This film is part of Free

Middlesbrough Film

A cityscape romp around the old grid-iron town of Middlesbrough in the 1960s.

Amateur film 1964 12 mins Silent

From the collection of:

Logo for North East Film Archive

Overview

Its a helluva town fun-loving students arrive on the Transporter Bridge for a cityscape romp. With all its technical faults, this quirky amateur film is still a fascinating record of Middlesbrough in the 1960s, in the shadow of a great industrial past. Slum clearance programmes are on the horizon. New council estates stand in the fading St Hildas district but there are still signs of community spirit in the condemned graffiti-daubed back-to-back terraced streets.

The film was produced by Donald Raymond Clark who was the audio-video technician at Middlesbrough College of Education, then part of the original Constantine College that became Teesside University in 1992. Middlesbrough developed its urban identity in double-quick time. From a coal and port town, dreamt up by Quaker businessmen, Joseph Pease and Partners, and built from scratch on a grid-iron pattern, to an iron town dubbed Ironopolis, from which, it was claimed, every metropolis sprang.