Country diary: Pristine avocets under the cooling towers | Richard Smyth

Teesmouth, Redcar and Cleveland: This isn't post-industrial wildlife, it's industrial wildlife, thriving against a backdrop of steam, tanks and chemical worksJust across the bay there's a decommissioned North Sea oil platform, sawn off at the knees and propped up in the sprawling scrapyard of Able Seaton Port to decay in the sun and salt air. It looks like a mirage, a hallucination, crash-landed spaceship. This is Teesmouth. Between me and the platform, a work party of oystercatchers is busily processing the broad, dark sands of the bay. A dozen or so seals have hauled out a bit further along, and lie torpid in the hazy sunshine.In the north, we're used to wildlife thriving in post-industrial habitats - flooded gravel pits, old spoil tips, rewilded opencast workings. But this isn't post-industrial, it's (still somehow) industrial. I drove here slack-jawed, following straight roads through steaming cities of metal architecture, what we might call industrial gothic or robot baroque. Continue reading...