BRIDGE OF SIZE

Despite the mildness of the afternoon, the February air was full of rain, which fell from a dispirited sky and turned the streets into mirrors, reflecting the sodium lamps, street signs and the soles of my shoes. I drifted down from the centre of Middlesbrough, past the vaudeville jollity of the redstone Empire Theatre and the gothic overstatement of the Town Hall. The latter building was dwarfed by a gargantuan new office block comprising dozens of identical storeys and doubtless containing hundreds of identical bureaucrats. The street lights carried gaudy blue and yellow banners proclaiming Middlesbrough as a tourist attraction, but there were precious few tourists on this damp and dismal day. I avoided the shopping centre, wisely so, for the Cleveland shopping arcade is truly awful, its exterior vast swathes of unbroken tile and brick, in the nature of such places, urban planners' best designs, without a thought for aesthetics or how they might blend in with the surrounding shops and offices.

I discovered the station, ex-North Eastern Railway, as the adjacent Albert bridge proudly displayed along the length of its wrought iron parapet. The station tended towards the Gothic, too. It was designed by William Peachey in 1877, as a monument to the incredible expansion of Middlesbrough, from an agricultural village in 1830 to the ironstone and salt capital of England a mere forty years later. The grandiose station roof was destroyed by an air raid in 1940 and demolished in the 1960's. A plaque on the station wall informed me that some 'sensitive' modifications had been carried out at that time. Sensitive in the same way as a sledgehammer is sensitive. Awful cubed concrete pillars now support the plainest possible canopies on both platforms. By some miracle, some of the original NER wrought iron columns and ornate support brackets have been saved at the southern end of each platform. The main concourse ceiling was a painted timber arch, and very fine, and the subway, supported by low stone 't' shaped pillars with white glazed tiles, was most unusual and gratifying, despite being awash with litter.

The Royal Exchange building, from its picture a splendid piece of Victoriana, had been swept away to make way for a flyover, which cut right through the middle of the town. In its place was a piazza which looked barren and windswept, apart from the statue of Henry Bolckow, the ironmaster and one time Mayor and a mock-Grecian building, the Royal Exchange pub, that was so vulgar and tasteless I thought someone had built it from a design on a bubble-gum wrapper.

I headed towards the river Tees. The commercial centre made way to the industrial and the buildings became ever more dilapidated. A crane repair warehouse, a storage facility for wooden cable reels, a coach hirer's depot, a vehicle breaker’s yard, and so on. The transporter bridge was in view all the time, but my sense of wonderment when I finally saw it in full was undiminished. The gloom of the day made it look towering, dramatic against the grey sky. This is a simply magnificent piece of engineering. It is the largest bridge of its type in the world. It is 850 feet long and 225 feet high at its highest point. It is 580 feet between the two towers. The two cables that wind the bridge platform across the river are 545 and 227 metres long respectively. Both cable ends are connected to a giant winch in the winding house alongside. You can peer through the dirty window of the winding house and watch the winding gear doing its work at a surprisingly high speed. It is a salutary experience watching cables only as thick as a couple of fingers winding and unwinding a platform that can carry 200 people or a dozen or so cars. The bridge was designed by the famous Sir William Arrol of Glasgow and built by the Cleveland Bridge Company. It was opened by HRH Prince Arthur of Connaught on 17 October 1911.

I left the bridge reluctantly and continued my stroll along Vernon Street. There I espied a solitary wall, high, mellow and handsome, with several elongasted portholes, through which a profile of the bridge could clearly be seen. I found out that this wall had marked the southern boundary of the Cleveland Iron works of Bolckow Vaughan. A plaque on the wall informed me that the site had occupied six acres alongside the Tees, and, in 1851, new blast furnaces had smelted enough Cleveland ironstone to bring Middlesbrough world renown as a great industrial town.

The surrounding area was by now quite impoverished, scrap cars lining the pavement in several places. At the end of Vernon Road stood a solitary old clock tower, black, grimy, dishevelled, derelict. Yet there was something grand about this Victorian rocket-ship, clock-face a skeleton save for some fragments of ivory that still clung on for dear life. The land all around had been flattened, leaving only this anachronistic building, saved by a category A listing, I supposed. I imagined all of the workmen scurrying back after their liquid lunch in one of the plethora of public houses that probably surrounded the area (one, the ‘Lord Byron’ was now a run-down printing works), looking up anxiously at the clock in case they were late and had their wages docked.
I had a hankering to return there way long after darkness had finally fallen. The rain had ceased but a cold wind had sprung up, tearing at the plastic sheeting marooned on the barbed wire fence surrounding the crane spares warehouse. It tugged also at the bags of waste that had been cast adrift on the tracts of derelict land. The hulls of the broken cars creaked and groaned in unison. Far in the distance, the landlord of the ‘Captain Cook’ public house ruefully surveyed the empty bar as he laid out yet another row of pint glasses. There was not a soul around. I imagined gangs of thugs hiding in the long shadows of the seedy warehouses and factories, waiting to pounce on innocent bystanders and divest them of their wallets, leaving their victims battered and bleeding in the gutter of this inhospitable estate, until hypothermia or loss of blood sucked the life out of them. Such is the imagination on a dark and lonely night as this. I quickened my footsteps, which rang out loudly on the cracked and broken streets, despite the hiss of the wind. I was almost running by the time I had reached the bridge again. I was immediately calmed by the massive structure, because it was bathed in a pure blue light, so soothing and bright that I could clearly see where both of the towers merely touched in the middle, like dried leaves falling from the trees and just glancing each other on the way down to earth. I followed the best-lighted path on the way back.

I returned also on the next morning, which was as fresh and cheery as a sailor’s chanty, and saw the bridge in quite another light. The gloomy introvert of the rain and the halo’d champion of the night had transformed itself into a gigantic Meccano in electric blue, greeting the sun with great optimism and brio. That must be the secret of this tremendous structure. Chameleon-like, it reflects the vagaries of the weather and the moods of the day, not unlike we humans. During my all-too-short stay, I realised that Middlesbrough is the bridge and the bridge is Middlesbrough. It is hardly surprising that the Town Council has adopted it as the logo. The two are good for each other, and I liked them both.