A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley

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, but it is less embarrassing than their hot pink ArcelorMittalOrbit. A stretched tendon-trumpet, a Constructivist colon, it is typically both industrial and biomorphic, with the tautness between its opposed sides evidently a ‘reference’ to the Transporter Bridge nearby, still the most famous structure on Teesside. ‘Creativity’ might make reference to ‘industry’, but 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