I left school at sixteen. The nuns and I had an existential disagreement, which ended very happily for me because it meant I could go to art college. Cleveland College of Art (now The Northern School of Art) was somewhere I immediately felt at home. The staff were fantastic - encouraging, dedicated, friendly and egalitarian. The students all wanted to be there. There was a real sense of communal momentum.

Every day, rain or shine, I walked from Middlesbrough train station to the college and back. Last week I walked that route again - not out of nostalgia, but for background research. I've been tracing Middlesbrough's pattern heritage to inform my Drawn to the Boro portraits.

I started at the station. Creativity has shaped this town more visibly than most, and it announces itself the moment you step off the train. The station is currently being transformed into the UK's Most Creative Station - a rolling programme of commissions and residencies by North East artists, part of a wider ambition to make Middlesbrough the most creative town in the country. 

Even the road crossing has been thought about.
 

Albert Road holds a wealth of Victorian buildings with rich decorative symbolism. The Victorians took a didactic approach to ornament - a motif was rarely just decoration, it was expected to carry meaning. Walking past these facades is like reading a message the town's builders left for anyone who cared to look up:

- Festoons - wealth, abundance, hospitality and welcome
- Corinthian columns - luxury and triumph
- Acanthus leaves - immortality and eternal life
- Artichokes - hope, peace, prosperity and hospitality
- Rearing lions - strength, courage and power
- The Tudor rose - England's unity
- Encaustic tiles in the medieval style - historical depth and moral instruction

A whole moral vocabulary, in stone and terracotta, waiting for us to notice.

A pair of listed buildings on Albert Road

The Middlesbrough Empire

Middlesbrough Town Hall

Park Methodist Church on Linthorpe Road was where my parents married. It's a fine building, now converted into apartments.

Directly opposite are Albert Park and the Dorman Museum, which houses an incredible collection of Christopher Dresser's designs, alongside those of Linthorpe Pottery, where he served as Art Superintendent.

Dresser fascinates me. He was a design polymath - carpets, ceramics, furniture, glass, metalwork, textiles - and a theorist who believed passionately in better design for the home. But where designers like William Morris turned away from the machine, Dresser embraced it. He believed everyone should be able to afford good design, and so he worked with industry rather than against it. It was a conflict Morris never resolved - a socialist whose handmade beauty only the wealthy could buy. Dresser simply solved the problem Morris agonised over.

Linthorpe Pottery embodied that thinking. It was founded in 1879 partly to bring work to an area of high unemployment, and its pots were made from the local red brick clay - literally shaped from Middlesbrough's ground. It was the first pottery in the country to fire with gas kilns, which allowed extraordinary experimentation with the glazes it became famous for: streaked, running, "flown" glazes, poured in layers and allowed to mingle. The same moulds were used again and again, but no two pots ever emerged alike. Individuality through glaze rather than form - mass production with a soul.

What struck me most was how contemporary Dresser's work feels. His famous teapot, all angles and geometry, dates from 1879 - yet it would have looked strikingly modern half a century later. And his creative curiosity was boundless: he travelled to Japan in 1876, one of the first European designers to do so, and that experience flowed directly into Linthorpe's glazes.
 

A PIERCED AND GLAZED MOON FLASK VASE DESIGNED BY CHRISTOPHER DRESSER Manufactured by the Linthorpe Pottery, circa 1890.

AN ESPN TEAPOT (design no. 2277) DESIGNED BY CHRISTOPHER DRESSER Manufactured by James Dixon & Sons, 1879.

Linthorpe Pottery Wave or Eclipse vase (design no. 2152) DESIGNED BY CHRISTOPHER DRESSER Manufactured by James Dixon & Sons, 1879.

CROWS FOOT CLARET JUG (design no. 2045) DESIGNED BY CHRISTOPHER DRESSER Manufactured by Hukin & Heath, 1879.

Further up Linthorpe Road, a few turns would take me to the old site of the college. It's been knocked down now, waiting for Lidl to build a supermarket.

Before the college moved, a student named Kelis-Angel Moloney made a short film that captures how I imagine most of us felt about the place:

*"I've never been to a college where everyone is so unique. You don't have to worry about what you're wearing or whether or not you'll fit in. It's a place where you can be yourself. And that's what I love about it."*

Watch the film here

The Victorians believed ornament should mean something. Walking back to the station, it occurred to me that this is exactly what I'm doing with Drawn to the Boro - building meaning into pattern, one portrait at a time, in a town that taught me to look up in the first place. The college building is gone, but the habit it gave me remains.