This is an ex-RAF Jet Provost which looms over the car park of the Hartlepool College of Further Education. It’s there because the college specialises in aerospace courses, among other things.

I’ve driven and walked past it many times, but most recently thought about it when I was in Stockholm earlier this year, and saw this Bell 206 helicopter on a stick:

Visible for miles around, and prominent in the landscape from the nearby Metro line, Cleadon’s 1860 water tower is the village’s best-known landmark. It has a very distinct and decorative Italian style.

I’ve always wondered why a water tower would be needed in the middle of nowhere. I usually think of a water tower being required to power industrial processes, such as canal locks, dock works, railways, or systems that need sudden deluges of water. But there’s nothing obvious nearby that would need such services… so why does it exist?

Well, in a sense… it doesn’t. Despite its name, it isn’t a water tower at all, and never has been. The Sunderland and South Shields Water Company used to pump water from the limestone in this area to supply to local residents and businesses. It used steam boilers to do this work, and the tower is actually a disguised, aesthetically pleasing chimney. You can see how easily a ‘tower’ associated with a water company would become known as the ‘water tower’ in local parlance, even if that was never its function.

The tower also contains a staircase around the central flue, and a balcony at a height of 25m. In the Second World War, it was therefore repurposed as a lookout for enemy aircraft. These days, it is used as a site for radio aerials and the like.

But Cleadon Water Tower isn’t, and never has been, a water tower.

This rock, which gives strong ‘Permanently Low Prices Forever’ vibes, commemorates the opening of Seaton Carew’s Esplanade by Councillor R Sargeant in August 1905.

The area on which it now stands was in fact constructed in 1997 as part of a new coastal protection scheme for the town.

So the rock is commemorating the opening of something that, in a sense, closed some time ago. I’m not sure I’d have retained it in the new scheme for that reason—but, then, no-one is ever likely to put me in charge of any commemoration of anything being opened. Thank goodness.

This 2018 sculpture on the seafront at Seaton Carew is by Stuart Langley. The sea glass used in the sculpture was collected and donated by local children.

The artwork is supposed to draw a connection between the ‘waves’ of the sea and the ‘waves’ of industrial, social and cultural change that are all around us. I’m not convinced I’d have guessed that. The art work’s local nickname, ‘the airwick’, feels more apt to me… but it’s nice to see something a bit different.

If you’re not already scintillated enough, walk exactly 1km east along Redcar seafront from Sinterlation and you’ll happen upon Lifelines, another 2013 Ian Randall sculpture celebrating local heritage. It symbolises fishing boats being pulled back to shore.

The two make a nice, inoffensive pair.

Installed on Redcar seafront in 2013, this is Sinterlation, a sculpture which references the town’s fishing history (the boats which form the bottom of the columns) and its historic steelmaking (the chains). The non-standard spelling references sinter, a mixture of iron ore, limestone and coke which is used to feed a blast furnace.

It’s a perfectly nice, if forgettable, bit of civic sculpture which brightens up the place, but I’m not moved to any strong feelings.

I recently walked past this sculpture next to London’s ExCel exhibiton centre and thought, “that’s new!”

It’s not, though. It’s been there since 2009. I evidently walk round with my eyes closed.

The sculpture shows three dock workers, and was the result of a long campaign supported by the Queen Mother, among others, to commemorate the people who worked at the docks between 1855 and 1983. The figures are based on the likenesses of real dock workers, including Johnny Ringwood who helped raise money for it. Now aged 89, he re-visited the statue earlier this year.

The bloke with the hat and the book is Patrick Holland, depitcted as a tally clerk but in reality a stevedore, a word I last thought about in April 2021.

The scene is loosely copied in Mychael Barratt’s Mile End Mural.

These two giant chairs, by Yinka Ilori, are currently on display next to the Royal Victoria Dock. One represents happiness and the other pride, though the fact that I can’t tell which is which is perhaps a marker of their limited success.

While we’re on refreshed artworks in Rotherhithe—and there’s a sentence I never imagined writing—this pair of boats made by Kevin Boys was recently unveiled on the refurbished Redriff Footbridge, replacing a previous artwork that had been stolen.

I would never have come across this spot had I not serendipitously wandered into the Russia Dock Woodland on an ‘I wonder where that path goes?’ whim.

After the closure of the Surrey Commercial Docks in the 1970s, Russia Dock was filled in—except for a little trickle of a stream. The surrounding area was planted to create a little woodland. Forty-odd years after it was completed, it’s become a 34-acre haven of nature in a formerly industrial area.

The filled-in dock sits at a lower level than the surrounding pathways, with the capstones still visible. This provides a nice link to its industrial past, but it did strike me that safety considerations might have prevented that design approach if the woodland were created today.

I’ve previously written about the many country parks in North East England, which stand as the beautiful legacy of our mining past, and I suppose this is a sort of industrial dock equivalent.