News from Nowhere

Last Sunday - a week ago - we decided it was time for a day at the seaside. Redcar, just south of the mouth of the Tees, may not be the most obviously attractive stretch of coast to visit, but we couldn't remember going there before, and the weather was sufficiently unpromising that walking somewhere urban seemed a good plan. As it was, we spent much of the morning discovering the unexpected attractions of Redcar, and hadn't walked very far at all before the wet weather closed in. We'd have made better use of the fitful sunshine if we'd walked further in the morning and taken shelter in the afternoon: but if we'd done that, we'd have had further to walk back, and we wouldn't have had time to be distracted by looking at things. And since there were lots of things to look at, we probably made the right choice.



Redcar has, for example, an impressive collection of sculpture. Much of it, appropriately, is made of steel - appropriately because until the closure of the steelworks, steel was what Redcar made (the steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge, among others, says Wikipedia); and there are promises that the works will restart. So the picture postcard panels in the railings of the Esplanade, the figures that decorate the wall of the cinema, and I have my suspicions about the red fish sculpture in the High Street (though I can't find any documentation for that one).

The penguins are steel and concrete with a polyurethane coating, and were made by the Great British Bollard Company. According to the ever-reliable Public Sculpture of North East England, Tony Wiles who designed them denies that they count as sculpture (because they are bollards, I suppose). They were originally grouped around a signpost, but they had to be moved from the seafront so that filming could be carried out for the film Atonement (which I haven't seen, but apparently Redcar stood in for Dunkirk, and the penguins were not felt to be appropriate). And this is how they look now they have returned from their vacation.

We turned inland, and wandered down the High Street: in addition to the red fish, there is a clocktower with a splendid nautical weathervane and a remainder bookshop where I bought a Spanish phrasebook. Then back to the front, and the museum compiled around the Zetland, built in 1802 and therefore the world's oldest surviving lifeboat. She was built to the design perfected by Henry Greathead. The distinctive features of the Greathead lifeboat appear to be buoyancy compartments lining the walls, and points at both ends so that the boat could be rowed straight out to the wreck and then when the survivors had been picked up, rowed straight back, without ever having to turn about and expose itself side on to the waves. To avoid the crew becoming confused by this reversal of polarity, and not knowing whether they were port or starboard, each pair of oars consisted of one blue- and one white-painted oar, and instructions were called by colour.

Redcar's lifeboat was originally just called 'Lifeboat', but was renamed 'Zetland' after the Lord of the manor - and he, in turn, was created Earl of Zetland in 1838 "after providing financial assistance to the Duke and Duchess of Kent who were the future Queen Victoria's parents." He chose the name because his grandfather had bought some lands in Shetland. At some point in the 1860s, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (who was staying with the Lord Zetland of the time) was so moved by a rescue in which the lifeboat served that he wrote a poem about it.

After all this excitement, we found ourselves a bench with a sea view on which to eat our picnic, then walked on almost to the outskirts of Marske before walking back along the beach, as the rain gradually became less tentative and more persistent. Grey sky, grey sea, mist veiling the steelworks, oystercatchers noisy along the waterline and, especially as we returned to our starting point, swallows zipping out low over the sands.