Newcastle's history runs from the eastern end of Hadrian's Wall to the pit tunnels beneath the city centre. Three days here cover a Roman garrison fort, a Norman keep, medieval friary walls, Grainger's Georgian streets and the industrial Ouseburn.
The eastern anchor of Hadrian's Wall, garrisoned by around 600 men for three centuries. A 35 m viewing tower shows the excavated fort plan below, alongside a reconstructed bath house and a surviving Wall fragment.
Henry II's stone keep of 1172 and the 1247 Black Gate, split apart by the Victorian railway viaduct driven straight through the bailey. Climb to the roof for the view over the Tyne that gave the city its name.
A 1239 Dominican friary whose cloister range survives as craft workshops, backing onto the best-preserved stretch of the 13th-century town wall, with the Heber, Morden and Durham Towers still standing along West Walls.
Newcastle's parish church until it became a cathedral in 1882, crowned by a 1448 lantern tower whose open stone crown worked as a navigation beacon for Tyne shipping. Inside: a Flemish memorial brass of about 1440.
Tyneside's industrial story is built around Turbinia, Charles Parsons' 1894 turbine ship that gatecrashed the 1897 Spithead Naval Review at 34 knots and rewrote marine propulsion. Home-front and shipyard galleries above.
The 1838 column to Earl Grey, Prime Minister of the 1832 Reform Act, standing at the hinge of Richard Grainger's neoclassical city. 164 spiral steps lead to a balcony over Grey Street and the 1830s planned streets.
The Hadrian's Wall gallery holds altars to Mithras lifted from frontier forts, a large interactive model of the whole Wall system, plus Northumbrian prehistory and the Shefton collection of Greek antiquities.
Newcastle's second-oldest pub, licensed since 1880: a narrow Victorian room with pre-Raphaelite stained glass windows, a long mahogany bar, ornate plaster ceiling and a record player instead of piped music.
An 1842 waggonway tunnel cut to move coal from Spital Tongues colliery down to the Tyne, then converted in 1939 into an air-raid shelter for 9,000 people. Guided tours only; hard hats and lamps are supplied.
Opened in 1835 as the largest covered market in Europe of its day, with its original Weigh House and clock. Marks & Spencer's Original Penny Bazaar stall, trading here since 1895, still keeps its 'Don't Ask The Price' sign.
Newcastle's industrial cradle — lead works, potteries, glassworks and flax mills packed into a steep burn valley, now surviving as listed mill buildings under the 1869 Ouseburn Viaduct and Byker Bridge.
An 1898 pub above the Ouseburn bank that keeps Northumbrian smallpipe sessions, rapper sword dance and clog dancing alive — traditions carried in from the Durham and Northumberland pit villages.