Walking with Dinosaurs

Written by Chris Corbett, Community Engagement Officer, Teesside Archives

A visit to Teessaurus Park will reveal some welcome improvements to this unique urban park. Visitors will find a freshly painted rainbow Stegosaurus, a rather smart and appropriately red and white Mammoth and the towering Tyrannosaurus Rex, patiently waiting its turn. The recent sunny weather has brought many families to this spot on the banks of the River Tees with shouts and screams of delight as the first dinosaur sculptures are spotted. The large Triceratops has even been fed pinecones, the others having made do with an assortment of sticks.

The history of the site is intriguing. Originally at the heart of Middlesbrough’s Ironmasters’ District, it was formerly occupied by Acklam Iron and Steel Works (Stevenson, Jacques and Co). The impetus to develop the site as a park was generated by a national ‘Art in to Landscape’ competition, organised by the Sunday Times and the Arts Council in the hope that it would attract more investment to what had once been at the heart of British iron and steel making. It opened in 1979 with the original sculptures designed by Genevieve Glatt and arranged on the summit of a re-landscaped mound of slag. The life sized mother triceratops and later her two babies looked out over a rapidly changing river. A local company, Harts of Stockton, fabricated the family group and the archives have images of the work in progress as well as the finished dinosaurs in their new home with their first group of admirers. More joined the party in 1987 when the mammoth and the others were installed around the foot of the mound, themselves produced by workers on the government’s Youth and Employment Training Scheme at Amarc Training and Safety Ltd.

While the sculptures have hosted a variety of graffiti over the years and the occasional pop group (Supernatural posed on and around the triceratops in the mid ‘90’s), the slag heap has developed a sufficiently interesting flora to qualify as a Local Wildlife Site. Where there are flowers, there are usually butterflies and while the caterpillars of the nationally scarce grayling butterfly eat fine leaved grass species and rarely visit flowers for nectar, the site has a good population of them. The mix of cover and bare areas for basking in the sun is perfect; when the grayling butterflies land and close their wings, their camouflaged underwings make them nearly impossible to pick out. These conditions also suit the wall butterfly, another sunbather accompanied by common blue butterflies throughout the summer months. The purple flowers of lucerne and greater knapweed and the yellow blooms of lady’s bedstraw form an artist’s palette of colour on the mound in late summer, a perfect stage for the dinosaur show.

Despite an internet search, no further information was uncovered about the sculptor and artist Genevieve Glatt. Was this her only work in the UK, what else has she achieved in her career? If anybody has information about her, please do get in touch with the archives. There may be clues in the council minutes held at the archives, definitely one to pursue on quieter days.

It can be difficult to reconcile the noise, dust, heat and smell of the original ironworks with the relative peace and tranquility of the site today; it has been so completely transformed. Industry still thrives on the old Ironmaster’s District though; the Riverside Park Road alongside the park is still busy with lorries, vans and cars and the warehouse of the North Sea industrial support company AV Dawson towers over the site from the east. However, once you enter the realm of the dinosaurs, a calmness descends, enhanced by the colourful reflections of wind turbine bases in the waters of the Tees as appropriately prehistoric looking cormorants fly upstream to fish. A perfect place to consider our industrial past, present and future.