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Chapter Two

Teesside: Infantilized Hercules

Railway Valhalla

Certain parts of the UK, according to the eminently sane, stable and sustainable south-eastern government, are a problem. Something has happened to them. They have become ‘dependent’. At some point they had industry, and then they lost it. How that happened is of no concern of us, but we note that many of them today are either unemployed, or employed by the ‘public sector’. Both are signs that these areas are parasitic. They are not standing on their own two feet. None of these places are in the South East England that the government (partly) represents, but we will find many of them in this book: Northern Ireland, South Wales, the industrial West Midlands. One of the places most often mentioned in this connection is the conurbation centred on the river Tees, in North East England, a smaller, younger, even less favoured cousin to the more northerly Tyne and Wear.

Teesside’s largest town, Middlesbrough, was thrown up with great speed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and was based around metalworking and shipbuilding, and later chemicals. These three industries were spread across older towns like Stockton or Redcar or even younger ones like Billingham, where their remnants can still be found. Labour couldn’t or wouldn’t reindustrialize the place, but they did expand various kinds of public-sector employment, which partly filled the gap. Accordingly Teesside is now often held up as the double-dip recession’s ‘worst-hit’ area, with its already fairly low levels of employment decimated by public-sector cuts; a report by credit rating pests Experian described it as the ‘least resilient’ place in the UK. Middlesbrough, when it was young and thrusting rather than an apparent industrial relic best left to rot, was described by William Gladstone as an ‘infant Hercules’. Now, David Cameron talks about ‘weaning’ this place from the teats of the state. Either way, the people who live here are treated as children. What is especially noticeable in Teesside, though, is that this ‘public sector’ has spent much of the last two decades trying to prop up, resuscitate, or bring into being a moribund or dead ‘private sector’ – regeneration companies and the sell-off of public assets to prompt property development, a new University to stimulate the ‘knowledge economy’, the building of art galleries to attract ‘creative capital’ and of shopping malls to inculcate consumerism. The public/private divide never looked so false as it does here, where the ‘public sector’ has long worked doggedly for the private, thus far without obvious reward.

The lack of reward may be partly due to a lack of infrastructure, which is ironic given the area’s primacy in the development of mechanized transport. As if to stress how low Middlesbrough is in the national pecking order, there isn’t a direct train here from the capital – it must surely be the largest town in the UK not to be connected to the Wen. But the route to it, roughly along the line of the river Tees itself, is notable. The East Coast Main Line from London to Aberdeen stops in Darlington Station, a great introduction to why this place is worth caring about. Darlington Station has a claim to being one of the most beautiful railway sheds on the entire network, a sombre, smoky and atmospheric place with a majestic series of curving vaults, a piece of Victorian high-tech whose beauty and emptiness are captivating. The reason for its grandeur is commemorative. It was designed like this in the late nineteenth century as a tribute to the fact that railways as currently understood were invented here, in the form of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Fading British Rail signs tell you that ‘The concept of public rail transport with locomotives originated in this town’, developing out of a coal transporting mechanism. The 1977 signs are now themselves period pieces. Their elegant modernist typography contrasts with vivid, scribbled drawings of navvies, various forms of antiquated locomotive, coal staithes and coaches. Something absolutely epochal happened here, and we’re told so, albeit very quietly. From there you hop onto the extremely basic, privatized, two-carriage Northern Rail trains eastwards; a rickety reminder that this invention is no longer valued in its country of origin. Under the last government there was talk of a Tees Valley ‘Metro’ to rectify this. It was to be an upgrade of the existing line with a couple of new stations, and unlike a real metro it hardly served residential areas, but any new public transport outside of London is rare enough to make it worthwhile. It was supposed to be ready by 2012, but was an early and unsurprising casualty of the cuts.

Strange emotional and aesthetic things were once invested in the railways; Middlesbrough Station’s hybrid of worn, laconic post-war terminal and jolly Falstaffian seventeenth-century palace is a case in point. The private transport system that replaced them has an equally irrational and grandiose presence in ’Boro. The first sights of the town are of busy, ornamental Victorian commerce, but soon you’re confronted by a red brick flyover – a rare and ghastly instance of a ‘contextual motorway’. It was ploughed through the town in the 1980s by the unaccountable Tees Valley Development Corporation, as part of the Enterprise Zone enforced the last time Teesside was in this much trouble, but given the change in architectural fashion it was not the expected sweeping, brutal concrete viaduct. Far from it. Where it meets the town it slices in half we find some neo-Georgian brick detail, and underneath are small buildings with neoclassical pediments. Inside one is what looks like a deeply insalubrious nightclub. It’s a lovely example of post-industrial dishonesty; a structure which of necessity sucks the life out of a town, presented as a cap-doffing tribute to it. ‘Enjoy Yourself’, reads the sign outside the club.

Iron Grid

That aside, Middlesbrough is a unique and curious thing. There are two attempts at building a town here, one of them north of the railway tracks, which fell on hard times and is now being ‘regenerated’, and which we will deal with presently; and the current town centre, to the south of it. It’s blank-slate urbanism, a near-grid pattern of parallel streets with main roads run through laterally, imposed on what is an unusually flat plain by the standards of northern England. Having spent much of my childhood in a railway town on the south coast built around the same time with exactly the same grid and much of the same architecture, I feel instantly at home here. The same shops, the same non-conformist churches (one of them, neo-Romanesque, housing The Money Shop). The same terraces in the centre and villas just outside. The same working men’s clubs and ’80s postmodernist shopping malls, all in the same red brick. The architecture might have tried to look traditional, but there’s nothing at all higgledy-piggledy or pretty about Middlesbrough – famously so. It is dour, but not without interest for that.

Partly that interest comes from the open grid that draws the eye to the dales beyond; partly from the subtle differences in cuisine. It is traditional for southern journalists to make a great deal in Teesside of the dish known as the ‘parmo’, consisting of a chicken escalope with layers of Parmesan cheese (or optional extras) slathered onto it, served with chips and salad. I won’t break ranks on this issue. Parmos are ubiquitous all along the Tees, from Billingham to Redcar, though they have not travelled as yet. I ended up eating a Lebanese parmo, which was delicious, and I ate every last morsel of it. It isn’t altogether surprising that there is a chain of restaurants here called ‘Fatso’s’. That said, few young people look obese, as such; rather, lots of people look very much like the sons and daughters of steelworkers, formidable and barrel-chested rather than glumly over-consuming. But the town’s culinary reputation fixes it as an emblem of post-industrial decline as much as the disused factories – cue horrified anthropological disquisitions on fat proles signing on and picking up a parmo en route to a day in front of Trisha. Combine that with the town’s elected mayor being a populist ex-policeman who invited NATO to bomb a local council estate and aims to create a ‘designer label city’; add the fact that the CCTV cameras often feature loudspeakers to yell at miscreants, and the situation seems even more alarming than it actually is.

Architecture critics dropping by for some Regeneration are prone to claiming there was nothing here to see before – (fill in building as appropriate), but now the poor sods have got some culture to lift their spirits. There is one moment here that is as great as anything anywhere, and that’s the juxtaposition of George Gordon Hoskins’s Northern Gothic Town Hall – the town’s second, a darkling presence on the skyline – with the Corporation House office block (now ‘Centre North East’), a precise and elegant Mies van der Rohe imitation. The soot-blackened belfry meets black smoked glass. Middlesbrough has plenty of very bland post-war office blocks offloaded here as indifferently as anywhere else, but this one takes hold of the place, centres it, ennobles it. Opposite the two black towers is a lower-rise civic complex, its expressed frame modelled in Brutalist-medieval steel and concrete, and you’re reminded that modernism is quite capable of adjusting itself to context without making any gestures at local materials, details, features and gob-ons, without being ingratiating or patronizing. What, though, if that context is a somewhat bleak, dour industrialism; what does it mean for those working in the call centre that occupies much of the tower? Later buildings in central Middlesbrough respond to its murky, autumnal context by either wishing they were elsewhere, or returning to the grimmest off-the-peg solutions. Three towers in the centre of the town make that especially clear: a Thistle Hotel and two blocks of student halls of residence, which are among the bleakest things I have ever seen – remarkable indeed, given their vaguely aspirational function. All three are clad with grey and black material, and have the most unbelievably tiny windows. The assumption is evidently that what you’re going to see outside is so awesomely miserable that it’s best to ignore it altogether. You could hardly get an hour of daylight through them (I tried to squint through, and could just about make out the cooling towers) but their saddest effect is not interior but exterior. They try their best to suck whatever life they can out of the surrounding area. ‘Luxury Student Apartments, available Now.’

The planned town’s extremities show two of its post-industrial strategies. To the south behind the student flats is Teesside University, under the frankly improbable banner ‘Britain’s Favourite University – Sunday Times’. Architecturally, there’s a squat, pugnacious Gothic clock tower, some rather chic pop-modern plastic-clad buildings from its earlier life as a polytechnic, and Blair-era constructions consisting of the usual set of cladding materials thrown at a frame. The University is what will take Middlesbrough into the future. A faint hint of patronage is strengthened by the proximity of the Dorman Museum, an ill-proportioned sandstone-domed museum to the local steel magnate. To the north, past a neo-Victorian mall and a small but incongruously well-designed and maintained 1980s council estate showing the influence of Ralph Erskine’s Byker Estate in Newcastle, the dereliction starts. A very large area of terraced housing has been subjected to the ‘Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders’, the New Labour scheme that entailed the compulsory purchase or expulsion and subsequent demolition of working-class areas and the building of new houses for a better class of clientele. There are acres of tinned-up terraces, but it’s done in a strange order, best known to the city authorities – one side of a street derelict, another not, so that residents have to walk through this every day. The council are taking absolutely no chances with the possibility that these empty houses could be seized by anyone not sufficiently aspirational – each metal door features a sign reading ‘This property has been cleared of all its contents including pipework and STAIRS’. The problem is, the Pathfinder scheme was cancelled. There will be no funding for replacements. This is the element of the strategy that was supposed to create a local property market. However, it’d be unfair to suggest that Middlesbrough’s goals have been solely material. In fact, they’ve been ‘thinking big’, in the parlance.

The first sign of this is right in the heart of town, just behind the Town Hall and Centre North East. That is, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or (lower-case) mima. The acronym looks towards MoMA, and the Institute itself looks towards the Continent, more specifically an architect more commonly found working in Amsterdam, Hamburg or Moscow than in Middlesbrough, the Dutch designer Erick van Egeraat. Egeraat is one of those architects whose speciality is making the simple look complicated – linear office blocks and towers with patterned slices, cuts and rashes all over them. He is a signature architect, that signature being a painterly slash, which is liberally applied to mima. It could have been absolutely anywhere, but then so could those miserly student flats; the significance of the ‘anywhere’ here is quite different, in that here ’Boro apparently has something with the high quality – or rather, with the star quality – that you’ll find in a fully fledged metropolis. It is little more than a box, dropped in the public green behind the Town Hall and the law courts, but there are two features that are wholly and indubitably ‘iconic’: one is a roof terrace, from which you can see exactly how strangely linear and rationalized the town’s plan is, and the other is a stairway that takes up a chunk of the façade, underneath a full-height glass wall, with that flamboyant upward slash to denote the architect’s hand. Inside, the light fittings and the handrails are even more obviously in the house style, constantly reminding you who did them – and fairly attractive they are too. The problem is the backside, never the part you’re supposed to look at in buildings like this; a distribution shed with thin E van E slices cut into it, lest you mistake it for being of the same ilk as the student flats. It’s not a building that is particularly likeable, largely for its shallowness and its lack of interest in the city around, not to mention its windowless, heartless gallery spaces, but it serves its function, one which is worth supporting – the scorn for provincial art galleries is largely dispensed by those who have never had their lives enriched or changed in one, at the age when such things are truly transformative. The exhibition showing when I was there, Bonnie Camplin’s ‘Railway Mania’, is an assemblage that shows far more engagement with Teesside than the building itself. The famous names, however, have better things to do, and so it is with the public art littered around outside. A great big Claes Oldenburg bottle sits outside, as a reference to famous local Captain Cook, apparently. Exalted art-historical provenance aside, it just looks like a lump of Regeneration kipple that could, again, have been created by anyone, anywhere. And that’s the central problem – do you try to make an in-received-opinion-unpleasant place like this look ‘better’ by making it more like other, ‘better’ places, or do you try to make it more like itself?

Temenos, Hubris, Thanatos

This question might seem idle, given that the result is dereliction and emptiness either way. Middlehaven, over the other side of the railway, is the site of one of similarly ‘signature’ architect Will Alsop’s many plans for post-industrial towns. It has a few things going for it – most obviously the becalmed remains of the old docks, and the magnificent, still-functioning Transporter Bridge. Posters and fences enclose a wasteland, although not much effort has been expended in keeping them up, revealing an absolutely huge, poisoned-looking grass expanse, broken up by two buildings and a public sculpture. Here you can see that Middlesbrough’s civic planners really couldn’t be faulted for lack of ambition – and this isn’t intended as a jibe, as so many cities in the UK could be faulted for exactly that. Others have stumbled through their relentless mediocrity; here, the problems resulted from an attempt to transcend mediocrity, to make the town into something completely unique. Given the place’s poor prospects – no investment in industry forthcoming, no likelihood of the new financial services economy creating an enclave here, no lawyers, no underwriters, no soon-to-be-CEOs – everything was staked on the ‘creative class’, that numinous entity described by the American theorist Richard Florida, who observes (accurately) that wherever ‘creative’ workers settle, be they bohemians or IT professionals, large sums of capital usually follow; but he implies (surely inaccurately) that anyone and anywhere can do it. It’s easy to ridicule it all, and the absurdism of the scheme wilfully courts derision. But in the absence of a central government with an industrial policy, what other choice did the city have?

The wager was that if ’Boro could do something absolutely spectacular on this post-industrial site – if Alsop, invited architects like FAT and invited artists like Anish Kapoor were given their head – then not only might the ‘creatives’ come, but it might even become a tourist destination. The renders in front of the wastes show a bouncy, bumptious, brightly coloured and brilliantly colourful Super Mario World. Some of the blocks on the hoarding are giant pink and yellow blobs, other more linear blocks dressed up with Swiss-cheese façades protrude on jetties out into the dock. There’s an office block ‘nicknamed’ (by who exactly?) ‘Marge Simpson’s Hair’. A cinema shaped like a Rubik’s Cube. Blocks intended to resemble Prada skirts. A ‘digital museum’ shaped like a Space Invader. Never mind a Claes Oldenburg sculpture, here we have an entire Pop Art District. It’s perhaps the most outrageous and demented of all the boom’s schemes, and like the boom itself, it was based essentially on gambling – not just the central gamble of the whole neoliberal project, or even the gamble of thinking Middlehaven itself could take it, but the fact that it was going to be centred on a ‘super-casino’. All this blather, all these computer-generated images, all these blaring hoardings, all of it contrasts bitterly with what is in front of your nose. The ‘public sector’ (which, let’s remember, is apparently hostile to the ‘private sector’), in the form of quango Tees Valley Regeneration, levelled the area for, so far, very little. There’s a completely nondescript out-of-town business park-style office block. There’s an optimistic temporary property suite designed as an aptly upturned lime green box, and one completed new building – Middlesbrough College, by Hickton Madely at Archial. This is a huge building, and aside from the Bridge it dominates Middlehaven, its curving mass covered in a silver and yellow cladding, with small windows punched into it at random. Round the back, it’s a huge white shed, as if we wouldn’t be looking. Far away is the only other building on the site – the Docks’ Clock Tower, attributed to William Morris’s collaborator Philip Webb – tall, gaunt and profoundly haunting in this dreamlike, spacious and sinister context. Between the patches of dereliction is landscaping in the colours of Middlesbrough FC and appropriately outsized benches with random globules of paint all over them, carrying at least some of the renders’ cartoonish promise. They connect the area to the football stadium, and to another element of this ambitious scheme – Anish Kapoor’s airy ‘Temenos’.

This steel sculpture, made to stand up by celebrity engineer Cecil Balmond of Arup, launched Kapoor and Balmond’s unexpected partnership as monumental sculptors to late British neoliberalism, but it is less embarrassing than their hot pink ArcelorMittalOrbit. A stretched tendon-trumpet, a Constructivist colon, it is typically both industrial and biomorphic, with the tautness between its opposed sides evidently a ‘reference’ to the Transporter Bridge nearby, still the most famous structure on Teesside. ‘Creativity’ might make reference to ‘industry’, but you still expect the former to be superior in the matter of aesthetics. But look around here at inner Middlesbrough’s surviving industrial structures – the Bridge itself, its hard-Constructivist mesh belying a rare delicacy and lightness, so laconic in its use of metal that it almost seems to fade away entirely in the middle, a kinetic sculpture that carries cars and pedestrians out of the way of the (absent) ships. Look at the shipbuilding cranes – a gantry crane of simplicity and power, another smaller crane full of crunching tension. Look also at the curvaceous maw of the distant cooling towers in Billingham, or the intertwined tentacles of the nearby chemical refineries. Cheat, and walk a mile up the road to the raw mechanical force of the Tees Newport Bridge. Look, really look at these objects, and then try to claim with a straight face that Kapoor and Balmond are better artists than these anonymous engineers. It might be the legible sense of need and utility that made the grunts of Dorman Long capable of such things. It’s hard to conjure that purposefulness, that straining of sinew, out of property development, but, well, Alsop had a go.

The other four of the Five Giants’ planned by Kapoor and Balmond might be a different matter, in the event that they are built. Now it’s easy to imagine Teesside’s south-eastern economic tutors ticking the place off for all this exorbitance, for what is surely a series of monumental follies. But with all this (private-sector, don’t forget) industry falling into disuse, what else could revive the area than the property market, the country’s biggest money-spinner? Middlehaven, unlike the thuggish Pathfinder schemes (but with the same end in sight), tries to kick off property speculation by appealing to art, heritage and tourism. If it won’t work as a money-making scheme – and the area’s desuetude rather suggests it won’t – it’s not down to political noncomformism, to the North refusing to follow the lead of the South into the new immaterial world of property and services. The place was originally commissioned and built by a regeneration quango, but the property collapse meant its takeover by the directly governmental Homes and Communities Agency and Middlesbrough Council. In late 2011, one new structure is nearly complete – ‘Community in a Cube’, by Essex-via-Merseyside postmodernists FAT, an ostensibly simple apartment block which reveals itself upon close inspection to have little Dutch-gabled houses growing out the top of it. This may well be the only part of the plan in Alsop’s original, consumerist-surrealistic form, to actually get built.

Middlehaven is eerie and maddening, but it is not frightening. That honour is reserved for the truly alarming redevelopment of St Hilda’s, slightly further along the river, just past the Transporter Bridge. This would be a natural place for development, to try and rectify the fact that unlike Newcastle and Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Stockton do not cluster around their city-emblem bridges, but industry does, or did, instead. So similarly, a large area is being cleared, but here the process of erasure is even more partial, the landscape even more scarred. There are scattered industrial sheds, stumps of low-rise council housing (mostly boarded up and cleared), and the lonely 1840s Old Town Hall, amongst huge, yawning open scrubland, looking out towards the cooling towers. Three very angry-looking men with shaved heads and tattoos are walking purposefully through a place where nobody lives, which isn’t reassuring. Short of doubling for a post-apocalyptic film set, it’s hard to see what exactly this place is becoming, what exactly is being done here, what the purpose is of the clearance of its population. Then you find out, in the form of a sign that says ‘BOHO ZONE’, which it transpires is the name of a new neomodernist building to house arts organizations. It’s the veritable front line of urban cool, and it’s right next to the new police station.

Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron

Teesside was the home of Brunner Mond, a large chemical concern that should be familiar to the millions who have read Brave New World. Aldous Huxley was inspired by a visit to Billingham, a 1920s New Town just outside Stockton-on-Tees and about ten minutes on the train from Middlesbrough; what he saw in their vast and advanced factory complex was so technically fascinating, and crucially so clean, so unusually sterile, that it contained the portents of a future industrial society. Not long after he was writing, Brunner Mond became Imperial Chemical Industries, a huge conglomerate, the largest in Britain – the ICI logo is surely instantly recognizable to anyone born here before 1990. The names of their products are equally nostalgia-inducing. Perspex, Dulux paint, Terylene, Crimplene. The conquest of nature, the transformation of oil or fabric into brightly coloured, mutable and improbable new substances, each given a catchy name. ICI died quietly in the 2000s, a late casualty of deindustrialization, parcelled out between different buyers, alternately bought up and closed down, but its remnants are in many cases still going, in facilities along the Tees from Billingham to Wilton. They are acknowledged, in an oddly back-handed way, in an artwork by Peter Freeman in the centre of Middlesbrough, called ‘Spectra-txt’ – a steel column with twinkling lights that can be controlled by text message. It is, apparently, inspired by Blade Runner, as the story goes that Ridley Scott himself was inspired to create his twenty-first-century Los Angeles by the sight of the Wilton skyline – dozens of pipes and towers, neon-lit and topped by flares. That’s one local context which neither Alsop nor Egeraat cottoned on to.

Billingham itself is instantly recognizable by its skyline of concrete cooling towers, many of them still belching away – but the town itself is memorable, in its severely depressed way. It’s a private-sector New Town sponsored by a benevolent corporation, which should make clear how the state and the corporation were hardly at odds in the Keynesian settlement; but here, unlike at Middlehaven, we find not the public sector doing the work and spending the money that elsewhere private capital would pick up, but the reverse – a private company helping to create social housing and a local centre. Like all company towns, the result is a little uncanny, with that persistent hint of not-right. The station itself is basic in the extreme, a concrete shelter and bridge, leading to small houses and bungalows. After a little while, though, you find the planned town centre, created to accommodate ICI’s post-war expansion. Designed by local architects Elder, Lester & Partners, it is the space age coated in pigeon shit. The buildings are often fabulous, after you squint away the layers of filth. A brave new world all of its own, trying to ignore Huxley’s patrician concerns about a sterile and functional modernity.