Black Path Premiere

[fmttmadmin]

Here it is.. on Teesside Archives/Middlesbrough Environment City youtube.
Rewind it to the start as the Premiere is actually running live at this moment (started 10am).

 

[fmttmadmin]

Do remember to wind the video back to the start and the countdown - it starts with a walk around the historic core, the Victorian heart around the railway centre. Including poet Ian Horn's words written along the wall on Bridge Street East.

Great the way they start the walk in the heart of the town and walk past the old and new - Middlesbrough College, past the dock, the Riverside and shows how close the Black Path is to the town centre.

 

[fmttmadmin]

A path between industry, next to becks and showing wildlife, flora and fauna. Chris and Michael explore the history, nature, the sculptures etc and the modern murals.

 

[Redwurzel]

Interesting video - the contrast between nature and industry is dramatic and I learnt a lot from watching it. Also the massive changes.

Near the beginning when they describe the girl bringing her dad's dinner/pie into the works. That could be my auntie. She was born in 1927 and in the 1930s she used to take my grandad's dinner into Cargo Fleet works when he worked the "long" shift. On the long shift the men worked all weekend and never left the works. There was no food provided. Amazing that young girls could just wander in. I was told the long shifts stopped before WW2 so my own mum was too young to help.

Ref the Navigation in the late 1970s - I remember the road through the under pass (for Riverside Stadium) through the Cleveland Bridge Works to North Ormesby that went over railways lines. At night it was quite spectacular as the orange glow and smoke of the works made you think you were driving through Dante's inferno ands suddenly in the middle of it was a pub - the Navvy.

Ref Cornish pasties, the crust was to prevent Cornish miners poisoning themselves as their hands could contain arsenic often found with tin and copper. Cornish miners did not come to Middlesbrough in many numbers, but there were quite a few in East Cleveland who came to work in the newly opening mines. One miner walked from Cornwall to Loftus to find work in the 1860s.

Ref South Bank - There was an area where the new slag was dumped from freight trains etc - it was called the Puddling - kids played around it , once my mum when she was a girl saw a boy drown and killed in molten slag - the train driver did not see him.