IT WAS A shudderingly bitter morning, hazed with Billingham smog, and I walked stiffly out into it, still harrowed and damp from my ordeal in the Metro Inn’s communal cleansing pod. Every Formule 1 shower comes decorated with an ankle-high frieze of van-driver pubes, marking the tide-line limit of the self-cleaning jets that dribble into action when you vacate the pod. Your bathing pleasure is compromised by the certain knowledge that gingery strays are plaiting themselves into your leg-hair, though only until you step into the drying zone, where they’re blasted free by a million-watt jet of hot air. Not so at the Metro Inn, where I writhed pitifully before a frail and frigid wisp, like a Death Eater’s final breath.
Craig sat frost-rimed and alone in the mist-wreathed car park, looking as if he’d frozen to death in the night. So indeed he had. The choke knob proved immovably glaciated, resisting my efforts to free it so doughtily that before long I had worn right through the tips of two glove fingers. Undeterred by the hard-lacquered remains of a lady’s parmo in the footwell, despair and its foul-mouthed minions soon made themselves at home in Craig’s Arctic interior. I gave the key a twist, thereby filling the world with hypothermic mechanical toiling topped with a squawked request to take my order. So began the parping litany of burger, fried chicken and pizza establishments that is ‘The Fast Food Song’, the queasily, cheesily appropriate E. coli of novelty hit singles.
In my twin capacities as tightwad and idiot, I spent an awful lot of my young adulthood on the hard shoulder, unscrewing the wrong bits of some stricken jalopy. It was a bitter-sweet moment when, at the age of twenty-seven, I opened the bonnet of my new (old) acquisition – a Citroën – and saw the entire engine hidden beneath a big cowl with DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, SONNY stamped on the top in seven languages. The age of clueless fumbling was at an end: my relationship with the motor vehicle would henceforth be agreeably more distant than the needy, dysfunctional, love-hate folie à deux it had become. I haven’t bought a Haynes manual for two decades, let alone quickly reduced one to an oil-smeared, bloodstained and – don’t ask – flaming mess.
The remedial skills currently at my disposal may be encapsulated in one simple maxim: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – but if it is, spray WD40 all over the bastard and give it another go. Get some under your fingernails and wave a socket wrench about and it even looks as if you know what you’re doing. It’s amazing how often this technique pays dividends: I strongly suspect you could employ it to good effect on head lice and sore throats. At any rate, it was with some relief that I now remembered the huge can of WD40 stowed in the boot, and indeed the scraper and de-icer acquired in a pound shop the day before and stowed alongside it.
But the boot lock was stubborn at the best of times, and this certainly wasn’t one of those. I depressed the chrome knob and it stayed depressed, deep-frozen and obdurate. Nothing was going to coax it back out, though that didn’t stop me pushing through my right glove’s final fingers while trying. Could a man hate a silver button? I gave it my best shot. I sank to my haunches and stared at it coldly from point-blank range, then spattered its stupid little face with the fruits of a long and furious raspberry. That felt good; I inhaled deeply and did it again. I was drawing breath for a third when I saw I was being observed through the driver’s window of a lorry parked outside.
Something had happened to Craig’s insides when I got back in behind the wheel. Something bad: loud, hot rage had fast-tracked the parmo-defrosting process, releasing a retch-friendly stench that I correctly guessed would haunt the interior for many days to come. Even with the parmo snatched up and by some irresistible reflex hurled into a hedge – sorry, Stockton on Tees – the sour and sickly smell hung heavy, so thick you could almost see it, like the wavy lines above a cartoon Camembert. I wound down all four windows and sat there for a while, letting the faintly acrid smog creep in and ‘The Fast Food Song’ creep out. McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut. Then I turned the key again and again and again, hearing Craig fire and die, fire and die. Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken. And with the starter wheezing into its death rattle, fire – and hold. Gunning the engine crazily and thickening the mist with great billows of uncatalysed fumes, I peered hopefully through the crystallised windscreen haze and pointed the Parmobile north.
It is better to travel than to arrive, said someone who’d never gone very far in an Austin Maestro. The driver’s seat had begun to fall in on itself, sucking my trunk ever deeper into the wire eggbox of its fundament. The steering made roundabouts a decent aerobic workout and parallel parking an iron-man triathlon, even with the front tyres so recklessly over-inflated they pinged when I flicked them. Bulgarian peasant-spec suspension meant that speed bumps and potholes weren’t so much absorbed as battered into submission. Craig cornered on rails – rails made of warm licorice.
The whole car had a sort of Tesco Value feel to it: it just about did the job, but felt like it wouldn’t for long. Shutting the door made a sound like kicking an empty Coke can, and more often than not caused the glovebox door to flop open. Closer inspection of the sat-nav screen’s data revealed that my true rate of progress was hugely slower than that indicated by Craig’s speedo, which read 70mph when I was actually doing 58. In their press releases, Austin Rover had made great play of the Maestro’s ‘homofocal’ headlights – an apparently innovative super-bright design burdened, like the vehicle they fronted, with an extremely silly name. Maybe he had suffered electrical complications during a difficult two-stage birth, but I have to say Craig’s homofocals were a useless liability. Heading through the Teesside fog I might as well have had a couple of IKEA tealights resting on the front bumper. Though it wasn’t all bad, as I was thus spared the finer detail of the terrible urban wasteland we presently broached.
An also-ran in the Location chart at number twenty, Hartlepool didn’t make the cut on my initial itinerary. Belated persuasion came via the dark insinuations of ‘Hartlepool mind-games’ overheard in the Middlesbrough curry house, and – read over an Asda Value breakfast – a newspaper profile of Peter Mandelson, for many years the town’s MP. This reacquainted me with a notorious local tale: that of the ship’s monkey, sole survivor of a Napoleonic warship wrecked off the Hartlepool coast, lynched on the foreshore by hysterical townspeople who took him for a Frenchman. What I found interesting about this shameful episode is that it never happened: there was no shipwreck, no monkey, no hanging. Even more interesting is how the townspeople went on to embrace this fictional humiliation as their defining symbol. In 2001, Hartlepool FC introduced a man in a monkey suit as their official mascot. H’angus, as he was known, quickly distinguished himself at away games by simulating sexual intercourse with match stewards, an activity for which he was regularly ejected by police. Undeterred by this CV, and a range of policies that began and ended with ‘free bananas for schoolkids’, a year later the people of Hartlepool elected him as their mayor. H’angus has since been re-elected twice – the first mayor in the country ever to be voted in for a third term. Perhaps it was their way of making up for electing Peter Mandelson three times, without lynching him on the foreshore even once. Or perhaps it was because they had simply gone past caring.
There were two questions I could be sure my friends and family would be asking when I visited them after returning home. The first: ‘Sorry, but would you mind parking that round the corner?’ The second: ‘So, what was the worst place, then?’ I drove through Hartlepool with my features set somewhere between confusion and disbelief, like George Bush being told about the twin towers, just as he was really getting into that story about the goat. I had an answer.
The drilled-metal grille, as welded over the doors and windows of long-abandoned buildings, was no stranger to me these days. But in Hartlepool, it had become the civic leitmotif, the must-have structural accessory. Entire misty streets, entire misty districts, bore this mark of the damned: Victorian back-to-backs, red-brick inter-war estates, Sixties mini-Bransholmes. The whole town had been earmarked for destruction, but the programme appeared to have been cancelled halfway through. There can be few sights more poignant, more disrespectful and intrusive, than a crudely bisected family home: a bathroom mirror gleaming out above the clinging shards of a pink-tiled splashback, an exposed bedroom wall still graced with a carefully hand-painted depiction of the Hartlepool FC crest.
It was foggy, it was cold, and at 10.30 a.m. it was utterly deserted – the first and only gathering of townspeople I encountered was a crowd of females, old and young, piling purposefully aboard two coaches parked outside a civic centre. It looked for all the world like the evacuation of the womenfolk, first phase of full withdrawal from a town deemed unfit for purpose. The men they were leaving behind, all six of them, seemed aimless and bereft. Two were walking stout little dogs across the empty car park outside a Massive Clearance Sale of Ex-Hire Formal Menswear. Two were wobbling around a playing field on what looked very much like their sons’ mountain bikes, knees out, fags in mouth. And two had devised a pastime that shall define Hartlepool for me whenever I think of the town again. Why don’t you give it a try? All you’ll need are two baseball bats, two cricket balls, string, plenty of gaffer tape, and a fierce belief in pain as the only cure for boredom.
I’d asked Ozzy to direct me to Jutland Road, having chanced upon it in a local man’s Facebook request for input into the Hartlepool Monopoly board he was designing. ‘I know there are plenty of scruffy streets, but don’t know what order to put them in.’ There was one constant in the replies: anyone looking for an Old Kent Road need look no further than the street most knew simply as ‘Jutty’. It didn’t seem up to much at first: blameless, well-sized pebble-dashed semis, set back from the road, a Sky dish on every chimney. The first suggestions of a darker side emerged with the chicanes, elaborate deterrents to anti-social driving habits, there in essence to take the joy out of joyriding. Then I spotted CCTV towers pointing down at me from all sides, the cameras secured in heavy-mesh cages, above a medieval array of spike-tipped anti-climb deterrents. But when, at length, Ozzy announced that I had raiched my f-f-f-fookin dustinoition, the satellite-decreed centre of Jutland Road, I wasn’t paying attention. Blocking the street ahead, oblivious to me or the watching eyes above, two stocky men in their thirties were lethargically belabouring each other with home-crafted maces, assembled from the components listed above. A swing, a yielding thwump of bodily contact, a low grunt of discomfort. Repeat.
Loath to alert them with a provocative toot of Craig’s whiny horn, I watched and waited, in thrall to their vacant, workmanlike demeanour. No snarls, no sneers, no deranged cackles; one was even wearing a high-visibility jacket, which bolstered the impression that they were engaged in some tiresome blue-collar obligation, like welding window grilles onto an abandoned factory, or half-demolishing a street of houses, or pop-riveting a Londoner’s nose to the bonnet of his Austin Maestro. Swing, thwump, grunt. It was simply the sort of thing people did in Hartlepool when there wasn’t a fictional monkey to not string up. After half a dozen exchanges, one took a mighty blow to the neck, which had him holding a hand up to request a brief recuperative intermission. At this point his yellow-jacketed opponent noted my presence, and waved me idly through, as if I’d been waiting to drive aboard a cross-channel ferry. As I gathered speed I glanced in my mirror and saw his head pitch abruptly to one side and his knees buckle gently beneath him. It might not have been quite what the curry-house couples had meant, but I knew what I had witnessed: a skull-smiting three-pointer in the Hartlepool Mindgame.
The sky had spent all morning knitting itself into a heavy, grey blanket, and heading out of Hartlepool this began to leak weather that Craig’s porous underpinnings eagerly blotted up. In this manner I was made aware that the sole of my left shoe now sported a hole. Having stopped at a petrol station to change into new socks, I was compelled to first tackle the conundrum of the unopenable boot in which they were entombed. Pleasingly, my cure-all remedy instantly sorted the boot, even if effecting it did mean having to buy another can of WD40 to supplement the one already in there. Duly inspired, I opened the bonnet and hissily lubricated the choke mechanism, more familiar to me as the entire engine bay. In the process I blundered across the dipstick: withdrawn and inspected, it bore no more than a black fingernail crescent at its tip. I felt exactly as I had when some student-era neighbours went away and I realised three nights on that I’d forgotten to feed their cat – in fact, worse, as I couldn’t look back on seventy-two hours of wanton debauchery to offset the guilt. It required almost two litres of distressingly expensive lubricant (‘Haven’t you got anything for low-performance engines?’) to get Craig back up to his mark. When I checked the manual I found I’d been working him like a pit pony: he’d been creaking through the agony with less than a litre of relief in his sump. It was difficult to know what was more impressive – my criminal neglect, or the dedicated incompetence required to design and manufacture an engine that after just 16,000 miles of social and domestic pottering was already burning oil like an aged tramp steamer.
It really didn’t take much to top the charts in the mid Seventies. Here is Wikipedia’s encapsulation of the 1976 worldwide hit that seeped dismally forth from the speakers as I headed away into the sodden coastal mist: ‘The story within “Disco Duck” centres around a man at a dance party who is overcome by the urge to get up and “get down” in a duck-like manner.’ Weave that epic fable around a studiously insipid rent-a-boogie riff, throw in some sub-Donald quackery and you had yourself a Billboard number one.
What you didn’t have, being a Memphis-based DJ, is a song with any British connections whatsoever. My in-car jukebox promised death by a thousand cuts, but halfway through ‘Disco Duck’ I realised this was one little stab to the eardrum that I need never have endured. When a jab at the next-track button unleashed the plinky, parpy opening strains of ‘I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester’, I felt like cranking the volume up to the max, winding down the window and filling the mist with a chest-swelling roar: Absent people of Cleveland and Durham’s defunct mining settlements, this terrible, terrible music is ours and ours alone!
The fog thickened; I slowed down and clicked the high-intensity rear-light button, savouring the intrepid thrill that doing so unfailingly instils. ‘Rear fogs activated, Captain. Steady as she goes.’ For an hour or more there was nothing to see but the occasional misty reminder that up here the seaside was – or had been – a workplace, not a day-trip destination. A skip depot fronting a mountain of landfill rubble that loomed above the dunes; greasy, grey vessels on a greasy, grey horizon; a horseshoe sweep of sand bestrewn with old tyres and twisted sections of gantry. Then the weather closed in, hard, and it was just screechy wipers, Geri Halliwell and an oncoming convoy of battered lorries piled high with rusty scrap, as if the post-industrial wastelands ahead were being hastily dismantled and taken away before I arrived.
Somewhere out to my rain-lashed, fog-shrouded right lay Blackhall Colliery beach, the most thrillingly desolate and despoiled location in all of Britain. It was there that the 1971 classic Get Carter romped to its feel-good finale, one introduced with Michael Caine pursuing a Scottish gangster across the blackened sands. Caine, as Carter, presently batters his quarry to death and heaves the corpse into a coal-slag hopper; Carter then fulfils the film’s entitled imperative by being got as he strolls breezily back across the shoreline, shot square in the forehead by a distant, faceless hitman. But even as the credits roll and the North Sea surf caresses Michael’s gingery curls, the contemporary viewer is still struck dumb by the spectacle bridging the two murders: did I really just see that coal-slag hopper unload itself straight into the sea?
Indeed you did, and if you’d stood on any east Durham beach in 1971 you’d have seen conveyor chains of coal-slag doing the same, right around the clock. Several million tons of the stuff had rendered this entire stretch of coast one of the most polluted in the world by 1981, when Blackhall Colliery was closed down. Elsewhere in Durham the practice lingered briefly on. In 1924 the county had been home to 304 pits, employing 170,000 men. By 1969 that was down to 34 and 36,000 respectively. The graph-line had been heading one way fast for sixty years, and Margaret Thatcher’s government did no more than usher it to the axis. Today not a single County Durham mine survives.
In thinning mist I drove now into one of the more feted casualties, a town that abruptly sprang forth from the tumbling coastal hillsides of east Durham in 1910, and on a wet December noon a century on was melting back into them, earth to earth, slag to slag, coal ashes to coal ashes. To enthusiasts of statistical calamity, Easington is notorious as the English town with the highest per-capita rates of obesity, unemployment and long-term sickness. Easington’s pensioners are the poorest in Britain. Two out of five of its adult men claim invalidity benefits. By whatever basket of dispiriting data employed to arrive at the conclusion, it is the most economically deprived town in the United Kingdom. But to members of the Moore household, with all respectful apologies to its woebegone citizenry, Easington is known only as a place of glory and celebration. For it was through the front door of an Easington miner’s home, as reimagined on a West End stage for the musical production of Billy Elliot, that my son dashed three nights a week for nine heady months in 2006, fixing the Equity-certified NUM strikers therein with a look of imploring horror, then captivating full house after breathless full house with a dynamic and flawlessly regional announcement: ‘The police are coming down the street – they’ve kicked in Jimmy Milburn!’
The depth and vigour my son brought to the cameo role of ‘Tall Boy’ proved a mixed blessing. Victim of his own Day-Lewisian versatility, he was also called upon to portray the pivotal martyrdom of ‘Posh Boy’, accosted later in the production by the eponymous young Easingtonian, and slapped, kneed, headbutted or rabbit-punched, depending on which particular Billy was on duty. In any event, I felt something of a bond with Easington, though sadly one liable to earn me the Posh Boy treatment had I opted to reveal it.
Easington Colliery mine was one of the last to be opened in Durham; the coal seams here headed straight out under the North Sea, and tapping into them from the clifftop pithead required eleven years of grim and awkward toil. Specialist German engineers were called in to penetrate the watery strata using an experimental freezing technique: one worker fell down a shaft thus treated, and emerged three years later entombed in a block of ice.
A deep, dark hole in the ground is a compromised working environment, and there were few deeper and darker. Easington’s miners would end up hewing coal from seams 1,700 feet under the seabed, 8 miles off the coast. But if Easington was never going to be a great place to work, in Edwardian Britain there were few better places for a miner and his family to live. By virtue of being built at a time when our industrialists could call upon an informed and sympathetic awareness of what was bad about old mining towns, and were blessed with the cash and philanthropic decency to put up a really good new one, Easington Colliery – attached to one of a cluster of blue-riband ‘super pits’ built along the east Durham coast – was assured of a gilded start in life.
Sited just down the hill from the old Saxon-founded village of Easington, the town was a top-of-the-range, state-of-the-art new-build, with the full set of optional civic extras: a working men’s club, a miners’ hall, even a cinema – an extraordinary embellishment for that time. The terraced houses were twice the size of their typical Victorian predecessors, and two imposing schools – one for girls, one for boys – went up side by side on Seaside Lane, as the high street was cheerily dubbed. Coal was king in 1910, and Easington Colliery was one of its grandest palaces.
Mindful of the many industrial towns that had swiftly outgrown themselves – Middlesbrough wasn’t far away – Easington Colliery was future-proofed to soak up the inevitable decades of growth. I parked above the high street and looked out across what had clearly been intended as no more than phase one: lone columns of dark red terraces strode out up the wet green hills, north towards the allotments and pigeon lofts, east towards the fuzzy grey sea, still waiting for the cross-streets that would link them all together. The headstones were packed neatly into the distant far end of a huge cemetery, like the very early stages of a round of Tetris. Towering over all stood those his-’n’-hers school buildings, full-on, Harrods-turreted temples of academe.
It was hard to accept that the community huddled beneath these gigantic, neo-baroque edifices could ever have managed the frenzy of reproduction required to fill them. It certainly couldn’t now. I hadn’t passed a soul under the age of forty by the time I walked up to the schools’ padlocked gates and looked through at the weed-pierced playground tarmac. No BOYS or GIRLS to walk in beneath the porticos thus grandly engraved, or stifle a ribald giggle by the door marked MANUAL INSTRUCTION. Easington Colliery pit closed in 1993; the two schools four years later. A survey taken twelve months afterwards established that only one in five former pupils of working age had found employment. And a decade on their schools were still looking for a job: as a weathered sign nailed high up the façade announced, the buildings remained a redevelopment opportunity.
Just a year after Easington hauled up its first buckets of black stuff, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admirality, announced that the Royal Navy would henceforth be powered not by coal – bulky, labour-intensive, calorifically inefficient – but by oil. It was to prove a tipping point. Demand fell away, and the market for British coal in particular declined dramatically after the First World War, with the availability of cheaper foreign substitutes. Durham’s coal output peaked in 1913, and Easington would never employ more than 3,200 miners, way below the projected estimates. The twin schools, built for 1,300 children, were never more than three-quarters full, and by the Second World War were more than half empty. To the plucky band of Billys and Tall Boys roaming its lonely corridors in the early 1980s, the place would have seemed almost godforsaken.
It felt a bit like that down Seaside Lane, home to an endless parade of small shops and perhaps half a dozen stooping female pedestrians. Easington Colliery’s population peaked at ten thousand, but its local traders now had just 2,100 heads to coif, minds to feed, hearts to clog. The usual preponderance of bookmakers and undertakers was broken up with dusty, shuttered victims of steady economic decline or blindly irrational optimism: an appliance repair shop, a mortgage broker, a chiropody clinic. I struck off down a terraced side street and at last spotted some Easingtonian males: grey-faced Jimmy Milburns and Elliot pères in dockers hats and baggy tracksuits, tinkering with small, old, cheap-to-run cars, or walking small, old, cheap-to-run dogs. Born and bred miners to a man, living 100 miles from the nearest working pit.
I’d anticipated – OK, feared – that men like these might still be looking for someone to take it out on, their bitterness matured to violent perfection over twenty-five years. But the mood, as far as I could gauge it – from the null-and-void expressions, from the round-shouldered, silent shuffle with which everyone went about their non-business, from the way that long-abandoned premises were left to rot slowly where they stood, without the fast-tracking input of vandalism or petty theft – was one of profound resignation. The Bransholme Effect: people who’d never expected much from life, and weren’t getting it. The spark had been snuffed out of a whole community, and how bright that spark had once burnt. When the inter-war collapse in profitability reined in the mine owners’ philanthropic urges, the miners’ pooled their own meagre free time and resources. They built a home for aged miners and a welfare ground with sports pitches and a clubhouse, and organised a communal doctors’ surgery and a new bus service. Even by mining-community standards, Easington was a proud, defiant, all-for-one kind of town. You’ll never guess what happened one summer’s morning in 1984, when the colliery’s striking miners discovered that a single scab had turned up to clock on with an escort of two thousand riot police. The Milburn-avenging re-enactment catalysed by my son necessarily underplayed events.
The 1984–85 miners’ strike was by no means Easington’s introduction to communal adversity. The town suffered horribly in the 1918 flu epidemic, and its miners endured a thirteen-week lock-out in 1921, as well as a very lean seven months during the 1926 General Strike. The colliery’s practice of tipping red-hot ash from its boilers straight on to the beach (where else?) accounted for a number of recklessly curious youngsters, and provided a handy navigational beacon for the Luftwaffe, who killed nine locals in a bombing raid. Above and beyond all were the self-evident occupational hazards. Two other shaft-diggers had joined their deep-frozen colleague in the churchyard before Easington Colliery had even opened, and before it closed a further 191 miners would lie beside them. Almost half were killed on 29 May 1951, when a huge explosion sent walls of flame roaring through 9 miles of deep galleries. Britain has never since endured a more deadly mining tragedy, and doubtless never will. At the end of the 1950s, annual fatality rates in the industry were half what they had been in Victorian times, yet still ran at around one death for every thousand workers. Those are not attractive odds. Would you go to a cup final knowing that eighty spectators wouldn’t get out of Wembley alive? The miners, of course, didn’t have the luxury of a choice.
The very real risk of being killed was just one chapter in the Bumper Book of Mining Badness. In 1937, George Orwell went down three Lancashire coal mines while researching his sociological treatise The Road to Wigan Pier, and offered a swift encapsulation of the underground working environment: ‘… the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell. Most of the things one imagines in hell are there – heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.’
As a man who spent much of his late twenties as a full-on tramp, Orwell was no whinging milksop. Rare is the novelist who can call upon an informed experience of what it is to shovel two tons of earth in an afternoon above ground, while assessing its subterranean counterpart. Yet nothing he had experienced – or would experience, in a life so rich with voluntary suffering that most obituaries found space for the word ‘masochist’ – could ever compare with the manifold horrors Orwell witnessed down the mines. The seams were often no more than 3 feet thick, obliging miners to hack and shovel for seven hours hunched in a squat. Still worse was the simple act of reaching the coal face, which involved creeping for long miles down black passages, usually bent double, sometimes on all fours. Every miner sported ‘buttons down the back’: permanent scabs on each vertebra caused by knocking against beams. Orwell got a good look at these, as the ambient temperature in many underground areas encouraged most miners to work in nothing but clogs and kneepads. ‘By no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner,’ he concluded. ‘The work would kill me in a few weeks.’
I turned a few lonely corners and wandered up to the cemetery, trying to conjure a more positive rationale for the defeated air that hung over Easington. Perhaps it was just the December rain, I thought. Perhaps the citizens’ spirits weren’t crushed, just comfortably anaesthetised by the soothing beauty of their surroundings, horses gambolling across tilted pastures, the coastal walk that was such a bracing delight, or certainly would be once the last mountains of coal slag and discarded mining machinery had been cleared off the beach.
At the churchyard I gave up conjuring. The polished new headstones honoured dearest fathers and beloved husbands struck down at 49, 52, 50, 53, 42 … The statistics had forewarned me, but it was still a shock to witness the reality. It felt like a scene from some personal remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, being shown how things would pan out if I went ahead and made that fateful decision to do nothing but eat crisps and smoke. Mining was an old man’s game by 1951 – the average age of those who died in the Easington disaster was forty-three, with twelve victims into their sixties. But looking around the graves I grasped that if there’s one thing worse for your health than working down a mine, it’s not working at all. The shadow of death that hung over every mining community had been lifted, yet the graveyard was filling faster than ever. When the pit closed, 1,400 Easington men had nothing to do but grow old and die. It wasn’t much of a job, and sixteen years on they were all opting for early retirement. I drove away in a mood of sombre reflection that Cliff Richard’s ‘Millennium Prayer’ came worryingly close to complementing. Thanks be to Cliff’s buddy upstairs that I wasn’t a miner, or an ex-miner, or a miner-to-be: one day, you can be sure, we’ll have to prise off Easington’s little pithead memorial in a desperate search for the 8.4 million tons of fuel that still lie down that very deep hole, but when that day comes I’ll be at peaceful rest in a rather shallower one.
I spent the balance of the morning pressing deeper into the unknown, that huge swathe of upper northern Britain only previously experienced through the window of a train or the windscreen of a much faster car. Craig-pace afforded me a ruminative drive-by of the Angel of the North, wings out on a neighbouring brow; I assessed it with an enhanced appreciation for the message inherent in its rusted majesty, and prayed that its head wouldn’t fall off under the influence of my malignant forcefield. Other than that all was deeply, defiantly traditional. The sun came out and varnished the timeless wet hillsides. Every other pub was called The Shoulder of Mutton. Doyenne of novelty hits ‘Lily the Pink’ oompahed out of the speakers, nestled in my discography’s timeline just behind David Bowie’s youthful stupidity ‘The Laughing Gnome’ – the oldest track in there, and such a durable magnet for Bowie-baiters that in 1990 he scrapped a public telephone vote that had been set up to decide the playlist for his forthcoming tour.
Grange Villa, another erstwhile mining community, had been included in Sky 3’s Britain’s Toughest Villages by virtue of an apparently ugly record of leek-envy allotment riots. December clearly wasn’t a hot-spot month for such activity, but the allotments I drove past – hundreds of them, like some sprawling shanty town of sheds and greenhouses – were still dotted with stooped potterers. Nurturing vegetables to prizewinning enormity was a pastime self-evidently honed to obsession in the time-rich forty-two years since Grange Villa’s nearest mine closed (and since ‘Lily the Pink’ topped the UK charts). The village had indeed become defined by its leisure pursuits, if not in the way Sky 3 wanted me to believe: I was bidden farewell from it by a rather fetching roadside bas-relief of a racing pigeon rampant above a trug of gargantuan produce. (I’ve always rather liked the whole peculiar concept of racing pigeons as a hobby, if not its guano-steeped reality – it’s just one of those things I’m glad somebody does, as long as it’s not me, like clearing gutters or giving a prostrate derelict the kiss of life. In any event, I was pleased to discover that the Royal Pigeon Racing Association still issues over a million identification rings a year.)
‘Bulldozers are due to start the demolition of Gateshead town centre today.’ It’s difficult to imagine a more damning admission of civic failure than that reported by Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle back in 2007. Not just a few offices or shops, not even a couple of streets – a town that 190,000 people called home was to have its entire heart ripped out, and just forty years after the last transplant.
It was twilight by the time Ozzy stuttered out the news of our arrival. Never before had his valedictory imprecation sounded so heartfelt. Squatting thuggishly atop the bluff that crowns Gateshead, Europe’s ugliest public building loomed over all it surveyed like a medieval fortress. The twelve slitted storeys imparted an air of narrow-eyed, thick-set menace, and the service shafts attached to opposite corners made convincing fortified observation towers. In the sodium streetlight I could see its flanks streaked and pock-marked with scabby decay, like a beached whale after a fortnight on the sand. I saw what the Chronicle had meant: Trinity Square car park might be defined as a single building, but in scale and in bearing, it was the whole town centre. Imprisoned behind blue-painted building-site barriers the car park now stood vacant, but two years on those bulldozers still hadn’t dared to confront it.
A slashed canvas smeared with pus and swastikas, atonal cries of fury: I’d have no issue with a Brutalist movement in art or music, safely confined as its artistic output would be by gallery walls or headphones. Brutalist dance I might even actively encourage. But you can’t take or leave architecture. It’s rather forced upon us. We have to look at it and walk around in it. It’s there to be lived in, worked in, shopped in, parked in. As such, I will never understand how an architectural movement that dubbed itself Brutalism was ever allowed to exist, let alone thrive as it did in Britain for two fateful decades. ‘Kids, wait till you see our new flat. It’s so brutal!’
With an effort I can just about forgive the forbidding and repetitive flanks of raw concrete that went up all over Britain in the 1950s. Cities needed rebuilding, and there was no cheaper, quicker way of doing it. Heck, I’ll even cut some slack for those architects and planners who convinced themselves that such grimly functional structures embodied the progressive, honest and classless fresh start the nation needed after the war. Their hearts were in the right place, even if their brains – and eyes – weren’t.
But that rationale was wearing thin by 1969, when Gateshead council finally declared the Trinity Square complex open. It was partly their own fault for taking six years to get the thing built, six years in which Brutalism’s brave future had curdled into a dour and cowering present. Because as it turned out, people didn’t quite feel at home in an abstract environment of bald cement. Reinforced concrete, which aged so gracefully in Le Corbusier’s pioneering Brutalist blocks in Marseilles and India, wept tears of rusty mould when asked to cope with north-European winters. Those tempting blank canvases didn’t cope much better with north-European vandals. ‘Britain’s first major free-standing multi-storey car park to incorporate a shopping centre,’ trumpeted the original Trinity Square proposal, words that in 1964 might have dampened pants across Geordieland. By 1969, they effectively translated as, ‘People of Gateshead, look upon me and despair.’
The first calls to have the car park knocked down rang out before it was even finished. After opening, Trinity Square wasted no time in acquiring the ambience that came to define its breed: that heady air of lawless neglect, scented with solvents and urine. The building had yet to celebrate its second birthday when the Get Carter crew arrived to film some of its more iconic sequences, but already bore the ravages of ‘spalling’ – a fragmentation of concrete surfaces typically seen in structures that are very old, and have been burnt to the ground. Its upper storeys were soon declared dangerously unsound and closed off; the glass-walled rooftop cafeteria, as smarmily patrolled by a corrupt property developer in the film, would never find a tenant.
You’ve got to hand it to the Get Carter location spotters, who perceptively connected the north-east’s doomed and desolate past with its doomed and desolate future. Blackhall Colliery is no more, and – finally – nor is Trinity Square. It’s rare to find a local with a good word to say about the film, though, as its belated discovery by Loaded-reading New Lads kick-started a noisy campaign to save the ‘Get Carter car park’. Gateshead council had first proposed knocking it down as early as 1981, with outline consent for demolition finally granted in 2000. Three years after that, Trinity Square came in at number seven in a national poll set up to find candidates for Channel 4’s self-explanatory 2003 series Demolition (I won’t spoil the suspense by revealing the winner, or the life-changing adventures I was soon to enjoy in its considerable shadow). One internet forum voted it the ugliest public structure in Europe, and another declared the car park ‘Britain’s most hated building’.
Yet Get Carter enthusiasts successfully shouted down much of this accumulated opprobrium: one cheerleader went as far as to claim that ‘Trinity Square is to Gateshead what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris’. This procured a local online response heavy on phrases such as ‘pathetic middle-class gangster wannabes’ and ‘Mockney cockhouse’, along with multiple offers to help re-erect the car park ‘in their fucking back gardens, if they love it so much’.
I found a guest house which in daylight might have afforded a view of Trinity Square. It was a stout old Victorian building run by a stout old landlady, with gloriously horrid orange carpeting and fire doors that parted with a drawn-out, abandon-hope creak. I was about to enter my room when the door next to it flew open, releasing a cloud of thick soot. Through this emerged a young man in overalls, looking like the survivor of a cartoon explosion. ‘Areet,’ he said, teeth agleam behind blackened lips. Then he inhaled hugely, plunged back into the room and slammed the door behind him.
Somebody had thoughtfully cleaved a jagged hole through the partition wall that this miniature mining disaster shared with my room, about the size of a firmly swung fist or rifle butt. But when I lowered my face to it, there was only blackness and the unmuffled sounds of masonry and joists putting up a decent fight against the blunt and bladed tools of destruction. The heftier blows forced a coil of sooty dust through the hole. I decided the sensible thing was to wodge newspaper in it and go out.
It probably didn’t help that I experienced Gateshead’s after-hours scene on a Wednesday in December, and from the gutter of a dual carriageway that I’d somehow ended up walking down. But my, it was dead. I’d girded myself for the Mockney-cockhouse showdown that seemed inevitable in any pedestrian encounter that required me to open my mouth (preparatory mantra: never Newcarsle, always Newcassle), but even when I scrambled across a concrete roundabout and six lanes of tarmac to a proper street with a proper pavement, there were no pedestrians on it to encounter. Regional-degeneration FACT: the north east is the only area in the UK with a shrinking population, and no other town within it is leaching citizens faster than Gateshead.
Crossing the River Tyne felt like crossing from East Berlin to West in the 1980s, or passing through some strange portal on the International Date Line that took me from Wednesday to Friday night. At the Gateshead end of the High Level Bridge I walked past a pub whose doors emitted a desultory, decrepit, old-man mumble. Its counterpart at the Newcastle side was a heaving, riotous Babel of life and young laughter. Even halfway across the bridge I knew I was set to reacquaint myself with almost forgotten urban excitements. Gateshead bid me farewell with a notice urging would-be jumpers to telephone the Samaritans; Newcastle said hello with a breathtaking vista centred around the floodlit Tyne Bridge, Middlesbrough-built sister of the Sydney Harbour crossing. It was all bright lights and bustle and the beckoning promise of boozy, big-city fun. Who was I to resist?
My evening explored the overlap between happiness and bemusement, as pub crawls are wont to. What a heady thrill to walk down streets where the shop windows were filled with cashmere and porcelain, rather than dead flies and some crack-head’s old microwave. Where watches sometimes cost more than £4.99, and parking bays were sometimes fully occupied. Where the festive illuminations were kookily naive as a knowing act of arch post-modernism, rather than just being really old and crap. Where the buildings were scrubbed and the pavements a-throng with bands of hearty merrymakers, some laughing, some singing, and, OK, some trying to smash in a glass door with a dustbin.
I dutifully went in search of terrible places, but it wasn’t easy. The bar-lined cobbled oblong that is Bigg Market seemed a good bet: whenever the Daily Mail runs a photograph of a girl with one shoe on slumped in the gutter, that gutter is generally outside a Bigg Market binge-barn. Hopes were raised by a rash of promisingly catastrophic encitements in the relevant windows (All house doubles £1 every night until 10 p.m.! Have two large glasses of wine and get the whole bottle free! Spend more than £15 and wet yourself in an unlicensed minicab on the way home!), but when I put my head round a few doors I saw just a light smattering of restrained and thoughtful drinkers, resembling young librarians on a staff night out. The music didn’t even seem especially awful, though having only hours before endured Duran Duran’s covers album in its soul-stabbing entirety I was in no position to judge.
It was an odd experience to turn corner after corner and not once find myself frowned down upon by some towering eyesore: Newcastle naturally suffered lapses of post-war architectural judgement, but owned up to the worst and had them removed from the skyline. Westgate House featured alongside Trinity Square in the Demolition series, an enormous concrete phone directory wedged into a shelf of regal old leather-bound façades on the city’s showpiece thoroughfare: possibly the single most unsympathetic urban development ever approved in Britain. Now it was just a hole in the night.
A gold-framed restaurant review posted proudly in the window of a curry house caught my now practised eye: ‘Tandoori night proves a qualified hit’ ran the headline, an actually rather generous summary of the experience described beneath: ‘Our house special side-dish went back largely untouched … the service was not what it could have been.’ Yet I went in and found the place packed; a waiter told me I’d have to wait at least an hour, then eased forward my trouser waistband and tipped a plate of leftovers into the gap.
In the end I settled for an all-you-can eat buffet warehouse called Gekko’s, in a food court atop a busy but bland glass-walled mall that styled itself as Newcastle’s premier leisure and entertainment centre. The two-for-£3 cocktail menu swung it: there between Leg Spreader and Monkey Brains was Bloody Awful, which I felt duty bound to sample. It certainly didn’t disappoint, revealing itself as an ingeniously repulsive blend of sambuca and something called Red Aftershock, which had the ring of a petrol additive for boy racers, and the taste of Benylin’s foray into the liqueur market. The young East European waiter raised one eyebrow when I ordered a brace, and the other when – after a tiny, face-crumpling sip – I summoned the cider chaser that at the time seemed the only sensible way of washing the stuff down.
The 50-yard flank of stainless-steel tubs that comprised the Gekko buffet had at first glance seemed brimming with bewilderingly random comestibles. But approaching it with a bellyful of strange alcohol, the whole set-up made perfect and beautiful sense. Sweet and sour pork, balti chicken, glistening towers of chips: here, in steamy profusion, was all that a young man desires to feast upon when drunk. Around me, whole convivial tablefuls of just such people were doing precisely that, interspersed with rather quieter pairings, a girlfriend wanly nibbling naan while her partner belched seven shades of Worthington over some pick-and-mix heap of spiced fodder. With Red Aftershock nudging the doors of perception ajar, I looked about and realised I’d been wrong to fear a Newcarsle shoeing. Geordies weren’t so much hard as incorrigibly debauched, to the point of reckless derangement. They get unbelievably drunk and do unbelievably stupid things, like surfing trains, jumping into rivers and taking their shirts off at football matches in the depths of a hard winter. They are, in essence, Paul Gascoigne. For the Geordie male, life is one long, out-of-control stag party. Though obviously not that long.
As the first of my many trips to the Gents made plain, Gekko’s was not a place where decorum stood tall. At one point the self-service cutlery station ran out of knives and forks, but rather than complain or wait, the punters simply shrugged and bullied their bhajis to bits with fists and teaspoons. Content that no one was interested in whatever I might get up to – after my second cider, even the waiter seemed to forsake me – I set about indulging to unsightly excess. I returned to the silvered tubs again and again, first with eager vigour, latterly with the grim, stumbling resolve of a contestant at a 1920s dance marathon. Ciders came and went. For a while I neutered their effect through sheer calorific input, a dam of carbohydrates to keep the alcoholic flood at bay. Modern technology permits me to reveal that this defence was breached at precisely 8.18 p.m., when I chose to take a phone-camera self-portrait. Focus and composition issues make definitive analysis a challenge, but it looks very much as if that’s a prawn on my shoulder.
Out in the street I found myself in a whole city full of new friends: debonair, attractive, happy people, my people. They were there in that lovely bar with the light sculptures and the big glass something or other, a wonderful and cosmopolitan establishment I simply don’t recognise in the review I’ve just read that damns it as ‘over-priced and full of pretentious gits’. They were there – hello again! – in a pound-a-pint Wetherspoon pub. They were even there in some Seventies club on Bigg Market, where I nosed into inebriation’s ugly end-game by very nearly dancing.
Cold night air is well known for its sobering properties, and I went through a couple of thousand lungfuls while getting hopelessly lost in the coal-smoked, terraced back streets of Gateshead. Finding my guest house had proved remarkably straightforward, but swaying gently beneath its porch-mounted baskets of plastic flora I’d checked my watch and noted it wasn’t quite ten: way too early to have got into this state, let alone to consider going to bed now that I was. I found myself seized by an urge to round the night off with a visit to the Pear Tree Inn, a Gateshead pub that irresistibly counted a horse amongst its regulars. (‘I called in to attend a bank holiday karaoke,’ ran one online memory, ‘and there he was at the bar, drinking beer out of a bucket.’)
A vague idea that the Pear Tree lay somewhere close at hand was hardened into a cidery, cast-iron conviction that it was precisely here, just up this empty, dark street of identical little Victorian houses, and left at the end. OK, maybe it was right. Oh, I get it: I’m remembering the map upside down. It’s back across here and down this empty, dark street of … hang on.
After a lot more of this, I discovered I was not after all alone in Gateshead. A group of old men were gathered under a streetlight, and I all but grabbed the nearest by the collar. Perhaps it was the befuddling revelation that this collar, and all the others, was attached to a long black frock coat, and set off with a Homburg and a full grey beard. Perhaps it was no more than the amnesia of the drunk and weary. For whatever reason, I now found myself badgering a huddle of elderly orthodox Jews for directions to a pub whose name I no longer remembered.
‘Excuse me,’ I began, filling their worried faces with Red Aftershock. ‘I’m looking for the, ah, that, you know, that pub with the horse.’
In silence I watched fear evolve into something else. There were mutters and scowls, and suddenly I knew what it was: disgust. I rewound my question and came to a horrid conclusion. Turning around and going away would have been a good choice at this point, but Mr Cider would have none of it. ‘No – not the whores, the horse! Hor-sssss: neigh, neigh! Like a big pony. They put down a bucket by the bar and the whores – the horse! – comes in and drinks out of it.’
Every face but one was now pointed at the pavement. It belonged to the youngster, whose beard still bore the odd fleck of black. ‘I cannot help you,’ he said, faltering and guttural. ‘Down there is nice restaurant. Maybe you ask.’
How extraordinary to discover, as I did the next morning, that Gateshead is revered by Jews around the world as one of their faith’s most feted centres of learning. Its trio of Talmudic colleges draw students and religious educators from across the globe, and are accepted as the most important outside the US and Israel. The first Jewish refugees arrived in Gateshead from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, and the local ultra-orthodox population has since swelled to 1,500: many decamped from Newcastle and Hartlepool, disillusioned with the religious laxity of their local congregations. Gateshead was, and for most still is, a town where young Jewish men and women do their shopping at different times of the day, to forestall unsupervised mingling of the sexes.
And yet this ultra-orthodox community co-exists in harmony with a healthy local Muslim population, to the extent of advising drunken out-of-towners to seek directions from a kebab shop, as I presently discovered the nice restaurant to be.
‘Is pub of young generation?’ All things considered I doubted it – a horse is no youthful plaything – and told the kebab man as much. ‘OK,’ he said, wiping his hands on his apron as a prelude to much pointing. I set off fairly certain that his gesticulations would not lead me to the Pear Tree Inn. Sure enough, a while later I heaved open a door handle girdled in tinsel, and found myself inside the Nursery House Working Men’s Club.
I strove to exude a sense of entitlement as I approached the bar, a gait and bearing that said: here is a man, a man who works. With every sticky step across the beer-steeped carpet swirls I expected conversation to stop dead and dominoes to clatter to the table, the oily palm placed firmly against my chest, the grubby thumb jabbed wordlessly at a notice over the bar: MEMBERS ONLY. ALSO, NO PONCES. But the half-dozen drinkers, mostly retirees with big moustaches, just mumbled on good-naturedly to each other. One or two even acknowledged me with tiny nods. All the same, I heard myself order a pint of lager from the young barman in a pathetic murmur stripped of geographical giveaways. After a moment’s reflection he placed before me a large bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale and a very little glass. I had a stab at a grateful smile and passed him a fiver.
At a small table in the corner I sipped bitter-sweet amber and slid gently into a matching reverie. My gaze drifted from the wall-mounted telly broadcasting silent coverage of a Spanish league match and up to the low-slung ceiling, its polystyrene tiles spattered with the ghostly stains of past exuberance. Around me, my fellow drinkers idly discussed motor caravans and the perfect Sunday dinner, punctuating every contribution with languid nods and deep, approving murmurs of ‘aye’. I sat there and savoured the low-key masculinity of it all, just happy to be accepted for what I was – a drunkard who didn’t want any trouble. How uniquely soothing was the sound of old men agreeing with each other. Or rather, how affectingly, unbearably poignant. That’s alcohol for you.
In 1976 there were over four thousand working men’s clubs in Britain. Now there are half that, with two closing down every week. The Nursery House and the way of life that went with it were clearly not long for this world: my arrival lowered the occupants’ average age by some margin. On a wall outside the Gents, a massed group photo of a 1960s club coach outing told of a thriving past, as did the yawning battery of urinals within. Until 2004, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union operated its own Tyneside brewery, an arrangement that allowed members to imbibe at heavily subsidised prices. That year the CIU sold up to a duke who made his fortune filling in decommissioned mine shafts with a patent hard-bonding slurry of kidnapped racing pigeons and bits of Hartlepool, and the plant now manufactures solid-gold top hats. In fact, it produces brown ale on behalf of Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, but the point stands. I’d no doubt be appalled if I had any idea what my bottle would have cost in 2003, or indeed any memory of what I paid for it in 2009.
I certainly don’t remember much about the reasoning process that now persuaded me to finish off my stay at the Nursery House with a large glass of ruby port, and a good old chinwag at the bar with the young man who doubtfully placed it before me.
‘Quiet tonight,’ I began. ‘Had thirty urinals to myself.’
For whatever reason this failed to break the ice, as did further attempts to kick-start chats about his town centre’s stupendous ugliness, and the coal mine in my guest house. Losing patience with the barman’s tiny nods and his sudden interest in Athletico Madrid v Espanyol, I elected to redress the conversational imbalance in the only obvious manner.
‘I’m in seals, me,’ I announced, wiping a rivulet of fortified wine from my chin. ‘Footwear. On the rude, like.’ I was speaking Geordie, and if the dominant part of my mind was to be believed, doing so with fluent ease.
For some time, I fear, I held forth upon the canniness of wor life as a travelling shoe and boot salesman, gannin up and doon the A1, a hinny in every Dolcis. Then, quite suddenly, I succumbed to a terrible leaden fatigue and in a triumph of determination over coordination made my way across the bar. At the threshold I wheeled round to hoist a farewell hand at my fellow working men. ‘Howay the shoes!’ I cried, before noisily and repeatedly attempting to exit through a locked door.