Please click on the icon to the left and buy some old prints. Find the ones of Redcar.
Find this one. but 'til then - go get yer stuff from Dabs or some other advertiser on this site. Thanks but please do it by clicking on the logo not by going direct.
This bit posted 23rd July 2004 Here's the deal. This is one of a set of sites - URLs - which are easily remembered references to geographical locations.The aim of these sites is to bring together for as many areas as possible interesting information about the local area with links and buttons to most of the sites you will need. So the service to you the visitor is that you only have one web address to remember. The service to advertisers is that customers won't need to know, remember or clog up their 'favourites' with names for web sites. I know that this site is getting rambling. I know that I should re-organise it so that each topic is on a different page. Hey it's summer. I'll have time enough for that when the weather comes.I'll digress a little here. Less than fifty years ago the year in the North East of England was described as typified in Too Long a Winter - copyright Yorkshire Television - as nine months winter and three months bad weather. It's probably that Global Warming...Somewhere down this page there is a reference to Redcar probably being the biggest town in England that's never had a proper hospital - there are three or four old houses in Kirkleatham Street linked together to form Stead Memorial Hospital. One of the houses in that street - Kirkleatham Street - has the only Blue Plaque I know of in Redcar on it's wall.
It's Red Barnes Hotel now but it used to be the home - Arts and Crafts stylee - of The Bell family. Ironmaster Sir Isaac Lothian Bell moved the family from Washington Old Hall. The Old Hall had some bad memories, cue the old stories about little boys cleaning chimnies.. One died in the chimnies of Washington Old Hall whilst the Bells were there and the Shaftesbury acts came into force a few years later .BUT the blue plaque isn't for him it's for Gertrude Bell. She was 'Friend of the Arabs' and she was actually a female Lawrence of Arabia rather than a Lara Croft....This following image is lifted without permission from the V & A - Victoria and Albert Museum - catalogue of 1996.
The National Trust now owns The Red House in Bexley Heath. Clearly there is a case for some sort of recognition for Red Barns in Kirkleatham Street , Redcar, aside of course from the fact that the whole of that area of Coatham is a conservation area. These are not Blue Plaques, they a plaques that are blue.
The point? I was getting to the point.Redcar is not only probably the largest town in England not to have ever had a proper hospital, it is also probably the largest town in England never to have had a Town Hall.Amazing news.
By 2006 there will be a town hall, in Redcar, there, in the gap in the picture.
This is the back of the library and the town hall will be built on that car park on the right.Don't get me wrong.
Redcar has got.
Council offices, but this will be a town hall.Amazing. No more sloping off to a housing estate in East Middlesbrough in search of Redcar Town Hall. Click on the Think of a Place discover a memory logo below - quite a way below - and go try to find this:
The big building is the demolished Coatham School and the smaller building is the old demolished Redcar Library. The new Redcar Library and the yet to be built - construction expected 2005-6 - Redcar's First Town Hall are on the site of the old school. The point? The point! For God's sake please some architect of some merit beat down the doors of Redcar & Cleveland Council and let's have a notable Town Hall . We've waited long enough!Click here if you are the principal of a small local organisation. LATEST: 5th July PD Ports sold by the Japanese owners. Plans to float on London Stock exchange and manage from Middlesbrough. See below. Just a little context to start - for the Wind Farm objectors...
Historically... there were wind mills in 'Redcar' in Station Road where the church is beside the pub, and in Redcar Lane. So praps the Heritage Lottery Fund should contribute to this restoration project.
And a rather large 'word' to those who say wind farming is no economic benefit to Redcar.Last time I checked - June 2004 - Cargo Fleet Wharf was in Redcar if not in Coatham and so was this. It lives at cargo Fleet Wharf and it plants wind farms. You can get this view from the Tees Viewing Point three miles down stream from The Boro's Riverside Stadium on Dockside Road - although it could be a bit of a safari through the undergrowth. Oh yes Cargo Fleet. A little historical exercise for you - including our international visitors ...Next time you have an ideal moment in a public place - waiting for a train, whatever. Have a look at the steelwork around you. See whether it has Dorman Long Cargo Fleet embossed into it. It very likely has. These days they don't do that, but they do ship steel from - very near - there to er shall we give an example, construct the underpinnings of what will replace the nine-eleven twin towers in New York. Oh and another thing if you know what a hectare is, the steel works is on 911 of them. It's 10,000 square metres and that means 911 of them is 2,251 acres This graph is about the sizes of food farms in Europe.
Not so much a farm - more a steel works. But quite big - even for a steelworks. Big enough to loose 18 wind turbines in? I have a bit of a problem with why windmills have suddenly become wind turbines.As a long ago trained ecologist I'm baffled to know how windmills can affect migratory birds but if i felt a whole forest of jet engines was going to be put in their path I'd expect carnage.It's a big step from wind mill to wind turbine but it's a short step from wind turbine to jet engines and bird strike. Clearly there are at least three wind farm proposals for the Tees and I think if the sponsors of these projects tell us that the two proposals for Coatham will be pretty much like the ones at Hartlepool then I can't see what right the RSPB has to say that what is proposed is a forest of low level mincers on sticks - as in some early horrorific failed experiment in Spain or whatever.I suspect that the 'one last' inshore wind farm is designed to demonstrate the idea to people who would never got out on a site visit ten miles out to sea. Exactly why such visitors would gain more from seeing turbines in Coatham Bay than on Coatham Marsh evades me but so does the idea that in or out of the sea affects the threat to bird life or visual amenity.However, I did - quite some time ago - make a proposal the Redcar & Cleveland Council that there could be a trade off between visual intrusion and amenity. It's always been a source of regret to me that the twentieth century saw a falling back from Victorian energy in the matters of public works. I mean that the 20th C didn't look after piers very well. I had a vision of a tram way running along the sea front from South Gare to Saltburn and returning through the sea with a landing stage for 'short haul' ferries in the middle of the bay.Essentially I proposed a string of wind mills along a line between the anchorage and the pleasure bay connected by a string of little islands and open steelwork bridges. I made this proposal the last time we got a ship stuck on Coatham Sands. Seriously, this was a counter proposal to the idea of dumping a long 'rock armour' dyke across the bay.In other words a string of wind mills is in all sorts of ways preferable to dumping rocks in the bay or putting all the windmills in rows at one end of the bay. At least with the string of pearls - Blyth Style - we may get a major and unique tourist attraction Oh dear I'll admit I'm feeling lonely at the minute, and feeling silly too.I think a spot of recent history is called for.The chemical industry 'reclaimed' a lot of seal sands which was not too good for the seals BUT it mean that the port of Tees - don't be fooled The Tees and Hartlepool Port Authority is a private company owned by the Japanese and shortly to be sold by them and possibly floated on the stock market... The Port Company couldn't dredge Seal Sands because it had been reclaimed as industrial land by the chemical - petrochemical - industry and so the shipping industry started to use the outer reaches of the Coatham Bay as an anchorage. then ships got bigger and they continued to blow ashore from time to time . So, the port and the shipping industry decided to protect shipping from blowing or drifting ashore by dumping a whole load of rock armour into the bay to extend the South Gare 'half way across the bay'. So I objected on the grounds that that would be the end of sand and fishing in the bay - for all anybody knew..So we have the Trojan Wind Farm. Get permission for a wind farm and you get permission to dump the rock armour to protect the ... the ships. So they thinks he's an environmentalist, so he won't go objecting to a wind farm then will he. Hence, and such I am very depressed that all sorts of people MPs RSPB etc. etc. are gonna object to this wind farm - instead of insisting it be modified along the lines I propose -and because they are objecting on the WRONG GROUNDS they gonna LOOSE.SO, in essence, as it stands the purpose of the proposed Coatham Bay Wind Farm is to catch ship that slip their moorings as they wait to enter Teesport. Realistically, blame me for opposing the extension of the Gare, blame 'them' for opposing my suggestion of a 'proper job'. i guess i would have to accept that some marine engineer somewhere has calculated that the 'catch net' for a supertanker - well ore carrier actually - needs to be three rows deep and for myself I don't oppose this development if it is properly engineered to have sufficient ship catching capability and they drop the rock armour and leave the hydrology of the bay substantially well alone. 
But these guys ... they's in Middlesbrough.They's outside THIS.
This is the Riverside Stadium where The Boro soccer club play their home games - subject to police permission. It's not the 'home' of THE BORO - that's a training complex near Darlington called Hurworth. There aint nothing here but this stadium. OK There should be adverts above this. The idea is... If you click on the ad. and buy something there's a bit of commission paid to support this site... I mean clicking above won't mean you pay more than if you access the site some other way but this site will benefit. Let's be quite clear about this the town of Redcar was called Redcar long
before the automobile was invented.
Hey. I apologise. Dabs sponsor Fulham. One day... One day maybe this site will sponsor the Boro..but 'til then - go get yer stuff from Dabs or some other advertiser on this site. Thanks but please do it by clicking on the logo not by going direct.
A red cliff at Redcar.
That is Saltburn. That is the road bridge over the burn or river that is a
bit salty on account of it being tidal....On the right, in the distance are some cliffs. They are red because they are
made of boulder clay.Somewhere, way to the left - north - of this picture there are grey shale
outcrops on the beach They's .called scars as in Scar borough and Raven scar.So. like, if yer a Viking and yer see the red cliffs and you sail or row a
bit north you find the Red Cliff Scars, and you's at Redcar RED cliff sCARs.The thing of it is..... Saltburn is in North Yorkshire and this is a place
where people call small rivers either a burn or a beck and small valleys gills.
That be Saltburn Beck in Saltburn Gill.... sorta 'Cos it's also Saltburn
Valley Gardens... and this is where there should be an Eden Project for the
North.... Like the Eden Project in Devon or wherever.
The Scars - this is actually West Scar - at Redcar.Note the safety point her. They are rock with rock pools and although slippery there's nowhere to fall.
This view of West Scar includes the stumps of the structure of Coatham Pier.The movie is of Redcar Rocks.The Rocks are mapped and named Coatham Rocks include Salt Scar after which a now closed local secondary scholl and a now re-named pub were named, Off Height, The Islands Ayton Hole West Flashes Westscar Head The Hampstead Inner Height.Redcar Rocks include TheFlashes Stokesley Scar East Scar Some people refer to this area as the Black Beach. The sand is the sand and the shale is the Black Beach. Not to be confused with the sea coal. Sea coal has always washed up on Redcar beach but it peaked in the second half of the 20th century when spoil was being tipped off the Durham coast. What was before - that - and is now is coal from coal measures exposed on the bed of the North Sea and washed to shore. 
That's them looking towards the beach. Now correct me if I'm wrong but people on rigs in the North Sea always refer to the world they have left behind as The Beach. However, Larry Grayson?Shut that door...?Well they did more than shut it, they bricked it up. Pictures are difficult to take on the beach these days - fears of paedophilia and such BUT that row of stumps leads to where the Coatham Pier entrance once was and in it's place was built a theatre - now the Regent Cinema - and Larry Garyson's catch phrase started life as an instruction from him to stage hands in that theatre to shut the stage door when the wind got up along the beach.This, is Redcar Beach. This is the view from the bricked up door larry Grayson would have had shut. 
I'll be honest - cos folk'll only complain - that picture of Redcar beach was
taken ten years ago, so long after Larry would have had it shut but before folk taking cameras near children were called paedos
and beaten to death. Saltburn cliffs in the background and a fairly clear indication that there is
endless of sand on there are rockpools in the scars.
It is around five miles from James Cook University Hospital - largest New Build hospital in Europe -but that is over the border in South East Middlesbrough.
