marcus westbury

Melbourne based design blog The Design Files recently spent a week in Newcastle enabled by the outstandingly awesome Siobhan Curran…

NEWCASTLE.  It is AWESOME.  I won’t hear a bad word said about it.  Totally and truly I am 100% cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die in love with the place.

Originally settled as an industrious coal mining town, Newcastle is Australia’s second-oldest city.  It’s around 160km North of Sydney.  Only about 150,000 people live there. But for a small-ish town I have got to say there is some seriously cool creative stuff going on there, and what’s more, you can go surfing on your lunchbreak. (No kidding!)

There is great coffee, incredible beaches, the best fish ‘n chips I have ever eaten,noticeably good looking people, cute hipster children on every street corner who appear to be able to skateboard from an extremely young age, an affordable housing market… all this and you’re only 2 hours from Sydney.  And YET, there’s not a skerrick of ‘Sydney’s little sister’ about it.  Newcastle really does have it’s own unique sense of pride and quietly confident vibe going on.  It is very attractive.

I agree – and it was particularly great to see so many Renew Newcastle projects being featured. See the various posts here or check out the special Guest blog on Renew Newcastle projects here.

In other news The Seattle Globalist named Newcastle as one of 5 Global Hipster Meccas.  Nice. Flattering. Almost certainly completely untrue. Unlike TDF i suspect they haven’t been there.

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Tags:   Newcastle · Newcastle hipsters · Renew Australia · Renew Newcastle · The design filesNo Comments