Chapter Five

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SO DARK AND quiet, always wind and rain; I was cold and I cried every night. I felt it was a strange, terrible place and I hope I never have to return.’

It wouldn’t be fair to damn Middlesbrough on the histrionic say-so of a single Brazilian WAG, obliged to relocate to Teesside during her husband’s brief stint with the town’s football team back in the mid Nineties. But shivering by a deserted, mist-wreathed bus stop at the edge of the industrial estate, I was at one with Andrea da Silva. When at last my bleary, bloodshot eyes pulled the timetable into focus, I found that it wasn’t a timetable at all, but a notice explaining that service information could be procured via a text message, at a charge of 25p per enquiry. This sort of thing irks me at the best of times, and on the back of a night interrupted by sheer cold and the encroaching sounds of drunken violence my reaction was intemperate. To passing commuters it must have looked like Sir Alex Ferguson addressing a player he has just watched lob his own goalkeeper from the halfway line, twice.

I knew I’d be in Middlesbrough all day, and didn’t fancy wasting half of it parking, but abruptly decided – then loudly announced – that the overweight self-abuse enthusiasts who ran the bus company had left me no option. Turning on my heel I let the freezing fog have it all the way back to the Metro Inn. Not for the first time Craig translated my righteous, right-foot fury into a pathetic sequence of staccato wallaby hops.

Once again Middlesbrough did its best to hide from me. There was no cathedral spire or other lofty structure to aim at, just a lot of demolition sites interspersed with more of those discouragingly anonymous retail halls that define so much of the British urban experience these days. Largely because of the magnetic lure of their attached car parks: by default I ended up at the Hill Street shopping centre, where I enjoyed a Gregg’s breakfast roll as much as you can enjoy any experience that incorporates microwaved bacon. Shopping brightens up your day! yelled a desperate pennant strung above my head.

Greasy, bilious and wassailed by piped carols, I conducted a detailed survey of Middlesbrough’s retail survivors. Let me tell you now they’re a rum bunch. In a single parade I found no fewer than three tanning salons, and by the end of the day had become well acquainted with the city’s curious two-tone populace: half the young women hewn from waxy lard, and half from a solid block of microwaved bacon. And while their girlfriends are broiling themselves under coin-op melanoma grills, the flower of Middlesbrough’s manhood is browsing the peculiar plethora of novelty shops, devoted as these are to equipment facilitating the rapid and prodigious ingestion of lager: a seven-litre pressurised ‘beer rocket’, a ‘Russian roulette beer bong’ and the ‘Extreme Beer Funnel and Tube’, a grimly surgical device that looked as if it might have been used to force-feed hunger-striking suffragettes. And how did all those mobile-phone shops ride out the storm? In fact, how did they even ride into it in the first place? At one point I could count four, without even moving my head. Each was replete with young staff in crisp shirts, bobbing about looking dynamic and urgent – no mean feat in shops completely bereft of customers. Clinton’s Cards: another mysteriously durable high-street success. In a just world, every branch of Clinton’s Cards would be burnt to the ground at once by state decree, for the public good. Something is intrinsically wrong in a transaction that requires people to pay £2.15 for a folded piece of cardboard that might as well read, ‘I have absolutely no taste and an appalling sense of humour. Happy Easter to a Very Special Nephew.’

The retail thoroughfare opened out into a broad grassed square crowned with a modest observation wheel, farthing to the London Eye’s penny. This was evidently Middlesbrough’s pre-eminent public space, but it was lined with civic and commercial structures of bullying concrete soullessness and engulfed by yawning, long-vacant plots (LAND FOR RESIDENTIAL OR COMMERCIAL USE – FRANKLY, AT THIS STAGE WE’D LISTEN TO FARMERS). Beside the wheel was a big glass box that identified itself as the new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, bright and studiously contemporary, but in the circumstances no more than a bold gesture. Middlesbrough – moving forward, read the inevitable regeneration slogan above its automatic doors. I went through them to learn that all the galleries were closed, and later discovered they were still clearing away an exhibition of fanciful motoring art, curated by the hosts of Top Gear and filmed in their presence a couple of days before. ‘We’ve been away in Middlesbrough,’ I heard Jeremy Clarkson sneer at his studio audience a few nights later, ‘and it’s good to be back in England.’ Biographical note: Jeremy Clarkson was born and raised in Doncaster (see Chapter 13).

MIMA, as of course it’s known, presided over a lumpy sweep of green that looked suspiciously like a hastily turfed-over demolition site. To one side was a small lake whose ice floes were home to thuggish seagulls. I kept walking and at last spotted a proper throng of citizens, trooping in and out of an institutional edifice and gathering on the pavement outside. It’s slightly more than twenty-five years since I last walked into a Job Centre, and walked out with a position in sanitary management at an IBM warehouse. I’ve no idea what forklift drivers eat for lunch, but I do know that it clearly isn’t good for them. Still, cleaning those toilets was the making of me, or might have been had I stuck it out for more than six hours. The establishment I entered now announced itself as a Job Centre Plus, which offered the promise of additional on-site facilities: something wholesome and uplifting, perhaps a petting zoo. In fact, the subtitle simply acknowledged the sheer size of its customer base. The place had the feel of a busy multiplex cinema foyer, smartly carpeted and dimly lit, its open-plan acreage bestrewn with interactive screens. Young men in sportswear ambled about, chatting in low monotones, occasionally leaning over a monitor and tapping at it with the expression of unimpressed channel-flippers. The security guard notwithstanding, there was none of the brooding despair that defined the last Job Centre I’d been in, the sense that at any minute some donkey-jacketed Yosser might dash his forehead into something or someone. Here everyone just seemed profoundly resigned. I found a spare screen and saw why. Of the 211 job vacancies it offered me, five were local opportunities in retail security (£6.10 per hour) and food production (£5.85 per hour). The rest – page after page of them – were ‘independent sales representatives’ based in the lonelier parts of Scotland, from Inverness to Perth. All sounded comfortably more terrible than any of the fictional related positions that I’d been stuffing into my CV of late: successful applicants would find themselves hawking cosmetics or replacement windows on a door-to-door basis, in areas where those doors might be separated by a couple of glens and a loch. The reward for this activity was described as ‘meets national minimum wage’.

Contaminated with aimless depression, I went out and trudged back up the street, past a church that was now home to a Money Shop pawnbroker’s. Outside it stood a map of the city, which I perused for some time, dully transfixed by annotations that seemed designed to leach the life-force from all who passed. ‘Middlesbrough Bus Station is a purpose-built facility providing a high-quality bus interchange with modern information systems.’ I wondered if it was possible to construct a less captivating sentence. I’m still wondering now. In any case, I felt abruptly compelled to get back to Craig and drive.

Middlesbrough’s suburbs proved soothingly suburban. No creepy, lobotomised Bransholmes here: just bland and blameless streets of inter-war semis, with the odd gaudy sheaf of pampas grass springing out above a neatly trimmed front hedge. Only the occasional glimpse of some distant clutch of silvered, smoking organ-pipes reminded me this was supposed to be the worst place to live in all the land. Pink-slippered housewives exchanged cheery words as they pushed their wheelie bins out onto the pavement for collection. A hale pensioner creosoted his fence. There was a touching preponderance of aged British cars, though one love still dare not speak its name: all these streets of pampered old Cavaliers and Rovers, and not a single Austin Maestro. I drove with one hand poised over the horn stalk, ready to give a reedy little toot of greeting, but it was not to be. This was Craig’s natural habitat, and he was condemned to roam it alone, the last of his kind.

Middlesbrough’s proudest civic emblem is 225 feet high and bright blue, but it took a lot of finding. In the end I hit the river and followed it downstream as closely as I could, weaving through ever more wasted post-industrial wastelands. And suddenly, in a celestial pool of late sun, there it was, a soaring lattice of struts and crossbeams, the ultimate tribute to Meccano engineering: the Tees Transporter Bridge.

I parked up and walked towards the little visitors’ centre that cowered beneath one of the bridge’s spindly legs. From afar it had looked frail and temporary, the scaffolding for a bigger bridge rather than one in its own right, knocked up out of floodlight gantries and bits of old oil rig. Up close it was fearsome, though my awe subsided rather when I watched it in action. In contradiction of my excitable and – let’s be honest – witlessly unscientific imaginings, the structure’s giddying height did not define the crossing experience. A modest yellow gondola, just big enough for half a dozen cars, was attached to cables slung from the top beam, and thereby hauled languidly across the water at a height of about four feet. The lofty clearance, of course, was down to what went up the river, not across it. The bridge was opened in 1910, when the ships were tall and the Tees was full of them. In the half-century before that, Middlesbrough had grown into the world’s iron and steel capital from nothing – literally nothing. The settlement of that name was a four-cottaged hamlet in 1830, when an extension of the Stockton and Darlington line – the world’s first railway – improbably hauled it into the vanguard of the Steam Age. A dock was swiftly built, and Middlesbrough became a serious player in the coal business, taking in the black stuff from the north-eastern coalfields and shipping it down south. Just as this trade peaked, the serendipitous discovery of huge local ironstone deposits sparked an extraordinary iron rush. Foundries and metalworks popped up all along the river banks and into the fields behind them, attracting job-seeking families from all over the north of England. In 1862, Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, paid personal tribute to a town whose population had more than trebled over the previous decade. ‘This remarkable place,’ he portentously announced to the gathered locals, ‘the youngest child of England’s enterprise, is an infant, but if an infant, an infant Hercules.’ Suitably inspired, the town adopted the stirring civic slogan Erimus – in Latin, We Will Be.

Middlesbrough reeled that future in with the manic haste of Norman Wisdom rehearsing the tablecloth trick. Trainloads of migrant workers arrived from right across Britain and Europe. The town became known as Ironopolis, and the Tees as the Steel River. Railways from Italy to India were laid with the fruit of its furnaces. Still the population doubled every few years, a rate of sustained urban growth never matched in Britain before or since. By the time the Transporter Bridge opened, the settlement that a dozen farmers had called home just a couple of generations before was a smoky, clanging city of 120,000. Amongst their number was Arthur Darwin, who made a posthumous name for himself by falling off the top of the bridge during the opening ceremony. Almost a century later his family was back in the news, courtesy of great-grandson John and a canoe-centred life-insurance fraud.

The town hit its industrial pinnacle in 1932 with the opening of the majestic Sydney Harbour Bridge, designed by local engineers and built from Teesside iron. A few years back I walked across its hefty span, and stopped halfway to survey one of the world’s most becoming prospects. Standing with my elbows on the handrail, those glittering yacht-speckled waters laid out before me, I spotted the legend ‘Dorman Long, Middlesbrough’ stamped into a girder, and found myself abruptly filled with heart-swelling, eye-moistening pride: for the momentous achievement that was the British Empire, for the faraway men whose toil and genius had brought this mighty, fearless structure to life, for the fact that I could call these men my forefathers. It was all I could do not to throw back my arms and burst into patriotic song, though for the sake of my family and Sydney’s police frogmen I’m glad I didn’t.

The Transporter Bridge visitors’ centre traced the city’s subsequent decline, through a table that highlighted a steady dwindling in traffic, both down the river and over it. It seemed sadly apt that other than guest appearances in Billy Elliot and Auf Wiedersehen Pet, the only memorable incident in the bridge’s recent history occurred in 1974, when Terry ‘And June’ Scott got confused driving home from a bear-baiting workshop, and drove his Jaguar straight off the end of the boarding platform. ‘Luckily Scott’s car landed in the safety netting,’ explained a caption in the visitors’ centre, whilst maintaining a diplomatic silence with regard to Terry’s earlier whereabouts, perhaps because I just made them up.

I wandered out into an afternoon that was now bright but still bitter, and for half an hour drove around St Hilda’s. This was the heart of old Middlesbrough, a place where heavy industry lived cheek by sooty jowl with churches, where the ironmakers’ mansions were shoehorned in between streets of workers’ cottages. A mid-Victorian print in the visitors’ centre had shown a genteel market place that could have come straight off the Quality Street tin, ringed with bow-fronted haberdasheries and populated with promenading couples in extravagant headwear.

‘Middlesbrough is a typical town in which to study the lives of those engaged in the making of iron, for it has come into existence for that purpose and for nothing else.’ So wrote Lady Florence Bell, wife of a prominent ironmaster, in a period account of her city. It wasn’t intended as a dire warning, but now began to feel like one, particularly as she’d then gone on to refer to the local foundries as ‘a Titanic industry’. Its wrecks lay all around. Eroded stubs of black-bricked factory wall cast long shadows over street after street of ransacked, rubbish-strewn nothing. It had been evocatively named in honour of the Roman god of fire, but the furnaces along Vulcan Street had long gone cold. ‘There is nothing here to appeal to a sense of art and beauty,’ continued Lady Flo, ‘yet imagination can be stirred – must be stirred – by the hardy, strenuous life of the north, the seething vitality of enterprise with which this town began.’ I drove on through the un-seething, non-vital anti-enterprise with which it ended.

Travelling from Bolton to Manchester in 1933, J.B. Priestley was awed by the clamorous, filthy compaction of slums and factories he passed through. ‘The ugliness is so complete it is almost exhilarating,’ he wrote. ‘It challenges you to live there.’ I could imagine walking about St Hilda’s that year, or at any time in the hundred years before, and feeling the same grubby wonderment. Now the whole place was a silent ruin. St Hilda’s is dead in all but name; in fact, dead even in that – the first church thus called had been built here in AD 686, and the last demolished in 1969. The houses that replaced it are already being knocked down.

As I had just learnt, there were once a hundred public houses in St Hilda’s. At length I found the solitary survivor, the Captain Cook, opened in 1840, a great scabby mansion of a pub surrounded by defunct engineering works and a partly demolished, wholly abandoned post-war council estate. From a primary school to a car park, much in Middlesbrough is named in honour of its most famous son, though James Cook was actually born in a village a few miles south of a town that didn’t then exist, and wouldn’t until eighty years after he was battered to death on a Hawaiian beach. The pub – Middlesbrough’s oldest – succumbed in belated sympathy six months after I passed. ‘The lads who drink here keep saying, “Where are we going to go now?”’ the landlady told the local paper on the day she pulled her last pint. ‘But there’s nothing round here any more. Nothing.’ From ‘We Will Be’ to ‘Well, We Were’.

I drove until the road ran out, or more accurately until it was blocked by two young men of unpromising appearance, doing something under the bonnet of a battered Fiat Punto without any numberplates. Ahead lay a straggly void that had been the docks, huge empty basins surrounded by huge empty wastelands. The lofty old four-faced clock tower was still here, its dockside dial blank, as it had been since a Victorian boss removed it to stop his workshy stevedores clock-watching. Across the water stood a lonely jewel in the mud: the silvery Riverside Stadium, home of Middlesbrough FC. Football grounds are reliably huge, yet this one seemed dwarfed by the brownfield dishevelment around it. It was built in the mid 1990s, with the club confident that all manner of glamorous new leisure and entertainment facilities would swiftly follow in its wake. When they didn’t, or so I’d read, the directors had been reduced to wooing prospective continental signings with a tour of the picturesque and not especially nearby market town of Yarm, encouraging them to take it for downtown Middlesbrough. One player supposedly thus deluded was Brazilian star Emerson, whose wife would later deliver her damning revenge.

The Riverside was financed through the generosity of club chairman Steve Gibson, a local bulk-liquids-transporter made good. They’ll probably be naming car parks after him in decades to come. But surveying Gibson’s gleaming endowment and the sprawling, post-industrial mess in which it lay marooned, I couldn’t stop thinking of the tireless and more straightforwardly edifying Victorian philanthropy described in the Transporter Bridge visitors’ centre. Every public building in old Middlesbrough had it seemed been financed through donations from ironmasters and shipping merchants. Charity was almost a competitive sport, and one they were still playing beyond the grave: bereaved relatives smiled wanly as wills revealed that the family pile was to become a lunatic asylum or sanatorium. Prussian-born Henry Bolckow, Middlesbrough’s premier industrialist and its inaugural mayor, indulged the citizenry like no other: he built the first proper school, the first proper hospital, and the first proper city park, named in memory of his fellow German, Prince Albert. Bolckow died without an heir, and bequeathed the vast bulk of his fortune to sundry charitable concerns. Within thirty years the magnificent ancestral home was a ruin.

Back then, do-gooders did good. Now they build football stadiums, and pay ungrateful Brazilians £80,000 a week to play in them. I dare say we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

I about-turned through the puddled potholes, and drove back to the highest point in St Hilda’s, a low hill crowned by the barricaded relics of Middlesbrough’s first town hall. The ox-blood rendering and Portland stone arches were crumbling and idly spray-tagged; the semi-tiled roof supported a clock tower whose four faces each told a different version of the wrong time. I steered Craig over a stretch of weeded pavement and eased up to the steps where Henry Bolckow, in contemporary portraits a Gordon Brown with big sidies, first stood in his chains of office. It seemed almost unkind to imagine confronting Henry with the present panorama. As a captain of industry – in fact more of a rear admiral – he would surely at least have approved of the Transporter Bridge. ‘A thrill to see from anywhere’, in the words of architecture’s Mr History, Nikolaus Pevsner, who clearly hadn’t looked at it from up here. Nor indeed since 1983, when he died. Today, and from on high, the bridge was doing its best to impersonate the girder-roofed structure left alone on the Hiroshima skyline on that terrible dawn in 1945. I was reminded that at the height of the Cold War, Middlesbrough retained sufficient economic heft to rank number two on the Soviets’ UK nuclear hit-list.

That morning I’d read a newspaper report on the closure of the Redcar steelworks. ‘It’s horrible,’ said one quoted local. ‘This place is on the bones of its arse as it is.’ It was a strangely compelling phrase, and one that now sprang unhappily to mind. Here I was in Middlesbrough’s arse, and all around me lay the bones of that arse. Even those would soon be gone. The residential crescent in front of the town hall was being stolen faster than it could be demolished: the gutters and drainpipes had vanished, most of the roof tiles, even window frames and the odd wall. One of the few remaining front doors bore the daubed legend, Leave us alone. I tugged at Craig’s heavy wheel and headed away. It was a journey that demanded a sombre, elegiac soundtrack, almost certainly Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. Instead I found myself obliged to recall the happier times in our nation’s proud history – specifically 1981, when Buck’s Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest.

The sun had tucked itself up in fat grey clouds by the time I drove past Ayresome Park, formerly the home of Middlesbrough FC, now an insipid Bovis-pattern estate with streets called The Turnstile and The Midfield. Surrounding it was a grid of narrow cobbled streets flanked by tiny red-brick terraced houses – the kind of streets that a patronising London-based tosspot finds it impossible to drive down without humming the old Hovis ad, even if he’s in a car that’s calling the kettle black. At the end of one, a grand pair of gates stood guard over a sweep of greenery and skeletal wintry trees. I parked up and walked into Albert Park, past a monumental sundial inevitably donated by H.W.F. Bolckow. It was marked up to display the time in Middlesbrough, Melbourne and New York; I couldn’t stop myself recalling the global reach of Trotter’s Independent Trading Company, as advertised on the side of Del Boy’s Reliant Robin.

The park’s large open spaces were lightly peopled with the hardy regulars you might expect to find in such a place on a December afternoon: lone dog-walkers, red-faced and smoking, plus the odd huddle of hoodies up to things I didn’t wish to investigate. At length, I came across a small bust of the hugely bearded, late-model Bolckow, surveying his creation through the bars of a vandal-proof cage. Henry was a modest man, who spurned all the many offers to have institutions he’d paid for named in his honour. Here, the trumpet he had been so reluctant to blow in life was yanked from his cold, dead hands and huffed into most forcefully. MIDDLESBROUGH’S FIRST MAYOR AND FIRST REPRESENTATIVE IN PARLIAMENT, read the weathered inscription beneath, CHIEF FOUNDER OF ITS INDUSTRIES AND PIONEER OF ITS EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS AND CHARITABLE MOVEMENTS. Yet Henry’s head and frock-coated shoulders were now hidden away and neglected, inestimably less conspicuous than the life-size bronze that dominated the park’s most prominent stretch of grass. I believe Brian Clough built the Transporter Bridge with his bare hands, and personally taught every steel-worker on Teesside how to read, though it’s possible he might just have scored a few goals for Middlesbrough Football Club before moving on to a career in quotable rudeness. Underneath all Henry’s facial hair I saw a look that said: I just don’t know why I bothered.

Back at the gates I spotted an evidently recent information panel, detailing in its first paragraph how Henry Bolckow announced his intention to lay out Albert Park at a Temperance Society gala. I was trying to picture a more definitively Victorian moment when a local voice piped up right behind me. ‘There’s sixteen mystiques on that sign, man. Sixteen! It’s a tootle bloody disgrease. These fork want to go back to school.’ I turned to see a little old man in a splendid astrakhan hat and coat of matching trim, who now launched unbidden into an evidently well-rehearsed rundown of the panel’s grammatical errors.

As a rule, the citizens of Middlesbrough are a placid bunch. When a local TV crew went out on the streets to record reactions to the Location survey, they encountered widespread indifference to the town’s humiliating denigration as the very worst in the land. All one could muster in its defence was that ‘a pint here costs 50p less than it does in London’. Even the local MP did no better than point out that Middlesbrough was ‘near some good countryside, and less than fifty miles from York’. No, it’s said that if you want to rile someone round these parts, there are only two sure-fire ways to do it: spell Middlesbrough with two o’s, or Teesside with one s. By the time the old man reached the park sign’s final outrage against orthography – a superfluous use of capitals in Sun Dial – I could very easily believe it. For good measure he then progressed eagerly into a withering character assassination of his own city.

‘Run by daft buggers this toon, man. A bloody dump and all. No walk, no money. You live rune dear?’ I raised a finger and opened my mouth, but had time to emit no more than a small cloud of vapour. ‘You don’t want to stay, man. See that rude?’ He waved a dismissive astrakhan cuff at the plain and dreary thoroughfare outside the gates. ‘Whole thing wants bloody nockerndoon. All you’ve got from one end to the bloody other is bloody teaker-wheeze. Not even a decent fission-chip. All teaker-whee bloody kebabs and bloody parmos.’

I’d spotted this mysterious word in the windows of many such local establishments, and seized the opportunity to ask for an explanation, and to sound like Prince Charles on a regional walkabout in doing so. ‘Parmo? Bloody crap, man. Foreign crap. Some horrible bloody foreign idea with chicken and foreign bloody sweaty-foot cheese. Smells worse than bloody Billingham chemical works.’ I was, of course, now duty bound to put this verdict to the test, and so some hours later pulled up in the dark outside a dazzling cathedral city of steam and light, with a horrible bloody foreign idea in my lap.

Even by the stunted health and safety standards of Victorian industry, a chemical plant was a particularly terrible place to earn a living. Work long enough processing white phosphorus – as many thousands did in match factories – and you would succumb to ‘phossy jaw’, a flesh-eating disfigurement which gave off an appalling stench and glowed in the dark. A chromium worker was readily identifiable by the misshapen hole in his face that had once been a nose. Opened in 1833, when workplace protection meant a baker’s boy hat and the Lord’s Prayer, Middlesbrough’s first chemical plant produced sulphuric acid.

As you’d hope and expect, conditions steadily improved thereafter, but never to the point where a Teesside mother would weep tears of joy at the news that her son or daughter had begun a career at Wilton or Billingham, the two sprawling chemical complexes that by the 1950s had established themselves as the town’s dominant employers. As the chorus to a self-evidently unofficial ‘ICI Song’ of this era cheerily put it, ‘Every day you’re in this place, you’re two days nearer death.’

It was perhaps with this in mind that Middlesbrough so recklessly embraced the escalope parmesan, a dish decreed by North Yorkshire Trading Standards to incorporate nearly twice the recommended daily allowance of fat for an adult male. So my subsequent research revealed, along with a potted history of this regional fast-food phenomenon, created by an American army chef who settled in Middlesbrough after the war. Swiftly abbreviated to ‘parmo’, Nicos Harris’s recipe was a cheerfully dumbed-down take on an Italian classic: a veal fillet coated with batter and breadcrumbs, then deep fried, topped with béchamel sauce and parmesan, baked briefly in a pizza oven and laid on a bed of chips. Ignore the original garnish of choice – who on earth let creamed cabbage into the world? – and it doesn’t sound at all bad.

I placed my order knowing none of this, nor the bit that described the half-sized dish I’d opted for as a ‘ladies’ parmo’. It was prepared backstage at one of the many Asian-run outlets that now dominate the local parmo scene by an unsmiling wobble-chops who left me alone for fifteen long minutes at the counter, there to contemplate the many other dishes I might have ordered from him in preference. In fact, there were none. I shall never understand how any competent and incorruptible health inspector can stand before a rotating bollard of animal matter, days old and defiantly unrefrigerated, without calling forth the proprietor and wordlessly executing him on the spot.

The pizza box I took possession of was almost too hot to hold. It was still impressively warm by the time I’d driven over the Tees, and right round Billingham to a lay-by beneath a gigantic overhead pipeline, broad as a Tube tunnel. I switched off the engine and heard a resonant gurgle from above; presently a complicated and very unhealthy smell eased in through Craig’s air vents.

It’s years since ICI sold off most of Billingham to other chemical firms, and I’d been told that the complex was now a shadow of its former self. Some shadow. For more than twenty minutes I’d skirted its perimeter, silently agog at the gleaming, steaming alien structures, with their silvery entrails and spires of flame, their gigantic metal spheres that gasped and wheezed with whatever terrible process they were striving to encourage or restrain. It was at once both exhilarating and dreadful, and I could very easily understand why Aldous Huxley felt inspired to write his creepily dystopian classic Brave New World after a tour around Billingham. It’s also said to have provided Ridley Scott, raised in Teesside, with the visual template for Bladerunner.

That smell was rather a leveller, though, like Darth Vader towering above you with his light sabre poised for the coup de grâce, and then doing a blow-off. There’s something just so stubbornly prosaic about bad odours. Scent is claimed to be the most evocative of the senses, but the most apocalyptic memory my nose could summon as I drove around Billingham was of youthful afternoons spent in the back garden, holding a stick crowned with a gently blazing carrier bag, raining fiery balls of molten plastic death upon a huddled platoon of 1/76 scale infantrymen.

And sadly for Middlesbrough, Billingham and Wilton have made the town synonymous not with a fearsome, futuristic grandeur, but with smelling awful. Teessiders are known across the north-east as Smoggies. The Location, Slow-Motion, Damnation survey laid heavy emphasis on Middlesbrough’s abysmal air quality when justifying its verdict. In the medical journals, the region is identified as the UK’s asthma black spot; on the football terraces, Boro fans are greeted with taunts of ‘What’s it like to smell fresh air?’

What indeed. I opened the pizza box a crack and was hit by a curdled waft that precisely replicated the challenging under-sock aroma described by the old man in the park. In haste I clamped it shut and wound down the window, welcoming in a roaring hiss and a chilled wave of pickled swamp gas. By judicious tinkering I established that a half-inch gap allowed the two stenches to cancel each other out. Then I eased the lid right back and there, prone on its nest of chips in the moody shadows of Craig’s interior half-light, sat a flaccid, glistening dumbbell weight.

Underscoring the insidious dangers of long-term exposure to airborne toxins, those who work at Billingham or live near it must cope with the more tangible fear of being abruptly blown to pieces. The plant was opened in 1917 to synthesise ammonia-based artillery explosives, and is today the UK’s largest producer of ammonium nitrate, a fertiliser whose fearsome combustibility has attracted the attention of many a terrorist, and whose manufacture and storage are fraught with hazards. The industry’s most dumbfounding catastrophe occurred in 1947, when a ship full of ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded on the quayside at Texas City, just south of Houston: 481 people were killed, including passengers in two passing aeroplanes whose wings were ripped off by the blast. The ship’s two-ton anchor turned up, still too hot to touch, in a field over a mile and a half away. That shattering disaster led to a radical tightening in precautionary regulations, but ongoing demand for what remains the world’s most ubiquitous fertiliser means vast and lethal bangs are never more than a discarded fag away: in the first decade of this century alone, related mishaps claimed five thousand casualties. In suffering no explosive deaths in recent years Billingham can count itself fortunate, though that’s probably not a word you’d want to suggest to veterans of the many ammonium-nitrate-based excitements the plant has hosted. A former instrument technician at Billingham recalled a 1960s blast of such harrowing intensity that three shell-shocked colleagues resigned on the spot. In 2006, nearby residents were flung from their beds by an explosion that ‘turned the whole world orange’, and was heard over 20 miles away.

My stinking lapful of ladies’ parmo was beginning to look like an encapsulation of Middlesbrough’s every deficiency. At this stage it wouldn’t have been a huge surprise if it had blown up in my face. But I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and felt sure that a parmo’s bark (smell and appearance) could not possibly be as bad as its bite (taste). I grasped the warm and yielding roundel; it promptly divided into soggy cubes, like a partly diced mango half. Then with a snatch and a snap of the jaws, my parmo virginity was sacrificed.

Sensations were instantly unleashed that seemed distant from anything Nicos Harris could ever have intended. Gone were the breadcrumbs; more significantly, gone, too, was the escalope. At the core of my mouthful sat a loose layer of puréed fowl. Outside that, a fat sheathing of oiled sponge, and outside that, a crusted ooze pairing the odour of century-old Dairylea with the flavour of exhumed whey solids. It was like a spam fritter left outside for a year in a land where it rained fondue.

I think we have now established that I will eat almost anything. I could not eat this. Another and much smaller bite confirmed the terrible evidence of the first. Even the chips, contaminated by leachate from what I would some months later hear a TV chef describe as ‘the antichrist of cooking’, proved beyond me. I tossed the box wanly into the footwell and drove away. Only then did I take note of the hour, and what it implied for my short-term accommodation plans. There was only one solution, and in a state of malnourished resignation I accepted it with no more than a slight lowering of the shoulders.

‘Hello again! Listen, we’re a bit full tonight. Would a view of the flyover be OK?’