Middlesbrough; Sunday, 24 October, 2010

If yesterday morning had been the epitome of damp, then this morning was the complete opposite, a clear blue sky, that kind of clear blue that means only one thing, cold. So I turned over pulled the duvet a bit tighter and decided that actually I wouldn’t get up at 8.

Two hours later the sky was still clear and looking crisp, but I felt it had probably got above freezing, so I got up and got ready to go out.

My first stop of the morning, a “short” walk from the city centre, actually turned out to be closer to 20 minutes, was the Dorman museum, effectively the town museum. Having had a look around the museum, I headed back towards the town centre and to MIMA. When I had booked to visit Middlesbrough, I hadn’t expected it to have a massive, modern, modern-art gallery. I don’t know why, virtually everywhere else does these days! I had a very pleasant lunch in the cafe before having a wander around the galleries.

The museum produces a very useful free map to the public art in Middlesbrough, which you can follow to visit the key piece, the largest piece of outside public art in the country – Temenos.

It forms the centre piece of the Middlehaven redevelopment of the old docks area north of the train station. Unfortunately, at the time of visiting the only other residents appear to be the Football stadium, what I suspect is the tax office which has my money in it (every time I have ever had to write to the tax man it’s always been to Middlesbrough) and Middlesbrough College. Everywhere else is the rubble of sites which have been cleared for redevelopment which doesn’t appear to be taking place. It’s possible when I visited that it was in the unfortunate break between all the demolition teams moving off site and the building teams moving on, but it was just such a wasteland, and the weeds were just so high, that I fear it might not have been quite that simple.

Having looked at Temenos, and realised that it looked almost exactly like the Anish Kapoor sculpture in the Tate Modern a few years back, just without the outer skin, I wandered back towards town, taking a quick detour to visit Teesside’s answer to the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building and the Brandenburg Gate.

The Transporter Bridge is the international shorthand for Middlesbrough, and it’s only one of two working transporter bridges left in the UK (the other one being in Newport, Gwent). The small museum next door to the bridge tells the story of its history, construction, how it works and lists some of the other examples around the world. Then it was time to take a quick trip across the Tees.

It’s a bizarre experience, the whole massive structure supports a gondolier that runs just a few feet above the water, taking 90 seconds or so to cross the river to the other bank, it is a bizarre cross between a ferry and a train, not feeling like either. Having crossed over I watched it cross back over before realising that actually there is nothing on this side of the river, so I had to wait the 10 minutes before it came back over, then caught it back to Middlesbrough.

I wandered back through town taking in the rest of the public art from the map I’d picked up at MIMA, but it couldn’t help to hide the fact that I had pretty much exhausted Middlesbrough of things to do on a Sunday that didn’t involve shopping or drinking, so I headed over to the cinema to take in an evening film, before grabbing some dinner stuff from a Tesco Express before heading back to the hotel for some more sleep.

Whilst I may have had the longest and deepest nights sleep ever in Hammerfest in January, I think Middlesbrough in October may be about to be the longest period of sustained long sleeps.