There was always the possibility of using the footbridge across the top, but I never had the courage. My mother often told me the story of her night out in Middlesbrough when she, her friend and their dates missed the last bus home after a dance. The four of them climbed to the top and made their way across the footbridge in the dead of night and in their Teddy Boy suits and full skirts and kitten heels. Good job it was too dark to see down to the estuary.

The whole Teesport landscape was the inspiration for the setting and atomsphere of the film Blade Runner. Ridley Scott is the only person of note (apart from my good self) that Hartlepool Art College (or Cleveland College of Art & Design as it was in my day) produced. Everyone who I have driven to Hartlepool is always captivated when we come over the A19 flyover and see the industrial landscape laid out below and into the distance. It is impressive, maybe for all the wrong reasons, but impressive nonetheless.

Looking at that view from the opposite aspect from the beach at Seaton Carew and turn anti-clockwise, you will see great expanses of sea and then your eye will settle on the Headland and St Hilda’s church, one of the oldest churches in England, built by St Hilda, who also built Whitby Abbey. The juxtaposition of the ancient church atop the craggy entrance to the harbour, still standing, with the new, constantly destroying and polluting, on the opposite side of the bay, joined by the great body of seething North Sea has held me transfixed and contemplative on numerous occasions.

It is the one place I always return to. As my contact with my family in Hartlepool dwindles, I still go back, to see them, but also to stand on the beach at Seaton and look at the stark contrast of then and now. And to remember endless happy summers of sandcastles and swimming.