The Centurion

About The Centurion

The Centurion sits inside Newcastle Central Station on Neville Street, in a room built in 1893 as a luxurious waiting lounge for first class passengers. Its defining feature is the ceramic work: walls and ceiling are covered in richly coloured glazed tiling by Burmantofts of Leeds, among the most complete surviving schemes of its kind outside a museum collection. The lounge closed in the 1960s and the space spent years in far humbler use, serving as police cells and then as a storeroom, before the tilework was restored and the room reopened as a bar in 2002. The scale of the room, with its high ceiling and deep arched recesses, is unusual for a station bar.

Today it works as both a station bar and a destination in its own right. There is a range of cask ale at the bar, alongside a cafe counter to one side that backs onto platform one for travellers in a hurry. Because it is inside the station concourse, it fills and empties with the timetable, and is a common meeting point before matches at St James' Park or nights out on Neville Street and the Bigg Market. For anyone interested in Newcastle's Victorian architecture, it is worth a look for the tiles alone.

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