NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland, North Tyneside & South Tyneside

This is the place for dazzling city life, vibrant culture and great shopping as well as the fun of the coast.

NewcastleGateshead has enough museums, shops and galleries to keep you busy all week - not to mention café-bars to entertain you into the night. Stroll down the elegant Georgian Grey Street to the Quayside and the Norman Castle Keep which gave the city its name. Opposite, on Gateshead Quays, are the billowing curves of The Sage Gateshead international music venue, and BALTIC, the Centre for Contemporary Art. Reach them on foot via the spectacular Gateshead Millennium Bridge.

Award-winning beaches and peaceful countryside are surprisingly close. Gibside estate has riverside walks and a beautiful Palladian Chapel, and there are great family attractions - in the Blue Reef Aquarium you can walk under sharks! - and the dramatic ruins of Tynemouth Priory and Castle. Take a picnic courtesy of our many farmers' markets.

Catherine Cookson fans will find an exhibition of her life and times at South Shields Museum and Art Gallery. Children can try archaeology at Arbeia Roman Fort or meet the animals on Bede's World's Anglo-Saxon farm, beside the site of the monastery where the saint lived.

Love glass and shopping? Sunderland's National Glass Centre stocks pieces by Europe's finest contemporary glassmakers. Exotic plants thrive in the city's Winter Gardens, centrepiece of the Victorian Mowbray Park, and you can book West End show tickets online for the Sunderland Empire, a classic Edwardian theatre.

To find out more about what NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland, North Tyneside & South Tyneside has to offer, visit: www.visitnewcastlegateshead.co.uk