This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Enabling this cookie helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Thank you Margaret.
From the site of where McDonald’s now is at the top of Marton Road, in this view we’re looking north up Sealey Street towards the cranes at Middlesbrough Dock and the Transporter Bridge beyond. If we could turn to our left we’d be looking across to Marton Road with a view straight up Corporation Road. Behind us just a little way would be St John’s Church at the top of North Ormesby Road.
Cutting across this view is Cargo Fleet Road, this short run of which still survives even though all the buildings were demolished by the early 1970s. The next right is France Street with an already cleared Hunter Street on the left. The terrace of houses leading off to the left in the distance is on Blake Street.
I remember that apart from a few large advertising hoardings this area was pretty much empty for decades until they built the Middlesbrough Leisure Park that today contains Cineworld, DW Fitness and Nando’s.
I was born at 50, Cargo Fleet Road, Middlesbrough, on September 21st 1945. My first job when I left school was as an errand boy, Billy Balmer’s grocery shop, next door to the little cake, and tea shop next door, and next to that was the newsagent, where I delivered the papers, morning and afternoon. I would live to hear from someone from my home town.
My gran Gertrude White had the shop at 15 Cargo Fleet Rd, across the road from your house. We lived at 18 Cargo Fleet Rd until my parents bought a shop at 127 Corporation Rd, you will probably know my brother Ian Grainger better than me. We left the Boro in 1964 to come to Australia and are still here in W.A.
Leigh May (Grainger)