Other in Tyne and Wear

Cragside House in Northumberland is one of the most remarkable country houses in Britain, a Victorian Gothic mansion built between 1864 and 1895 by the industrialist and inventor William Armstrong on a rocky hillside above the Debdon Burn that was the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectric power. Armstrong, who made his fortune from hydraulic machinery and armaments manufacture and became one of the wealthiest industrialists of Victorian England, brought the same inventive and systematic intelligence to his country house that he applied to engineering, creating a building of extraordinary technological ambition set within one of the most ambitious Victorian woodland gardens in the country. The house was designed primarily by Richard Norman Shaw in the Old English style, developed in stages across thirty years of building that added wings, towers and gables in a picturesque accumulation suggesting organic growth over centuries rather than a single patron's sustained building programme. The result is a building of considerable visual complexity that grows convincingly from its rocky hillside setting, its various rooflines and projections catching the light in ways that make it look different from every angle and in every season. The interior is among the finest surviving Victorian domestic settings in Britain. The library, the Owl Drawing Room with its extraordinary inglenook fireplace of marble and tile, and the dining room represent the Arts and Crafts aesthetic at its most complete and considered, every surface and fitting contributing to a total domestic environment of great richness. The hydroelectric system installed by Armstrong from 1878 onward, using the streams on the estate to power arc lamps and later incandescent bulbs, was a pioneering achievement in electrical engineering that anticipated the domestic electricity supply by decades. The estate includes one of the largest rock gardens in Europe, extensive Victorian plantings of rhododendrons and conifers and five purpose-built lakes feeding the hydroelectric system.

Northumberland National Park is the emptiest and most remote of England's national parks, a vast landscape of moorland, ancient woodland and river valleys covering over 1,000 square kilometres of the Cheviot Hills and the moorland between them and Hadrian's Wall that is home to the smallest permanent population of any English national park and contains some of the most completely rural and least disturbed countryside in England. The park has been designated an International Dark Sky Park, reflecting the almost complete absence of light pollution in this thinly populated region and making it one of the finest places in England for observing the night sky. The Cheviots form the principal topographic feature of the park, a broad massif of rounded, peat-topped hills rising to 815 metres at The Cheviot itself and extending across the Anglo-Scottish border into the Scottish Borders. The hills provide excellent upland walking of the open, trackless variety that rewards navigation skills and the ability to manage moorland conditions, and the combination of complete solitude, wide views and the historical resonance of this borderland gives Cheviot walking a character quite different from the more frequented national parks to the south. Hadrian's Wall forms the southern boundary of the park, and the central sector of the Wall traversing the Whin Sill escarpment at Housesteads, Vindolanda and Steel Rigg represents the finest and most complete section of the Roman frontier. The combination of the Roman military landscape, the medieval castles and peel towers scattered through the valleys and the prehistoric hillforts visible on every ridge creates an archaeological layering of exceptional depth. Kielder Water, the largest man-made lake in England by capacity, occupies the western section of the park and is surrounded by the largest planted forest in England.

St Mary's Lighthouse stands on a small tidal island at Whitley Bay on the Northumberland coast, connected to the mainland by a concrete causeway that is submerged at high tide and accessible for only a few hours around low water. The lighthouse, built in 1898 and decommissioned in 1984, is one of the most photogenic and accessible lighthouses in northeastern England, its white-painted tower and keeper's cottages reflected in the tidal pools around the island's base and backed by the grey North Sea. The lighthouse replaced an older coal-burning beacon that had warned ships of the rocky coastline here since the seventeenth century. The current structure is a conventional British lighthouse design of the late Victorian period, built in Northumberland limestone with a tower rising 36 metres from the rock to the light. Trinity House operated the lighthouse until its decommissioning, when North Tyneside Council took over the site and converted it into a visitor attraction while preserving the lighthouse buildings and their interpretation value. The island and its surrounding area function as a Local Nature Reserve, the tidal pools around the causeway supporting interesting marine life including anemones, crabs and various seaweed species exposed at low tide. The grassland on the island is managed for wildflowers and provides nesting habitat for a variety of coastal birds. From the island's outer rocks, views extend north along the Northumberland coast toward Coquet Island and south toward Tynemouth and the Tyne estuary. Visitors can climb the lighthouse tower, which provides panoramic views along this flat coastal section that are otherwise difficult to obtain, and explore the interpretive displays in the keeper's cottages about the history of lighthouse operation and the specific history of St Mary's. The causeway crossing, which gives the visit a pleasantly adventurous character, must be timed carefully according to the tide tables posted at the mainland end. The surrounding coast north of Whitley Bay provides pleasant walking along Northumberland's sandy beaches, and the area is also home to a strong population of grey seals that haul out on rocky islets and can frequently be seen from the shore.

The Angel of the North is the most visible and the most discussed public artwork in Britain, a steel sculpture standing beside the A1 road at Gateshead in Tyne and Wear that has become one of the defining images of the northeast of England and a landmark of international reputation since its installation in February 1998. Created by sculptor Antony Gormley, the Angel rises 20 metres from its hillside position and spreads its wings 54 metres wide, making it one of the largest sculptures in Britain and ensuring its visibility to the millions of motorists who pass on the busy road below each year. Gormley conceived the work as a meditation on the transition from an age of coal and industry to an uncertain post-industrial future, placing the figure on a hilltop above the former Team Colliery whose pit baths still lie beneath the ground on which the Angel stands. The industrial heritage of the site was a deliberate choice: the connection between the figure and the mining community whose lives played out on this hillside gives the work a historical grounding that purely aesthetic public art often lacks. The wings, Gormley noted, are not the soft wings of religious iconography but the hard structural wings of aircraft, referencing both flight and the engineering tradition of the northeast. The technical achievement of the installation is considerable. The sculpture weighs 200 tonnes, the wings alone containing 110 tonnes of steel, and the structure is anchored by 600 tonne concrete foundations that extend twenty metres into the ground to counteract the wind loads on the wing surfaces. The steel was manufactured by Hartlepool Steel Fabrications, a surviving example of the heavy industrial tradition the Angel commemorates, and the structure is designed to withstand wind speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Public reaction to the sculpture before its installation was polarised, with considerable scepticism among local residents who doubted whether the cost was justified and questioned the aesthetic merits of the work. Twenty-five years on, the Angel has been adopted with unmistakable affection by the northeastern communities it was meant to serve and has become a source of regional pride that was initially difficult to predict.