Haters

There was Chunky and there was Moustache and there was me. There were also four women in slippers. Always in slippers. From five o’clock every other Saturday we’d loiter on the bruised cobbles outside Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough Football Club’s fading stately home. We all shared one aim: to obtain the scruffy autographs of footballers no one now remembers.

Moustache always brought a small radio, which he perched on his shoulder like a ghetto blaster. He’d broadcast the results from elsewhere for the benefit of Chunky and me and the Slipper Sisters. In his heyday, before years of watching Middlesbrough had turned him humourless, it was said that he’d record himself delivering shock results on a tape and then play them to the amazement of others. I never stopped to ponder quite how a man with a Teesside accent thicker than wet cement pulled off a convincing James Alexander Gordon.

Without ever knowing his real name, I liked him. Ditto Chunky, who wore a Middlesbrough sun hat covered in pin badges and peered out from behind lenses the width of ice cubes. Chunky kept his autograph books and pens in a boot-bag which, when we’d finished and the last steward was begging us to leave the premises, he’d cradle like a newborn as we walked away. The Slipper Sisters preferred to keep their distance from us – before moving in for the autograph kill at the last minute. Amazingly, they achieved signatures without once unfolding their arms, probably welded in position thanks to years of indifference to north-eastern winters.

The ritual was always the same. At around 5.15 p.m. the beeping reverse tones of the away team coach sounded – a bugle choking a note that the hunt was about to begin. Moustache, Chunky and I would file smoothly into the small gap between the vehicle’s rear and the flaky red iron gates of old Ayresome. From there, we could doorstep players – both ‘ours’ and the opposition’s – as they stepped out into the cool air. ‘Can I ’ave yer autograph please?’ we’d bark at young full-backs and surprised Plymouth Argyle physiotherapists. (This was Division Two in the early 1990s. We only knew what Boro players looked like, as well as the odd few who had made it to the hallowed and sarcastic pages of 90 Minutes magazine. Often we would turn to the Slipper Sisters as a player signed, and mouth ‘Who’s that?’ I’ve no idea why we thought they’d know. Perhaps they looked erudite and worldly in that footgear.)

When it came to our players the ritual was similar, only with the odd matey extra (‘Can I ’ave yer autograph please, John?’). Chunky would always ask for – and, to my annoyance, sometimes get – free tickets for away matches, while Moustache would let each player know their rating out of ten for that afternoon’s performance.

Important things happened to me on those evenings. Some of them were individual firsts: a tottering Malcolm Macdonald emerging from the guests’ lounge and becoming the first man to passively intoxicate me; mistakenly taking part in my first ever demonstration when five men in moccasins and chinos pushed their way in-between us to holler: ‘Sack the board’.

Beyond those landmarks were the first stirrings of something greater: my sense of identity. I barely knew these people, nor did I live in the same town as them, yet I belonged here in a way I didn’t elsewhere. The tired terrain seemed more familiar and welcoming than that of my school and village, the creaking bricks of Ayresome more homely than our dull new-build. With only a small immediate family to speak of, the players whose names I collected hundreds and thousands of times, filled the gaps that cousins or uncles might ordinarily have occupied. Christ, they even ruffled my hair. On the pitch, these were men who gave me a sense of forgetful happiness more than anything or anyone else could. They taught me crushing disappointment too.

This football club was the establishment to which my own fortunes and moods were tied. On those autograph dusks I learned to care deeply and feel deeply cared about.

So far, so very sentimental, but even today thinking of Ayresome and its ghosts is like looking through a dog-eared family photo album. I know my link was – and is – far from unique. Indeed, it comforts me to suppose that young people are still forging similar bonds now, still waiting for autographs and learning to define themselves through their team as I did. I just fear they’re not. I fear that theirs is a football and an England very different to mine. One in which there is very little to relate and cling and belong to.

I hope I’m wrong, because hope is important and because in Middlesbrough it can seem that the team is all that the people have left. Where before they could belong to epic steelworks or the mighty structures moulded by their artisanship, now industry has died and often taken dignity with it. The club is both a beacon for belonging and a metaphor for the town’s decline – since my darling Ayresome was put to sleep, our new Riverside abode sits grandly, yet sheepishly, by the docks, industry dearly departed, promised replacements resembling thin air.

I’m five days shy of thirty years old as we cross the border from Scotland into England. The clouds over the green and silky North Sea resemble grey candyfloss from the vantage of my first class seat, whose purchase has been justified entirely on the grounds of an approaching birthday. It matters not that I have paid to be here: I still feel that my eviction is imminent and I’m sure the ticket inspector can smell my lowly yearly income when he checks my ticket. Amazingly, a woman with a trolley then starts handing out free food and drinks. I say yes to the tea, the coffee, the orange juice, the croissant and the biscuit, so that by the time she leaves East Coast trains are basically paying me to travel. When a man two rows from me declines the refreshment trolley, I am momentarily tempted to grab him by the lapels and slap his face while exclaiming ‘are you mad? This is free. FREE. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?’ Instead, I read the label on my pastry that says ‘Somerset Cheddar and Vine Ripened Tomato Croissant’, then in smaller, explanatory letters, ‘Somerset Cheddar and Vine Ripened Tomato in a Croissant’.

In Berwick-upon-Tweed, outside English pebbledash houses covered in English ice, St George flags will the morning to work up a bluster. The casual and widespread flying of such flags is something new to me about England, and I wonder whether it reflects a resurgent patriotism and the reclaiming of this symbol from the far right, or the fact that Asda flog them for a fiver. There are plenty here, perhaps reflecting Berwick’s frontier land status.

From behind net curtains England awakes to bacon sandwiches and Soccer Saturday. The land flattens and fog cuddles Lindisfarne and then Alnmouth, the latter unfeasibly idyllic like a Constable drawing of a Daily Express ‘Win a Dream Cottage’ prize. I’ve twenty minutes to spare in Newcastle station so I cross a bridge to watch the hustle and bustle of Saturday morning England on the move. There are blokes in their sixties, rucksacked-up and ready to go. The eldest distributes train tickets among them, Dad playing Dad to the Dads. Pairs and trios of women eye up and put down stag-do arrivals, everyone on their way to what must now make up 20 per cent of the UK economy: the weekend away.

Then it happens. They start with ‘Jingle Bells’ and move neatly into ‘We Three Kings’. A brass band. The sound, to me, of England, my England. It is a Truman Show moment: someone somewhere is directing this, turning up the emotion level to eleven to tell me something – that I am home. Of course, this is a homely feeling shaped by my upbringing as a treacly Yorkshireman, and thus my version of England. It reminds me that we all have our Englands to bear. That includes Duncan Bannatyne, I think as I while away another ten minutes in WHSmith where the front of North-East Life magazine bears the legend ‘Bannatyne’s Love of Stockton-on-Tees’.

The 10.30 to Nunthorpe will pass through Bannatyne’s darling Stockton. It is a stinking beast of a train, a two-carriage smog-powered bus on wheels. Every time it splutters a little bit of George Monbiot dies. The heating is fixed high and constantly turned on, boiling us all in our winter coats. I expect to turn around and see nothing left of the man behind me save for a pair of glasses perched upon the oily remnants of his blue cagoule.

This is not the quickest way to Middlesbrough. It is the scenic route. In a pleasingly sardonic tone, the weary conductor reads from a list of destinations: Sunderland, Seaham, Hartlepool, Seaton Carew ... Outside, the theme colour is rust: rusty post-coal sea, rusty industrial shells, rusty allotments, rusty-red back-to-backs, rusty piles of old cars and bits of unrecognisable machine, rusty under-used track that Beeching forgot. Everywhere there is space – space between former mining villages, space between track and sea, space between streets of occupied houses and boarded-up houses. Industry, mainly coal, once filled the gaps in landscapes and lives.

This forgotten line takes in St James’ Park, the Gateshead Stadium, the Stadium of Light, Victoria Park and the Riverside. By more backyards with St George flags we approach Hartlepool, an impressive wreck with patches of lonely beauty. The heritage marina and museum sit pristine, awaiting visitors like a dolled-up student house awaiting party guests. Ghosts are everywhere on this railway line and in this area. Ghosts and spaces. There are even ghosts of optimism: shiny office blocks skirt Seaham, Thornaby, Stockton, Middlesbrough and elsewhere, most awaiting tenants.

Beyond the silver turrets of chemical Teesside stand rigidly, flanked by postcard hills. Aldous Huxley called this view ‘a magnificent kind of poem’. It is a giant sci-fi set that against today’s blue winter sky makes my heart leap with joy.

At Seaton Carew, the Teesside Riviera home of ‘Canoe Man’ John Darwin, five teens board, a gangly mix of hormones and excitement. ‘Warrizit ahmaskin for, an ’alf return?’ asks one of the girls in a rhythmic machine gun accent. We pass by the home of Billingham Synthonia, the only club in England named after an agricultural fertiliser, then Duncan Bannatyne’s idyll, Stockton, beyond whose scrapyards full of railway history I was born.

Our passenger wagon rolls on by acres of disused sidings and passes Newport Bridge, a giant’s Meccano construction. As we queue to leave the train, I gesture for an old man carrying an animal box to alight in front of me. ‘I should think so, son,’ he says, looking down in the direction of his pet and back at me, as if he were holding the world’s last baby panda.

The Saturday into which we emerge is the full stop on a week of sad sentences for this area. BBC Newsnight announced that Redcar and Cleveland, Middlesbrough then Hartlepool were the three English council areas most vulnerable to the effects of government cuts. A Middlesbrough family was more likely to fall into poverty than a family from anywhere else. The Daily Mail threw pissy sleet on the blizzard in its own special way, screeching: ‘That’s a bit steep! Parking spaces in London cost £96,000 (£13,000 more than average HOUSE in Middlesbrough)’.

Leaving Middlesbrough station – once an attractive, oval-roofed hub, but since the Luftwaffe and Network Rail visited, an Anytown halt – my eyes fix on the row of buildings ahead. Looking upwards I see some fine Germanic flourishes that recall the town’s tradition of cosmopolitan industry. Looking downwards I see a young woman in a corset puking up on the wall outside Spensley’s Emporium, now the only bar in town offering pre-match strippers. The Premier League good times are emphatically over.

Surveying the scene is a sturdy statue of Henry Bolckow, the father of modern Middlesbrough. As rain bounces off vomit, he gives the impression of wishing he’d stayed celibate. That, though, would have robbed the world of a vital community, one christened ‘an infant Hercules’ by Gladstone. For a century Middlesbrough was as important to the British Empire as any place. What happened to it speaks for all of post-industrial England.

The air in Middlesbrough often hangs silently where once it roared to a white-hot chorus of clanks and hisses. Most of her iron and steel plants are flattened, crushed by market forces and other things no one here had a say in or asked for. Thankfully, the blood, sweat and toil that caked the walls have lasted long into the night. Never did the grafters of Teesside strain in vain. Their bridgework still straddles Sydney Harbour, the Nile, the Bosporus, the Yangtze and Victoria Falls. In separate pieces of one-upmanship on local rivals up the road, they made the Tyne Bridge and the Angel of the North (‘Built by Teessiders for Geordies’, one peacemaking worker welded to the inside of the latter). Theirs too are the rails spanning the former countries of the Empire. Sometimes, they even let southerners have a piece of the action: Canary Wharf, the Thames Barrage and the new Wembley all bear the motif: ‘Made in Middlesbrough’.

The town’s evolution from farmhouses to foundries happened at a speed only possible during the industrial revolution. In his English Journey J. B. Priestley reflected negatively on the haste in which Middlesbrough was built, writing that it was:

... more like a vast dingy conjuring trick than a reasonable town ... [with] inhabitants whose chief passions, we were always told, were for beer and football. It is a dismal town, even with beer or football.

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Middlesbrough’ had been one farm among many. It had no claims to fame, other than being next door to the village from which Captain Cook hailed. Between 1831 and 1891 the town’s population grew from 150 to 75,000.

In 1829, ‘six solid, broad-brimmed, broad-fronted, broad-bottomed’ Quakers bought ‘Middlesbrough’ for £30,000. The group – described in this way by Newcastle MP Joseph Cowen – saw that if the world’s first industrial railway line (the Stockton and Darlington) could be extended by a few miles to the east, the transportation of coal southwards via the North Sea became possible. With their railway completed, coal and money piled into Middlesbrough. By new docks north of the River Tees, a town was hastily planned and built for incoming workers. The land remained boggy to the extent that locals communicated between houses using speaking trumpets, to avoid stepping outdoors and sinking.

The coal market, however, was unsustainable and despite her youth Middlesbrough needed reinvention. Enter Henry Bolckow. A German, he moved to the area with fellow iron-founder John Vaughan. One afternoon in 1850, Vaughan tripped while walking in local hills. In doing so, he kicked up a tuft of earth and examined its strange colour. It turned out to be ironstone. Vaughan and Bolckow immediately bought the land and built a quarry. Luck had given birth to an iron industry quickly stoked by local slog. People flocked to the town to establish or staff foundries as the area became England’s answer to America’s gold rush settlements. Optimism abounded and was typified by the motto that Bolckow – first mayor, then MP – chose for Middlesbrough: Erimus (‘We Shall Be’).

By the 1870s, Middlesbrough was making a third of the UK’s iron, and the visiting Gladstone saluted: ‘This remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise. It is an infant, gentlemen, but it is an infant Hercules.’ This innocuous farm had grown into a living, belching behemoth, its tentacles spreading across the world. As Joseph Cowen (a Geordie, remember) wrote:

The iron it supplies furnishes railways to Europe; it runs by Neapolitan and Papal dungeons; it startles the bandit in his haunts in Cilicia; it streaks the prairies of America; it stretches over the plains of India; it surprises the Belochees; it pursues the peggunus of Gangotri. It has crept out of the Cleveland Hills, where it has slept since the Roman days, and now, like a strong and invincible serpent, coils itself around the world.

The industrialist organisers of Middlesbrough iron’s world tour attempted to care for their workers by building housing and social institutions. Demand outstripped supply, a price of growth that reinforced the town’s status as almost completely working-class. It was a man’s world too: Middlesbrough had one of the highest men to women ratios in the land, a fact which harked back to its class make-up – there were simply no middle-class families for women to work for as happened in more established industrial towns.

Diversity instead came from immigration. Middlesbrough was a melting pot; by 1871, over half those living here had come from elsewhere. Most were Irish: outside of Liverpool, this was (and still is) the most Hibernian place in England. These days, there is a recognisably Irish tint to the local accent (‘me mam’) and approach to the past tense (‘I could’ve went’). When Yorkshire wool-combers arrived in Middlesbrough in the 1850s, they sent a note back to Bradford warning against English reinforcements:

If you send men here in Large Numbers and the Masters begin to turn the Irish off it will very likely lead to a disturbance.

Though an infant, Middlesbrough was already a dirty old town. Yet in the same way that some of us from the area embrace the silver-chimneyed skyline of its chemical industry today, grime meant industry, ergo work. When the 1926 General Strike ended and the works fired up once more, local women took to the streets excitedly screaming, ‘Look! The smoke, the smoke!’

At the end of the nineteenth century, Middlesbrough was changing again. Steel production had begun its slow march to outmuscling iron. In huge plants, the shells of the above-mentioned bridges and buildings were created and then shipped along the Tees. It is physically impossible for anyone born in these environs not to cry when local boy Chris Rea’s paean to this lost world, ‘Steel River’, strikes up on the jukebox or radio. Rea’s song, written in the 1980s, is a nostalgic trawl through what has gone and a bitter longing for its impossible return. His lost Steel River Tees was a colossus whose banks wheezed with industry and whose waters carried local inventions to the world. She survived the bombs of the Luftwaffe, but now ran so tranquilly that salmon had moved back in.

Rea’s bustling Tees died when globalisation and Thatcher happened to Middlesbrough. For a while, a chemical sector spearheaded by ICI maintained jobs and upheld a sense of working worth. In recent decades, that has withered. A few plants remain, along with one steelwork, mothballed and then given the kiss of life early in 2011. There, men, and now women, will make things like they always have, this time rivets for the new World Trade Centre in New York. Regeneration schemes have come and gone with little to show, new names and new millions amounting to nothing permanent apart from poverty (the local unemployment rate usually tops the division or at least qualifies for the Champions League). The public sector jobs that papered cracks in the 1990s are now disappearing: Round Two for a Tory government in London; ‘here we go again’ for the locals. As always here, the football club’s fortunes have mirrored the town’s.

As I stand beneath Henry Bolckow’s statue, I wish they’d let Middlesbrough build things, let us show that round here, our brains are in our hands. I think of all the words I’ve read about the rise of this town and look around me at all the signs of its fall.

On a Saturday match morning in December 2011, 11 Valley Road is neat and tidy. It is the only brown and beige house in a row of red and faded whites, a cosmetic uniqueness that invites the onlooker to take notice. A small green plaque boasts that ‘International Footballer and Football Manager Brian Clough was born here’. Number 11 is a well-kept house on a well-kept working-class council estate, the type that seldom makes the news and is never the centrepiece of gritty, grotty television drama. There’s green everywhere: gardens to the front and back, trees and patches of grass crammed into all spare space – tiny pitches and trunks for goalposts. A middle-aged neighbour crosses the road arms folded. She is wearing slippers. (Could it be ...?) Birds sing, crows caw like belching tramps and the sun shines gloriously for a glorious son.

Just beyond little Brian’s house are the playing fields of the Acklam Iron and Steelworks Athletic Club. Here, the young man who later liked to call everyone ‘young man’ first smashed leather through proper goal frames. Working as a clerk at ICI through the week, the teenage Clough spent his Saturdays breaking nets among the fertilisers of Billingham Synthonia. Soon Ayresome Park called and signed Clough to Middlesbrough.

Clough’s time with his hometown club was explosive. Between 1955 and 1961, he scored 204 goals in 222 matches. When he left for Sunderland, the town wept. Clough’s teammates may not have felt the same – in 1959, nine of them had signed a ‘round robin’ letter demanding that their arrogant leader be stripped of his captaincy. Clough responded with a transfer request – refused – and a surfeit of goals.

I continue to the top of Valley Road and cross into Albert Park. ‘Alcohol Free Zone’ shout scolding signs on every bench. By the pretty boating lake the wooden hut cafe belts out Christmas hits. A lad of fifteen wearing a grey tracksuit yaps at me from his BMX: ‘How mate. You look like Harry Potter mate.’ ‘You look like a scruffy twat who fiddles with himself too much’ I reply, an hour or so later.

Just after the bandstand there is a statue to Clough, unveiled in 2007. Rather than the manager recalled in bronze elsewhere, here he is twenty-four and in training gear, his boots slung over a shoulder, purposeful, on his way to training or a match. Today a couple of teenagers take turns to slap his legs and backside. Oh to think what punishment he would have meted out. Probably a kiss.

All of this – his Valley Road family home, Albert Park, the walks to Ayresome – was vital to who Clough became. ‘I was the kid who came from a little part of paradise,’ he later said:

... to me it was heaven. Everything I have done, everything I’ve achieved, everything that I can think of that has directed and affected my life – apart from the drink – stemmed from my childhood.

Middlesbrough first played here in Albert Park, on the site of its archery strips. The club was formed, goes the local legend, in 1876 at a tripe supper by cricketers looking for a winter hobby. Four years later, Middlesbrough Football Club was evicted from the park for making a mess of the grass, and moved in with the cricket club next door. In 1895 and 1898, Boro won the FA Amateur Cup, firstly against Old Carthusians (who didn’t bring the trophy, so certain were they of retaining it), and latterly against Uxbridge.

Between war memorials, flowerbeds and a lady in a Leona Lewis T-shirt feeding pigeons, I leave Albert Park in search of a short-lived, long-forgotten football rivalry. On Linthorpe Road, Abyss Tanning promises endless bronzing of the type often popular in the north-east. I take a right on to the cobbles of Clive Road, one of many parallel strands of terraced housing that the local Victorian writer Florence Bell called ‘little brown streets’. At the street’s corner with Ayresome Park Road, I pause where once stood Paradise Ground, home to Middlesbrough Ironopolis FC.

Ironopolis of Paradise were formed by local romantics in 1889 and played in maroon and green stripes. Their dreamy-eyed naming policy veiled a steely financial rationale: Ironopolis were formed to make money. Where Middlesbrough FC refused to go professional and pay their players, Ironopolis would. The formation of a second team split the footballing public. Both played at home on the same Saturdays, and for a couple of seasons in the same Northern League.

The rivalry was bitter, and acidity intensified when Boro reneged on a merger deal aimed at Football League membership in 1892. From then on, their nickname among half the town became ‘The Scabs’. Ironopolis stole a march in 1893, gaining admission to Division Two at the same time as Arsenal, Liverpool and Newcastle United. Despite avoiding relegation, a year later Ironopolis were bankrupt. The town was simply not big enough for the both of them. The Scabs won. To enforce their point, Boro moved in over the road, so that the north-west corner of Paradise became the south-east of Ayresome Park.

Once we had graduated from the terraces, it was Clive Road that I’d walk down with my dad to take our seats in the South Stand. Preferring to keep in my mind an image of the area as it was, this is the first time I’ve been back. Everything seems small like junior school furniture, memory having inflated the appearance of the past. Red bollards mark the ground’s boundaries and the two-up two-downs across from our turnstile remain, but the turnstile is now a hedge in someone’s garden. In recognition of times gone by, they have erected a ‘South Terrace’ plaque above their double-glazed door. Around the corner, silver dots mark the Holgate End, our Kop. When it was rafter-full and bouncing, we sang and danced till we were woozy. When it was sparse and dripping with urine, we dreamt of moving to the seats. It was Old Football and I feel lucky to have been there. Thank God I am turning thirty and not twenty. Mine is the last generation to have lived in that world.

The homes now here are part of a roomy estate built after Boro left Ayresome in 1995. The development company did try to reflect that which had gone before: a bronze football marking the former centre-spot sits on a lawn and a sculpture of Alf Tupper-ish boots adorns the doorstep location of Pak Doo-Ik’s winner for North Korea against Italy at the 1966 World Cup. Streets are named ‘The Turnstile’, ‘The Midfield’ and ‘The Holgate’.

Walking among these houses I scarcely see their classic Barratt designs or think about who lives in them. What I see is the Portakabin ticket office beneath the away corner and what I think of is the time my dad pretended to be going in to enquire about an away match and came out with two season tickets. I see the ghosts of Ayresome, strolling to the ground early and chatting with their regular programme seller, or scrambling from the pub at 2.59 p.m., the sudden noise from within the stadium a rabbit to a greyhound. I hear the tinny Tannoy, team line-ups being read out and Queen records muffling away-end chants. Finally, the smells are back: horse manure and Midget Gems, stale ale and cigars.

Wading in nostalgia, I think also of the club’s history. None of the new hedges or walls remembers Alf Common, the first £1,000 footballer. His fee caused a scandal debated, no less, in the House of Commons, before he bedded in, scored goals and lost the captaincy for ‘drunkenness and violent behaviour’. Nor do the smooth pavements recall that Boro’s two greatest sides were stopped in their tracks by war: in 1914, a third place finish in Division One, in 1939, a team that had finished seventh, fifth and then fourth. Those 1930s teams brimmed with Ayresome angels. There was George Camsell, 345 goals in 453 for Boro, eighteen in nine for England (two per game!). In 1927, he’d scored fifty-nine in a season, only for Dixie Dean to break the record with sixty in the next. ‘Typical Boro’, the naysaying Teesside cynics in flat caps used to tell me. His job was made easy by wee Wilf Mannion, the Golden Boy, son of an Irishman who worked in the Bolckow-Vaughan foundry. Mannion’s feet made the ball dance: Stanley Matthews hailed him ‘the Mozart of football – stylish, graceful, courtly, showing exquisite workmanship with the ball.’ But the double-glazing doesn’t know ‘Mozart’, and nor does it swoon over Gentleman George Hardwick, the Hollywood-handsome Middlesbrough left-back who gave Total Football to the Netherlands. Gentleman George, then into his late seventies, once signed the autograph books of Chunky, Moustache and I. Underneath his signature in handwriting like my granddad’s he scribbled: ‘George Hardwick. Middlesbrough and Great Britain Captain’.

I turn left into Warwick Street, where those autograph days were played out. Still the bruised cobbles remain, but they lead only to a wooden garden fence, where the Ayresome Park Gates used to be. As I think back to Chunky and Moustache and me, two lads of ten or eleven years old begin to heckle: ‘What you doing ’ere mate?’ ‘He’s a paedo, int’e?’ ‘Aye, how, paedo mate, what you doing ’ere?’ As I turn to leave I notice that one of them is white, and one Asian. How great that abuse of a stranger is helping the next generation to integrate.

Among grids of tight terraced streets once filled by matchday cars, three teenagers take turns to race on a scramble motorbike. Much of the housing is boarded up, and the backstreet soccer schools of yore are sealed off by iron gates. ‘Back Alley Improvement Team’ say the signs fixed to them.

The streets without boards are inhabited by a large Asian population. Only four or five times watching Boro have I seen non-white fans – why do the club not embrace the people who live here, morally to show what a uniting force football can be, cynically because crowd sizes are dwindling?

Back on Linthorpe Road, I try to forget the past, but am frequently bombarded by it, both an upside and a downside of walking in a familiar place. I walk by the old site of the Rea family’s cafe, where Brian Clough met his sweetheart Barbara, and past the elegant Swatters Carr Hotel. Ironopolis were founded there, and players of infant Middlesbrough used its dance hall as a changing room. It is now a Wetherspoon’s, like so many historic buildings in small-town England. As is usually the case with the sachet-happy chain, a nod is given to local history – by the Gents’ in giant lettering a poem reads:

Where alchemists were born

Below Cleveland’s Hills

A giant blue dragonfly across the Tees

Reminds us every night

We built the world.

Every metropolis

Came from Ironopolis.

Linthorpe Road has become a trophy room of that great modern English obsession, eating out. Its retail spaces glisten with curry houses and pizza places, the spoils of a trend that continues amidst a recession. My favourite here is Akbhar’s of Bradford; there is something wonderful about one post-industrial northern town exporting Asian cuisine to another.

I veer right by the world’s first talking CCTV cameras. The police monitor the images they produce and can upbraid people from afar via a speaker. I’ve seen it used once, to tell off a teenage boy for dropping a leaflet, but have often thought how much it would enliven the town if the police took to commentating on people in the street: ‘And the lady with the Poundland bags now. She’s weaving in between the benches. Oh, and an audacious about-turn into Greggs. She must’ve smelt those sausage rolls ... Jimmy Armfield?’

Soon the street opens up into my favourite part of town, Centre Square. Though it sounds like a netball position, Centre Square is quite beautiful. The square itself (‘the largest civic space in Europe’, according to the council) consists of a dancing fountain and a well-heeled lawn. These are surrounded by the best and worst of local architecture, old and new. The columned splendour of the Central Library somehow looks comfortable next to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, a giant, jagged and bold glass palace. Opposite, though, are the law courts and council offices, one of which is a bungalow dressed as a crematorium, on stilts. Everything is overshadowed by the town hall, part gothic grandeur, part Transylvanian castle and declared on its opening in 1887 to be ‘in the style of the thirteenth century suffused with the feeling and spirit of the current time’. Today on Centre Square Emo kids mix happily with families – all are sat on folding chairs or blankets watching The Grinch on a giant screen. Picnics in the cold and scotch eggs through fingerless gloves. This is England.

With an hour until kick-off I walk underneath the meaty iron of the Albert Railway Bridge and by Bolckow and Vaughan’s old flat towards a ghost town. St Hilda’s, referred to by locals as ‘Over the Border’, was the original Middlesbrough. Its gridded streets housed workers, its main square their pubs and clubs. In one of its corners sat the Talbot Hotel, host of the alleged tripe supper that gave the world Middlesbrough Football Club.

St Hilda’s is now a large piece of hilly grass occasionally punctuated by fragments of original road. Building-wise, all that remains is the crimson clock tower of Middlesbrough’s original town hall, a spooky, lone relic, and a few blocks of adjoined, more recent housing. I walk towards it up what was once West Street, dodging debris left by recent house demolitions. Mayor Ray Mallon had determinedly cleared most of the area earlier in 2011; the last blocks avoided the wrecking ball due to the campaigning of their eldest resident. They seem to be clearing away old England, as if she was never there.

As I stand on rubble and glass, the silence is overwhelming. Everything is still, save for the town hall clock which, remarkably, still keeps the correct time. Outside one of the houses yet to be boarded then bulldozed, a giant St George’s flag droops from a pole. There is so much space here, as is the case across Middlesbrough. So many boards and shells.

There is beauty too. I look down on the River Tees, inactive, but silvery and strong. Then there is the splendid Transporter Bridge (the ‘giant blue dragonfly’ of the Wetherspoon’s poem), recently turned a hundred years old. This unique piece of artistry and labour is a symbol of identity for many here, and the fact it is surrounded by nothing but wasteland constitutes one of those endearing imperfections. In the other direction, the Cleveland Hills brood under a leaden sky, their unusual peak a Yorkshire Matterhorn.

I slip down imaginary side streets towards Middlehaven, the dock on which the Riverside stands. The all-new Middlesbrough College shines and looms. Could it be that inside its dramatic walls a new generation learns to make things as their forebears did? Beyond it, Anish Kapoor’s ‘Temenos’ sculpture floats like a giant slinky or an open-ended condom, depending on your mood. These ventures and umpteen wooden walls of multi-coloured ‘Middlehaven’ branding do not mask the tragic waste of grand plans undelivered. This was supposed to be another New Town, a space-age land of quirky flats and floating restaurants. With barely a brick laid, the developers have bailed, leaving a Teesside mud steppe.

Perhaps a metaphor, in neighbouring Able Dock a ship slowly sinks. This is the Tuxedo Royale, once a Geordie party ship moored on the Tyne, then a pre-match venue in Boro’s Premier days. Now she lists, her guts robbed hollow by local souvenir thieves. No one can now drink in her Bonzai Bar, nor endure her pre-game strippers (50p entry fee!). So many shadows of yesterday, some of them best forgotten.

In the distance, people drift towards the Riverside by stillborn dock water. An advantage of this sparse setting is how easily one can observe people going to the match as if they were in a giant, live Lowry canvas. I follow them, noting that none seem to be talking of football – has going to the football ever really been about going to the football? Eventually, we cross the oddly bucolic bridge that leads from one side of the dock to that which houses Middlesbrough FC’s home.

Despite my love of Ayresome, we had to move here. Between the day I was born in 1981 and 1986, Boro slid down the divisions and into liquidation. A team of locals led by captain Tony Mowbray climbed back up, but that only allowed breathing space as Ayresome crumbled. Since Boro moved, we’ve seen five cup finals, European football and Fabrizio Ravanelli in a Middlesbrough shirt.

Half an hour before kick-off, there isn’t an excitement about the place as in those razzmatazz early Riverside days of Ravanelli and Juninho, yet there is a calm buzz. This has everything to do with one man: Mowbray, back as manager, our manager. We identify with him, and him with our club and our town. He talks like us and dreams like us.

I meet my matchday friends Dave and Paddy beneath the feet of Mannion and Hardwick. Their action-curved statues act like brackets at each end of the Ayresome Gates, shifted here so that every time I pass them I’m reminded of Chunky and Moustache.

Inside the stadium, hundreds of people rush a final drink before forty-five minutes of abstinence. I queue up at the urinals where men converse with their backs to one another while pre-match beer passes through them.

I probably shouldn’t still feel like this, but every time I enter the Riverside and see the green green grass of home I tingle. There really is no colour as vivid and no theatre as live. As a professional worrier, I relish what’s about to come: an hour and a half when I’m not me and when everything leaves my head save for the football. Life becomes simple.

We file along the row and to our seats. As always, I bash the larger of my fellow supporters with my Man Bag. I still haven’t learned that watching football is not a satchel-appropriate pastime.

Boro’s recently reinstated and reassuringly shouty PA announcer Mark Page has had a career of Partridgian vicissitudes. In the early 1980s, he was plucked from local radio to fill the early Saturday morning slot on Radio One. Now, he is a star of Garrison FM, the British Army’s premier station. Page’s misdemeanours at the Riverside include the introduction of the God-awful ‘Pigbag’ as Boro’s running-out music, the playing of Blur’s ‘Song 2’ following home goals and the piping of recorded chants during a major European semi-final match (Steaua Bucharest, 2006. Seriously).

This may seem like needlessly parochial information born of petulance, and to an extent it is. However, it carries a wider importance – Page has played his part in the strangling of English football’s atmospheres. He is part of the choreography of crowds and the stifling of spontaneous delight. When music is boomed out ten minutes before kick-off just as both ends should be bating one another and making themselves heard to players in the changing room, and when the full-blooded oral chaos after a goal is scored is lost behind ‘Chelsea Dagger’, watching football becomes a muffled, managed experience. No wonder football grounds are quieter now. An orchestrated atmosphere is a false one and very few of us want to be part of that.

To think that those around me – for it is a refreshingly young crowd today – have only ever known this contrivance is saddening. With oral expression suppressed by the Tannoy’s onslaught, visual often takes its place. Chipping away at the Riverside’s dull ten-a-penny architecture are legions of homemade banners. Above us, one reads ‘Infant Hercules’. Behind the far goal is a silhouette portrait of chairman hero Steve Gibson with the words ‘One of Us’ next to it. Identity and belonging.

One exception to our sprightly neighbours is the old lady in front of us. She shuffles along the row at one minute to three, removes a large, crocheted owl cushion from her Tesco Bag for Life and plonks herself down. The teenager next to me is wearing dark red trousers. That this annoys me so much demonstrates that I am ready to turn thirty. He and his friend – thankfully sporting kegs of a less deviant hue – spend most of the first half talking about bands I’ve never heard of.

On the pitch, if and when it matters, a confident Boro move the ball about with grace. They are dominant, stroking it around as if imagining themselves in the early days of a better sport. Their passing style is comfort football, wholesome and reassuring. Key in this is their No. 10, part-plump, part-muscle, mostly a midfield tyrant. Nothing passes him. His partner in midfield grime, formerly ineffective and not unaccustomed to shouting at the crowd, has been converted into a bustling dynamo under Mowbray. This flying Scotsman is unashamedly old school, right down to the gigantic ‘HEAD’ holdall he carries into grounds on matchdays. Today, he hurtles into tackles at a speed that would make a fighter jet wince. When a Brighton defender blasts a clearance straight on to his back, the ball makes a bursting noise. The boy can play too, time and again fizzing it around or plucking a surprising turn from an armoury we had previously assumed to be barren.

Ahead of those two, Boro’s Moroccan probes and picks away from underneath a straggly mullet. His abeyance of Ramadan at the start of the season doubled as religious education for many of us here, though I chuckle and squirm remembering that when I saw him play in August, a Boro fan near me started to sing: ‘He’s had nowt to eat/but he’s fucking great/nowt to eat and he’s fucking great ...’

The Moroccan’s jiggery-pokery soon pays off as he plays a part in Boro taking the lead. A magnificent schoolboy scramble eventually sees Boro’s squat Australian urge the ball into the net. Before and after the hateful music, our celebrations are loud, clear and symptomatic of a crowd that believes its team may be going somewhere. ‘Twenty-five years since we nearly died,’ we sing, ‘Ayresome Park to the Riverside/Europe twice and we won the cup/with Tony Mowbray, we’re going up.’

The stripes of Brighton are not having it, though. They awake and arise into the game, all short passes and cryptic manoeuvres. A forward buzzes about, his mane occasionally threatening to take somebody’s eye out, and their enthusiastic young winger winds his way through a defence frequently paddling about upstream. When another Brighton player has possession, his right arm is constantly thrust aloft, a seven-year-old begging to answer a geography question.

There’s an intriguing struggle between each side’s Argentinian. Both are, in numbers of games played, England’s most successful Argentines, and both are left-backs. It is reassuringly English that from the land of Maradona and Messi, our longest-lasting exponents are goal-shy full-backs. They are fiercely competitive with one another, not least in the quest to see who can roll their socks down the farthest. Despite their Latin American schooling, both are guilty of launching profoundly pointless passes forward. I’m reminded of a bloke I used to sit near when I had a season ticket here. ‘Aye, hit it into the channel,’ he’d say, ‘the English fucking channel.’

As the floodlights blast into life – what is English football if not dark afternoons in the cold? – the half-time whistle shrieks. In the stand’s concourse, it is dog eat hot dog in the race to the bar. Deploying a set piece straight from the training ground, we send in six foot-three Paddy to take away the man-markers, leaving space behind for a clear run on the till. It works a treat, and by 3.55 p.m. the three of us are sipping £3.80 pints of vile, heated bitter from plastic vessels. Our watching of the scores from elsewhere is distracted by the gratifying pursuit of staring at an old man failing miserably to poke a straw into a Capri Sun.

In the second half, Brighton’s band of merry followers finally rouses with a quick burst of popular hit: ‘You dirty northern bastards’. I do like a bit of regional stereotyping in chanting. A few years back, in the week when Newcastle was found to be suffering appalling levels of obesity, I thoroughly enjoyed our chants from the St James’ away end of: ‘Have you ever had a salad/have you fuck’ to the tune of ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’.

There’s no such wit, alas, from the late teen behind us. He seems to be on day release from a monastery. I love a good expletive as much as the next twat, but this is proper, repeated nonsense which obscures the meaning of curse words that frankly deserve to be rationed and cherished. His expectations of a second-tier team are quite ridiculous. ‘Fucking shoot’, he cries when Boro are anywhere within fifty yards of the goal, ‘fucking shoot, you useless bastards.’ Am I mistaking passion for aggression? Was I ever like that? Would eighteen-year-old me hate me at thirty?

He does seem to be the exception, though. Although attendances have halved since Boro’s early-twenty-first century peak, somehow the atmosphere is often better at games than it was then. It feels as if the club is down to a hardcore of deep, deep carers: those that identify most with the team. The drifters have gone; long live the belongers. The most heartening thing is that many of them are teenagers. One set has even formed an ‘Ultras’ group, the Red Faction, who’ve set up noisily in a corner of their own, moving the heart of the Riverside across the stadium. Undoubtedly their growing bond is accelerated by the fact that they’re watching a team largely made up of players from the same schools as them, managed by a man who pronounces ‘five’ as ‘fahve’, just like they do. When I finish losing myself in today’s game I realise that, against my fears, young people are finding the sense of belonging football offers.

Back on the field, in glorious Technicolor the Flying Scotsman is smacking away a helping Brighton hand like a mid-tantrum toddler. The Albion player had only sought to pull Boro’s man from the ground to his feet. Knuckled Caledonian ire was probably unnecessary, but definitely funny. The two midfielders are grave robbers, taking the riches from Brighton attacks and covering one another’s backs. Towards the end, one of them becomes involved in a touchline fracas with Albion substitutes. In seconds, his comrade is there, provoking a scene that will later be played out in drunken high streets across merry England. Pointed fingers, testosterone, men pushing, pouncing and punching for reasons they can’t quite remember. Boro’s midfielders: leaders of the pack ... the pack coming for you.

Of late, the chants meted out by opposing supporters to Brighton have become a talking point and a reminder of football’s inherent homophobia: ‘Does your boyfriend know you’re here’ and ‘We can see you holding hands’ they sing. Offensive? Funny and a part of ‘terrace humour’? Certainly the Brighton riposte of, ‘You’re too ugly to be gay’ is. Unfortunately, my lot can’t muster anything more than vintage number ‘(You’re just a) town full of rent boys’ today, boring and boorish from the Boro.

The whistle soars and we roar. Three points, that staple ingredient of a good weekend. Over another appalling pint in the concourse bowels, we watch one steward de-brief other stewards with militaristic seriousness. Never in the history of human resources have so many men in fluorescent coats listened to so few words of use.

The three of us line up by the statues of Wilf and George. There’s Paddy and there’s Dave and there’s me. And, of course, there’s Middlesbrough. Though personal, identity is nothing if not shared. Middlesbrough and football give us something to hold on to in an England of flux. The town, its history and its team are interlinked in themselves, and all three are constants of the England in my mind.