newcastle was first collected in 1802 by the solicitor James Losh.[112] Situated in the rain
shadow of the North Pennines, Newcastle is amongst the driest cities in the UK. Temperature
extremes recorded at Newcastle Weather Centre include 32.5 °C (90.5 °F) on 3 August 1990[113] down
to −14.0 °C (6.8 °F) on 29 December 1995.[114] Newcastle can have cool to cold winters, though
usually warmer than the rural areas around it, and the winters are often compensated for by warm
summers, with very long daylight hours in the summer months, longer than all other major English
Cities. Newcastle upon Tyne shares the same latitude as Copenhagen, Denmark and southern
Sweden.
The nearest weather station to provide sunshine statistics is at Durham, about 14 miles (23 km)
south of Newcastle City Centre. Durham's inland, less urbanised setting results in night-time
temperature data about 1 degree cooler than Newcastle proper throughout the