Best Walks in and around Newcastle City Centre

Newcastle is an unusually walkable city. The centre is compact and largely on foot, and within a few minutes of the shops you can be beside the Tyne, on open common land the size of a small farm, or tracing a wall that has stood since the 13th century. Here are the walks worth building a morning or an afternoon around, all reachable from Monument or Central Station without touching a car.

The Quayside and the bridges

The riverside is the obvious place to start, and the best short walk in the city. From the foot of Dean Street the Newcastle Quayside opens out beneath the Tyne Bridge, and a level, pram-friendly promenade runs east past the old warehouses and the Law Courts. The set-piece is the loop over the tilting Gateshead Millennium Bridge and back across the High Level or the Swing Bridge, roughly two miles that takes in seven crossings in a mile of river. It is flat, well surfaced and lit, and passes plenty of places to stop.

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The Quayside is the single most rewarding walk for first-time visitors: flat, car-free and framed by the bridges, with Newcastle Castle and the cathedral's lantern tower above you on the bank.

Climb the stairs off the river and you are straight into the oldest part of the city, where Newcastle Castle and Newcastle Cathedral sit within a few hundred yards of the water.

Up the Ouseburn Valley

Keep going east along the river and the path turns inland up the Ouseburn Valley, the old industrial quarter that has become Newcastle's studio and music district. It is about two and a half miles from the Quayside up the burn, on good riverside path beneath three soaring bridges, and the valley floor is greener than its warehouses suggest. Ouseburn Farm sits in the middle of it, free to enter, with sheep, goats and pigs on meadows in the shadow of the viaducts.

The valley rewards dawdling. Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children's Books and The Cluny are both a short walk apart, and it is an easy quarter of an hour on foot back down to the Quayside when you have had enough.

Leazes Park and the Town Moor

For open grass rather than river, head north. Leazes Park is the oldest purpose-built park in the city, opened in 1873 after 3,000 working men petitioned the council for somewhere to walk, and its lake, restored bandstand and tree-lined promenade sit directly beneath St James' Park. It is barely ten minutes from the shops.

From its northern edge you step onto the Town Moor, a thousand acres of common land larger than Hyde Park and Hampstead Heath combined, where the Freemen of Newcastle still graze cattle a mile from Grey Street. There are no formal routes to follow, which is the point: you can strike out across open pasture in the middle of a city, an oddity almost nowhere else in Britain can match.

The medieval walls and Grainger Town

The last walk is a history lesson on foot. Newcastle's Town Walls once ran two miles around the whole medieval town, and long stretches survive, best seen behind Blackfriars Restaurant off Stowell Street and along Bath Lane. Pick up the wall near the Grainger Market, the Grade I listed covered market of 1835, and loop through the honey-coloured streets of Grainger Town.

This is where Richard Grainger and John Dobson rebuilt the town centre in the 1830s, and Grey Street, curving up from the Quayside past the Theatre Royal Newcastle, is often called one of the finest streets in England. It is a compact circuit, a mile or so, and every corner has something worth stopping for. Finish with a pint at The Town Wall on Pink Lane, named for the medieval defences that once ran along it, a minute from Central Station.