There is a sound I remember from my childhood. A sound that at some point I stopped hearing and then stopped noticing that I had stopped hearing it. I was only reminded that it had ever been part of my life’s soundtrack when I heard it again, many years later and thousands of miles away. The sound is one that I had heard every weekday morning through the late 1970s and early 1980s, the years I lived on a council estate on the south banks of the Tyne. In those years the heavy hum of an industrial city waking up reverberated along the Tyne valley. A deep rumble, the scraping of metal on metal, furnaces being fired, night shifts handing the baton to day shifts and activity that had been kept quiet while the city slept ramped up to full volume. I heard that sound again in the mid-1990s when travelling in India, the nation to which whole production lines, stripped from insolvent British factories, had been sold off, the land to which even the great, towering cranes of Swan Hunters were transplanted.

The morning chorus of late-industrial Newcastle was the sound in the background as I readied myself for the journey to school; a sink school which today would be defined as a failing school, an institution that would now be put under special measures or closed down. There, in my failing school, we were prepared for jobs that did not exist, jobs in failing companies that were part of failing industries. We were taught metalwork and technical drawing, we endeavoured to master the art of the draftsman, and to acquire the skills needed for a lifetime’s work in an engineering workshop. The only workshops I was to enter, once I left school and found work, were those that involved flipcharts, role play and motivational speeches.

To be educated in a comprehensive school by the Tyne in the 1980s was to be prepared for a world that was dying before our eyes. It was the equivalent of being expertly instructed in the art of making flint tools in the early years of the bronze age or winning royal patronage in the Paris of 1788. Technical drawing, even in the early 1980s, was being rendered defunct by computer-aided design. Although I did see computers at my school, as a child with severe but undiagnosed dyslexia, a child judged by my failing school to be a failing pupil, I was never allowed anywhere near the two BBC computers that sat in the corner of a heavily policed classroom.

As the rumble of heavy industry faded so did our chances of employment in anything like the world our parents and grandparents had known. At times school felt like it was merely a holding pen, readying us not for work but for life on the dole. On leaving school the place where the majority of my classmates who did find jobs went to work was the Department of Health and Social Security – the DHSS – whose vast campus of offices at Longbenton had already become one of the biggest employers in the Tyne conurbation, second only to Newcastle city council. The DHSS was the government department that administered the payment of unemployment benefit. On Tyneside unemployment itself had become the region’s growth industry.

Anyone who remembers what it felt like to live on Tyneside in the 1980s will recall that cold, pit-of-the-stomach feeling of creeping disaster. Local evening news was a list of closures and lay-offs, like a roll call after a battle. For people of my generation, brought up in the region, those years are today a subject of endless nostalgic conversation, a subject we keep returning to. Having lived through that time is one of the experiences that binds me emotionally to a region that physically I felt I had no choice but to leave; and by the 1980s leaving the north-east had, in effect, become a local tradition, a rite of passage. Even before I had worked out how I would do it the need to leave had become obvious. The point was made musically when I listened to the song by the Animals, "We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place", a song they did not write but did adapt, changing the lyrics to make them apply to Newcastle, even though their Newcastle, that of the 1960s, was doing relatively well economically speaking. While the title perhaps tells you all you need to know, the lyrics hammered home the message: "We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do."

Then, I think in 1986, when for the first time in my life I had some money of my own, I bought, for £2.50, from a charity shop near Newcastle Civic Centre, the book A Tale of Five Cities. It had been written in the late 1970s by the British journalist John Ardagh and published in late 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became prime minister. On one page Ardagh predicted that Thatcher’s "tough, anti-cossetting approach is the antithesis of the Geordie ethos" and asked rhetorically: "Will she shake up Geordieland?" It is always valuable but never comfortable to read an assessment of your home town and its culture made by an outsider, even one as insightful as John Ardagh. Long before Ardagh arrived in Newcastle in the late 1970s there was latent, pre-existing opposition to his sort of journalism. Even then, almost half a century after the event, memories had not completely faded of the sketch of Newcastle and Gateshead that had been penned in the 1930s by J B Priestley, who had written about the region in his best-selling English Journey of 1934. For a short time during the first world war Priestley had been stationed at Tynemouth so knew the region and its problems, and had had time to sharpen his literary knife. Newcastle came off comparatively lightly as it was Gateshead, where I was brought up, that received the full force of his cutting prose. "The whole town," he wrote, "appeared to have been carefully planned by an enemy of the human race." "If there is any town of like size in Europe," he went on, "that can show a similar lack of civic dignity and all the evidences of an urban civilisation, I should like to know its name." Priestley described Gateshead as "a frontier camp of bricks and mortar", but lamented that "no golden west has been opened up by its activities". "If anybody ever made money in Gateshead," he observed, "they must have taken great care not to spend any of it in the town." "No true civilisation," he railed, "could have produced such a town," and finally, in an exaggeration of sheer literary brilliance, he concluded: "Insects can do better than this." The Newcastle Journal was so affronted by English Journey that it ran an article under the headline "Tyneside Denounced by J B Priestley", stating: "Mr Priestley is a big man and has trod very heavily on the Tynesider’s toes."

John Ardagh’s A Tale of Five Cities was, for the 1980s, what Priestley’s English Journey had been for the 1930s. What hurt was that despite the exaggeration and generalisation, much of it was true. Both writers had said things that many people on Tyneside felt and said in private, but resented when the same observations were made by outsiders. Both had identified the traits of the region that have at times held us back: the shallowness of our confidence, our combination of breezy optimism and deep insecurity. Ardagh noted the sense of inverted snobbery that I feel is still there, a dislike for airs and graces, a quickness to spot slights and take offence, and a powerful dislike and resentment of external criticism. A belief that we are "real people" and that people in the south are somehow unreal and affected. But what John Ardagh did for me was point out, on page 198, something that I had not realised – that previous generations had come to the same conclusion I was then reaching. "The area produces brilliant young people," he wrote, "but the best tend to emigrate." More controversially and more hurtfully he continued: "Those who stay have many qualities: intellectual clarity is rarely one of them." Many of the people I know from my generation who stayed do not lack intellectual clarity, but when I think of those who left I see how the region has impoverished itself. Most years, at Christmas, I meet up with friends I used to drink and party with in the alternative scene of late-1980s Newcastle. We hold our little gatherings in London, where most of us now live, the rest coming in from the commuter towns that orbit the capital. Barristers, graphic designers, IT specialists, academics – they, we, are individual drops in the lifeblood of the north-east that for successive generations has haemorrhaged away, to be transfused into the economies and cultures of the south and the capital.

For me there were additional reasons for wanting to leave. This summer I took a journey that I have not taken since the early 1980s, a pleasure cruise down the Tyne, from Sandgate on Newcastle’s quayside to the mouth of the river. Among the plants that have colonised the former industrial sites on the banks of the river, working their shoots and roots through the layers of concrete and between the Victorian cobblestones, are migrant species. In the age of sailing ships, when ships were setting sail for Newcastle, tons of earth and rocks were scooped from the shores and riversides of their home ports and loaded into the deepest parts of their holds as ballast. On arriving on the Tyne this dead weight was shovelled out, loaded onto the backs of men and then dumped on the banks of the river. Between the rocks and within this soil from far-off lands, carried across oceans as ballast, were seeds, some of which germinated and poked their shoots through the soil to explore their new home – the Ballast Bank of the Tyne. Botanists might call them invasive species, but they were in truth accidental passengers rather than invaders, carried in the ebb and flow of Britain’s wealth and her imperial connections. Rather like myself.

When I left the north-east I did so with the physical scars of racism cut into my body and the mental scars lingering in my mind. African keloid scar tissue had grown over wounds from fights and beatings, some of which I concealed from my own family so as not to add to their concern. I was glad to leave the north-east and I had reason to be glad. I had at times, at school and in the street, been made to feel like an invasive organism, unwanted, a problem. I have met many black Britons who have had similar experiences to my own and who in response have completely rejected the towns and cities in which they were brought up. They keep visits to those former homes to a minimum. When I left the north-east I felt a similar urge. But in a way I never did completely leave, as I found it far harder to cut the ties than I had imagined.

Through shared experience of living through the region’s darkest decade since the 1930s, and ironically through the act of leaving itself, I began to make peace with the north-east. A sense of belonging that I had not felt while growing up emerged only once I had left. This perhaps should not be a surprise. I have met Geordies all over the world, bumped into them in bars, beaches and hotels in Asia, America and Africa. The one thing they have all had in common was a powerful affection and nostalgia for the region. The north-east, a place that had on so many occasions rejected me, was, I discovered, not so easy itself to reject. Even today, in my phone, under "home" is my mother’s house in Gateshead, not my house in the south. At our Christmas gatherings in London those of us who left the north-east as teenagers still ask who is going "home" for the holidays; this 30 years after our departure. And perhaps most telling of all, despite my deep teenage desire to be anywhere but by the Tyne, the sound of the north-east being criticised in a southern accent – even though I myself now have one – irks and grates. The defensiveness and tribalism that John Ardagh identified and criticised in the late 1970s is a trait I appear to have acquired.

We, in the early 21st century, live in the age of identity. I am mixed-race, half white, half black; I am dual national – British and Nigerian – and I am a working-class northerner who lives in a middle-class suburb of a southern city. To cut through all this complexity and duality I have, in recent years, begun to describe myself using a term that I would never have used three decades ago – Nigerian Geordie. I have, over the years, rejected my rejection. Like the plants that stowed away as seeds in the ballast of the ships that once sailed up the Tyne, the north-east is my home.