There are two very different ways of looking at Hartlepool.
The first is the lurid headline version — the kind of thing you might find in the Sun, focusing on obesity, ill health, decline. The second is less obvious: Northern Studios, the largest film and television production facility in the North East, part of the Northern School of Art.
Both are true.
Hartlepool does have serious health challenges. But it is also a town that has made attempts — uneven, imperfect — to diversify and modernise its economy in ways that set it apart from other coastal communities still rooted in the 1970s.
I spent a lot of time working in Hartlepool, including sitting on the Tees Acute Services Review, which recommended replacing Hartlepool and North Tees General Hospitals with a single modern facility. It was controversial, to put it mildly.
Hartlepool is fiercely attached to having its own institutions — its own hospital, its own football club, its own newspaper. I sometimes always suspected that some people would rather have a rubbish newspaper, a struggling football team and a decaying hospital of their own than share better ones with a neighbouring town.
On paper, Hartlepool looks similar to places like Clacton or Skegness. Another end-of-the-line town, another place with high economic inactivity, another potential target for Reform in local elections.
But it does not feel the same.
Hartlepool was built on shipbuilding and shipping. Like many industrial towns, it was hit hard in the 1980s, and for a long time it was an angry place. That anger translated into decades of Labour representation. When I worked there, the MP was Peter Mandelson, who once asked for guacamole in a chip shop and was told it was mushy peas. He also informed me, at one point, that he was “the finest communicator of his generation”. I passed no comment.
The deeper story, though, is not just about politics or industry, but about people.
As the economy shifted, opportunities opened up elsewhere, and — as in Redcar — people left. The most ambitious, the most mobile, the ones most able to take advantage of those opportunities.
Many did not come back.
That left a gap. Not just in the labour market, but in the social fabric. A break between generations. Those who stayed held on to continuity, to established norms, to ways of life that had made sense when the town’s economy was still intact. Those who left changed — and when they returned, if they returned at all, they often found themselves out of place.
Hartlepool’s labour market reflects that history. Employment is low, inactivity is high, and much of that inactivity is structural — long-term illness, early exit from work, a gradual detachment from the labour market rather than a temporary absence from it.
But Hartlepool is not simply a story of decline.
What is striking now is that it is no longer a place that ambitious young people always have to leave. The Northern School of Art, the college, and new training centres in areas like nuclear and electrical engineering offer routes that did not exist a decade or two ago.
The economy is still fragile, but it is more diverse than it was. There is still industry, alongside business, education, and a modest but real leisure and cultural offer.
And civic life matters here.
There is a functioning football club — and perhaps one that will find its way back into the league. There are museums, an art gallery, and a sense of local identity that is not just nostalgic, but active. The town takes itself seriously, even when that seriousness sometimes tips into stubbornness.
That stubbornness — the preference for independence over collaboration — can be limiting. But it is also part of what keeps the place intact.
Hartlepool is not obviously better off than the towns it is often compared to. It faces many of the same economic and social pressures. But it does not feel hollowed out in quite the same way.
It feels like a place that is still arguing with itself about what it wants to be.
And that, at least, is a sign of life.
Thanks to Northern Studios for the use of their photos