No one could say that the town of Middlesbrough, perched on the Tees estuary about halfway between Leeds and Newcastle in the north-east of England, has had it easy over the past quarter century.
Propelled in the 19th century from a small agricultural community to a town of nearly 80,000 people by the presence of iron and coal in the nearby Cleveland Hills, it thrived through much of the 20th on its busy port, steelworks and heavy engineering and chemical industries.
But the 1980s saw the demise of the docks and one by one the waterside factories started closing down. By 1987, when then prime minister Margaret Thatcher stood in a piece of industrial wasteland next to to the river promising regeneration, many had already left the town to find work elsewhere. And since then, in spite of frequent government interventions, Middlesbrough has continued to feature in all the wrong league tables. Unemployment and crime are high; wages and health are poor. And only last month, on the back of these figures, a national television programme named the town the worst place to live in the UK.
Yet all eyes are now on a new development along the Tees that, it is hoped, will kick-start a long-awaited regeneration of the town. Work has begun on Middlehaven, a £500m, 250-acre scheme to transform the former docks into the type of marina live/work space that has revived similarly grim parts of Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool and London. Masterplanned by architect Will Alsop, it will, when finished, comprise 2,500 homes and office space for 5,000 workers plus a boardwalk with restaurants, bars and cafés and a central landscaped park that will become a venue for live music performances. Two piers, each with a central “street” flanked by residential and leisure units, will thrust out into the water and two rows of residential blocks – with each building designed by a different architect – will form the area’s north and south borders.
The space Middlehaven will occupy has long been problematic for Middlesbrough. After a period of decline in the 1970s, the docks area became cut off, psychologically and physically, from the rest of the town by a railway line that in Victorian times carried coal to waiting ships and today still takes commuters to and from Darlington, the nearest mainline station.
Middlehaven was, and still is, known to locals as “over the border”, a place for prostitution, crime and a thriving market in stolen goods. The relocation of Middlesbrough football club’s stadium to Middlehaven in 1995 was meant to change all that but nothing else followed and for ten years or so the area stagnated – match days excepted.
Now work has begun on a new campus for Middlesbrough College, bringing about 20,000 full- and part-time students and their money into the area from next autumn, and next spring will see the start of construction on Middlehaven’s first two blocks, part of a £250m contract signed by developer Quinlan, which will result in 750 residential units plus office space and leisure facilities over the next five to seven years. Prices will start at about £100,000 and the first new residents should be moving in by the end of 2008. Developer Amec (now rebranded as Muse Developments) and Urban Splash are behind a similar project, which will comprise about 500 residential units and 600,000 sq ft of office space, with construction expected to start by spring 2009.
Joe Docherty, chief executive of Tees Valley Regeneration, the government body behind Middlehaven, is, as you would expect, bullish. But he acknowledges that the scheme has had its doubters. “Middlesbrough has seen so many proposed projects that never came to fruition that the joke was that it had had more visions than Mother Teresa and more pilots than British Airways,” he explains. “But this one is under way, we have private sector money coming in and it will make a difference.”
The change is likely to be felt most in Middlesbrough’s town centre, just south of the railway line. A loose collection of shopping malls and pedestrianised streets, centred roughly around the intersection of Linthorpe Road and Newport Road, it seems bustling enough until you notice that many people are browsing rather than spending and there is more than a fair smattering of pawnbrokers, second-hand-appliance stores and shops offering cheap furniture on hire purchase. Off the main shopping drags, many of the old back-to-back terraced homes are either boarded up or occupied by more than one family and much of the area is scheduled for demolition. One of the few sectors to be doing well is the bar and pub business but this results in gangs of (mostly) young men roaming the streets late at night, making it “inadvisable” to leave your car there after dark, according to one local resident.
Even without the Middlehaven effect, though, the area has already started to see something of a renaissance. “Five or six years ago, the market in Middlesbrough town centre was dying. Street houses were going for £20,000 and only investors were interested,” says estate agent Michael Poole. But in recent years, following a £100m, 10-year investment by the University of Teesside in new campus buildings and student accommodation in the centre, its streets and squares have been tidied and new shops and cafés have opened. This year the town also saw the opening of the Middlesbrough Museum of Modern Art, a much-acclaimed modern building designed by Erick van Egeraat Associated Architects from the Netherlands. Homes in the town centre now start at about £70,000 for a two-up, two-down street property in one of the side streets leading off Linthorpe Road.
Another area set to benefit from Middlesbrough’s broader regeneration and development is what locals still refer to as the “village” of Linthorpe (though the nearest countryside is at least two miles away). It is here, Poole says, that the real bargains are to be had. “If you are looking for a well built, old house with character, Linthorpe is your place,” he says.
Bounded by Kensington Road and Albert Park to the north and stretching down towards the A174 trunk road, which runs east to the coastal resorts of Redcar and Saltburn and west into the North Yorkshire Moors, the area is leafy and quiet with some handsome Victorian and Edwardian properties. According to Kathryn Beevers, a resident for 43 years, it also has a stronger sense of neighbourliness than other parts of Middlesbrough.
“We have plenty of meetings in the community centre to discuss things,” she says. “And if a burglar alarm goes off we are all poking our heads round or going outside to see what is happening. It is certainly less safe here than it used to be – in the old days you could leave your door open when you were in the garden at the back but not any more – but it is quieter than in the town centre.”
Sarah Halliday recently bought a three-bedroom, 1930s terraced house in Linthorpe with a fair-sized back garden in a quiet side street just behind the local parade of shops. She had been renting for two years after a move from Edinburgh and paid “between £100,000 and £150,000, which,” she says, “wouldn’t even have got me a one-bedroom flat in [the Scottish capital]. Here I can afford a whole house of my own.”
Just down from her new home is a two-bedroom, 1930s streetfront house, requiring some work, for sale through Drummonds for £94,950, which would barely buy a flat in nearby towns such as York or Durham. And a few blocks further south, where the streets are wider and leafier, Michael Poole is listing a semi-detached, four-bedroom home with two reception rooms and gardens at the front, side and rear for £217,000.
For now, estate agents think prices in Linthorpe and in Middlesbrough proper will remain attractive. But, as Middlehaven develops, most expect significant rises over the next decade. “Right now it doesn’t look like much,” says Robin Catterall of local agents Jackson Stops and Staff as he leads a tour of the brownfield site. “But within five years there will be a marked change. It reminds me of Leeds 10 years ago – and now look at it.”
Poole agrees. “I was worried a few years ago but now I am optimistic,” he says. “I can see the changes that have taken place. And it’s not just demolition. Things are going up. Now you can see cranes there as well as bulldozers.”
Local agents
Michael Poole, tel: +44 (0)1642-649649;
www.michaelpoole.co.uk
Drummonds, tel: +44 (0)1642-820888;
www.drummondestates.co.uk
Jackson Stops & Staff, tel: +44 (0)1325-489948;
www.jackson-stops.co.uk
