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If there's one Teesside town trying hard to reinvent itself it's HARTLEPOOL , ten miles north of Middlesbrough, England's third largest port in the nineteenth century and a noted shipbuilding centre, but deprived of investment and hope for years following successive economic downturns. These days, though, its image is slowly being transformed by the renaissance of its once decaying dockland area, now spruced up as the popular Hartlepool Historic Quay off Marina Way (daily 10am-5pm; last admission 2hr before closing; GBP5.50). The entrance fee gets you on to the bustling eighteenth-century quayside where active attractions based around pressgangs, the Royal Navy, seaport life and fighting ships stir the senses. There's also a replica eighteenth-century maritime pub, as well as a coffee shop and market, while a separate fee is charged if you want to take a guided tour of HMS Trincomalee (daily: April-Oct 10.30am-5pm; Nov-March 10.30am-4pm; GBP3.50), a navy training ship built in 1817. On the edge of the quay in the entertaining Museum of Hartlepool at Jackson Dock (daily 10am-5pm; free), you can climb the port's original lighthouse, board a restored paddle steamer and trace the town's history, including its most notorious episode, which to this day earns Hartlepudlians the nickname "monkey hangers": legend has it that when a French ship sunk off the coast during the Napoleonic Wars, the locals mistook the sole survivor, a monkey, for a Frenchman, and tried and hanged it as a spy. Back in the town centre, ten minutes' walk south, the restored nineteenth-century Christ Church, on Church Square, houses Hartlepool's accomplished Art Gallery (Tues-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Sun 2-5pm; free) and the tourist office (same hours; tel 01429/869706, ), which can help if you're seduced into staying.
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