Newcastle keeps its best things free: the Hancock, the Laing, a thousand acres of common moor and the finest bridge view in Britain from a pub bench. Add a £6 Metro day ticket and the whole coast opens up. Three days here need very little money.
Free natural history and antiquities museum on Barras Bridge, open 10am-5pm Mon-Sat and 11am-4pm Sunday. The Hadrian's Wall gallery holds a 1:100 scale model of the entire frontier plus Roman altars lifted from forts along it.
A 13th-century Dominican friary off Stowell Street, still ringed by the best-surviving stretch of Newcastle's medieval town wall. The cloister garden is open daily at no charge, with Heber Tower and Durham Tower on the walk west.
The civic art gallery on New Bridge Street has been free since it opened in 1904, showing John Martin's apocalyptic canvases and a strong Pre-Raphaelite room. Open 10am-4pm Tuesday to Saturday, including the Art on Tyneside floor.
The city's oldest public park (1873) sits directly behind St James' Park, with a boating lake and a gate onto the Town Moor — around 1,000 acres of common grazing land, bigger than Hyde Park and Central Park combined, and never closed.
The 1835 covered market between Grainger and Clayton Street trades 9am-5pm Monday to Saturday. The Weigh House still charges pennies to weigh you, and stall 21 is the original Marks & Spencer Penny Bazaar, kept at its founding size.
Greggs started as John Gregg's Gosforth bakery in 1939 and still runs from a Newcastle head office at Quorum. The Northumberland Street branch is among the chain's busiest, and a sausage roll plus a bake leaves change from £4.
A free city farm in the Lower Ouseburn valley, open 10am-4pm Tuesday to Sunday, with pigs, goats and polytunnels run as a training charity. The Victoria Tunnel entrance and the Byker viaduct arches are two minutes' walk away.
A stripped-back Ouseburn pub with the best no-cost view in the city: the full run of Tyne bridges from a bench in the beer garden. Pints start around £4.20 and the toilets are covered floor to ceiling in decades of graffiti.
A Tyne and Wear Metro DaySaver runs about £6.20 and covers the 25-minute ride from Monument to Tynemouth. Longsands is a mile of free surf beach below the ruined Plaza, with open-air showers at the Blue Reef end.
Victorian ironwork covers the platforms at Tynemouth Metro station, where a weekend market runs roughly 09:00-15:00 Saturday and Sunday with about 150 stalls of vinyl, books, tools and street food. Entry costs nothing.
A tidal causeway links the headland to St Mary's Lighthouse, crossable free for roughly four hours either side of low tide. Climbing the 137 steps to the lamp room costs about £4.60; watching the grey seals on the rocks is free.
The passenger ferry between North and South Shields has crossed the mouth of the Tyne since 1377 and takes seven minutes. A single costs about £2.40, with the last sailing near 18:00 in winter and later through summer.