Newcastle's Grainger Town (None)

Grainger Town is as much an idea as it is a place. It was named after Richard Grainger, a native of Newcastle and a builder and speculator unparalleled in the region, who was the coordinator of a radical re-planning that turned the town of his birth from an already handsome regional capital to one which excited the admiration of visitors from far and wide. His style was classical, and his work and the region's taste for Grecian architecture have together made the term 'Tyneside Classical' an accepted descriptive label. In the early 1990s a project was initiated to regenerate a substantial part of the historic core of Newcastle, including all of Grainger's work of the 1830s and a substantial part of the historic core of the town - the medieval market place and much of the area that lay within the medieval town walls - and 'Grainger Town' was born. Its boundaries included those quarters of the city that were most in need of rapid regeneration. This book describes the evolution of the area and explains how recent planning initiatives, coordinated by the Grainger Town Partnership, have celebrated and exploited a unique urban landscape and given it new life.