by Tim Moore
Contaminated with aimless depression, I went out and trudged back up the street, past a church that was now home to a Money Shop pawnbroker’s. Outside it stood a map of the city, which I perused for some time, dully transfixed by annotations that seemed designed to leach the life-force from all who passed. ‘Middlesbrough Bus Station is a purpose-built facility providing a high-quality bus interchange with modern information systems.’ I wondered if it was possible to construct a less captivating sentence. I’m still wondering now. In any case, I felt abruptly compelled to get back to Craig and drive.
Middlesbrough’s suburbs proved soothingly suburban. No creepy, lobotomised Bransholmes here: just bland and blameless streets of inter-war semis, with the odd gaudy sheaf of pampas grass springing out above a neatly trimmed front hedge. Only the occasional glimpse of some distant clutch of silvered, smoking organ-pipes reminded me this was supposed to be the worst place to live in all the land. Pink-slippered housewives exchanged cheery words as they pushed their wheelie bins out onto the pavement for collection. A hale pensioner creosoted his fence. There was a touching preponderance of aged British cars, though one love still dare not speak its name: all these streets of pampered old Cavaliers and Rovers, and not a single Austin Maestro. I drove with one hand poised over the horn stalk, ready to give a reedy little toot of greeting, but it was not to be. This was Craig’s natural habitat, and he was condemned to roam it alone, the last of his kind.
Middlesbrough’s proudest civic emblem is 225 feet high and bright blue, but it took a lot of finding. In the end I hit the river and followed it downstream as closely as I could, weaving through ever more wasted post-industrial wastelands. And suddenly, in a celestial pool of late sun, there it was, a soaring lattice of struts and crossbeams, the ultimate tribute to Meccano engineering: the Tees Transporter Bridge.
I parked up and walked towards the little visitors’ centre that cowered beneath one of the bridge’s spindly legs. From afar it had looked frail and temporary, the scaffolding for a bigger bridge rather than one in its own right, knocked up out of floodlight gantries and bits of old oil rig. Up close it was fearsome, though my awe subsided rather when I watched it in action. In contradiction of my excitable and – let’s be honest – witlessly unscientific imaginings, the structure’s giddying height did not define the crossing experience. A modest yellow gondola, just big enough for half a dozen cars, was attached to cables slung from the top beam, and thereby hauled languidly across the water at a height of about four feet. The lofty clearance, of course, was down to what went up the river, not across it. The bridge was opened in 1910, when the ships were tall and the Tees was full of them. In the half-century before that, Middlesbrough had grown into the world’s iron and steel capital from nothing – literally nothing. The settlement of that name was a four-cottaged hamlet in 1830, when an extension of the Stockton and Darlington line – the world’s first railway – improbably hauled it into the vanguard of the Steam Age. A dock was swiftly built, and Middlesbrough became a serious player in the coal business, taking in the black stuff from the north-eastern coalfields and shipping it down south. Just as this trade peaked, the serendipitous discovery of huge local ironstone deposits sparked an extraordinary iron rush. Foundries and metalworks popped up all along the river banks and into the fields behind them, attracting job-seeking families from all over the north of England. In 1862, Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, paid personal tribute to a town whose population had more than trebled over the previous decade. ‘This remarkable place,’ he portentously announced to the gathered locals, ‘the youngest child of England’s enterprise, is an infant, but if an infant, an infant Hercules.’ Suitably inspired, the town adopted the stirring civic slogan Erimus – in Latin, We Will Be.
Middlesbrough reeled that future in with the manic haste of Norman Wisdom rehearsing the tablecloth trick. Trainloads of migrant workers arrived from right across Britain and Europe. The town became known as Ironopolis, and the Tees as the Steel River. Railways from Italy to India were laid with the fruit of its furnaces. Still the population doubled every few years, a rate of sustained urban growth never matched in Britain before or since. By the time the Transporter Bridge opened, the settlement that a dozen farmers had called home just a couple of generations before was a smoky, clanging city of 120,000. Amongst their number was Arthur Darwin, who made a posthumous name for himself by falling off the top of the bridge during the opening ceremony. Almost a century later his family was back in the news, courtesy of great-grandson John and a canoe-centred life-insurance fraud.
The town hit its industrial pinnacle in 1932 with the opening of the majestic Sydney Harbour Bridge, designed by local engineers and built from Teesside iron. A few years back I walked across its hefty span, and stopped halfway to survey one of the world’s most becoming prospects. Standing with my elbows on the handrail, those glittering yacht-speckled waters laid out before me, I spotted the legend ‘Dorman Long, Middlesbrough’ stamped into a girder, and found myself abruptly filled with heart-swelling, eye-moistening pride: for the momentous achievement that was the British Empire, for the faraway men whose toil and genius had brought this mighty, fearless structure to life, for the fact that I could call these men my forefathers. It was all I could do not to throw back my arms and burst into patriotic song, though for the sake of my family and Sydney’s police frogmen I’m glad I didn’t.
The Transporter Bridge visitors’ centre traced the city’s subsequent decline, through a table that highlighted a steady dwindling in traffic, both down the river and over it. It seemed sadly apt that other than guest appearances in Billy Elliot and Auf Wiedersehen Pet, the only memorable incident in the bridge’s recent history occurred in 1974, when Terry ‘And June’ Scott got confused driving home from a bear-baiting workshop, and drove his Jaguar straight off the end of the boarding platform. ‘Luckily Scott’s car landed in the safety netting,’ explained a caption in the visitors’ centre, whilst maintaining a diplomatic silence with regard to Terry’s earlier whereabouts, perhaps because I just made them up.
I wandered out into an afternoon that was now bright but still bitter, and for half an hour drove around St Hilda’s. This was the heart of old Middlesbrough, a place where heavy industry lived cheek by sooty jowl with churches, where the ironmakers’ mansions were shoehorned in between streets of workers’ cottages. A mid-Victorian print in the visitors’ centre had shown a genteel market place that could have come straight off the Quality Street tin, ringed with bow-fronted haberdasheries and populated with promenading couples in extravagant headwear.
‘Middlesbrough is a typical town in which to study the lives of those engaged in the making of iron, for it has come into existence for that purpose and for nothing else.’ So wrote Lady Florence Bell, wife of a prominent ironmaster, in a period account of her city. It wasn’t intended as a dire warning, but now began to feel like one, particularly as she’d then gone on to refer to the local foundries as ‘a Titanic industry’. Its wrecks lay all around. Eroded stubs of black-bricked factory wall cast long shadows over street after street of ransacked, rubbish-strewn nothing. It had been evocatively named in honour of the Roman god of fire, but the furnaces along Vulcan Street had long gone cold. ‘There is nothing here to appeal to a sense of art and beauty,’ continued Lady Flo, ‘yet imagination can be stirred – must be stirred – by the hardy, strenuous life of the north, the seething vitality of enterprise with which this town began.’ I drove on through the un-seething, non-vital anti-enterprise with which it ended.
Travelling from Bolton to Manchester in 1933, J.B. Priestley was awed by the clamorous, filthy compaction of slums and factories he passed through. ‘The ugliness is so complete it is almost exhilarating,’ he wrote. ‘It challenges you to live there.’ I could imagine walking about St Hilda’s that year, or at any time in the hundred years before, and feeling the same grubby wonderment. Now the whole place was a silent ruin. St Hilda’s is dead in all but name; in fact, dead even in th
at – the first church thus called had been built here in AD 686, and the last demolished in 1969. The houses that replaced it are already being knocked down.
As I had just learnt, there were once a hundred public houses in St Hilda’s. At length I found the solitary survivor, the Captain Cook, opened in 1840, a great scabby mansion of a pub surrounded by defunct engineering works and a partly demolished, wholly abandoned post-war council estate. From a primary school to a car park, much in Middlesbrough is named in honour of its most famous son, though James Cook was actually born in a village a few miles south of a town that didn’t then exist, and wouldn’t until eighty years after he was battered to death on a Hawaiian beach. The pub – Middlesbrough’s oldest – succumbed in belated sympathy six months after I passed. ‘The lads who drink here keep saying, “Where are we going to go now?”’ the landlady told the local paper on the day she pulled her last pint. ‘But there’s nothing round here any more. Nothing.’ From ‘We Will Be’ to ‘Well, We Were’.
I drove until the road ran out, or more accurately until it was blocked by two young men of unpromising appearance, doing something under the bonnet of a battered Fiat Punto without any numberplates. Ahead lay a straggly void that had been the docks, huge empty basins surrounded by huge empty wastelands. The lofty old four-faced clock tower was still here, its dockside dial blank, as it had been since a Victorian boss removed it to stop his workshy stevedores clock-watching. Across the water stood a lonely jewel in the mud: the silvery Riverside Stadium, home of Middlesbrough FC. Football grounds are reliably huge, yet this one seemed dwarfed by the brownfield dishevelment around it. It was built in the mid 1990s, with the club confident that all manner of glamorous new leisure and entertainment facilities would swiftly follow in its wake. When they didn’t, or so I’d read, the directors had been reduced to wooing prospective continental signings with a tour of the picturesque and not especially nearby market town of Yarm, encouraging them to take it for downtown Middlesbrough. One player supposedly thus deluded was Brazilian star Emerson, whose wife would later deliver her damning revenge.
The Riverside was financed through the generosity of club chairman Steve Gibson, a local bulk-liquids-transporter made good. They’ll probably be naming car parks after him in decades to come. But surveying Gibson’s gleaming endowment and the sprawling, post-industrial mess in which it lay marooned, I couldn’t stop thinking of the tireless and more straightforwardly edifying Victorian philanthropy described in the Transporter Bridge visitors’ centre. Every public building in old Middlesbrough had it seemed been financed through donations from ironmasters and shipping merchants. Charity was almost a competitive sport, and one they were still playing beyond the grave: bereaved relatives smiled wanly as wills revealed that the family pile was to become a lunatic asylum or sanatorium. Prussian-born Henry Bolckow, Middlesbrough’s premier industrialist and its inaugural mayor, indulged the citizenry like no other: he built the first proper school, the first proper hospital, and the first proper city park, named in memory of his fellow German, Prince Albert. Bolckow died without an heir, and bequeathed the vast bulk of his fortune to sundry charitable concerns. Within thirty years the magnificent ancestral home was a ruin.
Back then, do-gooders did good. Now they build football stadiums, and pay ungrateful Brazilians £80,000 a week to play in them. I dare say we’ve only got ourselves to blame.
I about-turned through the puddled potholes, and drove back to the highest point in St Hilda’s, a low hill crowned by the barricaded relics of Middlesbrough’s first town hall. The ox-blood rendering and Portland stone arches were crumbling and idly spray-tagged; the semi-tiled roof supported a clock tower whose four faces each told a different version of the wrong time. I steered Craig over a stretch of weeded pavement and eased up to the steps where Henry Bolckow, in contemporary portraits a Gordon Brown with big sidies, first stood in his chains of office. It seemed almost unkind to imagine confronting Henry with the present panorama. As a captain of industry – in fact more of a rear admiral – he would surely at least have approved of the Transporter Bridge. ‘A thrill to see from anywhere’, in the words of architecture’s Mr History, Nikolaus Pevsner, who clearly hadn’t looked at it from up here. Nor indeed since 1983, when he died. Today, and from on high, the bridge was doing its best to impersonate the girder-roofed structure left alone on the Hiroshima skyline on that terrible dawn in 1945. I was reminded that at the height of the Cold War, Middlesbrough retained sufficient economic heft to rank number two on the Soviets’ UK nuclear hit-list.
That morning I’d read a newspaper report on the closure of the Redcar steelworks. ‘It’s horrible,’ said one quoted local. ‘This place is on the bones of its arse as it is.’ It was a strangely compelling phrase, and one that now sprang unhappily to mind. Here I was in Middlesbrough’s arse, and all around me lay the bones of that arse. Even those would soon be gone. The residential crescent in front of the town hall was being stolen faster than it could be demolished: the gutters and drainpipes had vanished, most of the roof tiles, even window frames and the odd wall. One of the few remaining front doors bore the daubed legend, Leave us alone. I tugged at Craig’s heavy wheel and headed away. It was a journey that demanded a sombre, elegiac soundtrack, almost certainly Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. Instead I found myself obliged to recall the happier times in our nation’s proud history – specifically 1981, when Buck’s Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest.
The sun had tucked itself up in fat grey clouds by the time I drove past Ayresome Park, formerly the home of Middlesbrough FC, now an insipid Bovis-pattern estate with streets called The Turnstile and The Midfield. Surrounding it was a grid of narrow cobbled streets flanked by tiny red-brick terraced houses – the kind of streets that a patronising London-based tosspot finds it impossible to drive down without humming the old Hovis ad, even if he’s in a car that’s calling the kettle black. At the end of one, a grand pair of gates stood guard over a sweep of greenery and skeletal wintry trees. I parked up and walked into Albert Park, past a monumental sundial inevitably donated by H.W.F. Bolckow. It was marked up to display the time in Middlesbrough, Melbourne and New York; I couldn’t stop myself recalling the global reach of Trotter’s Independent Trading Company, as advertised on the side of Del Boy’s Reliant Robin.
The park’s large open spaces were lightly peopled with the hardy regulars you might expect to find in such a place on a December afternoon: lone dog-walkers, red-faced and smoking, plus the odd huddle of hoodies up to things I didn’t wish to investigate. At length, I came across a small bust of the hugely bearded, late-model Bolckow, surveying his creation through the bars of a vandal-proof cage. Henry was a modest man, who spurned all the many offers to have institutions he’d paid for named in his honour. Here, the trumpet he had been so reluctant to blow in life was yanked from his cold, dead hands and huffed into most forcefully. MIDDLESBROUGH’S FIRST MAYOR AND FIRST REPRESENTATIVE IN PARLIAMENT, read the weathered inscription beneath, CHIEF FOUNDER OF ITS INDUSTRIES AND PIONEER OF ITS EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS AND CHARITABLE MOVEMENTS. Yet Henry’s head and frock-coated shoulders were now hidden away and neglected, inestimably less conspicuous than the life-size bronze that dominated the park’s most prominent stretch of grass. I believe Brian Clough built the Transporter Bridge with his bare hands, and personally taught every steel-worker on Teesside how to read, though it’s possible he might just have scored a few goals for Middlesbrough Football Club before moving on to a career in quotable rudeness. Underneath all Henry’s facial hair I saw a look that said: I just don’t know why I bothered.
Back at the gates I spotted an evidently recent information panel, detailing in its first paragraph how Henry Bolckow announced his intention to lay out Albert Park at a Temperance Society gala. I was trying to picture a more definitively Victorian moment when a local voice piped up right behind me. ‘There’s sixteen mystiques on that sign, man. Sixteen! It’s a tootle bloody disgrease. These fork want to go back to school.’ I turned to see a
little old man in a splendid astrakhan hat and coat of matching trim, who now launched unbidden into an evidently well-rehearsed rundown of the panel’s grammatical errors.
As a rule, the citizens of Middlesbrough are a placid bunch. When a local TV crew went out on the streets to record reactions to the Location survey, they encountered widespread indifference to the town’s humiliating denigration as the very worst in the land. All one could muster in its defence was that ‘a pint here costs 50p less than it does in London’. Even the local MP did no better than point out that Middlesbrough was ‘near some good countryside, and less than fifty miles from York’. No, it’s said that if you want to rile someone round these parts, there are only two sure-fire ways to do it: spell Middlesbrough with two o’s, or Teesside with one s. By the time the old man reached the park sign’s final outrage against orthography – a superfluous use of capitals in Sun Dial – I could very easily believe it. For good measure he then progressed eagerly into a withering character assassination of his own city.
