Redcar: Writing a Town After Its Blast Furnace Goes Out

Eleven years ago this month, the fire in the Redcar blast furnace went out. The town didn't go with it.

That gap, between what a place loses and what it keeps, is one of the hardest things a poet can try to write. Lean one way and you get nostalgia: rusting gantries in soft golden light, and everything better back then. Lean the other and you get the holiday brochure, where all is well now because there is ice cream. Neither is fair to the people who live there.

Below you will find a poem by Rudyard Kipling, spoken by machines; my own poem, Redcar; and three ways to write a place once its industry has gone, with a short exercise to try at your own desk.

Redcar and the Furnace That Fed the Town

Redcar sits where the River Tees meets the North Sea. In the middle of the nineteenth century, ironstone was found in the Eston Hills, just inland, and Teesside grew into one of the great iron and steel districts of the world. Teesside steel went into the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

In 1979, iron-making here was brought together in one blast furnace close to the mouth of the river, one of the largest in Europe. In October 2015 the company that ran the works went into liquidation and the furnace was shut down. Around two thousand two hundred people lost their jobs at the works, and more lost work in the firms that supplied it. In November 2022 the furnace itself was brought down in a controlled explosion.

There is an older survivor on the seafront. The Zetland lifeboat was built in 1802 and served Redcar for more than sixty years. It is thought to have saved more than five hundred lives. It is the oldest surviving lifeboat in the world, and it is still here, in its own small museum. Hold on to that. We will come back to it.

Kipling's Machines Speak

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, and died in 1936. In 1911 he and the historian C. R. L. Fletcher published A History of England for young readers. The Secret of the Machines sits in its final chapter, the one that brings the story up to Kipling's own lifetime. British industry was at its height and you can hear it. The machines speak for themselves, and they are proud.

The poem runs to forty-eight lines, twelve verses in all. Here are three. Watch for two things: the verbs, and the warning near the end.

We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine, We were melted in the furnace and the pit— We were cast and wrought and hammered to design, We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.

But remember, please, the Law by which we live, We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!

Go back to that first verse. Melted. Cast. Wrought. Hammered. Cut. Filed. Tooled. Gauged. Eight kinds of work in three lines, and every one of them was done by a person. The machines never mention those people.

They talk as if they made themselves, and that may be the real secret.

Then comes the warning: We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. A machine can't feel sorry for you. If you slip, it doesn't care. The last verse turns again, and the machines admit that for all their size and power they are only children of our brain.

It is a strange, double poem, proud and cold at once, and it leaves a question hanging. If the machines can't pity anyone, who does the pitying when the machines stop?

That is where Redcar comes in.

Redcar: The Poem

This is my poem Redcar, from North Yorkshire In Verse - Moor To Shore In Poetry.

Where North Sea winds in steel hearts roam, Redcar builds a coastal home— A town of grit and salted breeze, Where industry and surf find ease The blast furnaces once would roar, Their shadows cast on sand-swept shore Now memories in rusted frame, Still whisper of the iron flame But life rolls on in vibrant tone— With fish and chips and ice cream cone And surfers carving morning's tide, Where seagulls chant and dreams reside The esplanade in evening's glow, Holds hand in hand the ebb and flow And fairground laughter skips the air, As candy floss and sea mist share On coastal trails by dune and brigg, Redcar reveals its stubborn gig— A town that sings in rain and shine, With northern soul that won't resign.

Three Ways to Write a Place After Its Industry Has Gone

My poem gives one verse to the furnaces and four to everything else. The blast furnaces once would roar, / Their shadows cast on sand-swept shore. Then the turn: But life rolls on in vibrant tone. Three habits help me write a place on both sides of its loss.

1. Name the work

Not "industry". Not "the works". Name what people actually did. Kipling knew this, even though his machines don't: melted, cast, wrought, hammered, cut, filed, tooled. Each word is a job, and each job had somebody doing it, often for a whole working life. At Redcar there were coke ovens, and a blast furnace that ran day and night for years at a time. The right word carries respect. A vague word quietly says that nobody worked here.

My poem tries it in the first line: Where North Sea winds in steel hearts roam. Steel hearts. The steel isn't only in the furnace. It's in the people. That is a way of naming the work without listing it. It says the job got into them, and stayed there after the job had gone.

2. Count the people, not just the furnace

Two thousand two hundred jobs at the works. Those are real numbers, but numbers go numb on the page. Find the one person instead: the flask of tea, the shift pattern, the walk home along the beach. My poem stands back and looks at the town as a whole. That is one choice. The other is to come in close, to one pair of hands.

You don't need a name or a life story. One detail is enough. A man still waking at the time his shift used to start. A woman who can tell, from the colour of the sky over the river, that something has changed. One small true thing will carry two thousand people in a way the number never can.

This is the job Kipling's machines leave to us. We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. A poem about a closed works is one of the places where that pity gets done. Pity in the old sense: feeling with, not looking down.

A word about standing. If you write about work you never did yourself, say so, at least to yourself. Listen before you describe. The people who worked at a place know its sounds and smells far better than any visitor. The best thing a poem can do is get those details right, and leave their grief out of its decoration.

3. Let the present be as real as the past

This is where my poem puts its weight. The risk with a line like But life rolls on in vibrant tone is that it sounds as if the town simply got over it. Read the last verse again. Redcar reveals its stubborn gig— / A town that sings in rain and shine, / With northern soul that won't resign. Those aren't words for a carefree place. They are words for a place that has decided to carry on. The surfers and the fish and chips are no cover story. That is what carrying on looks like.

A quieter pair of lines does even more work. The esplanade in evening's glow, / Holds hand in hand the ebb and flow. The tide was here before the furnace. It was working the whole time the furnace was, and it is working now, twice a day, in and out, with no one tending it. When the town's great machine stopped, the oldest machine on that coast kept going.

What a Town Chooses to Keep

Return to Kipling's last verse. Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, / It will vanish and the stars will shine again. In 1911 that was a confident promise: however much smoke we make, we stay in charge of it. At Redcar the smoke did vanish, and nobody grew wiser first. The fire went out. Read on Redcar beach today, the line sounds nothing like it did in a schoolroom in 1911. The same line changes its meaning depending on where you stand to read it, which is worth knowing about every poem you borrow and every poem you write.

Listen, too, to how the two poems move. Kipling's lines are long and they drive. We were opens all four lines of the first verse, the sound of a piston, of something that doesn't tire and doesn't stop. Mine are shorter, in rhyming pairs, closer to the pace of someone walking along the front than to anything in a factory. Kipling gives you the machine's rhythm. My poem has the rhythm of the people who were left.

And there is the Zetland. A wooden lifeboat more than two hundred years old, kept safe by people who decided it mattered. The great furnace is gone. The little lifeboat is still here. What a town chooses to keep tells you what it loves. Kipling's machines boast that they are everything on earth except The Gods, and a furnace that size must have felt like that to anyone standing beneath it. It still came down. The boast belonged to the machine. The staying power belongs to the town.

Try This: Three Words, One Person, One Present

Think of a place near you where the work has stopped. A mill, a mine, a quarry, a dock, a shop. Write down three words for the work that was actually done there. Verbs, the way Kipling uses them.

Then write one line about a person who did that work. After that, one line about what is there now.

Put the three side by side and see what the poem wants to say. Leave out the word "sad". Leave out the word "lost". Let the verbs and the person and the present do that for you. I suspect the poem will be kinder, and truer, than you expect.

Read Redcar in Full

Redcar is one of the poems in North Yorkshire In Verse - Moor To Shore In Poetry, part of my British Counties In Verse series. The collection walks the county from moor to shore, one place at a time. You can order it online from Amazon, Blackwell's, Books A Million, Foyles, Hugendubel, Powell's, Thalia and Waterstones, and every retailer is linked from one page: books2read.com/North-Yorkshire-In-Verse.

There is no publisher marketing budget behind these books. They travel from reader to reader, so if this article gave you something, three small things help more than you might think:

• Note the date. Northumberland In Verse - Coast To Cheviot In Poetry, the next volume in the series, arrives in March 2027.

• Leave a review. An honest line or two on the retailer page where you bought the book helps the next reader find it.

• Tell one person. Send this article to the friend who writes, who reads poems, or who grew up on Teesside.

This piece grew from Episode 47 of Alden Carrow's Poetry Podcast, which arrives every Wednesday morning on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and wherever you listen. If there is a poem you would like featured on a future episode, a classic, something modern, or a favourite you have carried for years, email me at aldencarrow78@gmail.com. Every suggestion goes into a draw for a signed copy of North Yorkshire In Verse - Moor To Shore In Poetry, sent to you by hand. The next guest poem will come from one of you.

The furnace went out. The town didn't.

The reading is the thing. It always was.