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
