Middlesbrough, the iron town

Middlesbrough is one of the youngest and most industrial towns in England. On the banks of the River Tees, in the north-east, in 1829 it was a farm with a handful of inhabitants; seventy years later it was a town of almost a hundred thousand people, grown up around the furnaces of iron and steel. Prime Minister William Gladstone called it "an infant Hercules", and the English knew it as Ironopolis, the iron town. Middlesbrough steel built bridges famous around the world, including Sydney Harbour Bridge. Today the town has about 145,000 inhabitants, an international-class modern art museum and two spectacular historic bridges, and it is the gateway to one of England's most beautiful national parks, the North York Moors, and to the coast at Whitby and Saltburn. It was also the birthplace of Britain's most famous navigator, Captain James Cook.

The small Teesside Airport is about twenty minutes away, and Newcastle and York are about an hour away.

From farm to iron town

In 1829 a group of Quaker businessmen led by Joseph Pease bought the land of a farm on the Tees to build a port for exporting coal from County Durham, brought here by the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world's first public steam railway. A small grid town with a square and a church was laid out on the fields: it was the birth of modern Middlesbrough.

The real boom came in 1850, when the businessman John Vaughan and his German-born partner Henry Bolckow found large deposits of iron ore in the nearby Eston Hills. Within a few years dozens of blast furnaces rose along the river, and Middlesbrough became one of the largest iron and steel centres in the world, with thousands of workers arriving from all over Britain and Ireland. The Dorman Long company, founded here in 1875, used its steel to build Sydney Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932, and Newcastle's Tyne Bridge.

The bridges over the Tees

The town's symbol is the Transporter Bridge, opened in 1911: one of the few surviving transporter bridges in the world, in which a platform suspended from a steel structure about fifty metres high carries cars and pedestrians from one bank to the other without blocking passing ships. It is the longest bridge of its kind still in existence. Since 2019 it has been closed for safety reasons and is the subject of a restoration project, but it remains spectacular even from outside, especially in the evening when it is lit up. A little upstream, the Tees Newport Bridge, of 1934, was the first large vertical-lift bridge in Britain: its central deck could rise like a lift to let ships through.

Captain Cook

James Cook was born in 1728 at Marton, then a village south of the town and now one of its districts. The son of a farm labourer, he learned seamanship on the Whitby colliers and became the greatest explorer of his time: on three voyages to the Pacific he mapped New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, crossed the Antarctic Circle and reached Hawaii, where he died in 1779. In Stewart Park, where his birthplace stood, the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum tells the story of his life and voyages with objects, maps and reconstructions.

What to see in Middlesbrough

MIMA

In the heart of the town, MIMA, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, opened in 2007 in an elegant glass and stone building, shows international contemporary art, design and ceramics, with a collection ranging from 20th-century works to today's artists. In front of the museum, in the gardens of Centre Square, stands the Bottle of Notes, a large bottle-shaped sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, from 1993, decorated with phrases from Cook's journal.

Temenos and the riverside

On the bank of the Tees, in the dock area, rises Temenos, an enormous steel and mesh sculpture by Anish Kapoor and the engineer Cecil Balmond, from 2010, like a gigantic net stretched between two rings. The riverside is being transformed, with new homes, offices and public spaces.

Dorman Museum and Albert Park

Next to the large Albert Park, a Victorian park with a lake, tree-lined avenues and gardens, is the Dorman Museum, free to enter, with local and natural history collections and the most important collection of Linthorpe pottery, a 19th-century local works linked to the designer Christopher Dresser.

Sport and food

Middlesbrough FC, nicknamed Boro, plays at the Riverside Stadium: in 2004 it won the League Cup, the first major trophy in its history, and in 2006 reached the UEFA Cup final, lost to Sevilla. The town's signature dish is the parmo, a breaded and fried chicken cutlet topped with béchamel sauce and melted cheese, served with chips: a dish invented in the 1950s by a local chef inspired by chicken parmigiana and American cooking.

Around Middlesbrough

• Roseberry Topping, a hill with a tooth-shaped summit and spectacular views over the Tees valley and the sea.
• The North York Moors national park, with moorland that blooms with purple heather in late summer and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway steam line.
• Whitby, about an hour away, with its clifftop abbey ruins, the harbour from which Cook sailed and the atmosphere of Dracula.
• Saltburn-by-the-Sea, with its Victorian pier and an 1884 cliff railway that runs on a water-balance system, one of the oldest in the world.
• The beaches of Redcar, along the North Sea coast.
• Durham, with its World Heritage cathedral, about forty minutes away.

Living in Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough suffered a steep decline with the closure of much of its steel and chemical industry, and some of its neighbourhoods are among the poorest in England. But the town is changing: Teesside University, projects to regenerate old industrial land along the river, the freeport and industries linked to hydrogen and clean energy are bringing new investment. Homes are among the cheapest in the country, and the nature of the North York Moors and the coast is only minutes away.

Getting there and getting around

• By train: there is one direct train a day from London King's Cross, taking about three hours; otherwise change at Darlington or York. There are direct services to Newcastle, Manchester and the coast.
• By air: Teesside Airport has domestic flights and a few flights to Europe; Newcastle Airport is about an hour away.
• In town: the centre is walkable; buses serve Stewart Park, Albert Park and the surroundings.

For travel around the rest of the country see trains and transport, and for other cities British cities; for the region's industrial history see also the Industrial Revolution.

Tips for your visit

• How long: half a day for the town; two or three days to add the North York Moors, Whitby and the coast.
• When to go: May to September; August and September to see the heather in bloom on the moors.
• A tip: to see the Transporter Bridge at its best, go to the bank of the Tees at sunset, when the structure stands out against the sky.

Middlesbrough on the map

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