There is something strange about Middlesbrough.
If you don’t know what a Middlesbrough is, it’s a town in the North of England, close to the coast. It’s an old industrial town that was basically gutted when the shipbuilding and iron mining closed down turning Ironopolis, the town that built the Sidney Harbour Bridge on the other side of the world, into a place more likely known for it’s poverty than it’s former glories.
It feels rough when you visit. Driving in, you pass the rows and rows of empty terrace houses where people used to live. The local shops feel run down and unloved. It’s all just a little bit tatty. First year students would scare each other talking about ending up in the bad part of town. In the summer you can see the banding in the sky where something from the chemical works across the river has been thrown into the sky. You might be forgiven for thinking that The Road To Hell by Chris Rea (who was born in Middlesbrough) is talking about the A19 heading eastwards into the darkness.
But here’s the thing. For a place with all these negatives, I choose to go back there, of my own free will, several times a year. We still host our Rejunion there even though, year by year, more and more of the attendees have scattered to the four ends of the country (and in some cases the world). I have enjoyed most of my post-18 New Year’s Eve’s in Middlesbrough, normally in someone’s house before trekking back through the terraces and parks to wherever I was staying that time. Every time I visit, there is always that urge to get out and walk the streets to take in the familiar sights. I’d even dare to say, that on a Summer’s eve just as the sunset lights up the old Victorian buildings around Linthrope Park, you could say the place is almost beautiful.
I have a lot of fond memories of Middlesbrough. It was the perfect university town for me – small and easy to walk across, with the range of shops a student away from home would need. It was just far enough from Leeds that my parent’s couldn’t just “drop in for a visit” but close enough that I could get away and back to family when it was all too much. It was a place where the students and the locals intermingled rather than one group only turning up to cause trouble on a Friday night. The friends I made in my three years there are the core of the people I still try to keep in contact with. And without all of us sharing the experience of living in it, I doubt we’d think anything of the small ex-industrial town on the river side.
So yeah, it’s been knocked down from the heights it used to occupy. It’s not the historical wonder of Edinburgh, the strangeness of Brighton or old time charm of Dundee. And yeah, we graduates might make the occasional remark about how “at least we’re not in Middlesbrough” when discussing other places. But by god, whenever the A1 is closed and I’m diverted down the A19 and “Teesside” appears on the sign, I can’t help the smile that comes to my face.
