The Free Thinking Festival, October 23-25

We've a rather unlikely 'loo book' at home - a beginner's guide to Geordie. (We don't actually keep it in the toilet but you know the kind of browsing book I mean). My partner doesn't need a guide to Geordie but his oldest school friend gave it to me when we first got together and I started visiting Newcastle and the area frequently. It was meant as a joke but it was also a friendly reminder that I was an outsider - something I remembered when we started planning this year's Radio 3 Free Thinking festival of ideas and decided to move Free Thinking (October 23-25) for the first time to the north-east to be based in the The Sage Gateshead. It's an area with an intensely rich and independent history but as we learnt in Liverpool, another city with its own complex identity, you can't begin to understand fully the pride, passions and anxieties of an area in the few months running up to a weekend festival but you can work creatively with partners who do.

We launched Free Thinking in 2006 in Liverpool and from the start we believed part of the unique flavour of the festival would be that we brought local and national viewpoints and experiences together. We would never 'import' all our guests for the the weekend but work with a range of contributors, some of them locally-based and others with longstanding local connections, alongside invited speakers from around the UK or the world. The decision to move from Liverpool after three years was all the more difficult because of the strength of the relationship we'd built up with some of Liverpool's dynamic cultural organisations, our host venue, FACT, The Reader Organisation and our colleagues at Radio Merseyside, just for example. But we'd never intended to keep Free Thinking in one location and moving on has enabled us to refresh the festival by including the issues and voices of another area.

For all the impact of globalisation in contemporary culture there are still huge differences of experience and attitudes just across the UK and I think we strengthen the quality of the debate around ideas by reflecting this in Free Thinking, partly in the selection of speakers but importantly also by hearing from the audiences at the events. The choice of this year's lead theme, the 21st Century Family, was inspired in part by a discussion about the strength of some of the local response to a national story there'd been about families earlier this year. We're delighted psychologist Tanya Byron is coming to Gateshead to give the opening lecture on the future of the family whilst Newcastle writers Fiona Evans and Karen Laws have been running local workshops to develop the Free Thinking drama 'Beware the Kids' and no doubt we'll hear a whole range of viewpoints in our debate 'Is there a Future for Men?'

But of course moving meant that just as we began to think we were getting the hang of putting on 30-odd talks, debates and performances over one weekend and broadcasting them - we were starting again in a new area - and heading for an earlier weekend than in previous years because of other commitments in the venue. But the Sage welcomed us from the start and we're delighted to be working with the BBC team in the north- east as well as with a whole new group of colleagues from around the north-east - Newcastle's Lit and Phil, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle University, Cafe Culture North-East, New Writing North and more. We've just launched the brochure online and the print versions have just arrived. There's nothing quite like having it in your hand to make you believe the festival is really coming. And coming it is.

I've just heard the first Free Thought in Radio 3's Breakfast... little nuggets of ideas around 0830 every morning that lay, as it were, a broadcast paper trail to the main weekend. Though there's a whole lot of preparation still to do we're really pleased with the line-up: former England cricket captain Mike Brearley on leadership, David Miliband, MP for South Shields, on the ideas that have shaped him and personal values, composer and music producer William Orbit with his guide to listening... and so many more... I'm looking forward to hearing Julia Neuberger, surely one of the wisest voices in public life, and the discussion of the culture of the Tyne, Tees and Wear rivers and the debate on sport vs the arts...

Almost all the festival is broadcast so if you can't make it to Gateshead you can catch up with it here on Radio 3 over the weekend of October 23-25 and in Night Waves during the weeks following. Though I'm not quite certain how we're going to broadcast one of this year's innovations - Greyworld's Sonic Safari. Radio 3's The Verb, Radio Drama and the public art collective Greyworld are working together to create an invisible forest of words that will grow through the public spaces of the Sage. You'll be able to record your own word and pursue its journey in amongst the others - so who knows what we'll find? It's time perhaps to get out that guide to Geordie.

Abigail Appleton is Head of Speech Programming and Presentation for BBC Radio 3

• Everything you need to know about Free Thinking is on the festival's home page.
• Breakfast's Free Thoughts are online now, starting with Simon Critchley and Lindsay Johns.
• The Festival's schedule is here and you can download a brochure.
• Radio 3 and local radio listeners are voting for the 'Free Thinker of the north-east' for a special event on 25 October.
• The picture shows a Geordie. It's by Conor Lawless and is used under licence.