Running & Cycling in Newcastle City Centre

For a compact city, Newcastle is unusually generous to anyone who runs or rides. A few minutes from the shops on Northumberland Street you can be pounding a riverside path, circling a thousand acres of open moor, or slipping onto a traffic-free cycleway that will carry you clear out to the coast. This guide rounds up the best of it, staying close to the city centre and flagging where a route is genuinely traffic-free and where you still need your wits about you.

The Quayside and the bridges loop

The Quayside is the obvious place to start, and rightly so. The riverside path along Newcastle's Quayside is flat, well surfaced and scenic, running beneath the Tyne Bridge and past the old warehouses and modern bars. The classic outing here is the bridges loop: head downriver to the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, cross to the south bank, run or ride back up past the Sage and the BALTIC, and return over the Tyne Bridge or the Swing Bridge. It is roughly a couple of miles depending on which bridges you pick, and you can stack several loops for a longer session.

Best for: The Quayside path is largely flat and shared between walkers, runners and cyclists, so keep your speed sensible near the bars and the weekend markets.

It is worth knowing the Quayside path is part of the National Cycle Network, so on a bike you can simply keep going in either direction rather than turning back.

The Town Moor

If the Quayside is Newcastle's showpiece, the Town Moor is its secret weapon. This vast expanse of common land sits right on the northern edge of the city centre, and at roughly a thousand acres it dwarfs most urban parks in the country. Cattle still graze here, the paths are a mix of gravel and tarmac, and there is enough open ground to lose the noise of the city entirely.

The Moor is home to the Town Moor parkrun, a free, timed 5k held every Saturday at 9am. The course starts just beyond the northern edge of Exhibition Park, behind Wylam Brewery, and runs on gravel and tarmac. It is the nearest parkrun to the city centre and a friendly place to find your feet if you have never done one. As with all parkruns you register once online, print your barcode and turn up.

Parks: Leazes and Exhibition

Two handsome Victorian parks bracket the southern end of the Moor. Leazes Park, tucked behind St James' Park, is the oldest municipal park in the city and gives you a tidy lap around its lake, good for an easy warm-up or a gentle recovery jog. Just north, Exhibition Park offers another lake circuit, wide paths and a boating pond, and it sits right beside the parkrun start so many runners use it to warm up before heading onto the Moor.

Neither park is big enough for a long run on its own, but strung together with the Town Moor they make a varied loop of several miles without ever touching a road.

Best for: Leazes and Exhibition parks are both traffic-free and lit in parts, which makes them a sensible choice for shorter runs on dark winter evenings.

The Ouseburn and beyond

East of the centre, the Ouseburn Valley gives runners a change of character: a wooded, slightly ramshackle corridor of old industry, city farms and independent studios threaded by a burnside path. It is hillier and more broken up than the Quayside, but it connects neatly to the river, so you can run down the Ouseburn, join the Quayside path and loop back.

Follow the burn upstream and the greenery keeps going all the way to Jesmond Dene, the steep, leafy valley that Lord Armstrong gave to the city. The Dene is properly shaded and peaceful, with a waterfall, packhorse bridges and trails that climb and dip through the trees. It is more of an off-road, uneven surface than a fast course, but as a scenic long run linking the city to Jesmond it is hard to beat.

Cycle routes out of the city

Newcastle sits on one of the better stretches of the National Cycle Network, and this is where cycling here really comes into its own. National Cycle Network Route 72, Hadrian's Cycleway, follows the Quayside through the city and then runs along the Tyne all the way to Tynemouth and the coast on the north bank, or across the river to South Shields. Much of the riverside section is traffic-free, so you can ride a long way without much road contact.

On the south bank the Keelman's Way shadows the river from Gateshead upstream towards Wylam and Newburn, a largely traffic-free path that lets you build a proper circular ride: out one side of the Tyne, back along the other, crossing on one of the bridges. Route 14 also passes through the area as part of the coast-to-coast network, so signposting on the ground can mix route numbers. In every case, follow the blue-and-red NCN signs rather than any single number in your head.

Best for: Always check the blue National Cycle Network signs on the ground, as the riverside routes share numbering and the traffic-free sections are interrupted here and there by short on-road links.

parkrun and clubs

Beyond the Town Moor parkrun, the wider Tyneside area is well served on a Saturday morning. Gateshead parkrun runs in Saltwell Park just across the river, Rising Sun parkrun sits out at Benton, and there are others within a short drive, so wherever you are based there is usually a free 5k nearby. The city also has an active running and cycling scene, with clubs and social groups meeting on the Moor and the Quayside most weeks, and the flat riverside paths make an easy meeting point whatever your pace.

Whether you want a gentle park lap, a hard interval session on the Moor or a long traffic-free ride to the sea, almost all of it starts within a mile or two of the city centre. Lace up, pump the tyres, and go.

Got a favourite Newcastle running or cycling route we have missed? Get in touch.