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