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.
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