City, like once-floating Tuxedo Royale, may have fallen on hard times but that doesn't mean everyone has give up on the future
There's a ship in Middlesbrough dock that's been listing like the Costa Concordia. She looks like she might vanish completely into the River Tees. As I peer at her from across the expanse of flattened industrial land that separates her from the road, I can just about make out the name she once had, in sprightly red above the decaying mess of the bow: the Tuxedo Royale.
I'm here because Middlesbrough has been at or near the top of a lot of lists these past months. There's house prices. In England and Wales they fell by an average of 1.3% in 2011. But in Middlesbrough they plummeted by 9.9%. A few miles up the road in Hartlepool they took a 17.5% tumble. There were no worse declines anywhere in Britain. And then there are even bleaker lists. A Middlesbrough family is more at risk of falling into poverty than any other family in England. This is according to the credit reference agency, Experian. When the public sector cuts kick in properly, the people of Middlesbrough will find themselves the least able to withstand them. (Most resilient, by the way, will be a town called Elmbridge in Surrey, Experian has somehow calculated).
This is because when the shipbuilding and steel and chemical industries collapsed, the opportunities here were in the public sector – in education, the NHS and so on. Middlesbrough shipbuilders retrained to become – as the phase went at the time – "keyboard warriors".
Now there are To Let signs everywhere. This is a town where lots of window frames have no windows and lots of doorways have no doors. Amid all this the Tuxedo Royale seems especially sad and mysterious. Where did she come from? How did she end up like this?
I make some calls, and get talking with two men called Richard Moffatt and John Coates. "Have you got shoes with good grip?" says John. "If you don't mind signing something to absolve the dock owners of any responsibility if you fall overboard, I'll take you on board."
I ask who owns Tuxedo Royale. "Nobody," says Richard. "She's ownerless. If she had an owner someone would have to be responsible for her."
John Coates sits in a nearby cafe. Truckers stand in the toilets in their underpants, washing at the sinks. John isn't a trucker. He's unemployed.
"I just plod about from day to day," he says. "A lot of people cabbage but I try and keep busy. I go round to friends' houses. I'm trying to get this Tuxedo Royale project going."
John is 47 and looks younger, I think because there's a restless energy to him. He's propelled onwards by a vision. He used to work on the Tuxedo Royale now he wants to save her. He says he'll explain how when we're on board.
We drive through Middlehaven dock – an expanse of flattened nothingness that once, John says, "had a close-knit community living here. But very violent. Very dangerous. Lots of drugs. So they levelled the place. They had to, really."
We park outside the Tuxedo Royale. Close up, I can see what a mess she's in. The decks glisten with shattered glass. Electrical wires hang down from the ceilings like spaghetti. John tells me about her past. It turns out she's had quite the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang life.
She was built in 1965, on Tyneside, by British Railways. At first she was the TSS Dover, a steam-powered car ferry, but she was soon transformed into a Mediterranean passenger ship called the Sol Express. She saw many things back then, John says, from incredible parties to terrifying militia warfare. One day in September 1983 she was sailing from Larnaca, Cyprus, when she received an emergency call. Lebanese Christian soldiers and Muslim militia were shooting at each other in nearby Beirut. The fighting was so intense the port had been forced to close, but a group of American embassy staff needed rescuing. And so the Sol Express, "in a sign of confidence in the government", according to a New York Times article at the time, changed destination. She sailed into Beirut and saved the Americans.
Five years later, in 1988, an Irish shoe leather millionaire pumped a fortune into her and the Sol Express became the lavish floating nightclub, the Tuxedo Royale. For more than a decade she settled, wildly successfully, in Newcastle upon Tyne. Some of the TV series Our Friends in the North was filmed on board, and Daniel Craig went partying on the ship to get into character.
Later I manage to find a promotional video. The camera sweeps through bars bathed in blue light, past mirrored pillars that pulsate in pink neon. There's a revolving dancefloor, an ancient Rome-themed disco room and a psychedelic room. "Here's Trader Jack's disco bar," says the voiceover. "With its sleek clean lines and glossy wood floors it looks every inch the ship's disco. Here's the 70s theme club, Stowaways. The funky decor and colour scheme reflect the decor of that era. The concept of a floating entertainment complex is definitely of the moment."
John finds some strips of rusting metal for us to use as a makeshift gangplank. Last week thieves stole the actual gangplank, he says. We teeter precariously over it and on to the ship and I get a very different kind of tour.
There are ripped-out doors and shattered glass everywhere. John says the ship is being stripped for scrap: "They're smashing the portholes just to get the little brass knobs off. They've stolen miles of cables. They're spending whole weekends on board. We've found sleeping bags. A few months ago you could have started the generators, stocked the bars and run it as a club. She would have been up and running. Now look …"
It really is a shambles. The decks are strewn with debris. Mangled cables cascade down from the smashed ceiling tiles. The mirror balls are missing their mirrors. The thieves have stolen so much they've gone right through to the water. She would have sunk by now if she hadn't already hit the bottom of the river.
"All this …" John waves his hands across the devastation, "has happened in the last fortnight."
We continue our tour. "This was our Sunset Bar," says John. "They used to have a saxophone player over there." He points to a mound of mangled chairs. "It was a chillout bar. The floors were polished. She was really outstanding. Down there was Trader Jack's. You'd meet friends in the Sunset and go in there. They'd play Michael Jackson, Donna Summer. You never wanted to sit down."
John pauses. He looks around. "It's heartbreaking for me, this. I helped put in a lot of the lighting and electrical work. It's a bit devastating, actually."
"Can't the police do anything?" I ask.
"They don't want to know," John says. "They're '0800 go away we're not interested'. They haven't got the funds to do anything about it."
John falls silent for a moment. Then he says, "She's a victim of changing times, I suppose."
So what happened? I think a clue can be found in an Observer article from May 1999. The food critic Jay Rayner visited Newcastle that month. He walked past the Tuxedo Royale and wrote that she "looks, to the untutored eye, like nothing less than Dante's seven circles of hell made seaworthy". Then he walked on to his destination – a new Michelin starred restaurant where he chose "a warm salad of salt pork, griddled foie gras and puy lentils".
Newcastle was changing. The Tuxedo Royale was anachronistically ungentrified. She had to move to somewhere more culturally fitting. And so it was, in May 2000, she moored to great fanfare 50 miles south, here in Middlehaven, right in front of Middlesbrough FC stadium. Which is where she became a floating strip club for the home fans.
"They used to put strippers on in the Bonzai bar," says John. "Pre-match. The music would come on and the girls would jump out from behind the bar and dance certain dances. I remember one time we had 1,200 guys on board all waiting for the strippers but the agency was unreliable and the girls hadn't turned up. In the end we persuaded one of the female bar staff to get up and do a bit."
"She must have loved you," I say.
"Yeah, well," says John, "there were 1,200 drunken men on board, all chanting, and no strippers. So she got up and did a little bit, God bless her. We got away with it."
And then times changed again. In September 2004, plans were announced to transform the flattened wasteland of Middlehaven. Dubai's economic development minister, his excellency Mohamed Ali Alabbar, was interested.
"They had this vision," John says. "This place would be second only to Dubai. All these multibillion-pound futuristic buildings." The plans were incredibly elaborate. There would be a primary school in the shape of a spelling block, a cinema designed to resemble a Rubik's cube, apartment blocks inspired by Prada skirts, a hotel in the shape of the game KerPlunk, a brand new college and an Anish Kapoor sculpture.
The scheme was launched at the Venice Biennale. The Middlesbrough mayor, Ray Mallon, ceremonially handed his excellency a Middlesbrough football shirt. Part of the deal was that the Tuxedo Royale had to go.
"Our plans are ambitious and hugely significant and proceeding at a spectacular pace," the developers announced in 2005. "It is timely that this vessel should now move on."
The ship's owner, Michael Quadrini, said magnanimously that he didn't want to stand in the way of progress during these boom times. Anyway, he added, it was fine because the company had "been offered other sites both in the UK and abroad and are currently looking into which will be the best one".
But nothing materialised. Instead the Tuxedo Royale shut forever and sailed a few miles up river to a truly horrendous place – the "ghost ships" graveyard in Hartlepool.
The ghost ships were vast, hulking, decommissioned US and French military vessels that were supposed to have been dismantled in Turkey.
"But the Turks didn't want them," says John's friend Nathan, who has joined us on board. "They were too dangerous. Too filled with asbestos. So they forced them on to us instead." It makes you gasp to see photographs of the Tuxedo Royale in the shadow of the ghost ships. She looks like a minnow about to be devoured by sharks.
Now she's back in Able dock, right next to Middlehaven. The Dubai dream died. The financial markets collapsed and the coalition government announced its cuts. John, Nathan and I stand on deck and gaze out, across the expanse of nothingness, at the unrealised vision.
Actually, two lovely things got built before it all collapsed – the beautiful Kapoor sculpture and a gleaming steel Middlesbrough college building designed to resemble a ship's hull. But they stand alone and incongruous. In the midst of the economic devastation, saving the Tuxedo Royale is low on everyone's priorities.
There are only two men holding out hope: John and his friend Richard, a railway preservation enthusiast who lives in Dover. I telephone him. He says it'll cost £200,000 to move the ship into dry dock across the water, safe from the vandals and thieves.
"I said to my contact in Middlesbrough council: 'You must have people who can raise that kind of money,'" Richard tells me. "He replied, 'Well we did, but we've just made them all redundant.'"
"You're exactly what David Cameron hopes will happen," I say. "An entrepreneur entering a savagely cut community to try and make everything OK with a private initiative."
"Yes, he has a name for it, doesn't he?" says Richard. "'Localised something … or … um …"
"It's on the tip of my tongue too," I say.
"It's … um …" says Richard.
The next day Richard emails me: "I've remembered the name! Big society!"
"Big society!" I email back. "That's it!"
Now, John and I climb down the makeshift gangplank and back on to land. John points to the spot where the thieves jump across the water to steal the brass knobs and cables. It's a giant and perilous leap.
"They could break their necks," I say. John nods. "You've got to give them marks for bravery," I say.
We survey what's left of the ship. "Sooner or later those lifeboats are going to start falling off," John says. "If we don't catch it now, it's gone."
By 'it' he means not just the ship, but shipbuilding here in the north-east. "There are so many lads like us just dying for something to do," he says. "You get worn down. Your feeling of worth goes. But if we can raise the £200,000 to get her into dry dock we can get a thriving little community going. Bring the old shipbuilders down for a cup of tea.
"I know one old guy, a master shipbuilder, 67 years old. He's stacking shelves at Tesco. They don't have to do anything strenuous – just tell their stories. It'll be like going down to the allotments for them. And they can pass the knowledge on to the youngsters who'll be fixing the ship up. And in years to come they can say: 'I built that ship.' Or their kids can say: 'My dad built that ship.'" John pauses. "We have to go back from being keyboard warriors to actually making something."
"Have you got local support?" I ask.
"Yes," he says. "Although a man from Middlehaven said to me the other day: 'The ship's got more chance of getting out from the bottom than you boys have.'"
As John remembers this insult he suddenly looks incredibly upset. But then a different look crosses his face, a look of absolute resolve, and I honestly think he's going to make it happen.