Grey Street, Newcastle

From the museum, we walked up to Grey's Monument, a Grade I-listed monument built in 1838 in recognition of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1834. In particular, it celebrates the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, one of Grey's most important legislative achievements. The act reorganised the system of parliamentary constituencies and increased the number of those eligible to vote.

We then walked down Grey Street. Despite the city being a target for air raids during World War II which killed 141 people and injured a further 587, Newcastle's extensive neoclassical centre referred to as Tyneside Classical, was largely untouched. The area was developed in the 1830s by Richard Grainger and John Dobson. More recently, it has been extensively restored. The German-born British scholar of architecture, Nikolaus Pevsner, described Grey Street as one of the finest streets in England. In 1948 the poet John Betjeman said of Grey Street, "As for the curve of Grey Street, I shall never forget seeing it to perfection, traffic-less on a misty Sunday morning." The street curves down from Grey's Monument towards the valley of the River Tyne and was voted England's finest street in 2005 in a survey of BBC Radio 4 listeners. In the Google Street View awards of 2010, Grey Street came 3rd in the British picturesque category.Read more