Middlesbrough 1920-2020: A Century of Change by Araf Chohan (DestinWorld, £14.99)
THIS is a fabulous picture book containing nearly 400 images on excellent quality paper that charts the changing face of Middlesbrough across the last ten decades.
It therefore doesn't contain any Edwardian postcards that make up many pages in similar publications; instead it begins with photographs of smokey vessels on the Tees beneath the Transporter bridge in the 1920s. It also includes plenty of colour pictures which show how the town has changed in recent memory – often, it has to be said, for the better, although it is amazing to see the Victorian buildings which the A66 ploughed through.
The book is the third by local historian Araf Chohan, who is a proud "smoggie", having been born in the town in 1952 – his parents, from the Punjab in India, were among the first Asians to settle in the Boro. It is available in bookshops, on Amazon and from the Middleton St George-based publishers, destinworld.com
Today's staggering front page is from the 1940s chapter of the book, and shows a locomotive being hoisted into the Brescia. Football fans may remember that, by coincidence, Middlesbrough's footballers played Brescia in the Anglo-Italian Cup on December 22, 1993. They lost 1-0.
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