Bards of Paradise

MANY a 20th century traveller, some yet further down the line, may have supposed the bleak-blasted railway route from Middlesbrough to Redcar to offer a fair impression of purgatory, that state of intense suffering said to purify (and quite possibly to oxidise) the soul.

What if they were wrong? What if South Bank and Cargo Fleet and all that British Steel and Dorman Long balefully belched over them were in fact the Elysian Fields, the pathway to paradise?

Philip Thomson, a Scot who first made that ruddy red rite of passage in 1969, amplifies the theme.

“It was my first time on the line and it was like passing through Hades – all the furnaces, the coke ovens, the dense clouds of steam. It was a world completely different from anything I’d ever experienced.”

Nor, it might be added, were his early experiences of Teesside much ameliorated by a month at the Brambles Farm Hotel, first visited in the mistaken belief that it might be a rustic hideaway and not a council estate in the Boro.

“The coke smell was all-pervasive, not a whiff of country air at all, but they were warmly welcoming. I parked my little Healey Sprite outside for a month and it never got so much as a scratch.”

However greatly Brambles Farm may have been a crown of thorns, however, his personal purgatory was soon to be at an end.

He moved to Saltburn, paradise gained, and is anxious to retain it.

That finest of all northern seaside towns this year marks its 150th anniversary. Philip chairs the committee planning 12 months of celebrations.

“Celebration is important,” he says simply, “Saltburn is a very special place.”

FEW might disagree, though on a fair fearful day like Tuesday it’s like waking up next to the love of your life and discovering that she’s still wearing curlers. And a face pack. And a potato sack.

None ventures onto the pier, none battens down the bitter-cold promenade.

The surf shop may not be said to be on the crest of a wave; the fish and chip shop fries in vain.

We meet in Destinations, an internet café near the station, joined by Sue Featherstone and by Wilma Gardiner- Gill, another Scot who’d experienced what might be termed the Cargo Fleet catharsis.

She’d worked at the BBC in Edinburgh, was married to a Boro boy who wanted to move closer to home. “We were looking at Whitby but I got off the train at Saltburn and at once knew that it was the right place.

“Everything was just so calm. I realised there was something very special about it; I still love it.

“I sometimes think we don’t realise how lucky we are. I might go a few weeks without getting down to the promenade and then think that I should go every day.”

Sue, a fellow member of the 150 committee, is a self-employed adviser to voluntary and community groups.

“The year is really about promoting a greater understanding of Saltburn’s heritage among residents, but the spin-off is that we hope more people will come to the town.

“I’m a relative newcomer but there’s such a good community spirit I feel like I know everyone here.

Saltburn has sea, sand, sunshine and a great deal going on.”

She glances out of the rain-lashed window, knows what’s coming next.

“Well,” adds Sue, “we can’t always guarantee the sun.”

HENRY Pease, it is said, was visiting his brother in Marske when, while walking along the cliffs, he saw the snuggled, smuggled hamlet of Saltburn and had a vision of the Holy City akin to something from the Book of Revelation.

Though Philip Thomson questions the divination – “I don’t know it if was an ethereal experience or a commercial vision” – the powerful Pease family were caught up in the dream of a spa town for gentlefolk.

The railway arrived in 1861 – August 17, it’s supposed, to be the central week of this year’s celebrations – trains soon running into the back of the magnificent Zetland Hotel when it was completed two years later.

Rumours that this arrangement merely helped Victorian gentlemen to secrete into the hotel ladies to whom they were not necessarily married may, of course, be dismissed as envious tittle-tattle.

Pease had laid the foundation stone of Alpha Place – aptly named – in January 1861, built himself a fine manor that became the CIU convalescent home, brought the portico of Barnard Castle to stand in the Valley Gardens.

Trains also brought the white “Pease bricks” to face the imposing new houses built on a grid pattern – save for the railway line through the middle – in the new town.

In 1863 the vicar of Marske held the first church service, perhaps appropriately in the stable of the Zetland Hotel. In 1869 Upleatham school opened, in 1876 a Masonic lodge was formed, in 1885 the railway was extended to Scarborough and in 1895 Saltburn Urban District Council convened.

These days the town’s part of the Borough of Redcar and Cleveland, which hopes to find funds to illuminate Huntcliff in the way that it did Roseberry Topping.

Philip Thomson, a man who carefully chooses his words but who most frequently talks of challenges, is anxious that they protect the town’s heritage.

“Part of the town is a conservation area but some of the conservation isn’t particularly strong. There have been some sympathetic developments along the promenade but some of the newer structures elsewhere haven’t contributed to the town.

“If you want to see a council that really cares about conservation, look at Bath. I don’t see the same commitment from this council, but Saltburn still has some wonderful architecture and excellent buildings.”

The extensive programme embraces both entertainment and education – “I hope by December we will have looked at many aspects of growth and sustainability” – beginning a week tomorrow with a major exhibition at the community hall which they hope will form the basis of an expanded town archive.

Heaven on earth? “We are certainly rather excited now that 2011 is here,” says Philip. “Perhaps we would be more confident if there had been greater participation from members of the community but people are now becoming more aware of all that’s happening. It’s going to a great year for Saltburn.”

■ Further information on the year’s activities on saltburn150.org.uk or saltburnarts.co.uk – telephone 01287-624997. They’re on Facebook and Twitter, too.