Newcastle upon Tyne, drawn from its own streets.

Newcastle upon Tyne on paper

The Tyne runs west to east across the sheet in a deep confident curve, and the bridges cross it in a cluster so tight that on paper they read as a single hatched band — road, rail and foot, stacked and side by side within sight of each other. Nothing else in the frame is that concentrated. The banks rise steeply on both sides, and although the print does not draw height, you can see it in the way the streets behave: switchbacks and stairs on the Gateshead side, a tight spiral of quayside lanes on the Newcastle side, and the long approach viaducts holding the main roads level above them.

North of the river the centre is Georgian and planned — Grainger's streets curve into each other in a set of deliberate arcs, the most obviously drawn part of any northern English city. Immediately beyond them the Town Moor opens as an enormous pale block with almost no streets crossing it, a piece of common grazing bigger than the commercial centre it touches, which gives the print an unusual composition: dense, then suddenly empty.

East of the centre the Ouseburn cuts its own narrow valley down to the river, and the streets step around it. The terraces of Heaton and Jesmond run in long parallel rows with back lanes between them, at the grain that Tyneside flats produce, and Jesmond Dene threads a wooded line through them. Six and a half kilometres across holds the river, the moor, the centre and those terraces together.