As part of an upcoming exhibition, artist Angela Maddock decided to walk to Middlesbrough. From Camarthen. Here she explains why and the gold that she found here.
I want to walk and keep walking. Not ‘go for a walk’ where I end up back here, but walking where distance expands, as if I might be unspooling, lengthening. I have been still for too long. Sitting on trains, sitting at desks.
I’m texting my daughter, it’s the end of July. We are discussing landscape. I try to explain what it feels like to have been born in the middle, to be in the middle – between her and my mum – and to be middle aged. And my phone wants its say too. Every time I key in ‘middle’ it comes back with Middlesbrough.
It’s late August, another desk, trying to find somewhere to walk. I think of walking to my daughter, to my mum, but neither is enough. A map of the British Isles, perhaps I might walk north, and then I remember the text messaging, my butting in phone, I will walk to Middlesbrough. I know two things. I must not share this with my mum, for now, and yet I must tell everyone else, because the telling will make it happen. Telling means I cannot hide behind a thought that came to nothing. And the telling brings all sorts of responses, ‘My god, have you ever been to Middlesbrough?’ and ‘That’s a long walk just to end up in Middlesbrough!’ It is the just that starts to matter.
October 6th, standing outside Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen with my friend Gill and the gallery manager, Catherine. Ahead of us, a 15 mile or 24km walk to Llandeilo, the first stage in a journey to Middlesbrough via my family home in the Black Country. I am embarrassingly ill prepared. One long distance walk from my home to my friend Corrie’s in Port Talbot – a thirteen-mile walk in new boots that takes me four hours door to door – and three or four walks to Mumbles head and back. I’ve never been one for planning ahead.
By the end of day one I have two blisters. By the third day, I name the one on my right heel the MASSIVE; it will slough off, leaving the soft flesh beneath utterly exposed. The MASSIVE becomes my journey companion and brings me to tip toeing, stumbling and on at least one occasion, weeping. It is with me as I wait for Peter on Day 25, my company for the final walk from Yarm into the Boro. Peter who steps from the train in beautifully clean soft-soled shoes for a walk along the Teesdale Way and the muddied banks of the River Tees. I worry for his shoes, worry more that he might slide from bank into river.
It’s a long walk, made longer when we loose sight of the path in a low slung and strung out industrial estate at Stockton on Tees. We stumble into the Pit Stop Diner, me for a giant mug of tea and Mars bar and Peter a black coffee. Not much for such a long way. I tell Peter how excited I am, how I slept with the anticipation of waiting for Christmas Day, that it feels like there’s something big waiting for me.
All this way I have deliberately kept myself ignorant; a transporter bridge, an art gallery, the possibility of brilliant fish and chips, as yet blissfully unaware of the Boro’s particular claim to gastronomy, the Parmo. Instead, I have projected onto Middlesbrough what I know of the places familiar to me. That it might be like Wolverhampton, or Swansea. Post industrial, struggling, but also home to the occasional gem. And I have tried to dismiss the comments of others ‘Are you mad? Middlesbrough. No one walks there.’ And yet I have, safe in the knowledge that I will end up in a place I don’t know.
It’s the Tees Barrage Bridge that marks my arrival, that and the widening breadth of the River Tees itself, an expansive shift that is felt within me as much as seen. I recognise the switch in pace that always comes towards the end of a walk. No matter how tired, I quicken up: the rush of Christmas morning unwrapping. And then, as we walk and talk the gravel strewn path of the Riverside Park, a brilliant prophetic moment, a casual glance at the ground and the glint of a gold coin. Better still, a chocolate gold coin. I stuff it into my jacket pocket. Tomorrow, on the train home, it will melt and take on a different form, more buckled than flat.
I’d imagined walking into the Boro alone, saluting the Transporter Bridge, eating my fish and chips and returning home on the train. Quite unnoticed. The reality is not that different. It is oddly quiet, the streets barely populated. I do salute the Transporter, stand beneath one of its giant legs as it glides its cargo across the Tees. I visit MIMA and am left with the memory of walking into a jewelled box, so enduringly vibrant that I am able to conjure it up at will, a restorative balm for grey days. I chat with someone who declares that she will walk the return journey, something, in that moment at least, I think I might do for myself. But I leave before I am ready, for I am also eager to get home, to have the whole thing done.
I have always believed that when you leave a place too soon, you leave it well. With a sense of longing, that there’s more to be found. This is how I left Middlesbrough, on a train journey delayed before it even began and yet imagining a return at a different time, under different circumstances; to find more gold, perhaps, to eat a Parmo, definitely.
Angela Maddock’s exhibition, which documents her journey from Carmarthen to Middlesbrough, ‘Sometimes all you can do is Walk’ opens on Saturday, March 23rd 2019, at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen and continues until Saturday, May 4th.Angela walked from Yarm to Middlesbrough with Peter Neal, Operations Manager at Tees Valley Arts.