GREEN

Something that I find I’m always missing when living in a city is the lack of green. Hartlepool comes as a sight for sore eyes at the green spaces on every corner- reachable within a walking-distance-radius around my house. Many of these parks foster fond childhood memories: learning how to ride a bike, roller-skate, tree-climbing, daisy-chain making and all the summers in between. The green may not always be picturesque, sometimes a muddled palette of brown, grey and grit- a colour spectrum which would lay the bottom of my shoes after an off-path muddy detour. Often, earthy nature jostles with man-made features. This is inevitably the character of the parks. The pastoral mashes with park ruins and littered remnants of social gatherings. These are places of modern archaeology, interesting in their disjuncture.

Burn Valley

There is a park about 10 minutes’ walk from my house called Burn Valley- named for its stream which runs through the centre of the park. Burn Valley was opened in 1898. The green corridor connects the town centre with the family wood and beyond to Summerhill.

Fittingly, it was also a corridor in my life. Just before the park is my primary school and just after is my college. On my morning commute to college, I would walk past playground symphonies and navigate through patters of hovering parents with jingles of car keys in their hands; at once wanting to stay and drive away. I have a similar hesitation to move on. The walk demarcates my journey into adulthood and though I love the physical trip down memory lane, I am reminded that at some point, I always have to drive away.

Still, I like to linger in the past. The small strip of gardens that constitutes Burn Valley represents a once daily grind for me. But more so- in its memory- an appreciation of the simple, a beauty in the banal.

The town appears clearest to me in these small every-day moments, as poignant as the single blade of grass which paints the park green.

Cowpen Bewley

Cowpen Bewley is an uncanny place. Nestled on the outer edge of Hartlepool along the A1185, just off the A689 roundabout, the woodland park is dually natural and industrial. At its highest peak, you can view a panorama from the coast to the Cleveland hills. The park havens over 90 species of birds, 18 species of butterflies, and many other spectrums of wildlife across its varied expanse.

But the site was reclaimed from former brickworks, landfill and ex-agricultural land. The path circumnavigates soaring pylons- cornering every part of the woods where trees no longer reign. I can hear the monophonic buzz of electricity undercutting the birds. I have never been as close to pylons as I am here, so close the metallic wavelengths puncture my ears. Like the slight tremble underneath the woodland floor, I feel tense from its power. The constant current coursing through the stillness of the woods feels scarily unnatural.

Yet these points are a perfect lookout for kestrels. The lake, once a clay extraction pit, now thrives with fish, toads and ducks. The marshland once excavated for its salt, is now a unique ground for grasslands and its creatures hidden within. Regularly, my Dad and I would go foraging for four-leaf clovers… which were maybe a result of the mutated soil of reclaimed land.

Nevertheless, we would return from our walk at Cowpen Bewley, luckier in many ways.

Hartlepool here is a juxtaposition. The untouched and the reclaimed, the fields and the pastured aggregate, the urban and the decaying. This textural anthropocene constitute the town’s history and gritty identity. The resilience of nature is paired with the steely determination of the locals. Reserves like these are both prior to and in conversation with the people. They grow together.