Columnist and Tees Valley deputy chief reporter Julia Breen leaps to the defence of Middlesbrough after another national report highlights its failings

AND so, it was, that another journalist visited Middlesbrough, saw only the smoke spiralling from the towers, the unemployment, the drug problems, and the handful of half-demolished streets, and painted the bleakest of pictures.

On Tuesday the BBC published a feature written after sending a roving reporter to the town entitled “Does Middlesbrough deserve its unenviable reputation?”

What followed was a story which gave the impression that the town was full of drunk, unemployed steelworkers who go to the pub because there’s nothing else to do, smackheads, crack addicts, racists and teenage mums on benefits. Truant teens were drinking vodka in the park just after 9am and scooping coins out of the fountain, the reporter said.

It’s the worst place to be a girl, the worst place to live, drug addiction is more than double the national average, unemployment is higher than anywhere else, and “statistics about health, drug use and employment make for grim reading”, it said.

The reporter appeared to have visited the town centre and Albert Park, and spoke to a few people on the street. She quoted BBC Breakfast presenter and Boro’s own Steph McGovern defending the town – something Steph later said had left her “fuming” because she didn’t know anything about the story.

Middlesbrough is very, very far from perfect.

But I’d defy this reporter to be so scathing if she visited the Riverside Stadium on match day, and heard the famous “Riverside roar” from the supporters. If she’d felt the atmosphere in the stadium during the final match of last season, when the worldweary fans, having lived through a year of job losses with the steelworks’ closure, saw their club promoted, she would have been speechless.

She didn’t wander down Linthorpe Road, or look at the impressive university buildings.

She didn’t go to the lively bars and restaurants in the town centre, the quirky businesses in Bedford Street, the Orange Pip food market or watch the lively Mela celebrations.

She might have wandered down Parliament Road on her way to see the bleak halfdemolished streets of Gresham, but she didn’t see the beauty in the melting pot of cultures there, or see the elegant industrialism of the imposing Transporter Bridge.

She didn’t mention that you drive for 20 minutes, and you can be on top of the world, or at least on the Cleveland Hills, looking out across the patchwork rural fields, across to the chimneys of Wilton, and beyond that, the glittering North Sea.

Middlesbrough is real, and gritty, and problematic, but it is also beautiful in its own unique way. Its people are proud, robust, passionate.

I was in London last weekend, a city whose residents inspire the same passion about their home town as Middlesbrough. But the difference is no-one from Middlesbrough visits London, dips a toe in the water and tries to summarise the whole essence of the place in 1,000 words, for the whole world to read.

I could find much worse levels of poverty and deprivation there.

But don’t patronise us. We’re aware of our problems. The world is aware. We don’t need you kicking us again and again.