Saltwell and Bensham is an established, inner-city, Victorian neighbourhood, characterised by streets of two-storey brick terraced houses on a southwest-facing slope. Its streets and terraces are a familiar urban form that is ideal for the social regeneration and the consolidation of a sustainable community. There is little wrong with Saltwell and Bensham’s basic urban form of rigid city blocks, but the way those blocks are occupied – the buildings on them, the uses to which they are put – does not optimise the opportunities they could offer for social life and access to shops, amenities and transport. This is the basis for the area’s transformation into a newly sustainable and highly desirable neighborhood within a newly imagined Gateshead.