HARTLEPOOL

Hartlepool

Why Adam? Why did you do it? Were you not warned that this was the terrible place of no hope, the land that voted against its own needs, the land where there be monsters?

Because I had to know, that's why.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then safe to say it is less painful to write those thousand words than to stick around long enough to take a picture that properly sums up Hartlepool. Four women paddling in the cold mud to celebrate the sun being out? Could that be it?

There is a somnolent quiet that pervades the streets. Covid rates are amongst the highest in the country here, so this may be part of it. Or maybe it is because there is nothing here to see or to do. Row upon row of characterless low-rent houses scream with hopeless silence, with inertia. Young guys in hoodies lurk outside scabrous chip shops. A maritime museum boasts three beaten up old boats. Old men trudge through otherwise deserted streets. There are retail parks, there is empty space. There is a pub called The Cosmopolitan filled, ironically, with working class white men.

Nothing happens. Locals refuse to have their photo taken. Maybe they're wise to how foolish the media made them look for their inexplicable, childish, self-lacerating vote. Their forefathers fought for workers rights, fought the Nazis, fought the anti-union movement, fought Thatcher. But somewhere along the way, the spirit, the fight was sucked out of them and the town.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive". Never has this been more true.