Yesterday I took part in a press trip that intrigued and excited me in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. Living in nearby Hartlepool, I’m painfully aware of how comparably underfunded this region is when it comes to arts grants. Yet there’s an undeniable creative energy here that deserves recognition and support. The potential to build on what already exists feels enormous.
Middlesbrough Art Week (MAW), which has been running since 2017, was originally meant to centre around The Auxiliary: a new cultural centre near the station that will house over 25 artists’ studios, a gallery and community spaces. But its construction has run behind schedule, so the organisers had to think differently and scatter the work across the town in unexpected places.
As a result, many of the exhibitions I enjoyed yesterday were held in disused retail units within the main shopping centre. This posed many challenges for the organisers, such as when they discovered the old TX Maxx had no electricity on the ground floor. But ultimately, they’ve pulled everything together beautifully.
And this has helped solidify something that’s been brewing in my mind for a long time. That the future of art galleries lies in shopping malls, and vice versa.
Empty spaces
Wandering through Middlesbrough’s centre, you can’t ignore what’s happening across Britain’s high streets. Shopping centres are emptying faster than we can count. Online shopping has gutted traditional retail, leaving behind vast, sterile spaces that once thrummed with commerce. And the appeal of obvious replacements, such as cafes, pubs, gyms and hairdressers, can only stretch so far. If I can get a decent coffee or haircut locally, why trek to the city centre?
But art? Art changes everything.
This converted TX Maxx is one of the hubs for Middlesbrough Art Week
Kitty McKay’s repurposed seats form a dysphoric collection of works that are as uncomfortable as they are familiar
The beguiling voice of Jessica guides us through Harton Moor Estate, a journey rendered as an otherworldly graphic landscape by Erin Dickson
Take the former B&M store in Dundas Arcade. Until recently, it was a cavernous wound in a dying shopping mall. It’s now been transformed into In The Real, a group exhibition that felt alive in ways traditional galleries rarely achieve.
Jonathan Lloyd West’s monumental paintings dominated the space, forcing us to confront our digital scrolling obsessions. The scale worked perfectly: these weren’t precious objects demanding hushed reverence, but bold statements claiming their territory. Elsewhere, Kitty McKay’s repurposed metro seats created an unsettling familiarity. Best of all, Erin Dickson’s art film provided an entrancing take on a family life on a South Shields estate, via stark, otherworldly 3D models and landscapes.
But individual pieces aside, what struck me most was how natural it felt. Families who were out shopping casually wandered in, drawn by curiosity rather than cultural obligation. Children pointed and asked questions without being shushed. The usual gallery anxiety—am I looking at this correctly? Do I understand?—evaporated in this unpretentious environment.
Visceral power
Similarly, at 36 Albert Road, Andrea Hasler’s piece Residual Echo transformed another empty retail unit into something viscerally powerful. Four life-sized wax figures, linked by gold chains and fabric resembling internal tissue, created a vision of family connection that, I have to be honest, would have felt oppressive in a white cube gallery.
Here, though, with shoppers passing outside the windows, the work breathed differently. The red carpet threshold between performance and vulnerability felt more urgent, more immediate.
Andrea Hasler’s Residual Echo explores the visceral tensions between attraction and repulsion, intimacy and exposure
Middlesbrough Art Week and Thirteen Group have collaborated to create chairs for art week inspired by Italian modernist artist and furniture designer Enzo Mari.
Apartheid Apartments, which satirises the Israeli-Palestinian war, is an an artwork disguised as an estate agency
For me, this was all about democratising access. No intimidating entrance procedures, no £15 admission fees, no sense that you needed an art degree to participate. People simply walked in, engaged, and walked out changed.
This isn’t about dumbing down culture or sacrificing artistic integrity. If anything, the work I saw yesterday demanded more from both artists and audiences. Without the protective cocoon of traditional gallery spaces, art must work harder to capture attention and communicate meaning. It must compete with the everyday chaos of urban life, and in doing so, becomes more robust, more essential.
The economic argument
Shopping centres offer something else crucial: infrastructure. Climate control, security, parking, and accessibility features that many smaller galleries struggle to provide. The bones of retail architecture—wide corridors, flexible spaces, natural gathering points—translate surprisingly well to exhibition use. Former department stores become vast installation spaces. Shop windows become vitrives for sculpture or video art.
The raw economic argument is compelling, too. Property owners facing mass retail exodus need new revenue streams. Artists and curators need affordable spaces. Local authorities want to revitalise dying town centres. It’s a triangle of mutual benefit.
An early appearance for Liberty Hodes’ Marge 2.0, a live art performance and window installation not taking place in a shopping centre shopfront
Zaeemah Bashir’s art is part of the New Graduate Award: Make/Shift show
The Weapon & Wound show explores the contradictions of belonging and alienation
Don’t get the wrong idea, though: Middlesbrough Art Week doesn’t all take place in shops. One part of The Auxiliary is already open for business, and existing venues are joining in too, including the Town Hall, MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), Pineapple Black Arts and Platform A Gallery.
The last of these, in case you didn’t know, is actually housed within the train station, where it was founded in 2011 as an extension of Platform Art Studios. Entry is free, and you can pop in via Platform 1 while you wait for your connecting train. To me, this just reinforces how art can flourish in unexpected contexts. Commuters became accidental audiences, their journeys interrupted by moments of beauty and contemplation.
What I learned
So here’s my conclusion. As our high streets hollow out and our cultural institutions face funding crises, Britain needs new models that serve both commerce and creativity. Shopping centres could become the community hubs they always promised to be, just not in the way their original developers imagined.
Yesterday proved to me that culture doesn’t need their permission to thrive. Sometimes the most radical act is simply putting extraordinary work in ordinary places, where ordinary people can discover it without fear or pretension.
The future isn’t about choosing between high culture and popular accessibility. It’s about finding new spaces where both can flourish together, transforming the failures of one system into the foundation for another. Yesterday in Middlesbrough, I glimpsed that future, and it looked surprisingly promising.
