Teesside laid bare

Natalie Hardwick was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1985 and raised on a diet of parmos, pasties and politics. She’s based in London, works as features editor for BBC Good Food and has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and VICE on food and society. She can be found on Twitter @nardwick.

Natalie Hardwick

A Town of Two Halves: The Revival of Stockon-on-Tees

No town is ever good enough when you’re a teenager, but when you’ve grown up in Teesside you seem instilled with an uncomfortable pride. It’s a curious feeling, partly of resentment at how rough a deal you think you’ve been dished out; After all, you were born into an area with no nearby cities, an oft-Baltic climate, tattered heritage, little visible wealth and few opportunities for work and/or play. All the irksome foibles that other people who grew up in small towns will identify with. No cinema. No big department store. Even the McDonalds shut down. Newcastle had all the best shops, clubs and bars, but it’s an hour and a half away on the dawdling X10 bus. This resentment falls somewhere between aggression and Eeyorey defeatism, and it sits alongside a peculiar honour, or perhaps an acquiescence. Like most places with love/hate permutations, it’s a matter uniquely for insiders – woe betide anyone from the outside who casts any kind of aspersions on the town, for only brethren are allowed to foul their own. When my husband first visited Stockton, I repeatedly asked him “do you like it?”, “DO YOU LIKE IT?”

Thankfully he did, him being a man of simple pleasures with a predilection for pork pies, Bass and lack of pretensions. Teenage angst aside, Stockton has its demons. In 2015, a Lancet study found the life expectancy of a male baby is 67 - the lowest figure in England and Wales. A boy born in London’s Belgravia can expect to live until 91. It’s just the latest in doom and gloom statistics – earlier in the same year, a report by Public Health for Stockton found that within the town, there’s huge disparities between life expectancy. In richer areas like Eaglescliffe, a man can be expected to live 16 years longer than a man living in Stockton town centre. Walking through inner Stockton areas like Bowesfield and Tilery, you can believe the figures. BBC news reported on the Lancet study, filming in Stockton and sinking the town even further into the doldrums – “one in three people are unemployed; four in five households are classed as officially ‘deprived’; those in ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ health is twice the national average”.

Then something strange happened. Proving statistics can be as reliable as Stockton’s late night buses, just a few months later, a study by estate agent Hamptons found that Stockton is the fifth best place to live in the country. Of course you’d be an idiot to believe anything an estate agent says but they got their (cleverly manipulated) information from the Office of National Statistics, so there is some credence to it. According to house price-to-income ratios and the Life Satisfaction Index, Stockton does indeed rank up there with the country’s finest. Even inner Stockton areas ranked fifth in the poll – the town centre standing practically shoulder to shoulder with leafy Eaglescliffe. Call me a cynic, but maybe that whole Life Satisfaction Index thing swung it. Maybe Stocktonians are intrinsically satisfied with their lot. I’m not sure which study is more accurate, but one thing they’re right about is that Stockton is a town of contradictions and binaries.

Richard Milward was born in Middlesbrough in 1984. He is the author of three novels: Apples, Ten Storey Love Song and Kimberly’s Capital Punishment , published by Faber & Faber. Apples and Ten Storey Love Song were recently adapted for the stage, winning awards at the Edinburgh Fringe. Over the years his non-fiction has appeared in The Face, Dazed & Confused, The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, among many others. He’s currently working on a new novel and a collection of short stories.

Richard Milward

Hello, Goodbye: The Life, Death and Rebirth Of Grove Hill

I love Grove Hill, but I love it in a way you might love a temperamental uncle. For the most part it’s harmless, genial – but provoke the beast and it can turn nasty in a flash. Oddly enough this is part of its appeal to me – you can’t act like a d***head when you’re here, or you’ll be pulled up on it immediately. Teessiders are blunt, they take the piss, they’ve got their eye on you, but equally, they look out for you.

In the seven years I’ve lived here, I’ve never suffered any proper abuse, just the odd bit of razor-tongued fashion advice. The other night I was followed down Valley Road with taunts of ‘mosher’ after spewing up in my parka – but nothing more gruesome than the bile came of it. I consider myself at fault there anyway – opening your guts on someone’s street corner will almost always attract attention. Another night I was mistaken for the Elvis impersonator in The Broadway despite wearing a tracksuit top not a sequinned jumpsuit, and in 2004-5 I made the daily error of wearing bright yellow Asics on my wander down Keith Road to and from college.

This one afternoon a lad pulled up in his Nova or other souped-up monstrosity.

‘Excuse me?’ he enquired, quite high-pitched. I plucked my eyeballs from the pavement, expecting he might want directions, but the lad added simply: ‘Y’shoes are shite.’ Then he sped off into the afternoon (and I now wear unassuming black Sambas).

Of course, these daft anecdotes don’t define Grove Hill, but they contribute to its character. I’ve seen other, more seamy goings-on on my odd psychojogs round the estate and through my rear window, but it’s all down to your own outlook and interpretation, what does or doesn’t give a place a bad name.

For instance, I don’t mind people drinking on the streets (I do it myself), I don’t look down on those on benefits (I’ve been plugged into Middlesbrough Council in times of desperation), and I’ve got drug dealers and reformed drink-drivers among my closest friends. It’s all about your precious, particular worldview, what’s happened to you in certain places in the past that colours your judgement. Plenty of people in Middlesbrough see Grove Hill as a dive, plenty of others wear their TS4 heritage as a badge of honour. Some revel in the estate’s wildness, some recoil. Some peer at it through the rear window of their flat and scribe chaptered prose about it. But, for those who’ve never spent time in Grove Hill – or only experience it fleetingly streaking past the car window on their way to somewhere else – they’ve only got the accounts in the local paper or the anecdotes of others to fill in the blanks. And there’s a hell of a lot of newsprint to choose from. And right now, with half the estate levelled and half its residents rehoused elsewhere, there’s a hell of a lot of blank space to fill.

• From Stripped Tees: Hope and Endurance in the North East. There are three essay books in the Insights series so far; Birmingham, Southend on Sea and Teesside. Another is due next year, and a paperback collection is due in autumn 2017. For more info on Influx, visit influxpress.com.
• The essays (together) are £1.99 to download (from Amazon or other ebook retailer and direct from the website, including pdf copy).