In 2012, I wandered around the Community in a Cube (CIAC) in Middlesbrough after I had a meeting nearby. This visually striking, sustainable, RIBA award shortlisted block of 82 flats in the redeveloping Middlehaven area of the town was of particular interest as it seemed to have become flavour of the month among architects.

Fast-forward to 2019 and the development has been back in the news for rather less welcome reasons. According to local and national press reports, inspections of the building in the wake of the Grenfell disaster have revealed that the building—and, in particular, the distinctive timber cladding—are not compliant with fire regulations. ‘Not compliant’ to the extent that a 24/7 ‘waking watch’ patrol has been implemented at a huge cost.

So, when fate brought me to a nearby meeting again today, I thought I’d use the lunch break for another quick wander to see how the development had aged.

Over the last seven years, CIAC has become a local landmark. Its visibility from the A66 and the nearby railway line, combined with the eye-catching “sky homes” perched on top of it, have made the building a familiar and commonly mentioned icon of Middlesbrough.

That said, the intended ‘riverside vision’ has never quite emerged, with CIAC remaining the sole residential development in the area. It seems somewhat isolated as a result. The current plan is for a £30m snow centre to be build nearby.

The surrounding ‘naked streets’, which I found “disconcerting” on my first visit, are now much more traditionally clothed, with separation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. There’s also no shortage of weeds on display, which actually somewhat pleasingly soften the visual impact.

Close up, the building looks minimally weathered. The distinctive black stripes on the cladding have mostly worn away on the front of the building, but less so on the less exposed elevations.

The gigantic zebra crossing like paving remains in place at the rear. The geometrically patterned inset wall looks as sharp and fresh as ever. From this angle, I think I’d be hard-pressed to identify photographs taken today from those taken when the building was first completed.

And while seven years ago I said this building “isn’t quite to my taste”, gazing at it across the water of Middlehaven Dock today, I could almost change my mind. Perhaps it’s partly familiarity, but it feels less ‘alien spaceship’ than it did when it was first completed.

All things considered, it has aged pretty well. I’ve no idea how well it has done from a sales perspective: I hear tell from local colleagues that some of the flats are now let to students of the nearby Middlesbrough College, but there are certainly a fair few owner occupiers.

Of course, though, as successful as the visual impact has been, I wouldn’t have dreamed that such a modern building would now be deemed a major fire risk in need of hundreds of thousands of pounds of remedial work. I can’t begin to imagine how it must feel for the owners and residents of the flats to be living somewhere where they don’t feel as safe as they once did, let alone the financial consequences.

While I understand from the media coverage that it was compliant with regulations when built, this experience must surely raise questions about when the right things are really prioritised when landmark architectural developments are being designed.

1: It feels great, if a little anticlimactic, to finally be able to delete “Locum” from my email signature.

2: The North Shields Fish Quay has really smartened up since Wendy and I last visited. It would be nice to live somewhere with a river view, if only it didn’t have to be near a river.

3: Going to Ikea for the 10.30 Sunday browsing opening time isn’t a successful crowd avoidance strategy.

4: Barriers between healthcare organisations can make simple things—like arranging urgent vaccinations—more difficult than they ought to be. Perhaps someone should invent some sort of national health service which provides care based on need rather than budgets, contract provisions and organisational mission statements.

5: Telling patients that they look far too young to have donated blood 61 times makes them want to go back and donate again as soon as possible to receive more flattery.

6: Sometimes, people who use irritating business chatter do actually understand what they’re on about.

7: Business planning isn’t my bag.

8: Th Guardian Daily app doesn’t work properly on Kindle tablets.

9: Loud Christmas music in coffee shops makes settling down with a coffee and a good book difficult. Headphones and white noise on Spotify are an imperfect and antisocial solution.

10: It’s not easy being green: should I buy second-hand books and support the planet or new books and support the author?

11: Durham County Council has meeting rooms with quite spectacular coastal views in Seaham:

12: Dementia friendly parking spaces are now a thing… at least in Hemlington:

13: “At this time of year, it is not uncommon for viruses including influenza and norovirus to circulate in schools. The risk of infection can be reduced by practising good hand hygiene, particularly after using the toilet, after using a tissue to catch a cough or a sneeze, and before eating.”

14: Our TV needs re-tuning. Broadcasts are moving away from the 700MHz band of frequencies to free up spectrum for mobile data instead. Given the profitability of mobile data services and the proliferation of home broadband (especially in the context of PSTN switch-off), I wonder how long over-the-air television broadcast have left?

15: Arguments opposing the Public Libraries Act 1850 included a Conservative view that people “have too much knowledge already” and that “the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage.” In fairness, I suppose people now carry the sum of human knowledge in their pockets and do have a tendency to be rebel against authoritarian control, so perhaps he had a point.

16: The TLS has relaunched with a rather stylish new look. Dr Brian Klass’s comparison of politics in Trump’s America and that in Brexit Britain through the medium of cheese was a particular highlight of this issue for me.

17: Coffee shop Christmas music irritates Wendy even more than me. It’s depressing, or so I’m told.

18: A replacement wing mirror for a 2009 Aygo costs less than £50. I was expecting a much bigger bill after someone completely snapped mine off (and didn’t leave a note!)

19: The brand new Sunderland medical school has some impressive facilities.

20: Colleagues at Middlesbrough Council taught me that routine air quality monitoring still uses diffusion tubes fixed to lampposts; people have to go up in cherry pickers to change the tubes every month.

21: Research into treatments for interstitial lung disease includes a lot of discussion about disease taxonomy and the problem of lumping and splitting: considering diagnoses with the same underlying pathology together (lumping) or as distinct entities (splitting).

22: Cleveland Fire Brigade taught me about their Stay Safe and Warm free one-hour response service for boiler breakdowns where they lend people emergency electric heaters.

23: A wet and dreary Saturday can be a good prompt to light the fire and relax at home.

24: I didn’t know that Sheffield had a hybrid tram-train system until I read this Wired article.

25: Purdah rules can be really annoying sometimes, especially when I’ve done a lot of work to prepare for a meeting I’m no longer able to attend.

26: I thought I learned the etymology of the word “syndrome” after it was featured in a lecture. Yet after thinking about it for a while, the suggestion that it was derived from words for “before” and “diagnosis” didn’t ring true, so I looked it up in the OED online. The lecture version was thus proven to be completely wrong, so I suppose I learned not to take the content of lectures on trust.

27: Only a decade late to the party, I learned that Ecosia—the search engine that plants trees—is a thing.

28: People really don’t know what I do all day. This month, in my health protection role, a meeting of vascular surgeons has invited me to talk about knife crime, a univeristy course has asked me to teach about rural medicine, and a meeting of intensivists has invited me to present on recreational drug toxicology. They may be disappointed at me turning down their kind invitations, but they’d be far more disappointed if I accepted given that I know naff all about any of those topics.

29: Via Lana Greene’s column in 1843, I leaned of the German word “Multioptionsgesellschaft”. It was apparently coined by Peter Gross, a Swiss sociologist, in the early 1990s. It refers to a world swamped by choice, which feels very current: I frequently open Netflix for something to watch and close it a few minutes later with the resignation of not being able to decide.

30: I heard a snippet of a radio programme in which an older person was being interviewed and the subject of loneliness among the elderly came up. The interviewee suggested that while lots of attention has been paid to loneliness recently, too little has been paid to the loss of solitude for many other older people, such as those in care homes. I’d never heard that point made before, and I suspect it will stick with me: solitude is something very important to me.

This is Bottle of Notes, a 1993 steel and enamel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen which forms text from Captain Cook’s journals into a white bottle; a blue note inside is formed of a line of poetry by one of the artists. It’s about 35 feet tall, and leans at a considerable angle. It was forged a little further north in Hebburn.

Since the bottle’s 1993 installation, mima – the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art – has been built behind it. It opened in 2007, but is (perhaps unfortunately?) best known for hosting Jeremy Clarkson et al’s Top Gear exhibition of automotive art in 2009.

As I’m coming to the end of my time working on Teesside, I think it would be impossible to leave without featuring one of the most iconic sights of the area: the Tees Transporter Bridge. The photo below might give a more familiar view, but it’s very difficult to fit the bridge into a single frame when this close up!

The bridge was built 101 years ago, and remains in perfect working order. It is the world’s largest operational transporter bridge, and it carries people and vehicles along the A178, connecting Middlesbrough to Port Clarence. It remains the furthest downstream crossing of the River Tees.

There are only eleven transporter bridges left in the world, and still fewer that actually work. In the United Kingdom, only Newport boasts another working transporter bridge; there’s another bridge in Warrington that’s been out of use since 1964, while London’s Royal Victoria Dock Bridge was designed with (as yet unused) transporter bridge capabilities.

As with all transporter bridges, it works through loading people and vehicles onto a gondola, suspended from the main structure. This then moves back and forth – in less than two minutes each way – allowing traffic to cross. Here’s the gondola in action:

The current tolls are surprisingly small: just £1.30 for a car, or 70p for a pedestrian or cyclist. For a smaller fee, it used to be possible to climb the steps at either end and walk across the top of the bridge. A restoration project going on at the moment will install glass elevators to transport visitors to the top, making the reportedly extraordinary views accessible to everyday visitors once again.

Designed and built entirely on Teesside, and opened in 1934 by the Duke and Duchess of York (later the Queen Mother), this is the Tees Newport Bridge. It has a span of 82m, and two 55m lifting towers with counterweights of nearly 7,000 metric tonnes.

The little hut perched on the middle of the bridge is the winch-house, from where the up-and-down movement of the bridge was controlled. I say “little hut”, but I understand that it’s actually a quite beautiful oak-pannelled control room, modelled on the bridge of a ship. The bridge was winched by electric motors, though did have petrol backups. The third-line backup was to winch by hand, but it’s said that this would have taken twelve men eight hours.

22 years ago, after a final ceremonial raising and lowering (which is actually on YouTube), the road bridge was bolted in place: there was really very little point in continuing to maintain the lifting mechanism given that the innavigable (at least to big ships) Tees Barrage was just about to be constructed a little upstream. There was initially some speculation that the massive steel counterweights could therefore be detached and sold as scrap, until some bright spark realised that they were still actually supporting the weight of the road bridge, even though movement was prevented by the bolting process.

The bridge remains busy with traffic, as it’s part of the A1032.

I was back at the James Cook University Hospital for a meeting this morning – I previously featured it on 4th April.

I hadn’t ever really noticed until today how pretty the signs outside are. They’re a bit overshadowed by the massive lettering on a nearby fence.

I was going to make a sarcastic comment about the hospital’s “expresso bar”, but it turns out that expresso is, in fact, merely the Spanish to Italian’s espresso. There are, it seems, quite a few expresso bars. So I learned something new there!

This is Temenos, the first of five planned Tees Valley Giants by Anish Kapoor – perhaps most famous at the moment for the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London’s Olympic Park.

When all five are completed, the Tees Valley Giants will be the world’s biggest public artwork – although given that each sculpture is destined for a different Tees Valley town, there’s surely a philosophical debate to be had about whether they’re really one artwork.

It’s not really the done thing to write off artists’ work, especially when they’re as well-respected as Kapoor – but I’ve never seen anything of his that doesn’t strike me as a bit soulless and bland. He seems to play with scale and materials, but never actually use them to say anything of note. But heck, I’m barely qualified to have an opinion on this, so just look at the photo and be amazed.

In recompense for my forgetfulness yesterday, I’ve got a small collection of photos today.

If you’re thinking that the above looks like someone has built a house on top of a block of flats, you’re not far wrong. It’s CIAC, or community in a cube, a new residential development in Middlesbrough’s shiny new Riverside One development. It consists of a block of flats of various sizes, with a couple of luxury houses on the top. It’s a fully sustainable development, and architecturally interesting to say the least.

This shows the same building from a different angle, showing both “perched houses”. Also notice the bizarre Playschool-esque windows in the cutaway portion.

Walking round the back of the building, this whole other surprise awaits: a strange inset geometric patterned wall, and paving resembling a jumbo zebra crossing. Oh, and a lamppost at a decidedly jaunty angle.

On a related note, the surrounding naked streets are the first I’ve driven on, and it’s certainly a disconcerting experience that forces you to slow right down – especially at junctions.

There’s no denying that CIAC and the whole Riverside One development is distinctive, and also modern. But it isn’t quite to my taste. But perhaps you’re asking yourself what the sales office for such a distinctive development looks like… Well, it certainly isn’t your usual portacabin or converted garage!

I had a great photo in mind for today, but forgot to swing by the location, and then forgot about the photo-a-day altogether. I guess there’s always tomorrow!

In the meantime, in lieu of a photo from today, here’s an extra one from Teessaurus Park, which I wrote about yesterday. It’s made of this weird alloy called Elgiloy Hastelloy C and when you first see the texture, you will see why they choose it. I think this is probably supposed to be a stegosaurus, though my knowledge is rustier than these sculptures, and I’d be happy to be corrected!

I have no doubt that Jensen, my eight year-old nephew, is far more of a dinosaur expert than me, yet I’m fairly sure that this is a life-size tyrannosaurus rex (albeit one with a slightly rusty hip). I spotted it earlier today at Teessaurus Park, on the bank of the Tess in Middlesbrough.

If you were ever a fan of Sim City 2000, you’ll remember that putting parks in industrial areas tended to improve the perceived land quality, and help your city to thrive. Teessaurus Park seems to have been based on a similar premise, based as it is very close to Middlesbrough’s industrial heart.

When it opened in 1979, there was only one dinosaur. Seven more have been added since then, mainly in the late 1980s, built by young people on Norman Tebbit’s Youth Training Scheme. Yet no number of dinosaurs can distract visitors for long from the huge A V Dawson freight terminal right next door, or the highly industrial view across the Tees: