It’s twelve years since I last visited the transporter bridge: the longest extant transporter bridge in the world. It remains an astonishing sight, although in one crucial respect, it has changed beyond recognition.

For five years now, the Transporter has been out of service, becoming a monument more to modern underinvestment in infrastructure than early 20th century engineering. It looks like it might take investment of £30m to press it back into service.

Waiting for me dad, a sculpture by Mackenzie Thorpe, commemorates families waiting for the return of the workers across the bridge at the end of their shifts on the industrial sites beyond. As events transpired, it was unveiled about twelve weeks before the bridge ‘temporarily’ closed, which lends it a melancholic air to expectation it depicts: the figures will be waiting for far longer than they expected for anyone to return over the Tees.

I mention it far too much, but it did look especially pretty on this walk!

You know how on QVC, there’s never a gadget that performs only one function? Everything has to be multi-purpose, even if some of those purposes are a little bit questionable? William Bell (1844-1919) was once Chief Architect of the North Eastern railway, and I reckon he’d have loved QVC.

By Middlesbrough Dock, there was a need for a simple accumulator tower: a big tower containing water to provide hydraulic pressure to operate things like lock gates. William Bell’s team were on it in 1903. They decided not only to make an accumulator tower, but also to whack a clock tower on top. Why not?

Well, because the local ironworks didn’t want workers clock-watching, that’s why not. But Bell’s team weren’t to be defeated: they simply installed three clock faces, and left the fourth face—in the direction of the ironworks—blank.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way…

In the North East, we seem to like saving odd bits of old buildings: consider the Doxford Arch, for example, or the sign from the Crown Works site. In that spirit, allow me to present to you the last remaining wall of the Cleveland Salt Works:

But how did we end up with a salt works in Middlesbrough—hardly the most typical location?

In 1859, the Bolckow, Vaughan & Co Ironworks got fed up of dirty water from the Tees blocking up their boilers. They decided that a better solution would be to drill a borehole and extract clean water from underground. After a few years of boring, they unexpectedly discovered a huge bed of rock salt some 1200ft underground.

Rock salt, as it happens, is useful in all sorts of chemical processes being undertaken on nearby sites, so by 1887, the Cleveland Salt Company was founded to extract it, pumping water into wells and then using the heat of the ironworks to evaporate out the salt. Over the following six decades, hundreds of thousands of tons of salt were extracted through four different wells.

In fact, the salt mine ended up outlasting the ironworks: the ironworks collapsed in 1929, but the salt kept flowing until after the Second World War, with the works having been converted to run off their own coal supply rather than the waste heat of the ironworks.

Sometimes, I suppose one’s side-hustle outlasts one’s primary employment.

Yesterday, I wrote about a quirky construction in Middlehaven: the only one of an intended set of five which was actually constructed. I visited it back in 2012, and had returned twelve years on to see how it was doing.

All of the above also apply to today’s post, which is about Anish Kapoor’s Temenos.

Twelve years ago, I called this massive artwork ‘soulless and bland’—which is very much how it felt on this visit, too. The demolition of the crane which previously stood behind it at least gives Temenos room to breathe, but it doesn’t really say much to me.

It was intended to be the first of five ‘Tees Valley Giants’, humongous sculptures spread between Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Hartlepool, Redcar and Darlington. None of the others have been built, and it doesn’t feel like Temenos has become a local landmark in the way that was perhaps anticipated.

I wrote yesterday about the benefit of whimsy in life, and I think I actually prefer this much cheaper artwork nearby: a giant stick of rock.

In 2012, I went for a look at Middlesbrough’s newly constructed Community in a Cube (CIAC), a bizarre residential building with startling architecture, including some houses perched on the roof. Seven years later, I went back to see how it had settled in. After 21 years of blogging, there are no new ideas left. So, five years after my last visit, I’ve been back again.

CIAC is in Middlehaven, the bit of Middlesbrough which surrounds the dock. The area had an ambitious masterplan by Will Alsop. In the initial phase, CIAC was intended to be one of five cuboidal residential blocks, each to be designed by a different architectural firm and employing ‘statement’ architecture. They were commonly referred to as the ‘sugar cubes’. Eventually, more cubes would be built, expanding the quirky residential provision. Here’s an idea of what it was supposed to look like, eventually:

When CIAC was constructed, as part of Middlehaven’s commitment to sustainability, it was built with a sustainable biomass boiler system to provide heating and hot water to the initial five residential blocks. But you can guess where this is going.

Only CIAC was built, and for a long while—including when I first visited—it felt a bit isolated and alien. Partly through familiarity, and partly through the limited development of Middlehaven, it feels more like it belongs these days.

When I visited five years ago, I commented on the issues that had arisen due to the flammable cladding that had been used in the building. This has led to the most visible change to the building’s appearance: the aspect shown at the top, with the geometric inset windows, has lost its cladding. I’m not sure whether there’s an intention to replace it, but I actually prefer the current appearance: the geometric shapes being formed through industrial steel feel a bit more in keeping with the area than the previous wooden effect.

Originally, the block was surrounded by naked streets: these have long since closed, replaced with traditional roads and footpaths. Some sections, like the one above, are now so overgrown that it’s quite difficult to pick out where the grass verge ends and the former street begins.

The traditional roads are perhaps not quite as well-connected with public transport as they might be. The juxtaposition of ‘no public services’ and ‘let’s journey together’ made me chuckle.

Back in 2012, I noted the unique appearance of the development’s marketing suite. One might have thought that this would be a temporary structure, but it is still going strong twelve years on, now occupied by a firm of commercial property consultants.

No-one has quite got around to updating the signage promoting the marketing suite, but the greenery is doing a good job of absorbing it.

In 2012, I said that CIAC wasn’t quite to my taste, but I’ve rather warmed to it over time. A bit of quirkiness goes a long way.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that there’s simply not enough out-and-out whimsy in life. The Middlehaven masterplan was stuffed full of whimsy, and it’s a shame that more of it didn’t come off.

There was much talk at the time of its initial unveiling—and even a bit of ribbing in The Guardian about the ‘Kerplunk hotel’—a proposed hotel which bore more than a passing resemblance to the children’s game.

I recently discovered that the scale model of the masterplan is on display in MIMA, and let me tell you, sugar-cube residential blocks and a Kerplunk hotel have nothing on my favourite proposed but unrealised project in Middlehaven.

Friends: the toaster on the right of this photograph of the masterplan, just across from Middlesbrough’s Riverside Stadium, was to be a theatre. Yes, we live in a world where a toaster-shaped theatre was proposed but never built. As Liz Truss might say: That. Is. A. Disgrace.

Middlesbrough’s Old Town Hall was built in 1846 on a prominent site in the town’s marketplace. It was—and is—a surprisingly small building for a Town Hall, and by the 1880s, a decision was taken to replace it with something more substantial, located closer to the developing passenger railway.

The part of town where the Old Town Hall became steadily less prominent over time, and by the 1950s it was filled with mainly slum housing, which was summarily demolished. A new housing estate, St Hilda’s, was put up in the 1970s, with the Old Town Hall repurposed as a community centre. The centre closed in 1996, and the Old Town Hall has stood empty ever since.

But worse was to come: the 2000s brought the demolition of the St Hilda’s estate, leaving the Old Town Hall not only empty, but also abandoned in the middle of nowhere. These days, it’s on a sorry sight: I had to fight through the weeds to get to it. It feels as though it is being reclaimed by nature. There was something surprisingly soothing, natural and cathartic about the scene.

But it may yet have a future, as the surrounding area is redeveloped once again. The Council intends to reopen the Old Town Hall as a digital and creative hub, linking in with the nearby businesses in those sectors. The Council has already received £1m of funding to safeguard the building, and has applied to the National Lottery Heritage Fund for a further £3m. Here’s hoping.

Here are three bridges crossing the Ouseburn.

Nearest to the camera is the Ouseburn Viaduct, which carries the East Coast Mainline. It was built of timber in 1839, and rebuilt in iron thirty years later. When I took a photo of it twelve years ago, it was undergoing an extensive restoration.

Furthest from the camera is the 1878 Byker Bridge, originally a toll bridge—though the charge was removed in 1895. It carries the road now designated the A193.

In the middle is the newest of the three, Arup’s much-celebrated 1970s curving concrete Byker Viaduct, with joints glued together. It carries the Tyne & Wear Metro between Manors and Byker.

Though people assume he was born in Denmark, Arup’s founder, Ove Arup, was in fact born a stone’s throw from the bridge in Heaton. He was born in 1895: closer in time to the construction of the two preceding bridges than the one his firm designed. He had retired by the time the firm took on the Byker Viaduct project.