Newcastle on Screen: The City in Film and TV

Newcastle has a stronger screen record than most cities its size. Its bridges, its river frontage and its steep quayside stairs photograph well, and a run of writers, directors and actors with roots in the North East have kept bringing productions home. Some of the best-known titles were genuinely shot here; others are set on Tyneside but filmed elsewhere, and it is worth knowing the difference before you go hunting for a location. Here is what was made where.

The film that defined the image

The one that everyone reaches for is Get Carter (1971), Mike Hodges' gangster thriller with Michael Caine as a London enforcer come north to bury his brother. Principal photography ran through the summer of 1970 in and around Newcastle, Gateshead and County Durham, and the film used the real, unglamorised Tyneside of the day rather than a studio version of it. Its most famous set piece, the killing of the businessman Cliff Brumby, was shot at the multi-storey Trinity Square car park in Gateshead, a brutalist landmark that became known locally as the Get Carter car park and was finally demolished in 2010. Other scenes play out along the Tyne, on the bridges and around the Newcastle Quayside, which is why the film still works as a time capsule of the city before its redevelopment.

Best for: Get Carter's car park is gone, but the Quayside stairs, the High Level Bridge and the river frontage that frame so much of the film are all still there to walk.

The other Newcastle features

Newcastle-born director Mike Figgis made his feature debut with Stormy Monday (1988), a neo-noir with Sting, Melanie Griffith, Tommy Lee Jones and Sean Bean that was shot in the city in the summer of 1987. Figgis knew the place and wrote the story around locations he could use, folding the era's redevelopment into the plot, so the film doubles as a record of late-1980s Newcastle.

Football has given the city two of its most affectionate outings. Purely Belter (2000), Mark Herman's comedy drama about two teenagers scheming to buy Newcastle United season tickets, was filmed in and around Newcastle and is soaked in the geography of getting about Tyneside, Metro trains crossing the river included. Five years later Goal! The Dream Begins (2005) took the club onto the world stage: the stadium sequences were shot at St James' Park, with real Newcastle players appearing as themselves, and the film gave the ground a global audience it has traded on ever since.

Landmark television drama

The single most acclaimed thing set in the city is Our Friends in the North, Peter Flannery's nine-part BBC epic broadcast in 1996, following four friends from 1964 to 1995. It is genuinely a Newcastle production: filming took in the city centre, the Tyne Bridge, the Quayside, the Free Trade Inn and the wider North East, with Beamish standing in for earlier decades. It launched the careers of Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee and Mark Strong, and it remains the drama most often cited when people talk about Newcastle on screen.

A generation of the region grew up on Byker Grove, the BBC children's drama that ran from 1989 to 2006. Set in the district of Byker, it was actually filmed a few miles west at Benwell Towers, a Victorian mansion in Benwell that served as the youth club of the title. Its lasting legacy is two child actors who met on set, Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, playing the characters PJ and Duncan.

Newcastle standing in, and Newcastle standing for others

Two well-remembered dramas are Tyneside stories that were only partly filmed here. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, the 1980s comedy drama about out-of-work builders, gave the nation its best-known Geordie characters in Oz, Neville and Dennis, and used real Newcastle landmarks including the Bigg Market for establishing shots. Much of the supposed Newcastle material, though, was filmed in Nottinghamshire and at Elstree, so it looks like the city more than it was the city. Similarly, When the Boat Comes In (1976 to 1981), the inter-war saga set in a fictional Tyneside town, shot some scenes on Tyneside, including at Readhead's shipyard in South Shields, but filmed much of its bulk further south around Reading and Folkestone.

The traffic runs the other way too. Wire in the Blood (2002 to 2008), the psychological crime series with Robson Green, is set in a fictional Yorkshire city called Bradfield but was filmed in and around Newcastle and the North East, largely because Green wanted the work kept in his home region. So a good deal of on-screen Bradfield is really Tyneside wearing a false name.

Newcastle as itself

More recent television has been happy to let the city play itself. 55 Degrees North (2004 to 2005) was a BBC drama about a London detective transferred to Newcastle, and used real locations across the city and Tynemouth, with the HMS Calliope reserve base on the Gateshead riverbank standing in for a fictional police station. And the long-running ITV detective series Vera, with Brenda Blethyn, has spent well over a decade filming across the North East, Newcastle and Northumberland included. The Quayside appears regularly, a real bar on the corner near Broad Chare doubles as Vera's coffee stop, and the North Shields Fish Quay is a recurring backdrop.

Best for: If a Newcastle location looks oddly familiar on screen, it may not be playing Newcastle. Vera's police station, Wire in the Blood's Bradfield and Byker Grove's youth club are all somewhere other than where the story says.

Where to spot the locations

Most of the surviving filming spots are within an easy walk of the centre. The Quayside and its bridges carry the DNA of Get Carter, Our Friends in the North and Vera, and are the single best place to stand where the cameras stood. St James' Park, a few minutes uphill from Monument, is the Goal! stadium and a working ground you can tour. Newcastle Castle and the streets around Grainger Market give you the same Victorian and medieval textures that period productions keep coming back for. Benwell Towers, the old Byker Grove, sits west of the centre. And for anyone who wants the story as well as the sights, the city library's Local Studies collection and the region's tourism guides both keep useful location lists.

Know a Newcastle screen location we have missed, or spotted a detail that needs correcting? Get in touch and let us know.