Washington is a town in Tyne and Wear in the northeast of England. It was a small mining village but from 1964 became the core of a planned New Town, with a population of over 67,000 in 2011. It was part of County Durham until 1974 when the metropolis of Tyne and Wear was created.

Washington was just one of a series of small mining villages hereabouts: the coal lay deep but had profitable seams and associated industry up to the mid'20th century. Then these declined, but in 1964 Washington was designated as a "New Town". It was laid out in some 15 tracts, some around existing villages and others greenfield, and the grand concept was that each would have its own employment and amenities. The reality is that this created a sprawl of samey burbs with no real centre to the place except Galleries Shopping Centre.

It could have dwindled into a dormitory town for Newcastle, but was boosted with the arrival of Nissan in 1984. British car manufacture suffered from strikes, uncompetitive pricing and unreliability, and the Japanese brand Datsun seized the budget and midprice UK market. It rebranded as Nissan and set up locally, reducing transport times and giving access to the European Economic Area or EU. The plant was built on the former site of RAF Usworth / Sunderland Airport, and management insisted that only a single union would be recognised. The site now employs some 7000. It made the Bluebird, Primera, Ameira and Micra, and now makes the Qashqai, Juke and Leaf (even exporting them to Japan, which drives on the left like Britain) and is beginning to make electric versions of these. Its output is about 500,000 cars per year.