The most exciting thing to do in Middlesbrough on a Sunday afternoon, Ronnie Scott used to say, is watch the traffic lights change. Not any longer, since the opening in January of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
Mima is the latest addition to the band of new public galleries stretching across Britain from the West Midlands to the north-east. In the six years since the Millennium, our old industrial heartlands have been ruthlessly rejuvenated by the erection of landmark gallery buildings designed by what my dyslexic cowboy builder used to call ‘artitects’. First up in 2000 were Salford’s The Lowry and the New Art Gallery Walsall, followed in 2001 by the Millennium Galleries Sheffield, in 2002 by Imperial War Museum North (also in Salford) and in 2003 by the conversion of the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead into The Baltic.
Middlesbrough has form in the modern-art stakes. The town, which has its own collection of 20th-century arts and crafts, established its cutting-edge credentials in 1993 when it became the first and only municipality in Britain to unveil a public sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. While London balked at the artist’s proposal to plant a giant gear-stick in Trafalgar Square, Middlesbrough jumped at his offer of a monumental message in a bottle, commemorating Captain Cook’s birthplace in nearby Marton.
For 15 years Oldenburg’s ‘Bottle of Notes’ overlooked a car park; now it forms the focus of a redeveloped Middlesbrough Centre Square laid out with five acres of grass and steel stepping stones by Dutch landscape designers West 8, and overlooked by the shiny new glass and steel Mima building designed by Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat. The council has pulled off a remarkable feat: it has put up a gallery, grassed over a parking lot and rewound the famous song by Joni Mitchell.
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