A small, two-line subway system called the Metro runs through Newcastle-upon-Tyne, connecting the airport and the city centre with the coast, the quayside, and nearby Sunderland. Previous to its construction, my mother always told me, people refused to even take jobs across the river in Gateshead. This was before the quayside was redeveloped, before the appearance of the Sage and the Baltic gallery, long before the Angel of the North’s imposing silhouette began to greet cars returning to the homeland on a hill just above the A1. It was a time when a lot of Tyneside’s residents stayed within strictly delineated microcosms, and travelled between them very little. For my mother, growing up on a tight-knit council estate in Heaton that barely extended beyond two streets, the furthest her and her childhood friends could imagine were the seemingly distant communities of Gateshead and Byker.
The adults wouldn’t work in Gateshead, but Byker had a mythology all of its own among the children. Foreboding whispered warnings to “never look over the Byker Wall” were common on the playground. But then the Tyne and Wear Metro appeared in 1980, and attitudes began to change.
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