The Sights Of Middlesbrough?

Onto the M9 and the next destination for me was Middlesbrough. My cousin Razmee lives there and I'd not seen him in over a decade since my brothers funeral.  I've only been to this part of the world once before almost twenty years ago when I was on a course in Teesside but staying in Hartlepool so there were a couple of things I wanted to look at this time around.

I ended up getting on the road later than I wanted to, I'd lingered too long at the Wheel and the Kelpies so any planned stops along the way were going to have to be abandoned. Google maps had suggested I take the A1 which was fine with me, although I knew it would mean more average speed cameras again and originally I'd planned to stop and have a look around Bamburgh Castle or Lindisfarm and the Holy Isle. Berwick upon Tweed looked interesting too, but it'll all have to wait for another day. Shame these lovely castles have been inconveniently placed a long way from Cornwall. Just before Berwick (which was news to me, I assumed the border was the river Tweed) it was time to say goodbye to Scotland. Thank you, it'd been most excellent indeed.

 
I did manage to sneak a few views of Bamburgh Castle from the bike. Standing up on the GPZ's pegs at about 50mph is a fairly safe thing to do, or at least it is mostly, depending upon where the knackered head bearings are resting in their cups at the time. I could peer over the hedges at times and see the North Sea and glimpses of Norman architecture. I can't imagine anyone mistook the knackered Kawasaki for a Bavarian wife-carrying status symbol mind.  I realise the last few posts are sounding more like a travelogue rather than a bike project but I'm struggling to say anything that hasn't been said already abut the GPZ. Thankfully nothing else had gone wrong or fallen off since JoG and I'm thinking that getting home is half of the story anyway. One thing that had changed for the better was that now the Beeline Sat-Nav wasn't following a previously created .gpx file it was working much better in re-routing me when I made a wrong turn or stepped off route for something.

I made it to my cousins house in Middlesbrough bye late afternoon, the route taking me east of Newcastle and through the Tyne Tunnel. He doesn't live in what you'd ever call the most salubrious part of the city and unlike that first night in Elgin I made sure to lock up the bike and removed the fuel can from the rear rack. That night he listened to me talking far too much about the LDU as we had a couple of beers with his family sat outside around the fire brazier. Dinner was, for want of a better word, a local delicacy called Parmo. It's basically pizza, but instead of a bread base its chicken* that's been pounded into a flat circle and then baked. It's basically cheese and peperoni on a gigantic chicken nugget. It tasted pretty good, or at least the first two or three slices did. My arteries were quaking in fear however and I'm sure have written a strongly worded complaint about the whole affair.**

The next day the four of us went sightseeing! Now I realise that Middlesbrough probably isn't in the top ten cities of Britain for cultural sights. Hell, it's probably not even in the top 4.8 million, but nevertheless if you like Victorian(ish) engineering it's pretty good. I'd seen this from the Nutec training facility when I was here in 2004 but hadn't be able to visit which turns out was a big shame as it closed permanently in 2019 due to safety concerns.

 

The Tees Transporter Bridge was built in 1910-11 (so isn't actually Victorian although the scheme was proposed in 1872) and was capable of carrying 200 people, 9 cars, or 6 cars and one minibus across the river Tees in 90 seconds. There is a very similar bridge in Newport, South Wales that I visited in 2003 that was also closed when we went. It is currently closed for refurbishment and hopefully will open in 2024 with a new visitor centre too. As for the Tees bridge there are people actively trying to save it, and I really hope they manage to as there are only a handful of transporter bridges left in the world. It's estimated that it needs up to £7 million spent on it though, and Middlesbrough has some other pressing concerns at the moment. 

The building to the right is the control office and machinery building, it's closed but someone is still cleaning the windows so you can see the gigantic winding gears and the cast bodies of the ancient electric motors. The gondola is at this side of the river, but everything is securely gated off so there's no access to it. I love the sheer gravity of these steel structures, the thousands of rivets that have been hammered in to join sections and even the thickness of years and years of paint that's been applied by serious men with brushes. I was full of enthusiasm, Razmee quite interested, his girlfriend and eleven year old son just mildly perplexed that someone could be interested in an old, non working, obsolete quasi-bridge.

We drove up to the White Water Centre which was built for the 2012 Olympics and was where all the canoeing took place. It's still used as a watersports centre and has thankfully avoided the rapid slide into disrepair that often befalls these places once the circus has left town. From there we walked downstream along the banks of the Tees until we got to another bridge two and a half miles upstream of the transporter bridge and is another beautiful piece of engineering, this time from the interwar period. 

The Tees Newport bridge is an 82m long lift design, opened in 1934 by the future George VI. It's still open to traffic but hasn't been lifted since 1990. The 2700 tonne lifting span could be raised up 37m to allow tall ships to pass beneath by either electric motors, or if that failed by a standby petrol engine. If that too failed, a team of twelve could raise it by hand via winches in about eight hours... In the thirties and forties both of these bridges would be in daily use allowing cargos up and down the river along with the flow of traffic over the banks. Sadly this industrial and commercial need has all but disappeared from Middlesbrough and much of the North East, but I'm so glad that many artefacts are still surviving and there are people actively campaigning for them to be preserved for the future.

Unsurprisingly by this point Raz's lad and other half were bored witless and wanted to go home.

Due to complicated reasons, they don't actually live with my cousin except for at the weekends and as it was Sunday Raz and I were left to feed ourselves. However, Raz had got a cunning plan for tonight's nosebag action; he works as a property manager and has a couple of tenants who are Nepalese. Raz really likes his food and is into trying lots of different dishes. For a while he's wanted to try a Nepalese dish called MoMo. it's basically meat, onions and spices wrapped up in some really thin pastry and either steamed or fried, kinda like Chinese dumplings. He bought all the ingredients and his two tenants came and we all helped cook Momo under their instructions. I mostly got in the way of cooking so just did the washing up. Cooking the filling is relatively simple, but wrapping it in the pastry is an art neither Raz nor I manage to get close to...

 

The lady managed to wrap them up into net little parcels with each coming out identical. Ours, not so much. Still when dipped in the spicy sauce they all ended up delicious.

 

Full of food we watched a video on Youtube about some friends of theirs who had ridden a bunch of incredibly unsuitable motorbikes up a horrendous trail in Nepal called Upper Mustang. It was in Nepalese but I understood people questioning their life choices when I hear it. The bikes were 1200 GS, a Suzuki 250 commuter thing, a Kawasaki Z900 and an XR150 which would have been fine if they weren't two up on the Honda. And it was through quite a bit of snow and everyone was in jeans and trainers. Looked utterly beautiful but quite mad, cold and wet too.

Early night as Razmee works ridiculously long hours during the week and I had a long way to travel tomorrow.

 

*ish. As in, it may have once gone cluck, but I wouldn't bet my house on it...

** In 2007, North Yorkshire Trading Standards conducted a survey of 25 fast food dishes. A large parmo with chips & salad they tested contained about 2600 calories and 150g of fat. Consume at your peril...