invest north east england

North East England has excellent air, sea, road and rail links that make the area an important business hub with easy access to the rest of the UK, the European Economic Area – the world’s largest trading bloc – and many other worldwide destinations.

• By Air
• By Sea
• By Rail
• By Road

Air

Two international airports at Newcastle and Durham Tees Valley offer more than 30 scheduled daily routes to airports in the UK and Europe as well as Dubai and onward destinations.

Newcastle International is the largest airport, handling around five million passengers a year.

Flights to key airport hubs such as London’s Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, and Amsterdam Schiphol allow easy connections to more than 400 worldwide destinations. There are, for example, 15 flights a day to London from Newcastle, and three daily to Amsterdam. Durham Tees Valley also has twice daily flights to Amsterdam.

Other major European cities with direct flights from Newcastle include Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, Geneva, Barcelona and Dusseldorf. Low-cost operators fly frequently to a wide range of European destinations.

Sea

Three North East ports – Teesport, Tyne and Blyth – connect to the world’s sea routes.

Teesport is one of the three largest ports in the UK, handling around 50 million tonnes of cargo a year, and it has deep-water tidal facilities found in only a few of the country’s ports. A £20 million investment programme has brought improvements to road and rail connections, roll-on roll-off services and cargo handling.

Both the Tyne and Teesport have substantial container terminals and storage areas, with regular feeder services to hub ports such as Rotterdam and Felixstowe, and the Tyne has become one of the largest car handling facilities in the UK.

They have also invested heavily in developing and expanding sites geared to intermodal transfer to rail and road, and offer logistics services for the distribution of many types of goods.

An example of intermodal activity is Cenargo’s 114 acre pan-European transfer site in Tees Valley, which offers bonded goods storage, distribution and complete supply chain management services.

Rail

Newcastle is only 240 miles (400km) by rail from London – a journey time of three hours. Edinburgh is 120 miles (193km) to the north and takes an hour and a half by train.

There are direct main line services from Newcastle, Durham and Darlington to many major cities and commercial centres such as Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow and Aberdeen.

On the East Coast Main Line to London trains run every half hour during the daytime on weekdays and hourly at most other times. These services run into Kings Cross in London, adjoining St Pancras station from which Eurostar services operate to Paris and Brussels. 

Road

The North East has an excellent road network enabling short journey times between the principal business and population centres within the area.

The main A1-M1 motorway link provides journey times to London of around five hours and Leeds in two hours. A choice of east-west trunk routes along the A66 and A69 connect the North East with Carlisle and the M6, and onwards to Glasgow or south to Manchester. The A1, A68 and A697 run north to Edinburgh and offer journey times of around an hour and a half.