The Great North Run held last month marks a symbolic end of summer for the team at NE1 and the final days of NE1's Summer in the City events and activities programme. As the schools go back and the nights draw in, we start packing up the events and looking back at what a tremendous summer it has been.
Since July, we’ve delivered our Summer in the City programme, Screen on the Green, and Newcastle Restaurant Week, while sponsoring and supporting major events hosted in the city including Magic Weekend, Northern Pride, and Mela, events of all shapes, sizes, and styles, all packed into an 8-week period. We do this because we know that events play a crucial part in ‘place making’, shaping Newcastle’s unique identity and bringing people, spend, and future investment into the city. Events have also encouraged people back into the city post-pandemic and helped Newcastle return to almost pre-pandemic footfall levels much more quickly than the national average.
On the Quayside alone we had over 100 free events for people to get involved in as part of Summer in the City, and 84 free family movies screened at NE1’s Screen on the Green, our open air movie theatre which made a welcome return to Old Eldon Square. There was something for everyone.
Our Summer in the City programme was designed to provide a multitude of reasons for people to visit Newcastle and to keep coming back throughout the holidays. And come back they did, for free meditation sessions, yoga, and puppet making, as well as story-telling, art workshops and HIIT classes, the activities were a huge draw and were extremely well attended. One of the most popular activities of the summer was one of the only paid-for opportunities, the zip wire from the Tyne Bridge. People loved it and we’d love to bring it back. Making the Quayside and Old Eldon Square the hubs of the action was always our plan so people could arrive knowing something would be happening and where they needed to go.
People could spend the whole day moving around the city from one free event to another. It was ‘staycationing’ at its best. Exploring your home city like a tourist and seeing and doing things that perhaps you’d never considered before. This year, we also focused heavily on increasing activity in Old Eldon Square, making the area extremely familyfriendly. We introduced Play Rebellion, a free outdoor play space for young people and the response was phenomenal, with regular queues and a clamour to get involved. The artistic and buildable play-shapes worked well alongside the Screen on the Green movies, giving more reasons for families to spend longer in the area.
In addition to all of this, there was the welcome return of August’s NE1 Newcastle Restaurant Week, the first summer edition since the pandemic and by an impressive margin the best attended in the event’s illustrious history. We had 113 restaurants take part with more than 50,000 diners enjoying the Restaurant Week offers. At the last count, the event delivered an economic boost of over £850,000 for participating venues with results still coming in. Other major events in the summer calendar also set records for attendance starting with Magic Weekend which landed in the city for the sixth time in July. This year the event registered another successful weekend with the 4th best attended day in its long history. As one event finished another rolled into town and this year Newcastle was delighted to play host to UK Pride, which saw the biggest ever Pride march through the city with celebrations continuing at Northern Pride’s festival at Exhibition Park. NE1 sponsored the event, as we have since 2013, and this year we invited our business community to pre-launch celebrations before the weekend got underway. Exhibition Park has seen a raft of activity this summer, with Mela staged there again, while NE1’s sponsored Mela in the City, brought free, family-festivities into the city.
NE1 were also delighted to host several events on the river. We worked closely with the North East Maritime Trust, on the Historic Harbour Day to give people the chance to learn more about the history of the Tyne. In August we hosted the much-loved Dragon Boat race with over 20 teams competing while raising money for the Freeman Hospital’s Children’s Heart Unit Fund, CHUF.