Great North Museum Shortlisted for Family Friendly Award

Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock has been shortlisted as one of the country’s most family-friendly venues, in the Guardian Family Friendly Awards 2010.

Organised by Kids in Museums, the annual award recognises museums which make family visits enjoyable and fun. The Great North Museum: Hancock is one of only six museums in the country to have been selected as a finalist, from hundreds of nominations.

The winner will be announced in April - so watch this space for more information!

Beamish Museun - One of the world's coolest museums.

The Sunday Times has named Beamish Museum, Durham, as one of the world’s coolest museums:

Beamish Museum was featured alongside Science Museum, London and the Kennedy Space Centre, Orlando in it's list of the 'World's 12 Coolest Museums'.

"Forget tired old artefacts in dusty old display cases. The 21st-century museum visit is a whizz-bang affair, involving thrilling spaces packed with interactive technology, where you’re urged to grapple head-on with the mysteries of science and nature, history and art. Here are the world’s best.

Forget Doctor Who — time travel comes no more enthralling than the epic open-air museum at Beamish. Upon entering, you lurch back a century or so, into a lovingly created facsimile of Edwardian life in the northeast of England, including a colliery village, a working farm, a railway station, a pub, a bank and a bandstand, with clanking trams to catch and real-life horse manure to step in.
A community of flat-capped guides — nice touch, that — occupies the town at all times, and our favourite moment comes when you crouch in the damp and dark, listening for the telltale and slightly scary noises that warned a drift miner his tunnel was about to collapse, burying him alive."

Source: Sunday Times, 18th October 2009

Garden of the Year 2009 - Howick Hall Gardens

Howick Hall Gardens has been awarded Garden of the Year 2009 by Gardens Illustrated and the Garden Museum.

This is what Tom Stuart-Smith, LANDSCAPE DESIGNER, said about Howick hall Gardens:
"This place is a living ark, a gene bank of material from all over the world, planted
through 65 acres of grounds surrounding the house, and meticulously documented. Charles, Lord Howick, has planted more than 11,000 trees and shrubs with around 1,800 different species, all of them grown from seed collected in the wild, sometimes by Charles himself. The new planting is so subtly woven into the landscape that if you didn’t know the back-story you might miss it. The setting of the Howick estate is astoundingly beautiful. The 18th-century house overlooks the Howick Burn and the plantings are arranged either side of this in a long valley. You wander through groves of mature beech and young plantings. Eventually you are lured along a gradually descending valley that finally opens
out on a wide headland with the crashing sea below. When so many of our gardening endeavours are instant fixes, this garden is an antidote to the quick gratification of the makeover garden and the tourist honeypot. In a world where our horizon is, at best, centred on our own lifespan, it is a great gulp of fresh air off the North Sea. The ultimate in slow gardening."

Tartan and Tyne

The warm and friendly North East has been slowly reinventing itself to become one of today’s hottest places to visit.

Newcastle is now a number one city break destination, thanks to its Georgian buildings, rejuvenated quaysides, galleries, theatres, coffee shops, tilting Gateshead Millennium Bridge and the Tyne Bridge, a mini version of Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The Angel of the North sculpture at Gateshead still inspires awe-its wings are the size of a jumbo jet’s. And the maritime port of Hartlepool showcases a superbly recreated 18th-century seaport and Britain’s oldest warship still afloat. The Tall Ships Races finish there in August at the town’s biggest-ever party.

Source: Daily Mail, 6th February 2010

One of the finest Cities in England

Durham is a top contender for finest city in England. Its ancient heart sits high and mighty above a glorious loop in the River Wear. The cathedral has been voted the nation's best-loved building. Together with the castle, it forms part of our first World Heritage Site.

Source - Daily Mail Online, 10th January 2010