Newcastle's culture sits just off the obvious route: a Schwitters wall rescued from a Cumbrian barn, the world's last working Victorian stage machinery, and a valley of converted warehouses where the region's artists actually work.
Richard Grainger's 1830s classical streetscape curves down towards the Tyne, and Grey Street is routinely voted Britain's finest. Look for John Dobson's detailing, the Central Arcade's 1906 faience tiling and Grey's Monument.
The 1904 civic gallery is built around John Martin's apocalyptic 'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah', with Burne-Jones, Gauguin's Breton work and the Northern Spirit rooms of regional silver, glass and Ralph Hedley's pit paintings.
Newcastle University's gallery is arranged around Kurt Schwitters' Merz Barn Wall, the last surviving fragment of his Lake District installation, lifted out in 1965. Alongside it sit Uccello studies and the Victor Pasmore Basic Design archive.
Britain's largest independent commercial art gallery fills a Victorian biscuit warehouse: four floors of painting, studio glass, ceramics and sculpture, everything for sale and the whole building rehung four times a year.
The Hadrian's Wall gallery here is the strongest in Britain: altars, Mithraic sculpture and an interactive scale model of the full 73-mile frontier, plus the Shefton Collection of Greek antiquities and a Victorian natural history hall.
The 1867 Westgate Road theatre retains the only complete working Victorian wooden stage machinery in the world — drums, thunder run, understage traps and bridges. Tours take you beneath the stage to watch it worked by hand.
Built around Turbinia, Charles Parsons' 1894 turbine ship that gatecrashed the 1897 Naval Review at 34 knots, the museum tells Tyneside's engineering story through the Story of Newcastle and Destination Tyneside galleries.
A writers' theatre occupying a terrace of Georgian merchant houses just off the water, it staged Lee Hall's early work and still commissions new North East playwriting across two intimate stages of 160 and 60 seats.
An 1842 waggonway built to move coal from Spital Tongues down to the river, reopened in 1939 as an air-raid shelter for 9,000 people. Guided hard-hat tours walk the brick barrel vault, with the lights killed completely at one point.
John Dobson's 1835 Grade I listed hall still trades on its original grid, with the 1895 Marks & Spencer Original Penny Bazaar stall preserved in place, Victorian numbering above every unit and an iron-and-glass roof over the central aisle.
Ralph Erskine's 1970s housing wall is Grade II* listed and among Europe's most studied post-war social housing: a kilometre-long brick screen with mosaic panels and timber balconies, sheltering low-rise gardens behind it.
A converted whisky bottling plant that has been the region's key small stage since 1999, where Franz Ferdinand and Sam Fender both played early sets. A gallery bar sits at the front, a 300-capacity room at the back.