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,
