Middlesbrough
— — a town the railway and the iron built in fifty years.
Not only on a wall.
“A Teesside town that grew from a single farmhouse in 1801 to 90,000 people by 1901, on the back of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and the iron found in the Cleveland Hills. The Transporter Bridge has carried road traffic across the river in a gondola hung from a high lattice since 1911, one of the last of its kind still standing. Gladstone called it the youngest child of England's enterprise, an infant Hercules, in a speech to the town in 1862. from the studio
Middlesbrough, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Middlesbrough sits on the south bank of the River Tees in the North East of England, four miles from the river's mouth at the North Sea. The town as it stands was effectively founded in 1830, when the Stockton and Darlington Railway extended its line to a new coal-shipping wharf on what had been farmland. A population of about 40 in 1829 reached 90,000 by 1901, faster than any other town in nineteenth-century Britain. The Cleveland ironstone seam in the hills to the south fed the blast furnaces that built the modern town.
The Tees Transporter Bridge, opened in 1911, is one of the longest surviving transporter bridges in the world, carrying a suspended gondola 851 feet across the river beneath a high steel lattice. Sydney Harbour Bridge was reportedly inspired by visits to Middlesbrough's earlier Newport Bridge, the first vertical-lift bridge in Britain, which still spans the Tees three miles upstream. Both bridges were built by Sir William Arrol & Co. of Glasgow, the same firm that built the Forth Bridge. The Transporter is a Grade II* listed structure.
The town's modern identity sits between its industrial inheritance and the contemporary art scene at mima, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, which opened in 2007 on Centre Square. The institute holds the British Council's collection of modern jewellery and runs a residency programme tied to the local university, Teesside. Middlesbrough Football Club, founded 1876, plays at the Riverside Stadium on the dockside, a few hundred metres from the steelworks site cleared in 2015. Captain James Cook was born in 1728 in Marton, now a suburb to the south.