A Christmas Week trip out to the Coast. To the South Gare at Redcar. My old childhood town.

Wild and windy with clear storm damage. This place gets a real battering from the North Sea.

As a child I would either bike here or my Dad would bring me in his old rust bucket Ford. It was a great place to come, it was as exciting as this part of the world got. Huge waves, intrepid fishing boats, working lighthouse and huge supertankers coming into port. If you were really lucky you would get to see newly built mighty Oil Rigs being towed out to the oil fields, hundreds of miles north. That was many years ago.

The waves are still huge, everything else has changed. Hardly any fishing, lots of derelict industry, not so many ships using the ports now. Dad is a distant memory.

The photo below was taken from what was left of one the Gun Posts. Since the 1970s this view would have been dominated by a huge Blast Furnace, Europe’s second biggest. Now that’s gone as well.

2023, the Furnace should be there in the middle of that photo

Back 18 months ago, the Furnace was still there, a shell waiting to be scrapped. For decades the Furnace dominated Redcar. Dominated its skyline, economy and life. My Dad worked there, my brother in law worked there, most of my school friends went to work there.

From 2022, proved to be the last photo I would take of the Steel Works..

Walking there this Christmas and I could really feel THE GHOSTS of the past. A once childhood haunt is now just HAUNTED.

48 thoughts on “Ghosts”

  1. I am only able to go back to my place of birth and early childhood by using Google earth. From that perspective it seems unchanged, yet I am sure I would feel ghosts too. I know that most of the other places from my early life are unrecognizable and I would be sad going back. We hold on to the past, don’t we? I hope you were not too sad.

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      1. I know what you mean. It’s not here, it’s not now, but sometimes a place or a memory will push it’s way forward. The memory of the toast wasn’t so “Woohoo!” or horrible, but a glimpse of me as a teen, surviving through someone being friends, sharing while their family was out and the bread flowed to the little group at lunchtime. Probably made using the flour from across that field, ground in the mills of Heygates. The flour from there is currently used by the nuns in Holy Cross Abbey, Whitland not too far away, to make the altar breads, as life in Britain is still so interconnected.

        https://www.hcawhitland.co.uk/what-we-do/altar-breads

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      3. I had a ghost of a memory jump into mind, made me feel, made the moment clouded by a bit of sadness, but sort of stoic too. I didn’t let it last, the feeling was unwelcome, it passed.

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  3. Best wishes to you both for the New Year. I spent a year in Middlesbrough once and, as a mere country boy, watched in awe as they dismantled great pieces of industry and replaced it with supermarkets.

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      1. I guess they have hit a point where there aren’t enough working people to need a supermarket. It’s a bit like the bread and circuses model of the Roman Empire – eventually you run out of shiny things to distract the voters . . .

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  5. Most of my childhood haunts are no more. It’s sad to see the ravages of time, both in our own physical self and in the places we remember.
    Praying you had a wonderful holiday season, and will have a wonderful 2024.

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  7. It was 1988 when I went from Canada to see the town in what is now Poland where my mother was born and lived through World War I (it was part of the German Empire at the time) all I found was farmers’ fields, and an old weather-beaten sign on the side of the road. The name on the sign, written in Cryllic or something, translated to the name of the town where she had been born. It had been bombed during World War II. Other than the sign, there was nothing left. Not even the ghosts!

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      1. And the memory of that battle will fade, and the statue will come down. Who wants to think about all the lives lost on the ground where your house stands?

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  11. I just Google maps a few places of the past and it evokes emotions and recollections. The ghosts of the person I once was, the people I knew e.g. I’d ride a pony along the Carriage Drive, Little Brington towards Althorp gate house and round to Great Brington and back. I’d occasionally see the old Earl “walking” his dogs (opening the car door, letting them out and driving off). The cattle grids in the field behind St Mary’s are now filled in with concrete (would have been good the day a pony decided to bolt and jump them). The line across the road, in the street view of Google maps will say nothing to others living in the now:
    https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.2817684,-1.0223127,3a,15y,103.54h,86.23t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s8QlES1cnyCaXoDoWBqNTuA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu

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  13. Your lovely photos and your memory of this place versus what it is now is indeed haunting. It’s lovely when you can go back and visit the places and footprints you’ve travelled. 🙏

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