Howay Home: Newcastle By Heart, Local Secrets, Quiet Corners & Honest Stories from a Geordie Who Came Back
The Tyne Bridge is going green again. Half the scaffold came off the Newcastle tower this week and I stood outside the Guildhall like I had never seen it before. Two and a half years wrapped up. More than two thousand repairs they never budgeted for, nearly four thousand rivets swapped, and somewhere in the middle of all that, a scaffold hotel built on the Gateshead tower so the kittiwakes still had a ledge to come home to.
I was born in Heaton. I left for London in 2009 because that is where the job was, and I came back in 2023 because my mam's knees went and my dad is not a man who rings you and says the word help. For the first six months I felt like a tourist in my own accent.
This book is what I did about that. Three years of walking the city back into myself, written down properly. It is for anyone who was born here, left here, came back here, or is standing on the Quayside right now wondering why this place gets under your skin the way it does.
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What is actually in it
The birds nobody believes in. Ten miles from the sea and the furthest inland kittiwake colony in the world nests on the Tyne Bridge and the Baltic. When they leave, when they come back, and where to stand in March when they do.
Look up on Amen Corner. The vampire rabbit behind the cathedral. Fangs, ears on backwards, nobody has ever properly explained it. Plus eleven more things you have walked under a hundred times.
Two miles under your feet. The Victoria Tunnel, an 1842 coal wagonway that became a shelter in the war, and how to get down there.
A wet Tuesday and no money. The Lit and Phil, the Crown Posada, the Free Trade Inn garden and the best seat for the bridges in the city. None of them will let you down.
Tommy's spot on the Swing Bridge. One particular place on the deck, the story of the blind beggar who worked it for forty years because neither town could move him on, and the exact time of morning to go and stand there. It is the last chapter and the one I am proudest of. It is not on the internet.
The Grainger Market after the nine million pound facelift. The stottie I will not buy anywhere else, the traders worth knowing, and what they did to the air raid shelters underneath.
The Great North Run from the pavement. Which side of the river to stand on, where the noise is, and where the runners actually need you.
Living here now, honestly. Heaton, Jesmond, Gosforth, Byker, Sandyford, Ouseburn and out to the coast, written by someone who rented in London for fourteen years and knows exactly what an estate agent leaves out.
Cheat sheets. Every bridge in order with feeling, a Geordie glossary for the missus from Watford, the coast by Metro, and the walk I do when I need the city to feel like mine again.
Twenty two chapters, sixty eight pages
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Who it is for
Born and bred and think you know it all. Left for work twenty years ago and still get a lump in your throat at the Angel. Just moved here and cannot work out why everybody is so pleased to see you. Running the Run and want to understand what you are running over. It is written like a letter, not a listicle, and there is not a single line in it that reads like a tourist board wrote it.
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PDF, instant download after checkout, reads on any phone, tablet or laptop, and prints if you would rather hold it. Published by Roots & Routes under the pen name Tim Morris.
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