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.

While I’m not at all into cars, I have a vague policy-level interest in electric vehicles. I think they present fascinating dilemmas.

We desperately need to rapidly reduce the burning of fossil fuels if the planet is to remain habitable, and it seems inevitable that the adoption of electric vehicles will be an important staging post on the journey to a less carbon-intensive future.

Yet, it’s not an easy transition: there are all sorts of complicated policy problems, from the need to more rapidly develop the charging infrastructure, to developing better ways of tackling battery fires, to working out how best to manage life-expired battery-powered vehicles.

From an emergency planning perspective, allowing a controlled burn of a battery-powered vehicle isn’t a great solution if the vehicle is a battery-powered ambulance parked outside a hospital, or one of an entire fleet of fire engines parked next to one another. Decommissioning cars containing batteries which have simply expired is one thing, but safely transporting and managing vehicles whose cells have been compromised in major road traffic accidents is quite another. And so on and so forth… electric vehicles present 99 big problems in the service of solving the biggest planetary problem of all.

I therefore particularly enjoyed this article in the New York Times by Dionne Searcey, which profiles the introduction of an electric school bus in a US town. The ripples from that particular pebble were far-reaching. The one which surprised me most was, perhaps, the simplest:

The bus was so quiet that Mr. Nielson could hear his metal straw rattle in its travel mug as he navigated the brick streets downtown. And when he pulled up to some bus stops, where were the kids?

It turned out that children had been accustomed to running outside when they heard the loud diesel engine come roaring down the street. The new bus was almost too quiet.

“I told parents that, hey, you’re going to have to start looking because I don’t like to honk. It’s generally rude,” he said.

It’s well worth reading the full thing.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

On Tuesday, the incomparable Diamond Geezer compared Transport for London’s 2004 plans for their network to the 2024 reality. He concluded:

The map may not have happened in full but a goodly proportion of it eventually did, delivering better transport links for all.

I thought I’d undertake a similar exercise for my home region—North East England—and see how we fared.

In 2002, with much fanfare, the regional public transport executive Nexus published a £1.5bn ‘visionary’ public transport plan, dubbed Project Orpheus. This was to combine light rail expansion in the region with the re-introduction of trams and the construction of a cable car on Gateshead’s quayside. By 2018, the map was supposed to look like this:

So, how much of the 2002 ‘vision’ actually happened? How much fell by the wayside? How much of it happened later than planned?

I’d go through proposal-by-proposal in the style of Diamond Geezer, but it’s not worth it: none of the proposed extensions to the network happened; all of it fell by the wayside. As DG says, ‘all that really matters is what got built’—and none of it did.

Which isn’t to say we got nothing: we’ve had two new infill stations at Northumberland Park (2005) and Simonside (2008), refurbishment of many stations and rebuilding of Haymarket (2009), North Shields (2012), South Shields (2019) and Sunderland (2024). Several single line sections have been converted to dual running, the train shed has been completely rebuilt, and a new communications system has made live tracking available in an app.

We’re also due to get new Metrocars to trundle around the Metro track, maybe sometime later this year, only a decade-and-a-half after the end of the design life of the existing fleet (which is, erm, falling apart to such an extent that timetables have been cut to run the service with few working trains—and even with that mitigation, punctuality fell to its lowest ever level).

Unlike London, we might not have received even a fraction of what was promised, but we have had hundreds of millions of pounds of investment… and that’s an awful lot more than some other places have got.

High above the River Wansbeck soars this imposing black bridge, the North Seaton Railway Viaduct, better known as—erm—The Black Bridge.

Work began on its construction in 1925, replacing a wooden bridge built for the Blyth and Tyne Railway in 1859. Until Dr Beeching’s axe fell sixty years ago, trains carrying passengers regularly crossed the viaduct. Freight trains have continued to use the viaduct ever since, albeit in ever-dwindling numbers since the closure of the nearby collieries, with only five freight trains per day in recent times.

Later this year, with the re-opening of the Northumberland line, passenger trains will once again trundle across the bridge, one every half hour in each direction. I’m sure I’ll be along for the ride at some point.

The first weekend of summer took Wendy and I for a walk along the spectacular coastal footpath between South Shields and Sunderland. We stopped for some lunch at the unique Marsden Grotto, carved from the cliff face.

The last time we did this walk, we were soaked to the skin by lashing rain, but nevertheless enjoyed ourselves. Repeating it in glorious sunshine was a treat.

Our route from South Shields Metro station to Sunderland Metro station was 10.7 miles in all. I dare say it won’t be long until we tackle it again.

I was sorry to learn yesterday that Midnight Trains, a company promising ‘luxury hotels on rails’ connecting European cities, has admitted defeat… though I quite liked their whimsically melancholy animation.

For the last few years, I have enjoyed their weekly newsletter about their progress setting up the service. They have talked often of the difficulty of setting up a new international train company, but I had hoped (and perhaps assumed) that the strength of their vision would see them through.

Wendy and I have often reflected that we’d love to be able to board a night train in Newcastle and wake up in—or on our way to—any number of European cities. I’ve written before about how I’m particularly attracted to the more luxurious end of the spectrum. The en suites with showers in the new(ish) Caledonian Sleeper rolling stock played a big part in my decision to give it a go.

Wendy and I both believe, as I wrote then, that ‘there’s something ineffably luxurious about spending time in the act of travelling rather than rushing from place to place’. We recently reflected that a recent trip had felt less relaxing as a result of hopping on a point-to-point flight rather than giving ourselves time to ease into the journey.

I’m sorry that Midnight Trains has hit the buffers before it really got going, but I’m pleased to see the continued re-growth of European sleepers—and it surely won’t be long until I’m back on board.

I’ve visited Durham Cathedral many times over the years, and it’s where I matriculated as a Durham student in 2003. Yet, only in the last few days have I made my first ascent of the 325 steps to the top of the central tower.

I’ve always found it hard to imagine time in the context of Durham Cathedral. Bits of it are nearly 1,000 years old, which is a span that boggles my mind. The scale and grandeur of the structure also challenges my preconceptions of the technology of a millennium ago.

The tower I climbed is over 500 years old, and while the narrow spiral staircases felt like it, it’s still astonishing to contemplate that age—and in how many people’s footsteps I was treading.

On emerging at the top, the view is breathtaking. Particularly prominent to the East is HMP Durham, which I’ve previously visited in a professional capacity.

I also find the timeline HMP Durham mind-boggling, but in the opposite direction: young men were still being hanged at the prison gallows in my parents’ lifetime—an act of the state that seems unimaginable today.

It’s truly discombobulating to stand at the top of a very tall building and contemplate how little has changed over a millennium, and yet how much has changed in a lifetime.