Underpass

Subterranean Redcar

Disclaimer – Subterranean Redcar is quite a dramatic title, you may possibly be a little disappointed.

During lockdown I’ve been taking occasional walks from Redcar to Saltburn, setting myself the challenge of never following the same route home twice. About a month ago C. had told me that she had heard that there was an underpass that ran beneath the railway line linking Redcar with Marske.

There are not many accessible underground spaces around here so I resolved to find it. I had a look at the maps but couldn’t find any trace of an underpass. A couple of weeks later I was chatting to a friend at work and mentioned the underpass “oh you must mean the one in East Redcar, we used to call it Piss Alley.”

C. was heading to Redcar today so I scrounged a lift. I grew up in Middlesbrough and my knowledge of the geography of Redcar is quite poor. I asked C. to drop me off on West Dyke Road, which she did, unfortunately the road I thought was West Dyke Road is actually called Redcar Lane. Between Redcar Lane and West Dyke Road lies Redcar Racecourse. The racecourse cuts a large swathe through central Redcar and is surrounded by a high perimeter fence. I asked C. if there was any way to get from one side of the racecourse to the other without having to walk all the way around it, she didn’t know, I set off to find out.

I walked across the playing fields towards the racecourse and noticed a woman in the distance walking purposely along a footpath that led towards the racecourse fence, I decided to follow the same path.

To my great delight I came to a tunnel that ran beneath the racecourse. As tunnels go it wasn’t particularly long and possibly only qualifies as an underpass. but if this were a football ground, a passage to the pitch of a similar length would definitely be called a tunnel. The dictionary defines an underpass as a road that goes underneath a railway or other road, no mention of racecourses so I’m going to claim it as a tunnel.

Leaving the tunnel I found myself a few hundred metres away from Redcar Lane so set off to find my next target, the railway underpass.

Tory Redcar

I finally found the narrow cut between two houses, it would have been quite easy to miss. I walked along the cut and there it was, Piss Alley. To be honest, after the joy of finding the unexpected brutalist corrugations of the racecourse tunnel this was quite a let down, it was short, had second rate graffiti, and didn’t smell of urine. Although the latter may be due to pubs being closed for many months.