About the Vital North Partnership
The Vital North Partnership is a strategic partnership between Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books and Newcastle University, funded by Arts Council England and Newcastle University. Newcastle City Council staff are also members of the Vital North Partnership’s Steering Group. The partners share the goal that Newcastle becomes a centre for excellence in children’s literature.
We’ve been working together since before Seven Stories opened in 2005, the same year in which Newcastle University founded the Children’s Literature Unit. Today our collaboration stretches across the three university faculties and ranges from research to teaching, and from collections to public events.
About Children’s Literature in Newcastle
Newcastle University hosts a thriving children’s literature research community. To find out more about studying or researching children’s literature in Newcastle, visit the Children’s Literature in Newcastle blog.
About our bloggers
Rachel Pattinson 
Rachel Pattinson headed up the Vital North Partnership blog as Vital North Partnership Manager from 2016-19. Rachel is leaving this role in August 2019 for a new position, managing Newcastle University’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics and the Digital Economy Research Centre in Open Lab, part of the School of Computing.
Daniel Goodricke
I’m Daniel Goodricke, an architect and PhD candidate at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. I lead a collaborative, creative practice-based PhD project with Seven Stories: The National Centre for Children’s Books investigating how children and young people interact with museum, archive and reading spaces, and the broader city, and how such spaces may be reimagined. You can read all of my blog posts here.