In ‘Late Great Britain’, what use is art?
In Middlesbrough, to the north-east of England, people are quick to remind me that it’s always been a town of migrants. ‘Everyone here came from somewhere else’, local artist Annie O’Donnell says. At the turn of the 19th century, Middlesbrough was still a farming community of 25 inhabitants. From the 1830s, coal and iron ore were discovered, which became the lifeblood of the town – by the mid 20th century it held 165,000 people. But as the docks for iron and coal export closed in 1980, the population dwindled, and the familiar arc of meteoric rise and postwar decline was completed.
This great abdication has made Middlesbrough one of the most deprived places in the country, variously described as part of ‘Britain’s rust belt’ (The Economist) or one of the UK’s ‘least resilient’ locations (credit reference agency Experian). In this microcosm for the disenfranchisement of ‘Late Great Britain’, with no decent effort to rebuild the community here, set alongside public sector cuts and increasing immigration, you can see how the latter became an easy target for discontent. If the vote last year for the UK to leave the EU felt like the end of an era (Middlesbrough, like the North East in general, voted overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit), then another era had already come to an end for Middlesbrough the year before when the steelworks closed.
This history takes on a haunting patina the moment you board the twin-carriage train from Darlington which takes you through old industrial towns lining the River Tees into Middlesbrough. Housed within the railway station’s former parcel store is Platform-A, a gallery and set of studios. Director Tony Charles, a former steelworker, produces ‘unpaintings’: aluminium planks daubed in the primary colours of industrial signage, degraded with an angle grinder and sealed up in resin – manufactural gestures transformed into painted motion. Meanwhile photographs taken by Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale, are wheat-pasted across the station underpass, documenting the architecture of the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge, looming like a strange, blue UFO over nondescript suburban housing.