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.

The wall text at the start of this exhibition reads, in part;

Belonging takes different forms. Humans can share an affinity for a specific place, familial bonds and friendship, or spiritual connections based on religion or stories. Geography can also underpin local, national, and international connections. Hobbies and traditions in both real and imagined space can inspire a sense of camaraderie.

I’ve previously mentioned Wendy’s propensity to respond to wall texts by saying ‘I don’t have the bandwidth for that’. On this occasion, it was me perhaps imperceptibly rolling my eyes. Belonging does take different forms, but it’s hard to see how you can successfully curate a coherent exhibition around a feeling you’re choosing to define so expansively.

And, to be honest, I didn’t get it. But there were some nice pictures.

Here’s Mary Cantrill’s 1941 watercolour of a local landmark, Leazes Park Lake in the Snow of 1941. The label said that the park ‘offers tranquil escape in the bustling city’, which is probably true, but my overriding association with Leazes Park is of being asked to find patients who had absconded there from the RVI, which is just over the road.

This is JW Carmichael’s 1839 lithograph of The Ouse Burn Viaduct, looking like it is crossing an impossibly rural setting. It’s only a few weeks since I featured a photograph of the viaduct on this very blog.

This is Beryl Davies’s 1940s watercolour of The Haymarket, a part of Newcastle that has changed surprisingly little despite huge changes outside of the frame. This was painted as part of a project run the The Laing. After the council approved major redevelopment work in the city centre, the gallery’s committee sent forth artists to document the city as it existed before the work started, which feels somehow inspired and a little eccentric at the same time.

There’s something about the lighting in this picture which, along with all of the arches, that sort of feels like the kind of art that AI generators often spit out. It is, in fact, an 1813 painting by Thomas Miles Richardson, show a View of the Ruins of Tynemouth Monastery. For some reason, I had always thought that the the monastery had been damaged in the war, so to find out that it was in fact already a ruin over two centuries ago was a bit of a surprise!

And lastly, here’s that other local home of brilliant art, the Baltic, captured in watercolour here by an unknown artist at some point when it was clearly still a flour mill rather than a centre for contemporary art.

Belonging continues at The Laing until 30 November.

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

First published in 1954, this is a story of the end of a marriage. Evelyn, a distinguished barrister, has a beautiful wife 15 years his junior called Imogen. She is submissive and passive to the point that she almost has no character of her own, and becomes more so the longer the novel goes on.

Their plain neighbour, Blanche, is two years older than Evelyn. She’s presented as unremarkable in every respect, but becomes an object of fascination for Evelyn, and also an 11-year-old boy, in a weird narrative choice. The fascination is attributable to the fact that she actually has a character of her own, some opinions, and can converse reasonably.

Evelyn and Blanche start an affair; it takes forever for Imogen to realise what’s going on, and she just sort of subserviently leaves.

I did not enjoy this. The characters are all thoroughly unlikable, and are living in unthinkable social straitjackets. Almost everything they did or said made me want to fling the book across the room—though I didn’t because it was a rather lovely original from the London Library.

But mostly, this book is slow. It’s not slow in the sense of contemplative and reflective, it’s just stuffed with loquacious description and scene-setting.

This was absolutely not for me.

I recently visited MIMA for the first time: I came perilously close to visiting more than a decade ago but didn’t quite make it through the door.

The exhibition I popped in to see was ‘Working Lives’, which brings together works from the Middlesbrough Collection with newer pieces by contemporary artists in the Cleveland Art Society.

The curation didn’t do much for me—it seemed a bit random—but I think that’s probably because this was a pretty speedy visit without time to consider and reflect the choices that the curator, Alan Morley, had made. I perhaps didn’t give him a chance.

But two works did catch my eye.

At the top of this post is Sandhaven , a 1983 work by Ken Cozens, the late and much-celebrated local artist who contributed much to the local art scene by working for the local museum service, including as Fine Arts Officer at Middlesbrough Art Gallery. My photo is rubbish, but I was absorbed by the drama of the image, and also liked the colour scheme.

Below is the 2020 work Fractured Land 5 by Derek English, a much-loved local artist and art teacher. I liked the abstraction in this one, and found the lines and shapes intriguing.

The two paintings were exhibited beside one another, and I reflected that, if I’d had to guess, I’d have dated them the other way around—though I can’t really explain why!

Working Lives continues at MIMA until 29 September.

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 celebration of its bicentennial, the National Gallery has deigned to send some of its works out of London and out to visit the nation that owns them. Newcastle has been ‘loaned’ The Fighting Temeraire, Turner’s 1893 masterpiece which Radio 4 listeners once voted ‘the greatest painting in Britain’. If I’m totally honest, I’m so ignorant about art that I’d probably not have recognised it.

I wrote recently about the grief of aging, and it was that feeling that came to mind as I contemplated this painting: the outmoded sailing ship being pulled along to its final destruction by new-fangled Tyneside-built tug boats. The exhibition, though, made me note the brightness of the sunset, which perhaps represents hope for the future. The grief of aging is often paired with the joy of a new generation taking over.

This being the Laing, they haven’t just stuck The Fighting Termeraire on the wall and left it at that: they’ve built an ambitious and absorbing exhibition around it, featuring dozens of Turner paintings alongside other works. They even—and here’s a bit of lateral thinking—have displayed a piece of wood from the actual Temeraire.

I particularly liked how the exhibition unpicked Turner’s technique, featuring colour studies and sketches that would go on to inform his future work. I’ve never really thought about the artistic process of watercolour painting before, nor really of the way an artist would want to plan out both the colours and the objects in this way.

There was some interesting discussion on Turner’s view on the ethics of the sea battles he painted: was he a patriotic supporter, or more interested in the abhorrent loss of life? I find it difficult to look at his paintings and see anything but the latter—they all feel tinged by sad reflections on humanity. But for this to be a point of academic disagreement, there must be another way of seeing them, and I must just be projecting my views.

The exhibition also made the point that steamships are now as old-fashioned as sailing ships were in Turner’s time. That made me think about whether there is any art being made now, chronicling the ‘industrial revolution’ we are going through in terms of artificial intelligence putting people out of work. Are the Turners of today making brilliant works about that revolution which will be revered in centuries to come? We can only hope.

Turner: Art, Industry and Nostalgia continues at The Laing until 7 September.

I recently came across this 2013 article by Adee Braun in The Atlantic, which takes a historical perspective on the perceived medical benefits of time spent at the seaside. From a British perspective, there wasn’t much here that was particularly new: I’m sure we all learned in school history lessons about the Victorian obsession with the seaside.

The seaside resort was where the serious healing took place. The sea air along with the ocean views and warm weather were considered critical to a patient’s recovery, especially when treating tuberculosis.

Something about the presentation of the article, though, made me reflect on how restoring a walk at the seaside is for me—and how, in its own way, that’s a modern perspective on the health-giving benefits of the seaside.

Wendy and I love a walk along the coast or the beach, and we are therefore particularly lucky to live in the North East, where many miles of spectacular coastline are close by. If we’re feeling down or not quite ourselves, a bracing walk by the sea always helps. This is undoubtedly partly due to the physical exertion, but I think it’s also to do with the perspective that the coastline brings: the vast scope and the view out to an impossibly distant horizon serve as a reminder about how small we and our problems are in reality.

We have many friends and colleagues who dip into the North Sea year-round, as Braun describes people doing for hundreds of years. Braun says that a dunk in the freezing sea can resemble ‘waterboarding far more than a spa treatment,’ with ‘the twin effects of cold and suffocation causing terror and panic.’

That’s not for me, but I continue to enjoy a long stroll along the coast.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3. I not sure what’s going on with the doctor’s teeth, and can confirm that I’ve never worn a stethoscope at the beach.

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.

Published in 1967, McPhee’s book on oranges was recently recommended in The Economist as a particularly good bit of non-fiction writing. In its first form, it was a much shorter article in The New Yorker, but the author felt that he had too much fascinating material to keep to a single article, and so the book grew out of it.

Oranges is an esoteric and lightly humorous history of the relationship between humans and oranges. It focuses in particular on the development of orange juice made from pasteurised concentrate, which was a huge shift the industry was undergoing at the time the book was published.

I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about oranges before I read this book. They are berries. They are not ‘true from seed’, so if you plant the seeds from an orange, you might get a tree that bears lemons or limes or grapefruit or any other citrus: most Florida oranges are grown via grafts onto lemon trees. There’s a whole weird history about women and oranges, with a remarkably persistent belief that if a woman touched an orange tree, it would die.

This is a book that is strange and charming, clearly crafted with love by someone who just wanted to share information that he found fascinating. The enthusiasm shines through on every page. And, more than that, it’s easy to see how the modern work of non-fiction authors like Jon Ronson and Will Storr flows directly from the innovative style McPhee adopted in his early work.

If I could summarise in only one word, then I’d describe this book as ‘delightful’.