
If you drive into Newcastle on the A189 or the A167, take the turn off at the Town Moor and follow the road, down Barrack Road and then past St. James (the home of Newcastle United FC) and park somewhere in the vicinity of Terrace Place or Strawberry Place you are within a couple of hundred feet of the most lovely park any city knows. Leazes Park.


Long before I moved up to Newcastle I loved the music of one non-native Geordie, Kathryn Williams. Her first album’s title “Dog Leap Stairs” was a reference to a set of very old stone stairs in the centre of Newcastle. On that album was a song called “Leazes Park“. I listened to the song and imagined the park. When I finally came to visit it in real life, years later, I could imagine exactly what she saw when she wrote the song. In many ways that album was a love-song to this city.

Leazes Park is an immense Victorian park, with proper, solid iron fences painted black, pavillions, bandstands and a boating lake. It’s right next to the Royal Victoria Infirmary (the RVI), one of 3 very good hospitals in the area, an imposing and typically-Victorian edifice with a beautiful mansard roof. In the centre of a city which can be noisy, dirty and hectic, this is a perfect little oasis.

I have become very fond of this park in the years that we’ve lived here. Whether in spring, summer, autumn or the depths of winter it is still very beautiful and nothing can make you feel at peace like a walk in a park. I’ve been there under grey skies and blue, rain and sun, hail and thunder and it is still just as magical. Today I was lucky, it was the warmest day we’ve has this year for us – a balmy +9ºC – and after doing a little shopping I took myself and my camera out of the city centre and on a 5 minute walk which would take me to Leazes Park. Past Edwardian grandure and Georgian splendour, past the metal constructs of St. James and the ugly 60s wing of the RVI. Past my favourite Moroccan restaurant.


The birds were singing, the sun was shining and it was warm. People were playing basketball on the courts below, whilst I walked on the circular path up to the boating lake. On this lake live Canada geese, swans, tufted ducks, black-headed gulls, moorhens and coots. Whether it be people with prams, joggers, walkers, visitors, the tired or simply the curious, it seems in nice weather everyone comes to congregate here (there is a sneek-peak of the park on GoogleMaps). I sat down and enjoyed watching the swans hiss at those who came too close, the feeding-frenzy that a slice of white bread could create and the budding branches moving with a breath of wind.

Seeing the crocuses dotted randomly over the leaf litter beside the paths, brought a smile to my face as I remembered how much they looked like the description of “the meadow” in Twilight. Today it was really magical. I don’t think the two girls illicitly smoking on the benches, the guy in the sharp pin-striped business suit or the group playing basketball really noticed just how beautiful and lucky they are to be there in that moment, living in such a beautiful, happy place – even if only for a short while.


Easily as beautiful as the Parc de Belleville in Paris, it has a different feel. And different too than the grand Champ de Mars or the parks in London. It’s homely, it’s not threatening. You can see the Georgian houses sitting in front of the vast metalwork of St. James and then the trees in the foreground – a medly.

On a side-note:
This is my 600th post and it is also the one post I’ve wanted to blog since I first found Leazes Park. I will have been blogging here for 5 years in April, and how time has flown. I cannot believe I was merely 19 at the time. It seems like a lifetime ago, the way time flies. Happy, happy memories. Many of them. Here’s to the next 600.