This is clever architecture - very nearly TOO clever - married to old-fashioned big engineering of the kind they know all about in the north-east. The architecture, a 1997 international competition win, is by the London firm of Wilkinson Eyre. Specifically Jim Eyre, who seems to have virtually cornered the market in upbeat bridge design. The engineering is by Gifford and Partners. In cold functional terms, it is simply a pedestrian and cycleway connecting the quaysides of Newcastle on the north bank, and Gateshead on the south. It opens, to let big ships through. But bridges, these days, have long ceased to be merely functional connections. They have become important urban markers, catalysts for regeneration, even destinations in themselves. What Jim Eyre has done in Gateshead is make a bridge that is a building, and a kinetic building at that. A great big urban room, with movement added.

You might have caught a glimpse of it, if you watched Leonard Slatkin’s impressively sombre and contemplative Last Night of the Proms last week. As usual, you saw crowds gathered around the country in key public locations to participate via big screens. At Baltic Square on the Gateshead quayside, the mood of the evening was captured somewhat eerily as the camera was drawn time and time again from the mostly impassive faces of the crowd to the 160-foot tall, angled arch of the bridge behind, subtly picked out in unusually rich coloured light. The programmable lighting design, by Jonathan Speirs, is integral to the bridge.