A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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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