‘We are going to terrify you,” declared the mayor of Middlesbrough, as he unveiled his grand plan for a trio of 20-storey towers earlier this year, billed as the tallest buildings between Leeds and Glasgow. “This is about us saying we are here to be taken seriously now.”

Not many buildings are promoted as threats, but then not many mayors operate like millionaire businessman Andy Preston. Sick of decades of inaction in his home town, Preston has cooked up a £250m vision for a “stunning digital skyscraper” aimed at attracting tech companies, along with two residential towers, which he hopes will send chills down the spines of rival northern cities. “We are not going to put up with second best, put up with mediocre stuff,” he said at the launch in February. “We are going to suck some of your business out of your cities to us.”

A planning application was submitted and Chinese construction giant BCEGI has just been selected to develop the £30m “digital” office tower, christened Boho X. The glossy promotional visuals feature executives playing ping-pong on roof terraces and looking out over Teesside from their penthouse offices, happily at home in a place with its own private cinema, gym and even a rooftop helipad. Designed by local firm Logic Architecture, whose portfolio shows no evidence of tall buildings, the tower looks like something from a cut-price Gotham City. Its looming grey silhouette will be illuminated at night by glowing white stripes, the helipad floating overhead like an ominous halo.

Preston’s plans may have succeeded in unleashing terror, but perhaps not quite where he intended. Leeds and Newcastle might not be quaking, but those with a fondness for Middlesbrough certainly are. Boho X is a rushed, misjudged vanity project, say the building’s critics, who fear it could lumber the town with a costly white elephant, a blot on the skyline for decades to come.

“The only ambition this project has is to grab headlines,” says architect James Perry, who grew up in Middlesbrough and runs Something Concrete and Modern, an archive documenting postwar architecture in north-east England. “It feels like a building from a different era – when to be aspirational, you needed to build tall. The town will have to live with the legacy of a development like this, and Middlesbrough deserves much better.”

Boho X and the two other towers are the latest attempt to re-energise a part of the town that has languished for decades, victim to various failed plans. The location, an area formerly known as St Hilda’s, is a particularly loaded choice, as it was where Middlesbrough was founded in the 1830s, built as a planned settlement for the coal-shipping industry. This was set on a grid of terraced streets arranged around the old town hall, a handsome redbrick building that now stands as an abandoned relic, marooned in a wasteland of overgrown lots. The whole scene looks like something on the edge of Detroit.

The area was targeted for slum clearance after the second world war and replaced with social housing, but remained notorious for crime and sex work. It was bulldozed again in the 1980s, when it was reborn as Middlehaven and filled with two-storey homes. Separated from the rest of Middlesbrough by railway tracks, and nicknamed “over the border”, the area continued to decline. Its buildings were demolished once again in the 2000s to make way for an elaborate masterplan by the late Will Alsop.

As the Pied Piper of novelty plans for struggling northern towns, Alsop conjured up a kaleidoscopic vision of gigantic toy-shaped buildings scattered across a 100-hectare carpet, featuring a big teddy bear and an office block in the shape of Marge Simpson’s hairdo. These would sit alongside a Rubik’s cube cinema and a hotel modelled on the sticks-and-marbles game Ker-plunk. By 2012, with only one jaunty housing block completed, the vision was scrapped in favour of a more realistic plan for a mixed-used neighbourhood of streets and squares, reviving the Victorian layout of the area.

Common sense, it seemed, had finally prevailed, and the place set about feeling like part of the city again. A couple of fragments of terraced housing have since been built, along with the successful Boho Zone, a creative quarter for Middlesbrough’s thriving digital media and technology companies, housed in a range of three to four-storey blocks linked by zig-zagging bridges. It has the beginnings of a successful place, but Mayor Preston wants to crank up the ambition, and he’s not going to be constrained by the existing plans.

“I’ve totally ignored the development frameworks and masterplans,” he says proudly, speaking by phone from his home at Otterington Hall, a stately mansion with one of the finest topiary gardens in England. “When it comes to places like Middlesbrough, with decades of masterplans, they’ve all got one thing in common – they never happen.”

Rather than waste time and money on such elaborate big thinking, he wants to just forge ahead and build the towers regardless, hoping that building tall will send a signal and attract further investment. “If you try to make a plan perfect, it will literally never happen,” he says. “It’s a trade-off between making it happen and making it as perfect as possible. What we have to do in Middlesbrough is make stuff happen. We need to get that momentum going. Then we’ll start planning, because we’ll be fighting off the investors.”

A closer look at the blueprint for the office tower suggests he might want to do a bit more planning before the concrete-pouring begins. The building stands in splendid isolation with no relationship to its context, instead surrounded by three car parks, totalling 1.6 hectares of tarmac. Preston insists these will be temporary, but there’s no sign of what might replace them.

As for the proposed public space, it seems the architects have misplaced their scale ruler. The square at the heart of the development is as wide as the Champs-Élysées and, once you factor in the planned market area next to the town hall, the result will be a plaza as big as Trafalgar Square. The existing framework of walkable streets on a human scale has been swept aside for a 1960s vision of towers rising over a sea of undefined space, with parked cars as far as the eye can see. And is a glass tower really what tech startups want?

“The biggest flaw is to do with who they’re trying to attract,” says Perry, who has written a detailed objection to the scheme, showing how the same amount of office space could be housed in a low-rise street-based development, with parking in a concealed podium. “Tech companies don’t tend to be based in hermetic glass towers. They prefer low-rise campuses and have an environmentally conscious agenda. Where’s the study to show this kind of space is desired, when there are offices across Middlesbrough standing empty?”

A few hundred metres to the south stands Centre North East, the tallest building in Middlesbrough. Built in the 1970s and vacant for a decade, it’s just one floor shorter than Preston’s proposal, at 19 storeys. More recently, the council built a pair of office blocks nearby at Centre Square, both still awaiting tenants. “There are so many office blocks in Middlesbrough that could be redeveloped,” says independent councillor Mick Saunders. “You can’t fault Andy for wanting to bring investment in, but this looks like it could be a white elephant.”

Labour councillor Matt Storey is also sceptical. “Throwing up a tower block at this stage of Middlehaven’s development just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do,” he says. “There was a plan in place to build up the neighbourhood incrementally, with streets of housing, a school, and an expansion of the Boho zone with a low-rise courtyard block designed specifically for tech firms.”

Preston dismisses the previous administration’s plan, which included the same amount of office space, as “looking like something from a business park on the outskirts of Leeds”. His detractors, however, believe it looked more appropriate for both the scale of the area and the very businesses he is looking to attract. As for demand, Preston claims a number of tenants have already put money down to be in his tower, including a local law firm, an e-commerce business and the architects themselves. In response to the suggestion of widespread vacancy, he is frank: “There’s loads of vacancy,” he says. “That’s because it’s all shit. Nobody has built a decent fucking office in Middlesbrough for decades.”

Storey’s concerns range from the details of the development to the way it appears to be being rushed through the system. He is ward councillor for the area in which the tower is proposed, yet the first he heard of the project was at its public launch on the day the planning application was submitted. He says there has been next to no public consultation, and he has also raised the question of conflicts of interest.

Preston has declared a range of business interests in the area around the tower site, including the Boho 4 office development and a number of property companies, as well as investments in a range of tech firms of the kind the tower is aimed at. Storey makes no suggestion of corruption, but says these businesses and properties are bound to increase in value as a result of the proposed towers.

“It’s a stupid thing to say,” says Preston. “I’ve got interests everywhere. Whatever I do, people claim I’m trying to do it for myself, but I’ve got much easier ways to make money.” He maintains he is solely “on a mission to get jobs, ambition and optimism in the centre of town”, and says he is in advanced talks with someone who wants to create a “wellbeing village” nearby, as well as an urban farm, and claims he now has a developer on board for the two residential towers. “I am most definitely not a saint,” says the mayor, “but I’m not the fucking devil.”