The Blaydon Race

Let's get this out of the way: I had never heard of The Blaydon Races before I went to Blaydon.  Never.  If you said "Blaydon" to me, I thought of the safe house from The Living Daylights, and that's spelt "Blayden" anyway.  After I went to Blaydon, and discovered the song was kind of a big deal on Tyneside, I searched for it on YouTube and found this, which I think is the most Geordie video in the world:

Obviously that was no help with regard to the enigma of The Blaydon Races, because I couldn't understand a single word they were saying, but at least I know what the tune is.

Blaydon doesn't get the greatest levels of service in the world, which is why I missed it last time I was out this way; I had to make a choice between Blaydon and Dunston.  It took me two years, but I finally got back to Tyneside to cross it off my list.

The station is scythed off from the town centre by a heavily used dual carriageway, so they've provided a footbridge for access.  I did not appreciate this.  I think I'd have preferred a dingy underpass that stank of piss and horror.  I clambered up the footbridge, the cars whizzing beneath me, creating a dizzying effect.  About halfway across I realised I was making a kind of panicky moan, issuing it between gritted teeth as I tried to avoid plunging to my death.  At one point I reached out for a railing for support, and the railing moved; to be honest, I'm surprised everyone back home on Merseyside didn't hear my petrified yelp.  I was ridiculously pleased to make it down to ground level.

I probably over-appreciated Blaydon town centre as a result - after all, at least it was flat.  It was a reasonably put together suburban shopping centre, though a bit down at heel; there were empty shops, and the ones that were occupied were pound shops and charity shops and bakeries selling pasties.  The reason for the lack of variety became clear when I got to the far end of the pedestrianised precinct and encountered a massive Asda with its own car park.  Why go to eight shops when you can go to one?  Why even leave the hallowed halls of Asda for the outside precinct when you can move straight from the car park to the store and back again?

Seriously, this song is such a big deal, and I had never heard it.

Beyond the shopping centre the road curled up a hill, past a small industrial estate and then a church with a pretty bell tower.  One side of the road was lined with neat houses, but on the other side, there was a wide expanse of grass leading down to woods and a pond.  Volunteers with grabbers were picking up spots of litter.

A sign for Blaydon Youth Centre provoked an immediate reaction.  A youth club?  In Tyne & Wear?  Why, that's just like Byker Grove!  I'd been an avid watcher of the Grove, back when it was Grange Hill's gritty Northern cousin (they alternated in the post-Newsround slot).  Despite her years of soap acting and Strictly-conquering, I still see Jill Halfpenny as the posh girl who copped off with a bit of rough, and for all their fame, Ant and Dec still have a barely-visible coating of PJ and Duncan.  And why has Spuggie not turned up on Coronation Street as Fiz's long-lost sister?  It went downhill a bit, of course; the last time I tuned in was for Noddy's censor-baiting kiss of that boy with the awful pony tail.

All these thoughts of the Grove lead to me singing the insanely catchy theme tune to myself as I walked along.  I stifled these instincts; I didn't want the locals to think I was taking the mick.  Of course, then the only songs that went through my head were stereotypical Geordie classics - Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads!  The Fog On The Tyne!  Let's Get Ready To Rhumble! - so I just clammed up in case I was accused of perpetuating a hate crime.

The last warm day of 2015 (apparently) beat down on my face as I walked.  Past the leisure centre, I darted across a busy road leading to the A1.  I took a chance and ducked down a back alley, rather than continuing on the road, and I encountered the old bridge over the river Derwent.  Long since bypassed, it was now just an access route to a garage.  Hard hatted men in high-vis jackets leaned over the parapets, dealing with the pipe that crossed the river alongside.

I'd planned on following the road to MetroCentre station, and I'd resigned myself to a tedious trudge across acres of exposed tarmac car parks.  Luckily, my diversion offered a different path.  A tiny blue sign pointed down the side of the river, indicating a cycle route to the shopping centre.

Soon I was beneath cool tree branches away from the roads and traffic.  It wasn't quite the ideal country stroll; I could still hear the A1, and the path was covered in litter and dog muck, but it was infinitely preferable to a trek along baked pavements.

It's amazing the pieces of railway engineering that still lie around the country, unused.  The Swalwell viaduct crossed the river; once it carried a branch line to Consett, but that was lifted in 1963 and the bridge remains.  Too big to destroy, too difficult to find a new use for, the fine piece of Victorian engineering is just a canvas for graffiti artists now.

I passed round the back of the MetroCentre's retail park, catching glimpses of B&Q's service entrance and the blue and yellow bulk of Ikea.  I was glad I had found this more scenic route, until I realised that if I'd passed Ikea I could have nipped in and bought a box of Pepparkakor, the thin ginger biscuits that are like crack to me.  I don't get them much - the BF despises Ikea for reasons I've never really understood - and when I do get them I have a tendency to consume an entire box in one sitting.  It was probably for the best that there was a fence between me and the Swedish Food Hall.

Under an impressive concrete viaduct, avoiding some dog turds that had been spray painted pink.  I assume this is some kind of attention-grabbing device so they can be cleaned up at a later date, and not a radical piece of modern art.  The path spat me out on the back of an industrial estate, but another dart down the side of an ugly engineering firm took me to a stretch of vacant land crammed between road and railway bridges.

I was suddenly aware that I didn't really know where I was.  I hadn't planned on walking this way, and I didn't know where it would deposit me; I relied on that one sign pointing towards the MetroCentre a mile back.  Passing under another road bridge, dark and cold, with rough grasses poking through the pavement, I began to envisage being mugged and thrown into the river.

I was now wedged between the railway and the foot of the road embankment.  Sharp brambles snagged at me through gaps in the fence.  At one point I acquired a companion, about ten yards behind me; I clutched my phone in my hand, ready to use it as a weapon if I needed to (it has a very bulky case) but he disappeared not long after.  I'm not sure where, as there didn't seem to be any exits.

Finally I was on the road itself, and I could breathe again.  I saw the MetroCentre station but there was no way to get to it.  Apparently it never occurred to the designers that people might want to access the station from the road.  I found myself walking right past it, frustrated by a series of fences and vegetation.

I ended up crossing the dual carriageway, darting across the apron of the bus station, and then crossing the same road I had just been on via a footbridge.  It added an extra five minutes to what should have been a simple stroll.

Still, the bus station is very nice.

Geordie Score

Everybody likes Newcastle, don't they?  It's just an ingrained part of our national psyche.  I bet Ant & Dec wouldn't be half as popular if they came from Plymouth.  I'd never been before, but I'd long wanted to - it was far higher up my wish list than Preston or Manchester.

It's just so damn hard to get to.  I sort of imagine it to be on the opposite side of the country from Liverpool, but no, that's Hull, and no-one wants to go to Hull unless they really have to.  You have to do a diagonal, right up towards the border with Scotland, up where the air gets thinner and colder and you get the occasional whiff of haggis.  There's only one train a day from Liverpool to Newcastle at the moment, the 06:15.  It's a six car train that splits in two at York, with the front going on to Scarborough and the back continuing to Tyneside.

What I'm basically saying is that I probably would have liked Newcastle anyway, but the train crossing the Tyne sold me completely.  The parade of bridges lining up - impossibly high, impossibly wide - is such a striking, surreal vista.  Coming from Liverpool, which also has a very wide river with docks either side but never got round to building a bridge, it's awe-inspiring.  The train then slides into Central station and you get a glimpse of that magical, sexy Calvert font promoting the Tyne & Wear Metro, and it's full blown adoration.

And this love letter comes from a total of three quarters of an hour in the city, spread over two separate visits to the station.  I didn't even have time to step outside.  I had a ten minute window to barrel over to the ticket office, get a Hadrian's Wall Country Day Ranger, then run back to get my Pacer out of town again.

I had to dash because there's only a couple of trains a day to Dunston.  If I'd missed the 9:45 I'd have been forced to miss the station altogether.  Luckily I made it, and I was the only person to alight onto the wide island platform.  I immediately whipped out my mobile and checked in on Foursquare.  This is partly because  I like totting up the points (though it gets a bit depressing when I get an alert of Congratulations! Five weeks in a row at Sainsbury's!), and partly because it was a Dunston Check In.

You probably don't remember terrible family comedies starring an ape and Jason Alexander in a bad wig, but I do, based purely on its trailer:

It's a bizarrely accurate copy of the GoldenEye trailer, and I will love it forever for that.  Just turn it off before Academy Award winner Faye Dunaway simulates orgasm while getting massaged by a monkey.  (I should also point out I haven't seen the film; nothing could match up to the trailer).

Unsurprisingly, for a station so sparsely served, there's not much to Dunston.  A ramp up to the road bridge and a few signs, that's all.

I walked away, past a pub with footballs for lamps, and into a sparsely populated district of industrial estates, docks and 1960s housing.  Wide open expanses of green marked the spot where a tower block had been razed to the ground, waiting to be replaced with more modern housing when the market picked up.

I was shadowing the Tyne, but it hadn't been gentrified and tidied here; it seemed like a much wilder river than the Mersey.  The geography of the area means that the space by the river was devoted solely to industry and docks, with residences on the higher land instead of mixed inbetween as on the Wirral or in Bootle.  There was a feeling of desolation and isolation; I was the only walker, criss crossing the road to get round parked up trucks or places where there just wasn't a footpath at all.

Passing Mandela Way (I'm sure the hero of Robben Island will be delighted to learn that Gateshead Council have memorialised him with a road round the back of Costco) the traffic began to get a bit thicker, a bit more domestic.  I was approaching the Metrocentre.

When I was young, I got a copy of the Guinness Book of Records.  It was second hand, bought from a car boot sale and containing facts that were clearly out of date ("Abba are the world's largest band?  That bunch of disco has-beens?").  It had a purple cover and, for some reason, the pages smelt of beef.

I was the kind of boy who would open it at a random page and just go on a little tour of the pages, passing from one fact to the next, following little trails and picking up info on the way.  This is when the Guinness Book of Records contained actual superlatives, and wasn't just a list of "stupid people doing weird shit".  The MetroCentre was in there, partly because it was a massive shopping centre, but also because it had its own theme park.  You can imagine how exciting that sounded to a kid.  The Arndale in Luton didn't have a theme park; it had some fibreglass flamingos and a market that stank of fish.  In my mind, there was a rollercoaster right down the middle of the mall, corkscrewing screaming teens over the heads of their mums nipping into the British Home Stores.

I was disappointed to discover that the theme park closed five years ago.  What was left was a big shopping centre, one that was currently undergoing a lot of regeneration - ironic, since its opening in the 1980s was a symbol of regeneration in itself.

It was very Lady Di in places - mirrored tiles and marble effect - white columns to give you that Roman bath feel.  I'm not sure why there's this architectural urge to make large malls look like an extension to the Coliseum, but it does seem to be very popular.  The Central Mall is in the process of being transformed into the "Platinum Mall"; the shops are going upmarket, there are leatherette chairs instead of benches, and a champagne bar has been installed on the first floor.  It's all very WAG-friendly.

I was personally more excited to find a Greggs Moment, a new concept where everyone's favourite purveyors of pig gristle and oily pastry have put a few chairs in to make a cafe.  This revolutionary new idea is just being trialled in the North-East at present, though if they want to know how it works, they could just visit the Sayers in Williamson Square where they've been doing much the same thing for decades.  I resisted a Steak Bake and pressed on.

It was all very ordinary.  I suppose part of me was let down because there was no funfair.  A little train did pass me, offering kids a ride round the centre for a quid, but it wasn't exactly Alton Towers.  It was just another shopping mall.  Not even the laminated sign on the columns from BBC Three warning I could be filmed (for the first series of Mall Stars - a "brand new six part series following the lives of people who work at the MetroCentre in Newcastle!") could infuse it with any sense of glamour.

At least the bus station was interesting.  It was rebuilt a decade ago, and has a grand sweep to it, a real sense of place and importance.

It's certainly better than the station.  On the one hand, we should be glad that the MetroCentre has its own railway station - out of town shopping centres aren't often bothered about public transport provision (the Trafford Centre still hasn't got round to building the Metrolink extension it promised, fifteen years after it opened).  It gets a good service too - a train every fifteen minutes from Central, some of which continue onwards while others just reverse.

It's a shame it's such a bland, dispiriting station.  There's no ticket office, no attempt to integrate it into the loftily titled "Transport Interchange".  It's a couple of formica clad buildings out on the edge of the MetroCentre complex and it hasn't been updated since 1986.

The bus station came with a Debenhams - their decision to take space as anchor tenants meant there was money to redevelop the transport side of the mall, giving more space for arrivals by coach.  I don't know who would take a coach trip to see a shopping centre, but there's clearly a market for it.  Liverpool One has just installed some bays for visitors, which depresses me; I suspect there are a lot of people who are getting off that coach, looking round the shops, lunching on the Leisure Terrace and then leaving without seeing any part of Liverpool that doesn't belong to Grosvenor.

It's a shame the owners couldn't have found a few grand to give the station a make over to match.  Or at least to build a decent sign.  I had to squat under the platform sign, which just isn't on.  Never mind your champagne bars and branches of Karen Millen - won't somebody think of the bloggers?