Anyone reading some of the recent coverage of Middlesbrough could be forgiven for thinking there is little here beyond crime, deprivation and tragedy. The town has been dragged through some of the bleakest headlines it has seen in years, with the A66 crash, gang culture, violence and deprivation all picked over nationally and, in some cases, internationally.
Monetisation of deprivation
Don’t forget the YouTubers. I mean, I wish I could. You know the type. They arrive with a camera, find the most knackered-looking shopfront they can, slap some variation of BRITAIN’S WORST TOWN? across the thumbnail in fluorescent yellow and apparently complete a full sociological assessment of Middlesbrough before teatime.
Nothing says serious social analysis quite like filming the local baghead at their lowest point for 12 minutes and calling it content.
They get the clicks, the ad revenue and a nice drive home afterwards. We are the ones left living with the version of Middlesbrough they have sold to everybody else.
That does not mean hiding what is wrong here. We have real, deep-rooted problems and those of us who live here know them better than anybody parachuting in for content. But there is a difference between documenting deprivation and turning an entire town into poverty porn because misery performs well on an algorithm. Those of us who are actually from Middlesbrough know the picture is more complicated.
I am a proud Smoggie. I grew up with that identity and everything that comes with it. The industrial history, the gallows humour, the stubbornness and that deeply Teesside habit of taking the mick out of ourselves before anybody else gets the chance. We took an insult and turned it into a badge of honour, which is probably about as Boro as it gets. But I believe we may have reached a point where Middlesbrough needs to decide what comes next.
Between what we were and what we might become
“Smoggie” belongs to a Middlesbrough forged in iron, steel and heavy industry, and I’m proud of that history because it made this place. But we cannot spend the next century defining ourselves only by what we used to make. If Middlesbrough is going to move forward, our identity has to be allowed to move with it.
Middlesbrough is approaching its bicentenary at the same time as it bids to become UK City of Culture 2029, prepares to host the Turner Prize and embarks on some of the biggest regeneration plans the town has seen in decades. It feels, in some ways, as though Middlesbrough is in a chrysalis.
We know what we were. We have a pretty good idea what outsiders currently think we are. The difficult question is what we want to become.
The City of Culture bid is significant because it offers something bigger than a festival programme or another shiny title to stick on council stationery. And yes, before somebody points it out, I know Middlesbrough is technically a town bidding to become a City of Culture. Blame Sunderland for opening that particular door and move on.
If successful, the bid would bring major cultural investment and, more importantly, an opportunity to change how Middlesbrough is seen by people outside the town and by those of us living here.
At the same time, Middlehaven (over the border) could eventually see thousands of new homes around the Old Town Hall, while wider town-centre plans include housing, public spaces, a theatre and a hotel. For once, there is a sense that some of these things might actually connect.
We have reinvented ourselves before
Middlesbrough was once the original boomtown, the “Infant Hercules”, a place that helped build bridges and railways across the world. I’m making this point not because we should spend the next 100 years staring wistfully at blast furnaces and pretending the answer to every modern problem is more steel, but because it proves this town has changed before.
What we should carry forward is not the smoke. It is the mentality behind it; the confidence to build, the willingness to take risks and the belief that something created on the banks of the Tees can matter far beyond them. That is the identity worth recovering.
Too often regeneration is sold to places like Middlesbrough as though somebody is arriving to civilise us. A developer unveils some glossy CGI, a politician puts on a suspiciously pristine hard hat, the word “transformational” gets repeated until it loses all meaning and everybody goes home feeling terribly regenerated. This is not what Middlesbrough needs.
We do not need pity, and we certainly do not need another lecture about resilience. We have been resilient for decades. At some point “resilience” starts to sound suspiciously like being told to keep coping with less and be grateful about it. What we actually need is backing.
A chrysalis is not magic
There is a genuine cultural base here already. MIMA, Middlesbrough Art Week, The Auxiliary, the Town Hall, Central Library and a growing creative and digital sector are not things somebody has invented for a bid document. There is talent here. Proper talent. I see it in the people around me.
But culture cannot be expected to carry the entire weight of regeneration on its shoulders. Winning City of Culture will not make a bus turn up. It will not automatically make housing affordable, improve a struggling neighbourhood or create secure employment for a teenager wondering whether there is any point staying here.
A new theatre could be a brilliant addition to the town, but it only works if people can afford to use it and can actually get home afterwards. That is the point where the butterfly metaphor needs a bit of realism. A chrysalis is not magic. Change has to happen inside it.
Middlesbrough can put up new branding, commission public art and host major cultural events, but if the people already living here cannot find decent work, affordable homes, safe streets or reliable transport, then all we have really done is decorate the shell.
The alternative is to spend another decade pushing the same old problems around and calling it progress. There’s a dung-beetle metaphor in there somewhere, but Boro has had enough shit to deal with already.
National Inclusion Week
Bylines network has signed up for National Inclusion Week. Progress doesn’t happen in perfect conditions. Listen, adapt and take action
Build trust. Navigate change.
Who gets to emerge with us?
We can get excited about regeneration all we like, but there’s still one awkward question hanging over it: who’s it actually for?
The new town-centre strategy talks about attracting younger people, creating opportunities and encouraging people to build careers here. Middlehaven is intended to bring residents back into the original heart of Middlesbrough alongside education, sport and the digital economy. Those are good ambitions.
But regeneration has to be based on the Middlesbrough we actually have, not the one somebody hopes might magically appear. Church House was refurbished with a more affluent market in mind and is still sitting largely empty, which should tell us something.
We cannot build a new identity for Middlesbrough around the fantasy that better-off people will simply move in if we make the flats shiny enough. The people already here have to be at the centre of the plan.
If Middlesbrough changes, the people who stuck with it through the difficult years need to feel that change too. They need decent homes, reliable transport, safer neighbourhoods, accessible culture and jobs that pay enough to build a life on. Young people should not have to leave because opportunity lives somewhere else.
One of the most striking ideas in the City of Culture bid is the ambition to reconnect with people who left Middlesbrough out of necessity and give them reasons to return. That, to me, is the real test.
Not simply whether tourists come here for a weekend and discover that, shock horror, we do actually have restaurants and art galleries. It is whether people who grew up here start believing there is a future worth staying for.
Face it head on
Middlesbrough does have serious problems. Pretending otherwise would be as dishonest as reducing the whole town to them.
The challenge is not to swap one caricature for another. We do not need to go from Britain’s crime capital to some ridiculous civic brochure where everybody is permanently drinking artisan coffee beneath tasteful fairy lights.
We need the better story to become true in everyday life. That starts with facing down what is wrong rather than burying it, while refusing to let those problems define everything we are.
Middlesbrough is at a point where it can either confront the difficult stuff, invest in what is good and emerge as something new, or retreat into the familiar cycle of low expectations and managed decline.
A chrysalis can be a place of transformation, but only if something changes inside it.
That choice is not Middlesbrough’s alone. Local ambition matters, but so does national investment, political will and a willingness to stop treating places like ours as either problems to be managed or convenient backdrops for somebody else’s content.
The butterfly effect
I will always be a Smoggie, and proudly so. But I do not think our next identity should be defined by the smoke that once hung over the Tees, or by the worst headline somebody can write about us today. It should be defined by what we build after them.
Middlesbrough once sent ripples around the world through the things it made. Bridges, railways and industry carried this town’s fingerprints far beyond the North East of England. There is no reason those ripples have to stop.
If we get this right, the next Middlesbrough can send them out again through culture, technology, creativity, ideas and people. That is the butterfly effect worth aiming for.
We have spent long enough being told what Middlesbrough is. Maybe it is time we decided for ourselves.
Up the Boro.
