Porous Archives will be held in Newcastle upon Tyne at the City Centre campus of Newcastle University, with the precise location to follow. It will also be held online via Teams, but for those who want to attend in person, here’s a potted guide to getting here and getting around. Scroll down for travel advice. HGRG postgraduate members, please refer to the registration form for financial assistance details).
Newcastle is a city which serves its history in hefty, many layered portions, and offers up interesting preferences for remembering it. It’s a smallish, big-hearted town (think a little smaller than Nottingham, a little bigger than Brighton) with some outstanding streetscapes and urban features, a vibrant social life, and a pleasing willingness to dispense with accepted tastes or restraint when it suits. It’s famously convivial with a lovely selection of informal dining and drinking holes. Austerity continues to brutalise it, and many places and features are clearly held together with gaffer tape and hope, but they’re still there, still welcoming folks, and still fun. It has some of the finest and most dramatic green spaces of any city in the country, with Jesmond Dene and Town Moor the best known of them.
Within Newcastle are four free museums (Hancock, Discovery, Seven Stories and Farrell) four free or part-free galleries (Hatton, Laing, Biscuit Factory and (in Gateshead), Baltic), four theatres (Northern Stage, Royal, Tyne, and Live) a much-loved market (Grainger), a much-loved department store (Fenwicks), and a very special quasi-public library (the Lit and Phil – open to all for reading and gawping, lending available to members only).
It can and will get cold. According to the Met Office Newcastle is colder, on average, than Glasgow or Edinburgh, but warmer than Aberdeen or Bradford. It’s also windier than many urban locations in the UK. I recall I have the actual data for that… somewhere…
Newcastle University’s main campus is at the north end of the city centre and is served by Haymarket Metro station. Porous Archives will be held in the Armstrong Building (which in itself has a complex history), with precise details to follow in terms of the exact room.
A map of suggested things to see and places to eat (if you need to kill time before of after the event) is being put together… here.
What to expect – travel by rail: assuming punctual services (!) rail is easiest and will leave the smallest carbon footprint, and approximate rail travel times to Newcastle are…
30 min to 1 hour – Durham, York, Teesside
1 to 2 hours – Carlisle, Edinburgh, Leeds
2 to 3 hours – Sheffield, Glasgow, Manchester, London fast services, Stirling
3 to 4 hours – Nottingham, Liverpool, Cambridge, Birmingham, Leicester, Dundee, London stopping services
4 to 5 hours – Reading, Oxford, Bristol, Aberdeen, Canterbury, Brighton
5 to 6 hours – Cardiff, Inverness, Bangor
6-7 hours – Exeter, Portsmouth
7 or more hours – Swansea, Aberystwyth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Scotland north/west of the Great Glen
In all cases, advance fares can be tracked using this handy tool (https://www.thetrainline.com/ticketalert) which will alert you when advance tickets become available for your journey. LNER and Lumo generally run good-ish services – if you can accept their schedule and luggage restrictions Lumo can be genuinely cheap. Transpennine might run a good-ish service, and CrossCountry will be pure blind luck. There is one principal railway station in Newcastle – Newcastle Central, and it’s served by Central Metro station.
What to expect – travel by car: if traveling up the east side of the UK, including London, or if travelling from pretty much anywhere in Scotland (not islands), you should assume the train is quickest. The further you have to travel the greater the speed advantage of train travel will be. If traveling from the west of the Pennines, or from Wales or the West Country, car travel might be about as quick as using the train.
Using a car in Newcastle can be challenging unless you know you have parking or you have a permit badge. Driving into and parking in the city centre is generally best avoided – it’s a little bewildering and it’s easy to pick up a bus lane fine or get very stuck in traffic. Newcastle City Council car parks and street parking allow stays between 30 minutes and five hours, generally free overnight (between 19.00 and 07.00) with payment by PayByPhone app or contactless ticketing machines. Private car parks in and around the edge of the city centre do offer all day parking.
Regrettably there is minimal public charging availability across Tyneside in general. Note that NE1 and NE2 postcodes fall partially or wholly within a CAZ, also note that the Tyne Tunnel crossing (A19) is tolled. Tyne Bridge and Tyne Tunnel are both currently undergoing maintenance works.
Blue badge holders: providing you’re displaying your badge clearly you can park for free in any on-street “disabled badge holders only” bay without time limits applying, even if the adjacent street parking is charged. Some street parking in Newcastle is free but time restricted according to kerbside signage – these time limits don’t apply to blue badge holders either. It’s different for off-street parking: you will need to pay to park in off-street and multi-storey car parks at the normal rate using PayByPhone or ticketing machines. However, an extra free hour is added to your ticket expiry time (not actually shown on the ticket or PayByPhone app) providing you park in blue badge bays and have your blue badge displayed. You can park on single or double yellow lines for three hours providing you set the clock on your badge, the badge is clearly visible, and there are no yellow kerb markings.
What to expect – travel by bus: likely the cheapest option, even compared to Lumo rail services, but also the slowest. Flixbus and Megabus services operate to Newcastle from pretty much all UK towns and cities, and direct from larger cities – both firms pick up and drop off from outside the City Library in the centre of town (Metro – Monument). Always check websites carefully, what looks like a four hour journey may actually be a twenty eight hour journey – is the arrival date the same as the departure date?
National Express services are more expensive, they pick up and drop off from a slightly more awkward location nearer the railway station. In some cases they are marginally quicker though.
What to expect – travel by air: Newcastle Airport connects to most other large and small regional airports in the UK and NI – Schengen and international flights will generally hub at Schiphol, Heathrow, or Frankfurt. The airport is served by Metro (green line).
What to expect – travelling when you’re here: Tyneside has an outstanding, modern, intermittently clean and relatively affordable Metro system, serving the university campus (Haymarket) and all the other areas of town that are likely to interest attendees. All stations have step free access to the platforms without exception (ramps, lifts, or both) and level access from the platform to train with generally small, manageable height and width gaps. The sole limitation is that mobility scooters are not allowed at present – only wheelchairs (this may change later in 2024 when the new Metrocars are introduced).
Buses are also equipped with ramps or kneelers – the bus network is extensive and services are frequent, but buses often get snarled in city centre traffic. Mobility scooters are sometimes allowed, wheelchair spaces are provided on all buses.
Neuron e-scooters can be picked up around the city: they can only be used with the Neuron app and only by proving you have a driving licence. If this appeals, then you can enjoy all the fractured collarbones and wrists you could ever hope for. Note: Neurons are geofenced from being powered through certain areas including all the pedestrianised city centre streets, and they’re speed limited in others. Surprisingly, they do work well in ice and snow.
Cycle provision: most rail providers offer bike spaces for free but only if you reserve one in advance. When you’re here, Metro has space for bikes, but only off peak and not in tunnelled sections (unless it’s a folding bike), buses do not have bike spaces at all except for folders. There is a decent network of recently upgraded cycle routes which use minor roads or cycle exclusive paths around and beyond the city. Unfortunately, Newcastle’s PAYG bike hire scheme folded some years ago.
Newcastle city centre is not always an easy place to drive: it is better to walk, cycle, bus or Metro into town if possible
What to expect – accommodation: as a half day event, we hope that most, if not all attendees can travel two and from Newcastle in the same day, but please do contact paul.wright3@ncl.ac.uk for further advice (for searching purposes, the campus postcode is NE1 7RU).