Newcastle Community News

Newcastle Community News is a multi media Internet magazine. We publish articles in text, pictures and sound that reflect the culture and heritage of the North East region of England.

NCN was set up in 1999 with support from Adult Basic Education, Library Priority Services, The Newcastle Literacy Trust and The St Vincent De Paul Society at Blackfriars. This was possibly one of the first collaborative Community Multi Media Newspapers on the Internet. In January 2000 I became project manager for Tees Valley Communities Online and this sadly caused NCN to fall into limbo. However, the Geordie Discussion group remained active.

Updates to this site are fewer now but it represents for me a fantastic adventure leading up to the new millennium. The start was the famous “drummed out” story which has since appeared on TV and Radio. Then there here was my trip to Wooler to gather photos to add to The Loss Of The Good Ship Woolerite. Then there was an interview under the City. I saw the eclipse in Cullercoats and collected a whole series of interesting articles around Monks Haven. Then, for an event at Sunderland University, I started to collect mining stories and published an article about a monument near where I lived. As a result of this, author Mike Kirkup sent be a book containing an eyewitness account of the New Hartley Mining Disaster which I began to serialise in audio.

It is a shame that I and others were not able to keep up the stream of articles in the quantity that we were able to in the early NCN days. However, there is still plenty in this site for the visitor to enjoy. Who knows what the future may bring. This site is not dead, only sleeping.