New Writing North leads campaign with publishers to create £14m Centre for Writing in Newcastle

New Writing North is leading a coalition, which includes Hachette UK, Faber and Simon & Schuster UK, to create a state-of-the-art Centre for Writing in Newcastle worth £14m through government funding and so "reposition the southern and London bias of the writing industries".

The Newcastle-based writers’ charity has joined forces with civic leaders, academics and industry leaders to ask for £5m from the Department of Culture Media and Sport towards acquiring and developing the centre, matching the grants already pledged by regional partners.

The key partners in the plan are New Writing North and Northumbria University, with the support of local and regional government and businesses and some of the country’s largest publishers, including Hachette UK, Faber and Simon & Schuster UK.

It is planned that the Centre for Writing will be located at Bolbec Hall, on Westgate Road, a Grade II listed building of historic importance which will be refurbished and "brought back to life", campaigners said. The total cost for developing the centre will be around £14m.

The coalition said: "The facility will support writing and reading initiatives in the community as well as professional writers and publishing businesses across the North. It will be the first of its kind with a cross-section of national partners from the arts, academia, media, and publishing industries."

New Writing North already has a writing and publishing skills hub in Newcastle supporting skills and educational pathways and does significant work in education and across communities in the North East. The agency said the new project "will dynamically connect the dots between skills, education, and well-being".

The campaign is also urging for overall greater investment in the region’s cultural economy and infrastructure alongside the new facility. This will "help make the North East the centre of creativity for the writing industries... [and] establish the first national centre for writing, based in Newcastle, to help reposition the southern and London bias of the writing industries," campaigners said.

Claire Malcolm, chief executive of New Writing North, said: "The cultural industries already play a huge role in our regional economy and this is growing. This investment would help revitalise the region, attract inward investment and help train and develop a new generation of local talent.

"I want young people here to be able to grow up to be publishers, writers, and creatives without presuming that they need to leave the North East to achieve their ambition."

North East’s newly elected first mayor Kim McGuinness is also joining the campaign. She said: "For too long, the North’s creative talent has been overlooked and dismissed. Almost the entire British publishing industry is based in London, and decision-making centralised in the capital.

"It’s time to abandon tired perceptions and the decades long control over funding and powers which stifles the nation’s creative potential. Talent is classless, but not everyone gets the opportunity to develop it."

The campaigners hope that bringing the industry to the North East will result in major benefits to the regional economy and boost young people’s life chancers.

"More than 118,000 children in Tyne and Wear are living below the poverty line," New Writing North said. "Of this number, over one third of children living in Newcastle are growing up in poverty. A study undertaken by the Department for Work and Pensions demonstrates that being read to at age five is an important protective factor against poverty at age 30."

In May, it was revealed that UCLan Publishing and Bluemoose Books are developing a Centre of Publishing Excellence at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.