When the government asked the peo-ple of Middlesbrough and Hartle-pool to vote on whether they would like directly-elected mayors, locals were resoundingly in favour. It is not hard to see why the idea of change appealed to them. The prosperity of the 1990s seems to have passed both places by. The jumble of forlorn Victorian brick buildings, brutalist concrete shops, tatty office blocks and wasteland car parks in the two towns' centres suggest that both ran out of steam in the 1970s.
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