Chauffeur Service in Newcastle upon Tyne

Grey Street curves away from the Monument in one of the finest pieces of Georgian planning in England, the Quayside handles the evenings, and Gateshead answers back across the water with the Sage and the Baltic. Guests come for business, for St James' Park, and increasingly because Newcastle is the sensible way into Northumberland. The city is compact, sociable and considerably more elegant than its reputation abroad suggests.

Central Station is handsome and genuinely central, which is rarer than it sounds. From there we run the short journeys that make a stay easy: the Quayside and Grey Street hotels, the university and the Royal Victoria Infirmary, the business parks at Cobalt and Quorum, and the matchday routes around St James' when the city centre closes in on itself and the walk back to a rank is longer than it looks.

Northumberland begins almost immediately and is the reason many guests come at all. Alnwick Castle and its garden are under the hour, Bamburgh and the empty beaches of the coast a little beyond, and Hadrian's Wall runs west along the A69 towards Hexham. Durham and its cathedral sit twenty minutes south, and the Cheviots make a long, quiet day for anyone who wants the road entirely to themselves.

Newcastle International is unusually close to the city, often fifteen to twenty-five minutes by the A696. From London the drive is a serious one, generally five and a half to six and a half hours by the A1, and much better broken with a proper stop somewhere in Yorkshire. The East Coast train is the usual choice and we meet it at Central Station with the car already warm.