Paul Smith, Manager, The Three Tuns, Gateshead

The following is based on an interview with Emma Webster on 19^th May 2017.

I think the venue has made the area more tolerant. Locals see diverse crowds, ethnic musicians and lots of gentle people at the venue and have responded by acting more responsibly. We run five local music festivals each year and we invite the local Asian and Kurdish community, which is sometimes the only non-white faces that the locals see. In the summer holidays, we offer free guitar and drum workshops to the local youth so that they can play loud and get really stuck in. We have a ‘no tracksuit, no baseball cap, no swearing’ rule which helps to change the behaviour of anyone who wants to come in as they have to behave more responsibly when they’re in here. In fact, I’ve seen people I’ve thought would turn out to be no-hopers in baseball caps turn out well because they have become regulars at the venue. We’ve become the longest-running and most loved live music pub in the area and local shopkeepers have said that the area is unrecognisable from when we started 16 years ago.