Of course, there's no need to visit every single pub on our itinerary! Indeed, the sight of the retarded reprobates retching on the steps will be enough to put you off most of them.

But we'd like to welcome you - one and all - as we ask you to join us on our pointless amble round the town. Feel free to tip your guide. All currencies accepted.

Your starting point is the monument at St Thomas' church in the shadow of the fugly Civic Centre. To get your bearings and make sure you're heading in the right direction – if you fuck it up at this stage there's no hope for you – the curved seat and the statue of that gadgie with the sword should be immediately behind you, and the church itself should be just behind that. To your left, alongside the walls of the church, will be a perforation of young sun worshippers with roadkill ponytails and shades that would make Bono out of U2 laugh. In one hand these ladies will have a Costa coffee, and in the other a shitty burger from one of the area's many takeaways. A manky lone pigeon will be at their feet. See them? You're rocking.

In the eye line of these honeys is St Mary's Place. Look along this road, past Munchies takeaway and Oxfam and the Post Office – with its snaking queue of students posting home their soiled undies and pregnancy test results – and at the far end of this street you'll just be able to see Luckies Corner Bar [That's a link, as are all the other words in blue. Get clicking]. You don't want to go there, mainly because it’s utter shite. Instead you want to head off to your right, negotiating the raging traffic, to Blackwell's bookshop, therein to buy a shiny new copy of The Burglar's Dog Alternative Guide to Drinking in Newcastle upon Tyne.

This high-quality guide contains full details of all the lovely, lovely public houses on your route in far more depth than we can be arsed to write here, plus half a dozen pictures of a dog in various stupid costumes. And an index. Let's be honest here: you simply must buy a copy, since you can't carry a desk PC with you, you'll get mugged if you carry your laptop, and your cheap bastard print out of this page will be blown away in the Haymarket's legendary localised tornadoes. Fuck aye.

After emerging with your purchase, head towards the Crow's Nest and try to listen out for the mellifluous tones of the local Geordie dialect. You'll fail miserably, mainly because the damn place is full of fucking schtudents from anywhere but Newcastle, though it won't kill you to give it a try. And it'll keep YOU quiet, which is a blessing for us if for no one else. From the Crow's Nest, continue a million miles to the nearest set of traffic lights. Over the road and through the gridlocked carnage, you'll see the legendarily reviled Lego men statues around the war memorial. Pause to consider the inappropriateness of their setting, and try to understand that they're not the fault of the locals: we hate the fuckers, too.

Did you notice that gap in the buildings behind you while you were waiting an eternity for the "green man" at the crossing? That half-arsed car park with its granny's chin of spindly trees is where the Haymarket public house once stood. Unfortunately that traditional city centre alehouse steeped in proud history was demolished long ago, the town planners deciding that the genuine article was old hat and that what the city really needed was a sham Deep South theme bar instead. That'll be Old Orleans right in front of you, then. Shimmy off to the left between the Metro station and Lloyds TSB and, after dodging the beggars and Big Issue sellers at the cashpoints, you'll emerge on the city's main shopping drag, Northumberland Street.

Turn right to face the crowds, taking care to avoid the knock-kneed twats dishing out the flyers for Bar Fucko! - Drink yourself to death for a quid! On your left, just past the branch of Boots patronised exclusively by cunts too fucking rude to stop yakking into their phones whilst making a purchase, is a ropy back alley. We'd advise that you don't go down it, not for reasons of personal safety – a good kicking builds moral fibre after all – but because it's the location of Sgt Peppers, where the city's septuagenarians go to look for love. Imagine waking at 3am to find your aunt Doris lubing your logchute with Lurpak, and you're still not even close to the horrors that lie within.

Instead, take the second street on your left, where you will find the resurrected Tavern resplendent in its colour palette of dishwater and baby sick and, a few steps down from it, the translucent corpse of the former Pacific Bar Café. On the hour every hour there'll be a procession of boiler suited lunkheads carrying out the fixtures and fittings, although we hear rumours that those very items will soon be humped back in again in another desperate attempt to cater for the City Council's more discerning "Team" "Leaders". Watch this space!

The route now doubles back to Northumberland Street where, if you need a piss already, you should go to the Northumberland Arms in the alley between M&S and Eldon Square. Let's face it; it's the only reason most people ever bother with the scabby dump. After passing the news stands - with the Chronicle billboards defiantly denying the stories their sister paper the Journal made up – you'll be ready to run the gauntlet of inquisitive individuals who CANNOT shut up and WILL NOT fuck off. Market researchers, Oxfam press-gangers, random busy bodies and imperialist spies: each one of these will decide that you are just the sort of person they've been looking for. And they will hound you to the point of suicide.

Here's an activity for you: pick a point on the distant horizon and try to get there, British Bulldog style, without being captured by some cunt with a clipboard. And when you've gone so far as to swerve to dodge one of these unemployables yet have still been buttonholed in some chain store doorway, ask them, "What was it about my parabolic arc of avoidance that made you think I would want to talk to you?" Then punch! Wallop! Gouge! Hoof! And put the fucker through the nearest window. It works for us. Occasionally. Of course, to completely miss these idiots, and the Carling can-clutching scum on the benches, not to mention Fenwick's Christmas window if it's any date later than April Fools Day, head up the street between Superdrug and H&M where, after nipping into the piss-stinking (horrible) 1960s (worse) alley, you'll emerge on Princess Square, home to Trillians Rock Bar. Princess Square is also the location of the city's Central Library, or at least it was before the demolition project started. From now until the wildly optimistic date of 2009 you can stand in the square and watch the rats scurrying from the building site like their tails are on fire. There's one!

After shaking the grindcore tinnitus from your ears and maybe whacking a few rodents on your way back up the staircase, take two consecutive right turns back to Northumberland Street. On your way you'll see what passes for café culture to the imbeciles in this town: giving it all that ciao-bella-bella in a freezing concrete alley, on rickety metal chairs, outside a fucking amusement arcade.

Immediately across from the alley from which you've just fled is the city's flagship Monument Mall. There are two reasons to go there: One, to count the abandoned units with their Closing Down Sale posters flapping gently in the draught, and two, to ask the mongs in Virgin why they're all dressed as Captain fucking Scarlet these days. We'd tell you to continue on to the Monument area itself, but there's no real point. Scrap that: there's two branches of Waterstone's where you can BUY the Burglar's Dog book all over again as a souvenir for the folks back home. It's a bona fide Local Bestseller. And it'll keep longer than a fucking stottie cake or a bottle of Brown.

I suppose the Charles Grey is there, providing a safe haven for the lazy tourist and the terminally unadventurous, but you'll not want to bother with that. Nor will you give a darkened stool about the execrable - and impenetrable - Basement Trebles Bar – and they wouldn't let you in even if you did, so don't bother pushing the door. (Stop press: it appears to be doubling as a soup kitchen during daylight hours. Fuck. Me.) From outside the Charles Grey look south, the direction where the sun is trying vainly to burn through the smog and rapidly gathering murk. Head down the hill a few paces to Hood Street, taking care to avoid the taxi drivers for whom the words pavement and pedestrians have no meaning. At the far end of this street is the eternally appalling Bar 42: you may want to ponder chucking a Molotov cocktail into the stairwell, but then who would do the city's photocopying? Cross the road under the stilts of the hideous office block above, and head in the opposite direction to the embarrassment of the ruined Odeon Cinema, which is to say to the right.

Turn left down Market Street, passing the cop shop and the courts, and take another left just beyond whatever that fucking nightclub is called these days. Head back towards the library's building site – this time viewed from a different aspect – and cross at the lights towards the Laing Art Gallery. The grey concrete with the brass trim under your feet is the notorious and ridiculously expensive "Blue Carpet". There's no rhyme or reason for dragging you on this detour, except to make you feel as under whelmed as the locals are about the whole sorry fiasco. I suppose Fusion is here too, if you're thirsty.

Across the Blue Carpet and beside the also notorious and ridiculously expensive wooden staircase up to the bridge over the motorway, pause to lay a flower on the grave of Callaghan's Irish Bar. There's as much life in it now it's closed as there ever was in its heyday. Continue your interminable circle round the offices back to Market Street, where that nightclub will look just as nasty from this side of the road as it did when you passed alongside it. Wait a couple of millennia for a gap in the buses, then cross to the street between the chintzy furniture shop and the Magistrate's Clerks' Office. Down here – somewhere – you'll come across Enigma, where you can feast your eyes upon the latest bandwagon they're trying to clamber aboard. Thoroughly unimpressed, head back up the hill, under the charred skeleton of Worswick Street bus station and past the shameful wreck of the fire station opposite.

If you haven't fucked up the route – and how could you, when our instructions are so clear? – you'll now be on Pilgrim Street, and across the road should be a heart-warming mixture of designer boutiques and pawn shops. Duck down the street between Smokey Joe's and the City Takeaway: on your right will be the stage door of the Theatre Royal, and on your left will be the Adelphi. Go inside, order a pint, clear your throat and strike up a popular ditty. "And it's [insert team other than Newcastle United here], [insert team other than Newcastle United here] FC, they're by far the greatest team the world has ever seen". After discharging yourself from the General Hospital, retrace your steps to the front of Smokey Joe's, taking care to crawl past the Adelphi's window for fear of another panelling.

You're heading south again. Between the sandwich shop and the breeze block balls-up is High Bridge, where you will find the Bacchus, not to mention every single dickhead in the city who thinks he's Michael fucking Schumacher hurtling up the cobbles. It's not bad there, at least before 4pm when the suits start smarming in. Turning 180 degrees back to Pilgrim Street – do try to keep up – and passing more abandonment, you will come across the Market Lane, or Monkey Bar to its friends. Here, we suggest you try to pinpoint the awful smell that will inevitably assault your nostrils: cabbage farts and senseless death the last time we braved it, I think. In the spirit of charity, you might want to take a needle and thread to their mauled upholstery. Someone needs to.

Separated from the Monkey Bar by a literal alley and a metaphorical galaxy is Popolo where, if current form is anything to go by, they won't even think about serving you unless you've just stepped out of a salon AND you're laden with a dozen bags from P.O.N.C.E Menswear (Sale bags don't count). Like the Great Barrier Reef, the Pyramids and Benidorm, Popolo is a shining example of paradise ruined by the people who've come to search for that very paradise. There's no denying it: it’s been full of cunts since the people behind Secco upstairs (and soon to be next door) sold it to the highest bidder.

Across the road is the city's most shameful dereliction, where a whole host of thriving businesses were compulsorily closed to make way for development: development that is still at the squabbling stage five years later. Pass this travesty and, making a special effort to trip any visible skatepunks into the middle of next year, head for the subway to the strange-shaped pink thing in the middle of the road. This used to be Bar 55, but should eventually be re-opening as the Box nightclub. I say eventually advisedly, since at the time of writing it's less than a week until the grand reopening, and it looks like nobody's struck a fucking bat. I bet they're absolutely delighted in the flats above that the club will have a 2am license. I can just see the bleary-eyed residents, hurling (designer) plant pots at the drunken revellers below, furious at their fornicating in the fountains and their spraying of the sculptures with spat-out semen. I have no sympathy: anyone who chooses to live above a roundabout in the first place deserves all they fucking get.

Take the pedestrian crossing to Mosley Street. Down the hill, at the junction of Grey Street and Dean Street, you will come across Ant & Dec's dreadful Lodge, the chain hotel mediocrity of the Living Room and the wine bar snottiness of the Vineyard. (Barluga is up the hill to your right, but it can fucking wait until the next guided walk). This is the start of the route that only the shysters who want to sell you their overpriced piddle and spurious glamour call the "Diamond Strip". Have you ever heard such shite? This is the area where you pay through the nose for piss, are treated with blanket contempt by all and sundry, and where, if the barmaid had actually trodden in something, the look on her face would still be better than the one she's giving you now.

Just do what we do: button up your coat, put your hand on your wallet or purse, and keep on walking. The Attic? Fuck it. It's a bar an Albanian wouldn't find glamorous. @Home? Not sure if that's still going since, while there's always people in the window, I haven't seen the doors open in years. Maybe it’s only the management in there, softly sobbing over the accounts. Perdu? Just awful, awful, awful. And Apartment? They were the fuckers that started it, so we're hardly going to shed a tear for them because Johnny-come-latelys are nicking all their trade. Screw them all and the Segway they rode in on. Revolution has "diamond" pretensions, but it's really nowt more than a vodka chain bar out of its depth, and Tokyo round the corner is so discreet and unobtrusive that only the leeches from the legal profession know where it is. We will not be giving directions.

Can you guess Newcastle's crowning architectural feat of recent years? No, it's not the Millennium Bridge: that belongs to Gateshead. And no, it's not Sir Norman Foster's Sage building: that's Gateshead's too. Give up? The acme, the pinnacle, the thing that makes us most proud, is the demolition of the monstrous Westgate House next to the Union Rooms. From brave new world to "knock that bastard down" in under forty years: the genius of modern urban design. Standing at the monument across from the Union Rooms, in front of you you'll see the Long Bar, which we're only mentioning because it’s there and, past that, the Sports Café which warrants a plug simply for realising that, if you give football hooligans a few pairs of tits to gawp at and yell mindless shit at them, it'll calm them down. On your left will be the soporific blandness of Destination – we'll not tell anyone if you claimed you didn't see it - and on the corner will be the Head of Steam, complete with heavy-rimmed specs, Decemberists t-shirt and jeans hanging on a chain about a foot below its butt-crack.

Across from the Steamer is North, famous for its collection of porn movie posters. Here, did I ever tell you about the side project website we made a year or two ago? Tsunami-teens.com, it was called. "Their homes have been swept away, but they're still hungry for cock". Sick, apparently. It seems that suggesting that Banda Aceh girls would do owt for a bucket of rice and sheet of corrugated tin was a little bit beyond the pale. Still got half a million hits in the two weeks before the ISP kicked off and made us take it down, though. I digress... If you're in Newcastle for a short break, you'll have ample time for sitting around with your bags at the airport or station or bus terminus on the way home, so you're hardly going to want to watch people doing just that when you're on the lash. Centurion, therefore, can piss off, as can the Newcastle Hero on the other side of Central Station's main portal. Mind you, I have actually seen a bunch of dumbfucks step off the train, get hammered in the first bar they came across, then get back on the fucking Intercity, so I suppose it's worth mentioning those two bars for their benefit.

Leaving Central Station and crossing the road, you'll encounter the enforced begorrah bollocks and Guinness gobshite of O'Neill's, alongside the toenail-chewing tedium of Gotham Town's strained medieval dungeon theme. Far better to head up Pink Lane to the Forth Hotel, blinkering your left hand side so as to spare yourself the sight of Newcastle's pointiest spam javelins drinking in Coco.V. Once the Forth is ticked off, run like the clappers past the mental home that is Rafferty's and leg it between the chippy and the offy. Cross the road, scoot up the alley and hang a left, past the garish Chinese restaurant with the fairy lights straining the National Grid. There is a bar in front of you, and its name is Tilleys. And if you haven't enthusiastically formed and rancorously split an angular indie combo by the time your pint is pulled, then you're nowhere near cool enough to drink here. And all your pissy little Myspace "friends" will diss you on their blogs.

Out the door, past the theatre, and straight into the Bodega: decent pint, decent banter, shocking wallpaper. Double back to that silver spike thing stuck in the plaza across from Tilleys, then trundle up the path, keeping the old City Walls on your right. Turn right into Stowell Street, Newcastle's Chinatown and the area primarily responsible for the fact that I'm resting my fat fucking gut on the desk while I'm typing this. Don't ask for a restaurant recommendation, since they're all the same. Just stuff your face and move along. Rosie's Bar is at the end of this street and, across from the godlike Back Page Sports memorabilia shop (where you can buy another copy of the Dog book) is the equally godlike Newcastle Arms. Stop here for a couple: you know you want to.

Right. Now where the bloody hell are we? Oh aye. Go through the Chinese Arch and onto Gallowgate. Up the hill and right under St James' Park is Shearer's. We say: Fuck Shearer's. (We also say the Strawberry just across from it is quite nice if you can be bothered to plodge up through the mud in the car park to get there.) Pause to ponder exactly why a dog rough new tower block is being built right beside the identically ugly wreck of the former Wellbar House, and the stop for slightly less time to consider and reject Fluid over the road from the building site. Time's pressing, so shake a fucking leg. Down to the roundabout and turn left along Percy Street. On the street up to the left with the Sony Centre on the end, is a bar that we last saw being called Madisons. You can try it if you like, but we can virtually guarantee it will be closed for refurbishment. Instead, you may want to untuck your shirt, shave your head and get some unsightly old-school tattoos – maybe a swallow on the hand or a "cut here" around the neck. That way you'll feel right at home when you pass under the walkway between the throbbing Eldon Square shops and the deserted ones in Eldon Garden - plasterboard and faux-marble under a car park roof being nobody's idea of horticulture – and into the cavernous shed of the Goose. You'll also be a twat.

Better – and rougher – is the Three Bulls Heads next door. Here's an optional excursion: cross at the lights and visit the brand new bus station to see if the roof has fallen in. Not yet? Give it another minute or so; if it's anything like the other one further up the road, the fucker will be raining glass and iron the next time a pigeon farts. Once that one's done, cross back over, leg it up the stairs to the Percy Street car park, find the biggest oil slick you can find, and roll about in it for a good twenty minutes. This will prepare you for the Percy Arms, and bring back a little of the greasy charm that sadly disappeared when the tramps started replacing the bikers. Don't have a piss here, though: the bogs contain the devil.

Your penultimate stopping point is the World Famous Trent House, but if your feet are knacking by now you might consider skipping it, since it’s up the road between the charity shop prefab and the executive estate agent. If you don't mind a lengthy hobble, take the first right as you head up the road, then follow the rather lovely Georgian terrace to the end. Sup your ale, clack a few balls around the pool table, crack a few heads around the pool table, and return the way you came.

Finally we arrive at the Hotspur, where the pints will be tasty, the staff friendly and the ashtrays full to overflowing. From a window seat here you will be able to see the church where you began your lengthy and informative tour of Newcastle. You'll also be able to watch M&S's inexorable slide over the entire fucking city. Taking stock of your day's journey, we can money-back guarantee that you will be unimpressed, utterly shattered and none the fucking wiser. And we can confidently predict you'll be looking to sue easyJet or Virgin trains for dumping you here in the first place. Welcome to the wonderful world of citybreaks.

Next month we will be offering an equally grim guided tour around the bits we ignored this time - namely the Grainger Market, the Bigg Market and the bustling Quayside – in a feature we're threatening to call "Gadgies, radgies and onion bhajis".

Attendance is mandatory.

Have you bought this fucking book yet?