On Saturday, Moorside library in central Newcastle will close its doors; another four city libraries will stop receiving any council funding, and will be transferred into the hands of volunteers. A note on the Newcastle Libraries website states simply: "On Saturday 29 June we will be closing the following libraries as part of the £100m we have been forced to save by 2016."

Newcastle City Pool has already closed to the public and is only running club training sessions for a few final weeks, before shutting definitively at the end of July. Overseeing one of the final training sessions at the pool, which has produced three Olympians, city of Newcastle swimming club head coach, Louise Graham, has been wondering what to do with the dozens of multi-coloured flags that decorate the walls, celebrating all the international appearances of former club members.

"Nine-year-olds see those flags and are inspired. That inspiration and that history is going to be in a cupboard somewhere," she said. "It is just desperately sad."

Nick Forbes, the Labour leader of Newcastle city council is despondent at the imminent closures, but believes that in a few years time, the ultimate scale of the cuts the council is likely to be obliged to introduce across all departments, will make library and pool closures pale into insignificance.

"I'm devastated by it. Libraries are part of the move towards civilised society. They are a sense that our collective knowledge is available to all in a publicly accessible space. The idea that we have to close them is just appalling – but the prospect of removing people from residential care is even worse," he said, in an interview at Newcastle city council headquarters.

"These are the invidious decisions that my colleagues and I are faced with and that every council in the country is going to have to grapple with over the next few years."

He described the local government budget reduction of 10% for 2015-16 announced by the chancellor George Osborne in the spending review, as "slightly worse than our worst case scenario", although he was still waiting for a detailed breakdown of funding allocations for Newcastle. He said the new cuts were likely to force the council into making very significant cuts to the number of Sure Start centres in the city (which have currently been untouched), into rationing the provision of council-funded home care to only the most profoundly vulnerable elderly and disabled residents and into radically reducing the amount spent on cleaning up rubbish and graffiti.

"The council will have lost somewhere between 55% and 60% of its government income over a six year period, and the organisation can't continue in that way," he said. Of the £100m he estimates the council will be cutting between 2013 and 2016, approximately half of that figure reflects rising cost pressures within the city (largely the result of the ageing population requiring more, expensive care), and the other half is the result of central government cuts to the city's budget.

"We have this awful situation of seriously increasing demand on the one hand and decreasing resources on the other," he said.

Newcastle council has been arguing since the beginning of the year that there is a political bias to the way central government carves up cuts to local authorities, providing data analysis suggesting that the poorest areas of the country are taking the brunt of the cuts.

The city is also more affected by public sector cuts than most southern councils, because it has a higher than average proportion of people employed in the public sector (more than a third of the working age population). Unemployment has risen by 3.5% to 10.1% since 2008, one of the highest rates in the country, making the city more vulnerable to welfare cuts.

Forbes was unconvinced by the chancellor's argument that "five new jobs have been created for every job cut in the public sector", remarking: "That's just not borne out in Newcastle, there just aren't the private sector jobs." He was also uncertain that the chancellor's announcement of an "upfront work search" scheme, which will require the unemployed to make weekly visits to jobcentres, would improve employment rates.

"In my experience people are visiting jobcentres on a daily basis looking for jobs. It is all very well saying people should come weekly, but if there are no jobs for people to find, then it's a wasted visit," he said.

In the past year, Newcastle has attracted national attention for proposing a 100% cut to the city's £1.2m arts budget – a decision which has subsequently been modified, so that the city's cultural institutions are now merely grappling with a 50% cut. Forbes regrets the level of cuts, but argues that they illustrate the difficult choices local councils are being forced to make as they calculate how to cope with ongoing funding reductions.

"No-one questions the value of the arts to our society and culture, particularly to the economy and society. The question is, in a time of austerity and swingeing budget cuts, how do you pay for it? The problem was that arts and culture always had to compete in the council's revenue budget against other vital services, everything from bin collections, and libraries and swimming pools to adult social care and children's social care."

Since 2010, the council has made considerable savings. It will have cut 22% of its staff headcount by 2016; 1,320 full-time posts, of which 695 have already been cut, including road sweepers, park keepers and youth workers. The council's support services have been cut by 50%, partly by integrating the customer services systems for different council departments. Further cost-saving integration of back-office and IT services between the council and the city's universities is planned.

Officials say they have done a lot to try to ensure that the council – in the favoured local government jargon – has made "efficiency savings" and "works smarter", they have tried to find "creative solutions". They have managed to save many of the 10 libraries originally scheduled for closure by finding community groups ready to take them over. But now they believe further rationalisation and barely perceptible "salami slicing" is no longer possible.

"We are getting to the point now where it is difficult to maintain the services people expect," Forbes said. There was a city-wide consultation earlier this year about the budget proposals for the next three years. "We thought it was important to have a very honest discussion with the city about what the council was going to be able to do in the future, and it was inevitably a lot less, given that we faced cuts and cost pressures amounting to more than a third of our flexible revenue budget."

There has already been anger locally at the council's decision to switch to fortnightly bin collection, and to charge an annual £20 levy for the removal of garden waste. Forbes said his email inbox this week was full of complaints about long grass, the result of cuts to the city's environment budget. By 2016 he expects to make more dramatic cuts to the teams charged with removing fly-tipped rubbish and cleaning the city's streets.

More significantly, Forbes believes that Sure Start services will have to be reduced from the current 18 centres, to a "rump service", catering only for the city's five most deprived areas. "That will set back our work on tackling inequality by generations," Forbes said.

Newcastle also proposes to ration the amount of support it gives to the elderly and the disabled so that those classified with "substantial" needs will no longer be eligible for state support, and only those with "critical" needs will be looked after by the council; similar decisions have already been taken by other councils. Forbes did not think that the £3bn for social care announced by the chancellor would be enough to allow the council to reconsider.

Although officials will continue to search for other ways of making the cuts, Forbes believes that the prospect of avoiding big reductions in these services is slim. He rejects the accusation, which he has repeatedly faced this year, that his forecasts are deliberately alarmist.

"People accused me of painting the most alarming scenarios possible for political purposes but actually we have been over optimistic in our assessment of what the government was going to cut, rather than pessimistic," he said.

It is a dispiriting time to be a council leader responsible for implementing cuts, Forbes said. "The services that the council provides offer a lifeline of support to the people who most need them, the kind of help that transforms people's lives from a path of poverty to one of opportunity, and it breaks my heart to see the loss of opportunity that the destruction of these public services represents."

Catherine McKinnell, Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne North, and shadow Treasury Secretary said that the impact was only beginning to be felt by constituents. "Up until now, most of it has been announcements that people have had to digest, and the reality hasn't bitten. But it is about to get a lot more difficult," she said. "It is a deeply concerning picture for the city."

At Newcastle City Pool, Graham says she feels sorry for the younger generation of swimmers. "For the juniors who are coming through, showing that potential, the future is looking a little bit bleak. We really don't know what the future is.

"I was involved in the Olympics last year, and the buzz that came from that was amazing … the idea of inspiring a generation. I came back from that, and within a few weeks we knew that this was closing. These kids do face a massive hurdle.

"Some of them dream big, but some of them won't have the opportunity to carry it through like other generations have."