How Newcastle is using regeneration to stem the city’s brain drain

Anyone who has visited Newcastle recently will have felt a certain buzz in the air. England’s most northerly city is renowned for its energy and its nightlife, long considered to be the UK’s liveliest. Perhaps it is all the Lucozade – among the city’s most famous 20th-century inventions – but there is a growing sense of optimism in Newcastle which is reflected in a series of strikingly confident regeneration schemes completed in recent years.

What had once been another declining post-industrial city has become a hotbed of development, now given greater impetus with the creation of the North East Combined Authority in May last year. A clutch of strategic projects – from the commercial-led Helix development to the 21-acre, 5,000-home redevelopment of Network Rail land at Forth Yard – are transforming the city’s urban landscape.

“There’s so much going on at the moment,” says Ryder’s Jonathan Seebacher. “When you get clients who have never worked in the city, they are always blown away by everything that’s going on.”

But Newcastle’s reinvention is far from complete. Connectivity across the city has been constrained by the closure or partial closure of several bridges across the River Tyne. The Gateshead flyover was shut in December last year following the discovery of structural issues, limiting access into Newcastle city centre from the south.

Ongoing works on several other key routes including the A1 and the Tyne Bridge, which has been reduced to a single lane during the course of a four-year restoration project due to complete in 2028, have been causing further frustration to commuters.

>> Also read: Tackling infrastructure gaps and overcoming investment delays in the North-east

“We’re spending huge amounts of money just to stand still – it’s not transformative investment, it’s survival,” said Nik Welsh, executive director at Believe Housing and chair of Constructing Excellence North East at a recent roundtable discussion for Building Design’s sister title Building. Another member of the panel, who lives south of the Tyne,  said it was not “worth it going to my city centre” because of difficulties crossing the river.

Newcastle’s transformation has been an iterative process of adaptation and renewal spurred by many of the same global trends of deindustrialisation which swept Britain in the second half of the 20th century. Once one of the world’s largest centres for ship-building and pottery manufacturing, the city started to teeter into decline during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The city’s last coal pit closed in 1956, followed a few years later by the shipyards on the River Tyne, which began to disappear in the 1970s.

Like Glasgow and Manchester, Newcastle’s population started to decline and the city found itself at risk of losing not just its local industries but its inherited identity. What remained was its urban fabric, including its grand Georgian commercial centre around Grey Street.

The Grainger Town project in the late 1990s and early 2000s tackled heritage at risk across this classical core, restoring facades, rescuing buildings and reinvigorating the streets around Grey’s Monument and the Theatre Royal. It created much of the confidence for today’s investment cycle and cemented Grey Street’s reputation as one of England’s great thoroughfares.

More regeneration continued on the Ouseburn, a small river which flows through the city into the Tyne, where the city’s post-industrial playbook of repair, re-use and culture-led growth took shape. The once-derelict Maynards Toffee Factory reopened in 2011 following a refurbishment designed by local practice xsite architecture as a workspace for creative and digital firms and swiftly became a regeneration touchstone.

Nearby Hoults Yard continues the pattern, turning the former Malings pottery factory into a business and cultural complex. More recently, the historic Bigg Market area was restored by MawsonKerr for NE1, a company tasked with managing the city’s Business Improvement District.

The foundations for much of the renewal happening now were laid by a partnership established back in 2015 by Newcastle City Council and Gateshead council called the Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan. The plan runs up to 2030 and provides developers with long-term certainty on growth, land use and infrastructure across the two cities’ shared urban core.

But the most significant recent change has been the establishment of the North East Combined Authority (NECA), which elected its first mayor – Labour’s Kim McGuinness – in May last year. The mayoralty covers a large swathe of north-eastern England but Newcastle, as the region’s largest city, is the natural focus.

McGuinness was born in the city and grew up in a council estate. Since her election, she has approved a dizzying number of regeneration initiatives for the region, including a £1.85bn expansion of the Metro to Washington, just south of Newcastle, a strategic partnership with Homes England, a brownfield housing fund programme and a £8.5m expansion of Newcastle College Energy Academy, which provides training for jobs in green energy.

She has also unveiled a 10-year local growth plan aiming to spur the regional economy across six sectors, including life sciences, the creative industries, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing and tech.

These new devolved powers provide some hope that the city will be able to get a grip on some of the longer-term issues which have held back its growth, particularly the connectivity constraints across the Tyne. When the Tyne Bridge fully reopens in 2028, directly linking Gateshead to the emerging Pilgrim Street development, it will be a sign that at least one part of the city is fulfilling its long-promised potential.

So what are the key projects shaping the city’s recent past and its future?

Newcastle Helix, The Spark, Ryder Architecture

Perhaps the most significant recent development in the city centre is Newcastle Helix, a 24-acre cluster of buildings spanning offices, life sciences, hospitality and housing. A partnership between the city council, Newcastle University and Legal & General, the £350m innovation quarter is aiming to provide the city with world-class office space for local academia and businesses. The goal is to keep the brightest minds in Newcastle, stemming the flow of graduates and businesses to London.

Construction started in 2018 on the site of the former Scottish and Newcastle Brewery and is still ongoing. Prior to work startin,g the site was “basically 24 acres with a huge brick and barbed-wire fence around it and a sign saying, ‘you shall not enter’,” says Seebacher. “It has really opened up that part of the city and provided much-needed pedestrian links through the West End.”

Ryder has been involved with the design of five of the seven buildings to have completed so far, the most significant being The Spark, a striking £28m office building with over 13,000sq m of floorspace. Its 12 storeys are clad in an earthy copper-coloured steel frame contrasting with walls of azure-blue glass, supported on a podium of black columns.

Its clean, modernist but playful design makes it comparable to the best buildings within the celebrated King’s Cross redevelopment in London, something which the wider development is in many ways seeking to emulate.

“We did a huge number of study visits to see what was best in class,” says Seebacher. “We talked about a London type of office environment. So we spent a lot of time on all of those buildings, during concept design and on a huge amount of engagement before we even picked up a pen.”

Seebacher says the concept behind the scheme was to create an ecosystem where graduates could spin out of the nearby university campuses. “The panacea would be you can move across the road, you can go into incubator space, then you might move across to The Spark and take a floor plate, because your business has grown in that period, and that ecosystem can provide that. And, providing that on a campus means there is a collaborative element with like-minded organisations and like-minded people who can help you on that journey.

“All of a sudden it becomes this real vibrant mix of different functions which have strands that connect them.”

Ryder also designed a specialist life sciences building on the development called the Biosphere, a six-storey life sciences block clad in a white-coloured Chipperfield-esque grid of square windows. Other practices working on Helix include Hawkins Brown, which designed a life sciences building, Gillespies, responsible for landscape design, and Make, which provided the overall masterplan.

Newcastle Civic Centre, Faulkner Browns

Ryder is one practice among a thriving community of architecture firms based in Newcastle, which also include FaulknerBrowns, GSS and xcite architecture. FaulknerBrowns has worked in the city since the 1960s, with recent projects including the 27-storey Hadrian’s Tower, containing 162 flats and a rooftop bar, which was completed in 2020.

The firm also completed a student accommodation and teaching building for Newcastle University in 2012, and the Core, a life sciences scheme, in 2014.

But the firm’s most celebrated recent project has been its refurbishment of the grade II*-listed Newcastle Civic Centre. Originally designed for the council by city architect George Kenyon, completed in 1967 and opened by King Olav V of Norway (to commemorate the historical ties between Norway and the city), the modernist landmark is known for its sleek ground-level arches and the sheer concrete walls of its main tower, topped with a ring of copper seahorse statues.

FaulknerBrowns’ proposals to overhaul the building were initially controversial, with strong criticism from the Twentieth Century Society. The scheme ended up winning RIBA North East Building of the Year in 2022, being praised by judges for its “non-invasive” approach and for celebrating the original architecture.

A key part of the brief was to elevate the building’s public entrance and fix circulation issues. FaulknerBrowns added a frameless glass facade wrapping around the building’s open undercroft area, enclosing its colonnade of arches to create a contemporary reception space which retained a 1960s feel.

Later additions to the building were also stripped away to reveal original fabric and finishes, while services were upgraded and the roof fitted with heat pumps and photovoltaic panels.

FaulknerBrowns senior associate Nick Heyward, project director on the scheme, said the proposals were “developed in response to the council’s aspiration to protect, preserve and enhance their unique heritage asset, extending its use as a civic facility and improving its environmental performance”. 

The scheme underlines a key element of Newcastle’s regeneration approach: celebrating its best architecture while making targeted interventions which sensitively bring historic buildings up to date. The same approach can be seen on another FaulknerBrowns scheme, its proposed refurbishment of the grade I-listed Grainger Market.

The plans, unveiled last year, will add two contemporary pavilions to the main hall of the market building, which was built in 1835, and remove retail units added in the 1970s to free up space for additional seating.

Pilgrim Street development, Ryder Architecture

Ryder’s Pilgrim Street development is a major regeneration scheme on the eastern edge of the city centre, opposite the central conservation area which includes Grainger Town. It is bringing more than 750,000sq ft of new grade-A workspace, a public square, hospitality and a boutique hotel to one of the city’s most historic thoroughfares.

The scheme’s first completed landmark is Bank House, a 14-storey, fully electric office tower built on the site of the Bank of England’s former base in the city, a 1970s brutalist block which was demolished in 2012. Further phases include the twin office blocks at Pilgrim Place and the government hub at Pilgrim’s Quarter.

The project has its policy roots in the East Pilgrim Street Development Framework, adopted to guide comprehensive, mixed-use renewal of the area The masterplan is being developed by a partnership between Reuben Brothers-owned developer Taras Properties and Newcastle City Council.

Redevelopment gathered momentum in 2019 when designs were unveiled and enabling works began across several cleared plots, including the site of a 1930s Odeon Cinema which had been vacant for more than 15 years before its demolition in 2017. Bank House completed in 2023, and by early 2025, the vast Pilgrim’s Quarter scheme had topped out.

Located on a large island site fronting onto Pilgrim Street, this £155m development will be HMRC’s base in the North-east, housing thousands of civil servants across its nine storeys. 

While the project has had its controversies – the Odeon cinema had been grade II-listed before its protected status was successfully appealed in 2001 – the redevelopment is likely to be transformative for this formerly down-at-heel chunk of the city centre. “If you know Newcastle at all, it wasn’t a great part of the city. But in terms of its location, it’s fantastic,” says Seebacher.

The office buildings are just two minutes from the city’s biggest Metro hub and Northumberland Street, the centre’s main shopping street. It also extends the city centre eastwards and provides links to the residential eastern parts of the city.

Other key players

Grainger plc 

Founded in Newcastle in 1912 and now a FTSE 250 company, Grainger is one of the UK’s largest listed residential landlords, specialising in build-to-rent communities which it owns and operates nationwide.

Xsite Architecture 

Based in the Ouseburn Valley, Xsite focuses on urban regeneration, creative workspaces and mixed-use projects. 

MawsonKerr

An employee-owned architecture firm based in Newcastle. Its work spans various sectors including residential, heritage, education, commercial and leisure. 

GT3 Architects

A sustainable specialist practice with projects including passivhaus and low-energy designs in sectors including leisure, hospitality, residential and heritage.

SPACE Architects

Specialises in adaptive reuse, education and low-carbon retrofit. Recent work includes the Henry Daysh Building refurbishment at Newcastle University and, with Elliott Architects, the award-winning Farrell Centre

Network Rail

The landowner and client behind the huge Forth Yards scheme, which will be built through the transport operator’s newly created Platform4 division.