Newcastle and Liverpool

It has just occurred to me how much difference being on opposite sides of England makes. Both are ship building ports, just a little inland, and have a distinct accent, influenced by their Celtic neighbours; cities full of energy, pride - cultural, sporting, boisterous nightlife, classical 19th century buildings and iconic waterfronts.

But eastern Newcastle looks to the Old World. Its trading partners are North Europe: established old countries. Newcastle's genesis was when the Romans built a fort on Hadrian's Wall here. Liverpool celebrated 800 years of its charter in 2007, but even it concedes it was a small place until c1700. It only become a parish the year before, and really its story only begins in the Civil War. Both became cities in only the 1880s, but Newcastle had long been a prominent town. It was significant enough to need walls in the medieval times, and has 4 churches from that era including a large one which became the cathedral. Newcastle has little of pre 1700 compared to Norwich and York, but it is the best preserved of the Midlands and North industrial cities. It has two 17th C almshouses and a medieval friary. Walking along The Close and Sandhill on the quay, one quickly sees that Newcastle was important long before it began shifting coal in flatbottomed boats and building the likes of the Mauretania.

Liverpool is the only of the northern and Midlands cities of Britain that has nothing before 1700. Unlike Newcastle who proudly sports its Back Gate and Norman Keep today, Liverpool's small castle was swept away in the civil war. Liverpool never had town walls, being little more than a hamlet when Newcastle's 2 mile stretch were bring erected - and the Tyneside city is proud of its considerable remnants. The mercantile homes of Livepool's earlier traders do not survive. Its oldest city centre building dates only from c1720 - a very handsome classical Bluecoat School. Liverpool today is entirely a product of the Georgians onwards, and classicism remains its predominant style - other than the many thoughtless 1960-70s blocks.

Liverpool then is New World. It began to flourish when trade started with the developing States. Liverpool may be close to Wales, but it is also close to Ireland, thus giving it a double dose of Celtic. And beyond Ireland - America. Liverpool did not get rich on looms or mines. It has warehouses and docks, not factories and mills - because it was growing on imports rather than manufacture in the city or what could be found in the ground. Liverpool's two way influence came from the cities in a new continent and the style they were forging. Only West Coast ports of Britain have (to my knowledge) iron framed 19th century buildings, which are prevalent in Chicago and New York. Both Liverpool and Newcastle claim the earliest British use of ferro concrete, which is a building innovation associated with America; but Newcastle does not have those glass and steel houses of New York's SoHo that appear in Liverpool, Glasgow and Bristol.

Neither city has an architectural signature. They each have a couple of buildings by lesser known architects who had very original ideas: Liverpool has the vast white edifices of Aubrey Thomas's Tower House and Liver Building and Peter Ellis' two Cook St area offices; Benjamin Simpson's Emerson and Half Moon Chambers are art deco originals in Newcastle. But whereas Liverpool has no famous prevailing architect, Newcastle's John Dobson and Richard Grainger are well celebrated, and a whole area of the centre is now known after the latter. Yet the effect of the known and the several less known designers is the same in both cities: a classical centre. But classical architecture is repetition. It is copying the accepted canon from the earliest cities and perpetuating it. Whatever the philosophy behind it, Greek isn't individual expression and groundbreaking. Classicism had been back in fashion since early 1600s in Britain; it was not even newly returned in the 18th Century, and was soon to be rivalled by Gothic, and then to be joined by the freer new styles of Nouveau and Deco. Liverpool and Newcastle show all those styles but Classical is too pervasive and too homogeneous to gain any real applause from me.

Liverpool's river is much wider and as yet, unbridged; but Newcastle's waterfront icons are the bridges. But it doesn't have strong waterline buildings except, more recently, on the Gateshead side. Both cities slope away from their rivers, showcasing their buildings like a neat tiering window display, showing the wares of the whole of their centre: Liverpool's wonderful cathedrals on its back row; Newcastle's mid distance medieval with its rear being held up by a huge football stadium. But as the eye is drawn to the various layers of Newcastle, one forgets that the front row is small fry. If row alone was visible, there would be little to admire about Newcastle. Its ferro concrete building - now the Malmaison hotel - is diminutive compared to the First Grace of Liverpool. There is no dome here, and Liverpool's middle grace - which is more of a filler in Merseyside - would seem very large beside the Tyne. The connection between the two banks of the Tyne makes for a cosier, more intimate, more accessible waterfront.

Liverpool has yet to produce a worthy new building. It last was 40 years ago - the Metropolitan Catholic Cathedral. Started earlier but finished later, the Anglican Cathedral is amazing but not a new style; but the competition for it stipulated that it had to be gothic. Newcastle City Hall is another of the few 1960s buildings that I admire, and both cities are filled with plenty that I do not, including their inner city road systems. But Newcastle has a new cultural centre that even if you don't like the building, you will at least want to comment on. Norman Foster's Sage Music Centre brings Gateshead further into the waterfront picture, after the renovation of the old Baltic flour mill became a major art gallery in 2002. It was he who composed welcome additions to the bland building decades of the 1970s - his East Anglian buildings have no equal in Newcastle or Liverpool. Liverpool's attempt of modern at FACT is disappointing, and the King's Dock development and now the peglike 4th Grace are not worthy of the effort or fuss.

Cathedrals are the aspect which brings Liverpool ahead. Newcastle may have a larger parish church, but Liverpool had no plan to use its St Nicholas as the seat of a new see. It built afresh on a hill, so that the new building can be seen and appreciated as one of the world's biggest and greatest neo Gothic churches. The abandoned 1920s Catholic cathedral morphed into a startlingly new place of worship. But Newcastle's catholic cathedral is barely noticeable, and despite being quite large for a parish church and having the only Scots style spire in England, there's not much to single out Newcastle's Anglican Cathedral church.

Overall - who is best? Newcastle is older and has a sweeping street that joins city and water - though the glory of Grey Street is more about the use of the hill and its curve rather than the repeating columns and pavilions. But the superior cathedrals of Liverpool counter that. Liverpool is bigger and grander, has the Beatles and larger museums. Liverpool is fond of telling us that it alone has national museums, outside of London (forgetting that Falmouth, St Ives, Bradford, Manchester and York all have them too); yet I am more drawn to Bessie Surtees House, the castle and the Newcastle Story - to which Liverpool has no answer. Culturally, the art galleries must be fairly similar - the Baltic matches with the Tate for modern art, the Laing with the Walker (though I believe the Walker is bigger) and other national museums of Liverpool are at least partly found in the Discovery Museum - a great Co-op warehouse containing ships and a kind of people's and river's story of the city. Most of the arts facilities have a corresponding partner in the other city - both have two grand theatres, a producing theatre, an arena, an arts cinema and a central multiplex, an Academy and Head of Steam music venue each and new media galleries.

On a personal level, I have lived in one but not yet stayed in the other. It seems that both lack the kind of nightlife I seek while excelling in the kind that I don't. When living in the North East, I could find plenty of places for a daytime coffee that I liked, and plenty of places to eat out. But when it came to an evening drink, I was stumped. I like bohemian and relaxed, but Newcastle seem only to offer frenetic - either trendy, kitsch, and even the Ouseburn valley is more about 'real pubs' than the wine and coffeebars I wish for. Hence I often stayed in. Even early in the evening, the hoards on the quayside and the behaviour of already drunk groups spoiled my feelings about a city that I had actively sought to make home. My most recent visit to Liverpool led me to conclude that the nightlife could be a similar problem. On a summer afternoon, it was not the rambunctiousness of Scousers on the razzle that put me off, but that even on a quiet day that I couldn't find somewhere that I wished to sit and sup in a relaxed quiet way on my own.

Yet I continue to be fond of both and would like to experience more of Liverpool to make the comparison fairer.

I will be making further comparison and including Glasgow in a forthcoming piece.