The Links Art Gallery occupies a restored 1930s art deco building on Whitley Bay's Northern Promenade that originally opened as the Garden Restaurant. The gallery was set up as a community interest company in 2010, after the building's renovation, and runs as a single-site gallery, shop and café between the town and St Mary's Island. Exhibitions rotate through the space on a regular programme, prioritising North East painters, printmakers and ceramicists over touring national shows, and the attached shop sells work directly from the artists exhibited. Workshops for schools and residents run alongside the exhibition calendar. As a not-for-profit rather than a commercial chain, the gallery reinvests takings from the shop and café into its exhibition programme, and it remains the only Links Art Gallery site, with no branch elsewhere on the Tyne and Wear coast.
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