INDUSTRIAL

TEESSIDE

LIVES

AND

LEGACIESA Post-Industrial

Geography

Jonathan Warren

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Industrial Teesside, Lives and Legacies

Jonathan Warren

Industrial Teesside, Lives and Legacies

A post-industrial geography

ISBN 978-3-319-64539-1 ISBN 978-3-319-64540-7 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64540-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950863

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge © Michele Allan

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer NatureThe registered company is Springer International Publishing AGThe registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Jonathan WarrenNewcastle UniversityNewcastle upon Tyne, UK

For Susan and James

vii

This is an important book that deals with something of enormous con-temporary social and political significance—the cultural consequences of de-industrialisation as these are experienced and understood by people living in a place that was literally and exactly created by the industrial revolution. Much of industrial Teesside sprang from the ground in the nineteenth century and became a place to which people flocked for work in a new world system. Jon Warren notes that it was a zone of mass immi-gration. Richard Webber (2004) showed that much of this was from one of Europe’s poorest peasant peripheries—the congested districts of the West of Ireland. I am mostly a descendant of that immigration, although like many of the ‘White’ people of the North East of England I am a mongrel of mixed ancestry. The point of that historical diversion is that the transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial society, a trans-formation that has happened in my own adult lifetime, is in cultural terms a transformation on the scale of that experienced by my great grandfather when he moved from the Ox Mountains in County Sligo to be first a navvy and then a coal miner in County Durham. Jon Warren has seized, absolutely rightly, on the profound insight of C. Wright Mills that the proper focus of Sociology as a discipline is on the intersection of biography and history but as a sociologist working in geography he has extended the notion of biography to include not just the biographies—the life histories—of people but also the biography of the place in which

Foreword

viii Foreword

they live. The point is to understand life course in a place as that place changes, we might say underneath your very feet, is constitutive of the way you understand the world now and understand your own place in that world.

So we have a biography of Teesside that brings together the social and economic history of a place with both personal life histories and collec-tive responses to how one’s own life has intersected with these changes. And it does so at a crucial point in the history of Teesside itself and of the industrial world for which Teesside can almost stand as an instantiation of an ideal type. This a point of crisis—a point in time in the history/trajectory of a system—when things cannot stay as they are. The system must change. We find this expressed very clearly in political terms by the people of Teesside’s overwhelming rejection of continuing membership of the European Union in the 2016 referendum, by the election of a Conservative Mayor albeit that the tiny turnout for that election is more indicative than its actual result, and by the subsequent revival of the Labour Party on the basis of that Party’s left wing leadership and mani-festo in the 2017 general election. The political system is in crisis because the industrial system is in crisis. Jon Warren’s book goes a long way towards explaining why this is so.

There are many good things in this book. I will point particularly to the serious history of both the cultural forms of the work structure of organised capitalism—the world of ICI in particular (and for a novel that actually took that as a form see Sid Chaplin’s Sam in the Morning (1967), which I have always thought was set in a fictionalised ICI). It is not just that there was an industrial culture of firms—in ICI based on high wages and salaries and on a German concept of the form and interests of stake-holders in the enterprise, there was also a very large and intersecting industrial-skilled working class and middle class. The industrial middle class is a massively neglected group in studies of the nature of the class order but even more ignored is the way there was both a transition within a working life from skilled working class to industrial middle class roles and extensive familial relationships between skilled workers and the industrial middle class, including of course marriage of skilled male workers to women in white collar jobs. Not least of the virtues of Jon

ix Foreword

Warren’s work is that women are given their proper place in the social structure of the organised industrial world and that place was by no means just in the home—they were a crucial part of the world of work as well.

Jon Warren has been able to write the book he has written because of the very careful methods and methodological programme he deployed in the research on which it is based. He has combined documentary research, interviews and focus-group work, with the latter based on stimulation of discussion through the deployment of visual images—the visual matters, although as Jon notes we can reproduce how places look but we cannot reproduce how they sounded—and I would note in an area where the chemical industry was so important, how they smelled. We have a record addressed to one sense, and very useful that record is too, but not a soundscape or a ‘smellscape’, although all three senses matter in stimulat-ing recall and sensibility.

Taken just as a monograph in social research this would be an impor-tant book, but it is much more than that. It deploys the conceptual framework and the methods toolbox of the social sciences to show us how people think about their world now and are beginning to think about how that world might be made different. For people of my genera-tion, the young elderly in their late 60s up to their mid-70s, who grew up and lived through organised industrial capitalism in places like Teesside, we are looking at a world—to use that dreadful phrase—going forward, that will not offer our children and grandchildren the security and sense of purpose that we had in our own lives. Jon Warren lets all the genera-tions of Teesside speak to what that means and how their understanding of the future is shaped by their own lived past. I hope this book is read by Teesside’s politicians because there is nothing on offer today in this place or in places like it that has the character and potential of the modernisation programme, so well described by Jon Warren, of the 1960s—of the white hot heat of the technological revolution in which if not diverted I would have had a life course as a biochemical engineer, and that life course was available, not just as an economic function, but as a social function, giving real meaning and purpose to my life. Work matters, and we see that in the accounts people offer us here. The question is what if anything

x Foreword

we can put in its place, and that is a question not just for social scientists or even for politicians but for all of us as citizens. Jon Warren’s book tells us where we are starting from. Now, where do we go?

Durham University Professor David ByrneDurham, UK

References

Webber, R. (2004). Neighbourhood segregation and social mobility among the descendants of Middlesbrough’s 19th century Celtic Immigrants. Retrieved from http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/working_papers/paper88.pdf

xi

NORTHERN TOWNSThese Northern townsAlways changing, just the same.This one’s different, this one’s mineI hurt when you stumble, I love when you shine.

Northern Powerhouse?We were the first, we were the best!Standing proud above the rest.We led the world, we showed the way.

We made bridges, we made shipsWe made iron and steel.Our ‘Transporter’, clad anewGrand Lady of the Tees.

This Northern townThis dusty shadowI hurt when you stumbleI still love when you shine.

Copyright Marilyn Jordan. July 2016

Preface

xiii

It’s difficult to know quite where to start, as there have been so many people who have helped this book make it onto the page. I would like to begin by thanking everyone who has participated in the research over the last 2 years while I was working at Durham, who spoke to me, answered my questions, commented on the photographs and set me right when I had the wrong end of the stick! I hope that I have represented your views fairly and retold your stories accurately. Thank you for talking to me, without you I would not have a book.

I would like to say a very special thank you to Michele Allan of Durham University whose brilliant photographs contributed so much to the proj-ect, especially to the visual focus groups, it was a real privilege to work with you, and I hope to again in the future.

Additionally, I would like to thank all the organisations who helped make the research possible by providing their facilities and expertise. Matthew Jones and Julie Allinson at Stockton Central Library, Ruth Hobbins and her colleagues at the Teesside Archives, Bella Adam, Giles Maffett and Alistair Hudson at the Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art (MIMA), Julian Harrop from Beamish Museum, Nathan Stephens Griffin and Lorenza Antonucci at Teesside University and the Thrive Community group in Stockton. A big thank you too to Marilyn Jordan, who read her poem “Northern Towns” at one of the research events and has kindly allowed it to appear as the preface to this book.

Acknowledgements

xiv Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joanna O’Neill at Palgrave for her patience and support, never having written a book before her calm manner when I rang her to ask daft questions was always really welcome and very reassur-ing. Thank you too to the original commissioning editor Dominic Walker for having faith in the idea and proposal, I hope I have done it justice. This research was funded by a research leadership award from the Leverhulme Trust (RL-2012-006), held by Professor Clare Bambra. I would like to thank Clare for giving me the time and space to research and write this book.

I would like to thank my friends Kate Mattheys and Kayleigh Garthwaite for their encouragement and support whilst I have been try-ing to write up the research. I often felt that the book would never get done and your reassurances that it would meant a lot. Kayleigh deserves another vote of thanks for offering comments on the draft of the text, as does David Byrne who also wrote the foreword. Thanks are also due to Fred Robinson of St Chad’s college for his support and advice. I must also mention my students, friends and colleagues at Trevelyan College Durham who encouraged me and suffered regular updates when they asked “how is the book getting on?”

Most importantly I would like to give the biggest thanks to Susan and James for putting up with me whilst I was trying to produce this book. I was probably the most miserable husband and dad in the world between November 2016 and May 2017 and would like to say sorry! Thanks for everything, I couldn’t have made it to the end of this long journey without your love and support.

xv

1 Introduction 1

2 Understanding Biographies of Place: Industrial Teesside 15

3 Industrial Teesside’s Biography 51

4 Exploring Teesside’s Visual Legacies 87

5 Changing Industry, Transforming Lives: Social and Cultural Legacies 137

6 Two Teessides?—A Legacy of Inequalities 181

7 Conclusion: Place, People and the Post-Industrial 209

Contents

xvi Contents

Epilogue 249

Index 253

xvii

Fig. 2.1 A map of Teesside based on the 1968 County Borough boundaries 17

Fig. 2.2 The decline of employment in steel and chemicals on Teesside 1965–2010. Reproduced from Evenhuis (2016) 29

Fig. 4.1 Tees-Side Industrial Development Board brochure cover 1947 93

Fig. 4.2 Workers leaving the West Gate at ICI Billingham in the early 1950s (ICI archive) 95

Fig. 4.3 Stockton High Street in the 1950s (Valentine of Dundee, St Andrews University) 98

Fig. 4.4 Apprentices at ICI Wilton, Training Centre Machine Shop—1960 (ICI archive) 100

Fig. 4.5 Women working in the summarising office at ICI Billingham (ICI archive) 103

Fig. 4.6 Launching a Bradwell boiler into the Tees—Head Wrightson, Thornaby 1950s (Remembering Thornaby group) 105

Fig. 4.7 ICI workers doing maintenance, one in full protective clothing the other with basic protection (ICI archive) 107

Fig. 4.8 Messenger boys at ICI Billingham 1950s (ICI archive) 109Fig. 4.9 ICI Safety Committee meeting—1950s (ICI archive) 111Fig. 4.10 Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge (Michele Allan 2015) 114Fig. 4.11 Say No to the EU—The Coatham Hotel/Windsor

Ballroom Redcar seafront (Michele Allan 2016) 116

List of Figures

xviii List of Figures

Fig. 4.12 The National Cycling Championship Stockton High Street—June 2016 (Jon Warren 2016) 118

Fig. 4.13 A view of Middlehaven dock Middlesbrough, from the North bank of the Tees (Michele Allan 2015) 120

Fig. 4.14 The Village Deli—Hartburn village, Stockton (Michele Allan 2015) 122

Fig. 4.15 Derelict housing at Limetrees Close, Port Clarence, the Transporter Bridge in the background (Michele Allan 2015) 124

Fig. 4.16 Redcar steelworks—July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016) 126Fig. 4.17 Wind turbines at Redcar beach, bench in the foreground,

July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016) 128Fig. 4.18 The Victoria Estate, Stockton-on-Tees, Summer 2015

(Michele Allan 2015) 130Fig. 4.19 The mouth of the Tees viewed from South Gare,

July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016) 131Fig. 4.20 A view of the Eston Hills from Warrenby—July 2016

(Michele Allan 2016) 133

xix

Table 2.1 Employee jobs (2015) 18Table 2.2 Employee jobs by industry (2015) 19

List of Tables

1© The Author(s) 2018J. Warren, Industrial Teesside, Lives and Legacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64540-7_1

1Introduction

When I wrote the proposal for this book in October 2015 the future of steelmaking on Teesside looked bleak. A slump in world steel prices meant that the steel made at the Redcar blast furnace was uncompetitive and unwanted. Steel that had been sold at £500 per ton a year before was now trading on the global markets at around £250 per ton. Redcar steel cost around £400 per ton to produce so the works looked likely to close, marking the end of steelmaking on Teesside.

However, the crisis was not just seen as a matter of economics. It was not seen as just the closure of a business, due to hard economic facts. Rather, it was seen in much bigger terms; this was an issue of identity and a threat to the region’s culture. The local press talked in terms of ‘170 years of history under threat’ (The Gazette 29/09/2015).

Tom Blenkinsop, MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland at the time, said:

It’s the heart of our local economy, but more than that it’s our culture and tradition. It’s the very identity of where we come from, the pride we take in ourselves and our parents and grandparents before us. (Hansard 17/09/2015)

2

These reactions show that in an increasingly post-industrial world, where many of the industries that built modern Britain have faded from view or disappeared altogether, the industrial past still matters and has the power to evoke powerful emotions. What is happening on Teesside now has happened in many communities in Britain, Northern Europe and North America over the course of the last generation, it not only signifies an economic shift but is also part of a much wider and profound cultural transformation.

Things have moved on quickly. Hopes of saving the steelworks at Redcar quickly faded. Despite widespread public outcry, rallies and dem-onstrations there was no intervention from the UK government to save or support the Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) operation. Instead the gov-ernment held to the line that such closures are inevitable due to globalisa-tion, and Business Minister Anna Soubry gave a predictable reaction:

The steel industry across the UK is facing very challenging economic con-ditions. The price of steel has almost halved over the past year, with over-production in the world market. Government cannot alter these conditions. (The Guardian 28/09/2015)

So instead, a Task Force to deal with the fallout from the closure was set up, with central government contributing £80 million. £30 million of this was earmarked to deal with redundancy payments and the remaining £50 million was made available to help people return to work, by provid-ing training, placements for apprentices, help to start new businesses, and supporting companies who had been part of  the SSI supply chain. Additionally, a report by former Conservative Trade and Industry minis-ter Lord Heseltine was commissioned.

However, as a former union convenor from the plant pointed out to me, the annual wages bill at SSI was around £120 million, for not much more the plant could have been mothballed (as it had been in 2010) and production resumed once the global steel demand began to rise (as it did in 2016).

The former site, whilst having excellent access to Teesport, is also highly contaminated, and with clean-up costs estimated to be in excess of £1 billion (Heseltine Report 2016), it is unlikely then that the former

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steelworks site will become an asset for Teesside’s economy in the near future.

There have also been a number of further significant developments in the past two years. In March 2016 the Indian-based steel conglomerate Tata industries announced that it wished to sell its UK-based steel operations, in particular the huge Port Talbot steelworks complex in South Wales, which employs over 6000 workers directly and has a major role in the Welsh econ-omy. This time both the devolved Welsh government and central govern-ment were anxious to avoid closure, and got a lot more involved in trying to help Tata find a buyer. This provoked a backlash on Teesside; why had Redcar not attracted the same concern or SSI been given the same amount of help as Port Talbot? Was this yet another case of Teesside and the North East being marginalised and forgotten?

Another significant development for the region and a question I had not considered when I wrote the initial outline for this book is:

What effect will the UK’s decision in the referendum of June 23rd 2016 to leave the European Union have upon the region?

This is as yet unknown but what was very clear is that Teessiders were amongst the most enthusiastic ‘Brexiteers’ in the UK. Teesside voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. In Redcar and Cleveland 66.2% voted to leave the EU, in Middlesbrough 65.5%. Stockton voted to leave by a margin of 61.7% and Hartlepool had the highest ‘leave’ vote in the region with 69.6%. Darlington had the highest remain vote, but still 56.2% voted to leave. This potentially has serious implications for a region that is involved in a great deal of export activity and receives considerable funding from the EU to clear up polluted sites (like Redcar Steelworks) and had hoped to receive infrastructural funding for the new Tees crossing and link road endorsed by the Heseltine report (2016).

One potential explanation is that many in the region feel that they have been left behind over the past 30 years; one of my research partici-pants told me:

we have got nothing now; the industry has all gone that’s why I voted to come out. (Focus group participant September 2016)

Introduction

4

This may not be a rational response, as successive UK government policies have had a great deal more to do with de-industrialisation than the EU, nor is it true that “all the industry has gone”; Teesside still has a higher than average amount of manufacturing employment than the rest of the UK. It is, however, a response that needs to be investigated and understood. Why people believe it to be true is important.

In early July 2016 I interviewed Anna Turley, MP for Redcar. She told me that she felt the closure of SSI had made a big contribution to the Brexit vote.

people blamed the EU as the government kept saying that EU regulations meant that they couldn’t do anything to save the steelworks. (Anna Turley, MP for Redcar July 2016)

What is undoubtedly true is that Teesside’s future post-Brexit is not likely to be any more secure or clear than it is currently. It is also not clear what the political implications of this are for the area’s traditional Labour- dominated politics. At first glance, the voters of Teesside appear to have many of the features that the populist right has managed to mobilise in recent times. Areas with declining industrial work and diminishing job opportunities, older industrial areas that have suffered due to globalisation, have been fertile ground for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and the Republicans under Trump in the USA.  In France such areas have been attracted to the populist right, Marine Le Penn’s National Front, and also the radical left, Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Untamed. Whether normal service will be resumed in Teesside’s politics after Brexit remains to be seen.

Beyond Economics

So what has the economic impact of the closure of Redcar steelworks been? There were 2066 directly employed SSI workers who were made redundant as a result of the closure and 26 supply chain companies esti-mated job losses to total 849 employees. By September 2016, 1 year on from the closure, it was estimated that of the 2150 former SSI and supply chain workers who claimed benefits, 1990 (93%) had moved off benefits.

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Many are now in alternative employment, have started their own busi-nesses, are in training or have taken retirement (SSI Task Force: One Year On Report 2016: 5).

Figures such as these suggest that the area has managed to ‘absorb’ the economic shock caused by the closure of the steelworks. However, there is concern about the quality and sustainability of the employment that workers have moved into, in particular some of the self-employment start-ups as someone associated with the task force told me:

I’m not sure how long some of this will last, there are only so many burger vans which you can have in one area.

The impact of the decline and closure of large industries can of course be monitored and expressed in economic terms and figures can be pointed to, but they only tell part of the story. Teesside is undoubtedly still an important industrial area, in particular in the field of petrochemical production.

Official figures from NOMIS (2015) show that the area has higher than average employment in manufacturing, 9.3% of the labour force as compared to the UK average of 8.3%, but surprisingly it is less than the 11% for the North East in general.

But figures do not tell the human story; yes, successful industries still exist, but they do not provide employment on anything like the scale that they once did. In October 2016 I went on a tour of the Wilton International chemical and processing site, which had been organised by SABIC chemicals. Anyone who was interested could go along as long as they signed up in advance. There were several writers, reporters and photographers, as well as former employees from the site. Our tour guide told us about the plants, which looked impressive in the night sky. He announced that around 1500 workers currently worked on the site, at which point a gentleman in the tour party remarked:

when I started work here at ICI there were 19,000 workers on this site.

What is clear is that whilst there is emotional attachment to industries such as steel and chemicals, what their passing or reinvention represents

Introduction

6

to many people is the loss of something—the loss of the security and certainty of work that existed for many and has disappeared within less than a lifetime.

This was also expressed by Keith, a former ICI worker whom I spoke to on several occasions in the course of the research. This quote from him illustrates a great deal:

I worked for ICI from when I left school until I was 52, my whole working life. I earnt a decent living, and really we were well looked after. You could buy a house and didn’t have to worry about booking holidays in advance, you knew you’d be able to pay for it. What have kids got today? My son still lives with us and he works in Sainsbury’s, lots of his mates are on zero hour contracts. There are only so many retail parks and cafes you can open; it seems the only people with any money to spend are people like us. The whole area is living on the pensions of people like me who worked for ICI or British Steel.

Why Teesside?

The idea for this book began during a research project attempting to assess the impact of ‘austerity’-driven, neoliberal policies, welfare reform and spending cuts upon the borough of Stockton-on-Tees. This area has high levels of inequality and the highest life expectancy inequality in England for both men and women.

In order to understand this, it is not only essential to understand the place as it is today, but the historic processes and forces that shaped it. In other words, it is necessary to understand the biography of the place. Stockton-on-Tees and the wider Teesside conurbation can be described as a post-industrial area. The term post-industrial, as Byrne (2005) has pointed out, does not necessarily mean that there is no longer any indus-try at all within an area; indeed within Teesside chemicals, steel, engineer-ing and manufacturing are still important contributors to the area. But what is different is the size and the scale of such industries. Crucially they no longer exist on the same scale, have the same significance or require the amount of labour they once did. In the past, the area was thought to be significantly different to the rest of the North East region. Hudson,

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Beynon and Sadler as recently as 1994 argued that the area was “in the North East but not of the North East”. However, it can now be argued that it has more in common with the wider region. Within the North East, industry and manufacturing survive and are still major players within the local economy; for example, Nissan on Wearside. But the hey-day of the ‘carborniferous capitalism’ that established the shape of and dominated Tyneside, Wearside and Durham via a complex web of coal, steel, heavy engineering and shipbuilding has of course long since passed.

Teesside’s story is similar but its trajectory changed during the early twen-tieth century with the development of the chemical industry and steelmak-ing, both of which expanded until the late 1970s. These industries, although much diminished in terms of their output and workforces, still retain a powerful visual presence and exercise a strong emotional grip. The legacies of the industries that dominated both Stockton-on- Tees and the wider Teesside area for the majority of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continue to contribute both directly and indirectly to the issues faced by the area today. Consequently, the area’s past still shapes its future and influences the ways in which that future is conceived and envisioned. Industries change—they develop, adapt and sometimes disappear altogether; however, it is clear that the ways of life—attitudes, practices and expectations—that they helped to establish do not, they remain, in the shape of “industrial structures of feeling” (Williams 1973). For good or ill, they persist and that persistence is significant. Being ‘post- industrial’ is not just a matter of eco-nomic change, it is one of social and cultural transformation. This book will try to understand the ongoing transition and the tensions between what Williams termed the “residual” and “emergent” cultures.

At the heart of this book are two key questions:

Firstly, what are the legacies of the area’s industrial past?Secondly, how do those legacies contribute to its present situation and its

future prospects?

I have tried to answer these questions using archive material, in-depth interviews and visually-based focus groups. In these groups participants were given an outline of the project, then asked to look at around 50 photographs of the region portraying industry, industrial work, and the

Introduction

8

industrial and post-industrial landscape and then comment upon them. In depth interviews took place with key stakeholders including: those who worked/are still working in traditional industries; local employers, training providers and trade unions; local government and related devel-opment agencies; community workers and community representatives; campaigning organisations in the local area; academics and commenta-tors with an interest in the area.

Teesside and me

This book uses the idea of biography as one of its central themes and it has made me reflect on my relationship with Teesside. I am not from Teesside or even the North East, I come from the South London suburbs. It was my Dad who first made me aware of a place called Teesside. My Dad worked in engineering, he was in sales and project management, and when I was a kid he worked for various large engineering companies like William Press and Balfour Beatty. Dad was always off somewhere to a meeting in one of many company Ford Cortinas (or in later years Sierras). I would often ask Dad where he was going before he went to work or if he had left early when he came home, the answer would usually be ‘the office’ (Sidcup in the South London/Kent Hinterland), but often it would be Teesside, quite a round trip in a day, around 500 miles and in the late 1970s and early 1980s before the M25 opened this involved crossing London. Something which was all too common I suppose in the days before mobile phones, email, the internet or skype. I believe that when Dad said Teesside what he really meant was ICI. Balfour Beatty were involved with numerous projects at both the Billingham and Wilton sites that involved putting in boilers and turbines for the sites’ power stations. Of course, it was around this time that ICI was at its zenith, approaching the point in 1985 where it would be the first British company to make over £1 billion profit in a financial year. But it was some years before Teesside became more than just a name of somewhere my Dad went to work. As a sixth form student in the late 1980s exchange trips were com-mon, usually with France or Germany for those studying languages. However, our Government and Politics teachers came up with something

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rather different. The idea of a North–South divide had come to promi-nence and was becoming the hot political topic of the day, largely a con-sequence of the savage and sudden de-industrialisation that had been accelerated by the Thatcher government’s abandonment of the ‘post-war consensus’ and its haste to embrace what was then called ‘free market economics’, and what we now call the Neoliberal project. The discussion of this divide had become a key feature of political discourse; what’s more it was not a divide that looked likely to disappear in the summer of 1987. The Conservatives had just been returned to power with a third consecu-tive general election victory. Neil Kinnock’s rebranded and ‘Militant free’ Labour party with its new red rose logo had failed to make an impression. It was against this backdrop that me and my fellow students were offered the opportunity to go on an exchange trip to ‘the North’. What became known as the ‘Northern exchange’ was made possible by one of our teach-ers, who had a good friend who was working at Billingham Sixth Form College. The idea was that we would travel to Teesside, stay with our hosts in their homes, and attend college with them before they came ‘down South’ to do the same with us. Additionally, there would be trips to see local places of interest and industries. The idea proved popular; after all, it meant a trip with our mates to a new place, even if the motives of some were questioned by the teachers. One friend who had moved from Huddersfield a couple of years before was asked: “Why do you want to go on a northern exchange?? You’re from the North!”.

So in early July 1987 we piled into the school minibus and set off on the long journey to Teesside. The skyline that became visible as we approached from the south after what seemed like many hours in a small minibus made an immediate and lasting impression on me; coming over the Tees flyover, ICI Billingham was like nothing I had ever seen before. Over the next week we saw a lot of the region. The girl I stayed with lived in Hartburn, her parents were both school teachers. She had an older boyfriend who drove a Ford Capri, which took us on tours of pubs around Hartburn, Eaglescliffe and Yarm, and even across the North York Moors to Scarborough. My friends were dispersed for the week across Teesside, in Billingham, Stockton and Middlesbrough, but we were all brought together at Billingham College. I can’t remember a great deal about the classes we had whilst there. However, many of us were very impressed by

Introduction

10

the fact the college offered a common room for smokers, whereas our own sixth form made us leave the premises to indulge our unhealthy but still in those days socially acceptable habit! The programme that had been organised was varied and we travelled across the region. We visited Beamish Museum and the recently opened Gateshead Metro Centre, then billed as Europe’s biggest indoor shopping centre and at the time a great novelty! The summer weather also meant a trip to Runswick Bay on the North Yorkshire coast, with some foolhardy souls braving a swim in the North Sea. The parts of the week that made the biggest impression on me were the visits we made to industrial sites on Teesside; I was impressed by the scale of it all and how close it was to both town and country. A drive out to Seal Sands showed us the oil refinery, but also we saw grey seals on the shoreline too. We crossed the Transporter Bridge, in those days painted green and more of a relic from the past than the Teesside icon it has since become. The highlight of the week as far as I was concerned was tour of British Steel at Redcar. After an introductory briefing and explanation about the steelmaking process we were driven round the site and up toward the blast furnace. The furnace was being tapped with molten steel running into vessels to be taken away; even from a distance this was an impressive sight. We got much closer to red hot steel at Lackenby beam mill, where after donning hard hats we watched as steel ingots were rolled and processed into beams. Standing on the gantries above the track we could feel the heat from the beams passing below us. I remember thinking how modern it all was as we talked to the guy in the control room who adjusted and monitored the process as the red hot steel moved along the rollers. Nearly 30 years on, despite all the changes to industry on Teesside, the beam mill remains and my interest in the industries that built the region, their remains, their legacies and their potential futures endures.

The Structure of This Book

Chapter 2: Understanding Biographies of Place. Industrial Teesside

This chapter begins by explaining the methodological approach used in the book, the theoretical concepts around ideas of de-industrialisation

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and post-industrialism and why Teesside is a good place to examine these ideas. It then goes on to outline the idea of ‘biography of place’, which underpins the book.

Chapter 3: Industrial Teesside’s Biography

The industrial revolution began in Britain, and the North East was the first true industrial region. Teesside was part of the industrial age from day one. The Stockton to Darlington railway provided the model for a transport revolution. Engineering, rail and the movement of coal from the inland coalfields to the sea provided the spur to the region’s industrial take off. Middlesbrough’s access to iron ore in the Cleveland hills saw the town rapidly rise to become ‘Ironopolis’, a major centre of iron and steel production. In the twentieth century iron and steel were joined by the chemical industry with ICI’s huge plants at Billingham and Wilton. This chapter outlines the region’s rise in the nineteenth century, its develop-ment and its decline since the 1970s.

Chapter 4: Exploring Teesside’s Visual Legacies

This chapter outlines and reflects upon the discussions and themes that emerged in the visual focus groups that were conducted between September and December 2016. The composition of the groups and the method that was followed are explained, as well as the nature of the pho-tographs that were used as visual prompts. Finally, the responses the groups had to the photographs, the comments they made are discussed and the themes which emerged across the events explored.

Chapter 5: Changing Industry, Transforming Lives: Social and Cultural Legacies

This chapter explores the idea that when work changes, then so does wider society. It does this through in-depth interviews that examine the lives and experiences of individuals who have lived and worked through the changes Teesside has undergone since the 1970s. The topics covered include atti-

Introduction

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tudes to work, work and status, job security and whether people believe their working lives are better or worse than they once were. It also explores further the themes that emerged from the visual focus groups and attempts to make sense of the relationship between the past the present.

Chapter 6: Two Teessides?—A Legacy of Inequalities

Teesside is a place of contrasts; it is profoundly unequal. In Stockton on Tees male life expectancy at birth varies by 17 and a half years, female life expectancy by 11 and half years between the most deprived and least deprived parts of the town, the largest health gap in England. This pat-tern is similar across the wider Teesside region. The poorest places are as deprived as any within England the richest as affluent as any within England. This chapter examines the economic and social inequalities on Teesside, asks how the industrial past contributed to them, and whether current national social policies and local initiatives are likely to have an impact upon them.

Chapter 7: Conclusion: Place, People and the Post-industrial

This concluding chapter revisits the discussions of the earlier chapters and assesses how an understanding of the area’s industrial past might be of benefit to the area; those trying to shape its future and what that future may look like. Furthermore it asks what the implications for policy may be and what further challenges will be presented by Brexit.

References

Beynon, H., Hudson, R., & Sadler, D. (1994). A place called Teesside: A locality in a global economy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Byrne, D. S. (2005). The nature of post-industrialism- South Tyneside in the twenty-first century. Northern Economic Review, 36, 1–14.

Emergency Debate on Redcar Steel. (2015, September 16) Hansard

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Hansard. (2015, September 17). UK steel industry debate. Vol. 599. Retrieved from https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2015-09-17/debates/ 15091732000002/UKSteelIndustry

The Guardian. (2015, September 28). Redcar steel plant to close with 1,700 job Losses-Sean Farrell and Dominic Smith. Retrieved from https://www.theguard-ian.com/business/2015/sep/28/redcar-steel-plant-to-close-with-1700-job-losses

Heseltine, M. (2016). Tees valley: Opportunity unlimited-An independent report. London: Department for Communities and Local Government.

Nomis Employee Jobs. (2015). Tees Valley ONS Business Register and Employment Survey: Open access. Available at  https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/

SSI Task Force: One Year On Report September. (2016). SSI Task Force: Redcar & Cleveland Borough Council available at http://www.redcar-cleveland.gov.uk/taskforce

The Teesside Gazette. (2015, September 29). Save our Steelmakers.Williams, R. (1973). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. In

M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 130–143). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Introduction

15© The Author(s) 2018J. Warren, Industrial Teesside, Lives and Legacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64540-7_2

2Understanding Biographies of Place:

Industrial Teesside

This chapter begins by making some key points about Teesside’s history, industry, development and its economy. It then moves on to explain the sampling strategies and the reasoning behind the use of interviews and visual focus groups as the research methods that were used during the project. Moving on, the theoretical ideas of de-industrialisation, post- industrialism and globalisation are introduced and discussed. Next a discussion of the closure of Redcar steelworks in 2015 provides a case study to illustrate the effects and consequences of globalisation. Finally, the chap-ter outlines the idea of ‘biography of place’, which underpins the book.

Teesside provides a sociologist like me with a case study about one of the central concerns of the discipline. Specifically, the issue of how industrialisation happened/happens, the mechanisms that drive it, and the connection between industrial and social change. Or put another way, how when the way we work changes, our way of life changes too. In fact, the founding of what became the Teesside conurbation also occurred around the time that the social sciences were emerging. The rapid indus-trial and social change that characterised the industrial revolution was dramatically showcased here. All of the settlements that came to make up Teesside existed in some form prior to the mid-nineteenth century, and some, like Stockton-upon-Tees, had importance as a market town

16

with a history extending back into the middle ages. However, all that changed from the early to the mid-nineteenth century.

The area that became Teesside experienced very rapid take off and indus-trial development from a primarily agricultural area made up of market towns to an industrial powerhouse in just a few decades. In particular, the journey of industrial development that took Middlesbrough from a very small settlement to the booming centre of the iron industry in just 30 years, and which William Gladstone on his visit to Middleborough in 1862 famously described as an ‘infant Hercules’, was truly remarkable. Nor did the area’s development stop with iron, steel, ships and railways. The area can also be said to have participated in a second industrial revolution in the early twentieth century, with the development of a petrochemical industry. Although pioneers like the Eaglescliffe chemical company were producing sulphuric acid in the nineteenth century, the establishment by Brunner and Mond of the Billingham Chemical Complex to produce synthetic ammo-nia in the wake of the First World War provided a massive boost to Teesside’s industrial output, causing large-scale urban development, and further transformed the North Bank of the Tees. The company evolved into ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), whose Teesside operations at Billingham, Wilton and North Tees would become the biggest concentration of chemi-cal plants in the world. The young Aldous Huxley featured the Billingham nitrate plant in his vivid vision of the future ‘Brave New World’, a place that he had worked in as a young chemist. Thus by the outbreak of the second world war, Teesside was firmly established as an industrial centre and one that would be essential to the nation’s wartime economy and beyond.

This place could be seen as an extreme case, as it rose so rapidly from virtu-ally nothing, it’s like someone lit the touch paper and off it went and of course it has declined relatively quickly too. (Rob MacDonald, Professor of Sociology Teesside University)

Locating Teesside

Teesside is hard to define, its definition varies and changes. There is no town called Teesside, it was and remains to a great extent geographical and political shorthand for a conurbation of towns that have certain

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things in common, the most obvious one being a geographical proximity to the river Tees and its estuary.

Teesside is arguably more visible the further away you are from it, road signs 50 miles away direct you to Teesside but as you approach the con-urbation the road signs change, directing you to the area’s constituent parts; there is no Teesside town centre. Furthermore, people don’t tend to describe themselves as being from Teesside, instead they will tell you they are from one of the towns that make up the conurbation like Middlesbrough, Stockton or Redcar, or more often the suburbs of those towns like Southbank, Thornaby, Dormanstown or Billingham, and then often mention the sub-district or estate they live in.

The research for this book has been concentrated within the geograph-ical boundaries of what between 1968 and 1974 was the County Borough of Teesside (Fig. 2.1). This encompassed Billingham, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, Eston, Redcar and Saltburn and Marske, but there has also had some valuable input from Hartlepool too. This has been due to the fact that it was these areas that were dominated by the steel, heavy

Fig. 2.1 A map of Teesside based on the 1968 County Borough boundaries

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engineering and chemical industries throughout the greater part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is these communities that have been most affected by de-industrialisation since the 1970s, and also where these industries in a modified form still exist. The question of whether de-industrialisation has fundamentally meant the end of a way of living and a transition to a new form of society, one which can be said to be post-industrial, is a difficult one, but I would strongly argue that this place, precisely due to its rapid industrialisation and its subsequent decline since the 1970s, makes it an appropriate, if not ideal, place to ask such questions.

The Economy of the Tees Valley Today

The two tables below produced by NOMIS using data collected by the ONS Business Register and Employment Survey show the amount of employment and the types of industries in which those jobs exist within the Tees Valley. Tees Valley consists of five Local Authorities. Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, Stockton-on-Tees, Hartlepool and Darlington. Traditionally Teesside was seen as consisting of four of these areas, and excluded Darlington. The figures show that the area has lower rates of full-time employment (66.7%) than the North East (67.8%) and the rest of Great Britain (69.1%). Part-time employment is more common (33.3%) in Tees Valley in comparison to the wider North East (32.2%) and nationally (30.9%). But it is the nature of the types of employment that is revealing. Manufacturing employment in the Tees Valley now only accounts for 25,000 jobs (9.3%), whilst this is higher than the figure for Great Britain as a whole (8.3%), it is lower than the

Table 2.1 Employee jobs (2015)

Tees Valley (no. of employee jobs)

Tees Valley (%)

North East (%)

Great Britain (%)

Total employee jobs 270,000 – – –Full-Time 180,000 66.7 67.8 69.1Part-Time 90,000 33.3 32.2 30.9

Source: ONS Business Register and Employment Survey: open access

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North East figure (11%). This is a far cry from what was the case in 1975; figures quoted by Beynon et al. (1994: 104) show that the then county of Cleveland (which covered Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, Stockton-on-Tees and Hartlepool) had 105,500 workers employed in manufacturing—43% of all employment. This gives a sense of the scale of transformation that industry and employment in the region have undergone in the past 40 years.

Table 2.2 Employee jobs by industry (2015)

Tees Valley (no. of employee jobs)

Tees Valley (%)

North East (%)

Great Britain (%)

Mining and Quarrying 1250 0.5 0.2 0.2Manufacturing 25,000 9.3 11.0 8.3Electricity, Gas, Steam and Air

Conditioning Supply900 0.3 0.4 0.4

Water Supply; Sewerage, Waste Management and Remediation Activities

2000 0.7 0.6 0.7

Construction 14,000 5.2 4.8 4.6Wholesale and Retail Trade; Repair of

Motor Vehicles and Motorcycles38,000 14.1 14.0 15.8

Transportation and Storage 13,000 4.8 4.0 4.7Accommodation and Food Service

Activities17,000 6.3 7.3 7.2

Information and Communication 7000 2.6 3.1 4.2Financial and Insurance Activities 6000 2.2 2.2 3.6Real-estate activities 3500 1.3 1.5 1.7Professional, Scientific and Technical

Activities23,000 8.5 6.6 8.4

Administrative and Support Service Activities

18,000 6.7 7.3 8.9

Public Administration and Defence; Compulsory Social Security

13,000 4.8 6.3 4.4

Education 32,000 11.9 11.0 9.2Human Health and Social Work

Activities47,000 17.4 15.7 13.3

Arts, Entertainment and Recreation 6000 2.2 2.2 2.4Other service activities 4000 1.5 1.9 2.0

Source: ONS Business Register and Employment Survey: open access

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About my approach

I was anxious that the research for this book would capture something about Teesside’s industrial past and reflect upon how that past has shaped the region’s current situation and possible future trajectories. I was also very aware that whilst the industrial landscape has remained visible within the area, the people who worked within the area’s dominant industries of petrochemicals, steel and heavy engineering and spent the whole or the majority of their working lives within those industries are not getting any younger. As the North East’s industrial landscape has disappeared in the past few decades, it has been taken for granted that the memories of those industries will endure through those who worked within them. This is no longer the case, people are getting older and this important resource of experience and memory is getting smaller with each passing year. Therefore, I was keen to speak to a wide cross-section of individuals with direct experience of industrial work, to listen to their stories, explore their experiences, and hear what their thoughts on Teesside and its future were. However, industrial workers were not the only group that I wished to talk to; I also wanted to speak to those in local government, local develop-ment agencies, trade unions, local members of parliament, those running local businesses, academic commentators and students studying at Teesside University. My approach then used two approaches in order to find participants, theoretical sampling and snowball sampling.

Sampling Strategies

Theoretical sampling is a strategy that is associated with the methodologi-cal approach of grounded theory a more general methodological approach, which was pioneered by Glaser and Strauss. They describe it thus:

theoretical sampling is the process of data collection for generating theory whereby the analyst jointly collects, codes, and analyses his data and decides what data to collect next and where to find them, in order to develop his theory as it emerges. This process of data collection is controlled by the emerging theory…. The initial decisions for theoretical collection of data

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are based only on a general sociological perspective and on a general subject or problem area. (Glaser and Strauss 1967: 58)

Theoretical sampling allowed me to focus on particular instances, i.e. diversity within the relatively small amount of cases that I had the resources to examine. Although I was keen to examine as many different instances as I could, it was unlikely that I would be able to achieve what Glaser and Strauss term ‘theoretical saturation’. Theoretical saturation is said to occur when all possible ‘instances’ have been investigated. As Teddlie and Tashakkori (2009) explain, the accumulation of instances is at the heart of a theoretical sampling strategy:

with theoretical sampling the researcher examines particular instances of the phenomenon of interest so that he or she can define and elaborate on its various manifestations. (Teddlie and Tashakkori 2009: 177)

Saturation was not something that I thought was possible given the resources at my disposal. Additionally, the nature of my research meant that it was going to generate further sets of questions rather than produce a comprehensive set of answers. However, I did manage to cover a good range of instances. It is also important to remember, as Bryman (2001) points out, that:

Theoretical sampling refers to the sampling, not just of people, but also of settings and events. (Bryman 2001: 305)

Consequently, the decision to use not only interviews but also visually driven focus groups allowed a wider set of instances to be covered. The additional part of the sampling strategy used the highly practical strategy snowball sampling technique. The basic premise of a snowball sampling approach is that it is a non-probability sampling scheme in which you begin by sampling one person, then ask that person for the names of other people you might interview, then interview them and obtain a list of people from them, and so on. The idea has been used extensively in research since the 1950s onwards, and was outlined in detail by Goodman (1961). This proved invaluable in making new contacts, it also allowed

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me to establish my credentials with potential new participants as I could introduce myself on the basis that someone already known to them had already spoken to me and recommended them. Furthermore, in a num-ber of instances participants had already spoken to those whom they had recommended and were expecting a call or approach from me.

The semi-structured interviews

As already explained, a large part of the research consisted of undertak-ing semi-structured interviews and analysing the results. It is worth dis-cussing some of the general features of using interviewing as a methodological approach. May (1993), when attempting to define the nature of interviews, cites Ackroyd and Hughes (1981), who argue that interviews are:

encounters between a researcher and a respondent in which the latter is asked a series of questions relevant to the subject of the research. The respondents’ answers constitute the raw data analysed at a later point in time by the researcher. (Ackroyd and Hughes 1981, cited in May 1993: 91)

Many methodological discussions of interviews, e.g. Bryman (2001), May (1993) and Denscombe (1998), emphasise the considerable amount of resources, particularly in terms of time, which interviews require, and also raise questions about the reliability of the data collected through them. I would argue that whilst these points may serve as useful contrasts and points of debate when attempting to differentiate interviewing from quantitative methods, they are of little relevance here.

Firstly, interviews should not be seen as time-consuming; they were without exception for me time well spent and were always thought- provoking. Issues regarding reliability were also outweighed by the high validity of the data produced and, in addition, rendered largely irrelevant by the adoption of a theoretical sampling strategy. More pertinent to me are points that Denscombe (1998) makes about the nature of the inter-view interaction/process itself. He points out that interviews are not con-versations, an obvious point perhaps, but one often overlooked. He

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argues that there are three key assumptions at work: firstly, they involve the consent of the respondents; secondly, responses are ‘on the record and for the record’; thirdly, the researcher sets the agenda. These points remind the researcher to consider the dynamics and power issues that go on during interviews and be mindful of them. I am, luckily, an experi-enced interviewer, and was prior to starting this research project. However, I needed to remember that my participants were not usually experienced research participants, and needed to be guided and helped through the process. This, however, involved walking a fine line. I had to take respon-sibility for the process and manage it, but I had to do so without assum-ing too much, or coming across as bossy or authoritarian, thus intimidating the subject. This was very important as I was aware of how little I knew in comparison to my respondents. Interviews need to be an arena within which knowledge can be discussed and exchanged. As such, I am rather uncomfortable with the traditional terms ‘researcher’ and ‘respondent’ as it suggests a one-way flow of information, rather than an active two-way exchange of ideas. Throughout my fieldwork I tried to create a situation whereby the interviewees and I could both play out our roles within the interview process.

Bateson (1984) argues that research is an interactive process within which all the particular participants have particular roles. His points are made in relation to social surveys, but I would argue the points he makes hold good for the interaction in qualitative processes also:

I conceive of a social survey as a social system consisting of three partici-pants (client, researcher and informant ….) engaged in common task: the production of knowledge. To understand the data construction process and its problems one must understand the respective roles and functions of these three participants and their mode of interaction. (Bateson 1984: 8)

If Bateson’s ideas are taken on board, it is possible to understand what was going on in this process and to appreciate the interviews in the fullest sense possible. All of the participants had more experience of living and working on Teesside than I did. They were my window into the place, and by talking to them I encountered more facets of the place than I could have done by direct observation. Within the interviews I tried to

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facilitate as best as possible the conditions where the participants could recall, examine and discuss their views. I had only two questions which served to start the conversation, they were:

1. What do you think the legacy of Teesside’s industrial past is? 2. How do you think that legacy shapes Teesside’s future?

Once we had begun talking, conversation progressed to wherever the participants wanted to go. The interviews varied in length, the shortest was around 25 min, the longest in the region of 100 min. Some too were conducted face-to-face, whilst others were conducted over the telephone.

I would argue that Bateson’s framework is a helpful way to understand how I tried to conduct these interviews, and it demonstrates how the research process in terms of data collection was to a great degree a collabora-tive one. My task was that of gathering and collating the insights of numer-ous individuals who all had different stories, perceptions and opinions. The research could not have been undertaken on the basis that the researcher is in someway further up the ‘hierarchy of knowledge’ than anyone else.

Visual Methods

In addition to using the approaches and techniques outlined above, I was also keen to attempt to use the photo elicitation method (Harper 1998). Harper argues that this method reverses the usual roles in the research process because the researcher in presenting an image to a group for interpretation:

suddenly confronts the realization that she or he knows little or nothing about the cultural information contained in the image. As the individual pictured (or the individual from the pictured world) interprets the image, a dialogue is created in which the typical research roles are reversed. The researcher becomes a listener and one who encourages dialogue to con-tinue. (Harper 1998: 28)

To be honest, this strategy was driven by my own interest in photogra-phy, and it’s potential as a research tool to enable to establish a dialogue

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between all participants in the research process. I had also been involved with a small-scale pilot study that had attempted to engage with young people at a number of youth groups on Tyneside and explore their hopes for the future through the use of photo diaries, which the participants then presented as the basis for discussion groups. This was partially suc-cessful, but many of the participants surprised us by presenting albums of life events rather than photo diaries, which led to a very wide scope for the discussions, and a tendency for each participant to present to the researchers, which in turn meant discussions were not as focused as they could have been. For this project I therefore decided that each group would be presented with the same set of images for discussion, allowing some kind of meaningful comparison to be made about each group’s reactions, based upon the composition of that group. I feel that the use of photographs in this method makes it a more democratic process, with the participants setting the agenda to a greater degree, i.e. the researcher has to listen, observe and interpret the reactions and comments of the participants.

So photographs of both the past and the present for me are useful as a ‘jumping off’ point, they provoke questions about the places and practices they portray, the times in which they were captured and the lived experi-ences of those who inhabit those scenes. I was not concerned with under-taking in-depth analysis of photographs themselves, I was instead more interested in analysing the responses that they might provoke, and the stories, reflections and opinions that might then follow. As such I was con-cerned primarily with photographs as part of the research process rather than as things in themselves, as Knowles and Sweetman (2004) explain:

we are concerned here with visual methods and the use of visual material in the research process: with the conceptual and analytic possibilities of visual methods rather than the status of the visual image itself. (Knowles and Sweetman 2004: 6)

I thought that using this method of research would be both interesting and potentially enlightening for a number of reasons. Firstly, this method provided a contrast to the semi-structured interviewing that I pursued with the majority of my participants who took part in the research for this

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book. Secondly, Teesside is visually still an industrial place, Whilst the petrochemical and steel industries employ a fraction of the people that they once did, unlike most of the region, and indeed the country, industry is not just something that happens in another place, or something that happened in another time. Taking this as a starting point I reasoned that individuals would be able to respond to images of the industrial past, either via their own experiences or those of their families and friends. This process is about how individuals conceive of the social world around them, what Albrow (1997) terms the ‘socioscape’. The notion of the ‘socioscape’ allows the context of places, communities and the trajectories of individuals to meet and interface. Rossi (2007) summarises the ‘socioscape’ as:

the lived experience of all social relations in a locality … the local intersec-tion of sociospheres the latter consisting of the wider relations of the occu-pants of the socioscape. (Rossi 2007: 418)

However, I was also aware that in order for this method to be success-ful it would be important to try and avoid what Strangleman (2013) has discussed as “smokestack nostalgia” and “ruin porn”. He importantly notes how researchers must be:

alive to the ways in which geography, history, work, and workers interact to produce norms, values, cultures and social life. (2013: 35)

I was also careful not to try and impose other templates upon both the selection of images and the reactions that I anticipated from the partici-pants. This was, however, an ongoing reflexivity issue as I was very aware that my part in the research process was to provide a method, set param-eters and facilitate discussion and data collection.

This method was successfully used by Byrne and Doyle (2004) in their study of the end of the coal mining industry in and around South Shields, a town at the mouth of the Tyne in the North East. I was fortunate to be able to speak to both of the authors about their experience of using this method, and this reassured me that the focus groups were feasible and would also prove a useful source of material. In their account of their research, Byrne and Doyle explain how the method worked for them.

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people do not think about what they are doing while life runs on in the usual way, when things change they are forced to reflect on their own par-ticular place in the world. They are forced to reflect upon the place of col-lectives of people to which they have belonged in the past, and to which they may still belong in the present and future. This reflection can be seen in its social context as well as an individual act. In other words, people reflect on issues of identity in conversation with others about this identity. Our method was based upon getting people talking about change. The images expressed what had been and what is. They indicated change. (2004: 171)

This it seemed, was what I wished to achieve with my visual focus groups.

De-industrialisation

Ideas about de-industrialisation have been widely discussed amongst social scientists since the 1970s and the nature of the process is a con-tested one. However, it is safe to say that its key concern centres around the long-term decline in the output of manufactured goods or in employment in the manufacturing sector, the movement of jobs and capital, and the impact this has on communities and localities. For exam-ple, see Bluestone and Harrison (1982). There is also an overlap between the debates about de-industrialisation and the idea of shift towards a post- industrial society. Another way to frame it might be to say that de- industrialisation has been primarily concerned with the decline of manu-facturing industry and employment in it, whilst post-industrial theory has attempted to interpret what it might mean. De-industrialisation has also disputed post-industrial ideas, for example Bell (1974) saw the decline of blue collar jobs and the increase of white collar work as being evidence of the arrival of a post-industrial society. While the decrease in the absolute numbers of workers in the manufacturing sector in Britain has clearly occurred over the last four decades from an absolute peak in the mid-1960s, this does not mean that industries have simply ceased to exist; many are able, due to technological innovation, to produce goods more competitively and with greatly reduced workforces. Others, rather

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than disappear, have sought lower costs and higher productivity by relo-cating to off-shore locations. Consequently, globalisation is also a factor within de-industrialisation.

De-industrialisation in the UK has been a rapid process. The peak of manufacturing employment did not occur in some distant decade in the nineteenth century, it occurred in the 1960s.

Back in 1966, when manufacturing employment peaked, 8.9 million worked in manufacturing and a further 500,000 in the coal industry. This compares with just 2.9 million employed in manufacturing in 2016, and none at all in the coal industry except at a handful of opencast sites and tiny drift mines. The shift from manufacturing to service sector employ-ment is a phenomenon shared by other advance economies, rooted in dif-ferential rates of productivity growth and accentuated by globalisation and the rise of China, in particular, as a competitor. But in Britain the process of deindustrialisation has gone further and faster than just about anywhere else. (Beatty and Fothergill 2016: 4)

The UK’s experience has been further exacerbated by neo-liberal gov-ernments since the late 1970s who did very little to mitigate the effects of de-industrialisation, seeing it as a process that was unstoppable, and many also believed it to be necessary. The point to note is that the effects of de-industrialisation, whilst they have been experienced across Britain’s economy as a whole, have been felt the most in particular places. Beatty and Fothergill (2016) argue that:

industrial job losses were concentrated in specific parts of the country—mostly but not exclusively in ‘older industrial Britain’. Towns and cities in the North of England, and to a lesser extent in the Midlands, were espe-cially badly hit. The west of Scotland around Glasgow, and South Wales were similarly affected. In many cases the economic base of whole com-munities was destroyed. By contrast, London escaped relatively lightly and so did most of its vast hinterland in the South and East of England. (Beatty and Fothergill 2016: 4)

One of those places in ‘older industrial Britain’ was Teesside. The decline of employment in steel and chemical production on Teesside was as dramatic as anywhere, as Fig. 2.2 below shows.

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The question that arises in the wake of this kind of very dramatic and sudden change is what does it do to a society? Does it mean that a funda-mental shift occurs, changing the nature of that society permanently?

The Idea of a Post-industrial society

As a student I was taught how the pioneers of the discipline searched for the logic of history, unlocking the secrets of why economic and social change happened in certain places and not in others. This debate has become embedded within the social sciences. The question of changes to work and how to interpret them is one that has been with us through-out the modern era. Changing patterns of industry and work hold a cen-tral place within the social sciences. The decline of feudalism and the rise of large-scale industrial production organised around what became known as ‘the factory system’, and its consequent impact on social life, lay at the heart of the ‘Founding Fathers’ work. Marx, Weber and Durkheim all sought to explain: the coming of industrial society its

Fig. 2.2 The decline of employment in steel and chemicals on Teesside 1965–2010. Reproduced from Evenhuis (2016)

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meaning and its consequences. Importantly all of them speculated as to its future development, and what this might mean for the those who would live in the next phase of society. All produced different visions of the future, which in many ways reflected and reinforced their analytical schemas for understanding their present.

Whilst Karl Marx abhorred the inequities that industrial capitalism bred, he was confident that the future might allow the liberation of human creativity, now that industry promised the ‘conquest of neces-sity’. Conversely, Max Weber was pessimistic about the future, fearing the destruction of individuality by the increasing dominance of ‘legal rational bureaucracy’, which, by the end of his lifetime, was firmly estab-lished as industrial capitalism’s operating system. Emile Durkheim, meanwhile, was concerned that whilst the new division of labour offered freedom from the rigid norms and values of the declining ‘mechanistic societies’, the lack of norms offered by the ‘organic’ social order also offered the prospect of a ‘pathological’ society and ‘anomie’ for human-ity. However, what they all shared was a central concern with social evo-lution. They also felt able to make grand universal predictions about ‘the shape of things to come’. Importantly, all the writers of the classical age saw work as important and central to explaining the rapidly changing world about them.

Why are the above comments important to anyone studying work in the early twenty-first century? Well, as Krishan Kumar (1978, 1995) has outlined, the work of the nineteenth century sociologists was about defining the character and parameters of industrial society. Thus the debate about whether we are now living in a fundamentally different form of society, one that is post-industrial, has always taken as its base-line and constant backdrop the work of sociology’s classical age. Post-industrial theory can be argued to have begun in the works of the nineteenth century. However, it is more commonly traced to the specula-tive theories or futurologies that emerged in the USA in the 1950s and rapidly spread to Europe. The post-industrial theorists such as Daniel Bell, Alain Torainne, Alvin Toffler, Rudolph Bahro and Andre Gorz, to name but a few of the protagonists in this debate, had very different ideas and views about the changing nature of industrial societies, but all shared

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a common basic assumption that a transformation was occurring, a transformation which would

eventually produce societies as different from the classically conceived indus-trial societies as those of the earlier agrarian societies. (Kumar 1978: 191)

Kumar points out that post-industrial theory of all varieties has several common themes. Firstly, an assumption that industrialism was/is in cri-sis. This has been elaborated in themes such as ‘limits to growth’ and environmentalist post-industrialism, e.g. Gorz (1980) and Bahro (1984). Secondly, the theme of de-industrialisation is at the heart of post- industrial theory. De-industrialisation refers broadly to the debate about the changing nature of the productive process and what it produces. To put it crudely, industrialism is seen as synonymous with the mass produc-tion of manufactured goods in factory settings. Also, this activity and its associated sub-processes, for instance coal mining (as it produces raw materials in the form of fuel to power the productive process), are assumed to employ the majority of the labour force. Once manufacturing and related employment declines, as it has done in the G8 nation’s economies relative to other sectors over the past 40 years, it is argued that post- industrial society has arrived. This notion is central to the work of Daniel Bell (1974) and lies at the heart of the post-industrial agenda. The third strand that Kumar identifies is closely allied to the second. Changing pat-terns of work and employment are of concern to the post-industrial theo-rists as they have tended to constitute their evidence for arguing that things have changed. For instance, Bell (1974) argued that the apparent dramatic increase in non-manual, white-collar work in the USA during the 1950s and 1960s supported his argument.

For post-industrialists the future of these areas has been the subject of intense speculation. Gorz (1982) argued that de-industrialisation means the end of the class structure Marx identified. In particular, Gorz argues that the working class has lost its historic potential to act as a “class for itself ”. However, Gorz also envisaged the decline of manual labour as offering the opportunity for a widespread reappraisal about the role and value of wage labour in general in advanced societies. Post-industrial the-ory, therefore, can be seen as having a profound concern with the future,

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its shape, and identifying the key actors and the mechanisms which will take us there.

Kumar (1978) argues that this tendency for futurology within post- industrial theory can be attributed to several factors. Namely the per-ceived ‘crisis of industrialism’ that was unfolding during the 1960s, the widespread social change and conflict in the USA during the same period illustrated by the struggle for civil rights and the rise of the feminist movement and, finally, the technological advances of the period, which are best characterised by the space program. Kumar points out that faced with the need to explain large-scale social change, many looked to the existing theoretical base. This base was of course classical sociology:

futurology, in casting around for a suitable conceptualization of large scale societal change, found only the evolutionary schemes of the past to hand and adopted these for its own purposes. In doing so the futurologists have recommended the characteristic task and pattern of nineteenth century sociology. Basically their procedure has been very simple. They accept that the nineteenth century scheme in its strict form will no longer do. ‘Industrial Society’ as it has been understood hitherto cannot be taken as the fulfilment and the final end of social evolution. But all that has to be done is to add another stage to the sequence. The old story is given a new chapter with a different ending. (Kumar 1978: 191)

The significance of this is that it explains why post-industrial thinkers seek to highlight and focus upon ‘novelty’. There is an inbuilt propensity to overlook continuity with industrial society. Difference is sought, often to the detriment of more complex explanation. Change has to be big, qualitative and preferably traumatic. This schematic of historical epochs also requires clearly defined lines of transition. This allows societies to be placed neatly into them, and assigned general characteristics that can be used to qualify these judgments. In this respect post-industrialism is evo-lutionist in its approach to the world, in a similar sense to that of anthro-pology in the nineteenth century. It wishes to chart and explain societies according to their place in the hierarchy of development. What it tends to overlook is how those societies operate and the consequences for indi-vidual lives within them. There are also important differences at the global level of development, which the post-industrial thinkers of the

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1960s and 1970s did not fully consider. In an ongoing process, emerging industrial societies can be argued to be transforming from pre-industrial societies, whilst post-industrial societies are largely dependent upon other societies, to fulfil industrial society functions for them. Manufacturing has not diminished in its importance in terms of production and con-sumption for post-industrial societies, it has just been relocated. It can therefore be argued that the continued existence of industrial societies is a prerequisite for any post-industrial society. The acceleration of this pro-cess in the last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty- first centuries led to the post-industrial debate being redefined around the notions of globalisation and the information society.

Kumar (1995) argues that information theorists explain the impact of knowledge on the world of work in two ways: One is the upgrading of the knowledge content of existing work, in the sense that information technology adds to rather than subtracts from the skill of workers. The other is the creation and expansion of new work in the knowledge sector, such that information workers come to predominate in the economy Kumar (1995: 23).

If we assume that ‘information work’ equates to what was traditionally termed ‘white collar work’, we can trace this theme back to the post- industrial theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. Bell in ‘The coming of post- industrial society’ (1974) characterised the predominance of white collar work as central to a “post-industrial economy”. However, numbers can be misleading. Braverman (1974) argued that whilst ‘white collar work’ was becoming predominant, it was no longer what it once was, i.e. highly skilled and allowing the worker a high degree of autonomy. Instead, Braverman suggested that the ‘proletarianisation’ of white collar work was taking place, via the extension of ‘Taylorist’ management of the labour process from the shop floor to the back office. Braverman’s point is important as it suggests continuity with the labour process that domi-nated ‘industrial society’. It also shows why we should be wary of techno-logical determinism. Braverman focuses on the experience of workers and the management of the workplace; these are clearly in the realm of ‘action’. Therefore, if we are to examine the claims of information theo-rists such as Castells, their account of the labour process needs to be explored.

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Castells (1996) argues that the workers of the ‘network society’ fall into two broad categories. Firstly, the majority of the working population he terms “generic labour”. These workers have no specific information skills, nor do they appear to be contributing to the direct development or maintenance of the ‘network’. In ‘industrial’ terms they are unskilled or at best semi-skilled workers. Castells’ second category of workers are described as ‘informational producers’; Castells sees these workers as hav-ing a privileged position within the labour market as they are the pro-grammers and code writers that the network requires, a technocracy for want of a better term. These skills make them highly employable, and as such they are highly autonomous. Such arguments are not new. Byrne (2002) points out that this distinction looks very like the Leninist idea of the ‘Aristocracy of Labour’. Nor is such a division unique in post- industrial thought: Gorz (1982) divides the work force into what he terms the ‘traditional working class’ and the ‘neoproletariat’, which he also refers to as the ‘non-class of non-workers’. The former group is highly skilled, essential to the productive process and can derive their identity from their labour. They are, argues Gorz, an ever-decreasing minority. The latter are workers who, when and if they work, do so to fill particular, often time-limited, jobs. They lack security and they do not derive their identity from their labour. Both Gorz and Castells are discussing what Marx termed the ‘reserve army of labour’. This supply of workers is ready to replace existing labour and, as such, undermine the capacity for resis-tance amongst the existing work force. Again, it can be argued that if this analysis is correct, there are grounds for seeing these developments as having continuity with ‘industrialism’ rather than evidence of its ending.

Globalisation

The idea of globalisation is a powerful one and it is often cast as a pro-cess that has accelerated the drive towards de-industrialisation in Western societies. As such it is something that is a key component of the narrative of post-industrialism. Globalisation has of course become a mainstream term. It is used extensively in the media, who often use the

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term with no definition at all beyond a vague idea that it refers to some process that is happening ‘out there’ and is beyond our control. Academic notions and theories of globalisation generally offer a more sophisti-cated view. Whilst there is broad agreement that there is some signifi-cant degree of structural socioeconomic change occurring that merits the use of the term ‘globalisation’, the parameters and mechanisms by which it operates and its social consequences are disputed. For example, Robinson (2007) argues that there are no less than seven broad varieties of ‘globalisation’. But if we set aside the differences of opinion that exist over globalisation, few commentators, if any, would deny that some-thing is going on, and that it is something that social scientists should be attempting to comprehend. Many of the issues in the globalisation field overlap with the many other contexts. However, the boundaries of these contexts whether they are economic, historical or local are fluid and function primarily at a heuristic level. This is especially the case with technological issues. If we attempt to define the globalisation thesis at its most basic, Waters (1995) argues that globalisation is essentially concerned with:

greater connectedness and deteratorialization. (Waters 1995: 136)

The interconnectedness that Waters is describing is often viewed as occurring within the economic, the political and the cultural sphere. The other important, if somewhat clumsy term, Waters uses is ‘de- teratorialization’. This shows how globalisation is also geographical and bound up intimately with the notions of both space and place. One of the key components of the globalisation thesis is that place becomes less significant due to the overcoming of spatial division. Information tech-nology is often cited as the technological driver that makes this possible as it overcomes space effortlessly, rendering place irrelevant. This process is termed ‘time-space compression’ (Giddens 1990), i.e. communication can now take place as quickly between London and Tokyo as between next-door neighbours. However, the significance of this process needs to be questioned. Firstly, is it really the case that space and place have become irrelevant due to the speed of communication? Secondly, is this anything new? Hasn’t this process been going on for centuries?

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Globalisation can be argued to be an ongoing long-range process rather than something that has arrived in the last two decades. Indeed both Robertson (1992) and Arrighi (1994) argue that the globalising process in the sense of an expansion of trade over ever-larger distances can be traced back to the middle ages. What is happening, they suggest, is the intensification of the patterns of international trade and commerce that have existed for centuries.

Teesside and Globalisation: The case of Redcar steelworks

It is clear then that much has been written about the meaning and nature of globalisation, and here is not the place to attempt a comprehensive overview of the myriad of theories and extensive literature that surround the term.

Having said this, there is a need to explore the way in which globalisa-tion features as a factor in explaining Teesside’s biography. This is because it is often used as a way to explain the area’s socioeconomic situation and problems, and also provides a justification for governments not to inter-vene in order to mitigate those problems.

The closure of the blast furnace at Redcar in 2015 provides a case study in how ‘globalisation’ is often offered as both an explanation and as a justification for action or inaction. The Redcar blast furnace at the time of its closure was the second largest operating in Europe. It was planned in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the then state-owned British Steel Corporation’s plan to rationalise steel production at coastal sites. The deep water port adjacent to the Redcar site and the fact that smaller blast furnaces had been operating on the site since the early twentieth century made the site a logical choice. It would also allow the closure of a number of smaller blast furnaces on Teesside. In fact it was initially planned to build three blast furnaces on the site; however, falling demand for British steel throughout the 1970s meant that only one furnace was ever built. This opened in 1979; the Redcar plant survived the drastic re-organisation and downsizing of British Steel’s operations that came about

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in the 1980s. By the 1990s British Steel had been privatised, and the Redcar plant by the end of the decade was part of the Corus group (an Anglo-Dutch partnership). Corus was itself bought out in 2007 by the Indian steel giant Tata. In the wake of the global recession and the cancel-lation of orders, Tata announced their intention to close the plant in 2009. However, Tata agreed to ‘mothball’ the plant until a buyer could be found. (A blast furnace and the coke ovens that feed it cannot simply be switched on and off; if they are allowed to cool completely they will be damaged beyond repair). In 2011 a buyer was found—Thai-based Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI), who restarted the blast furnace in April 2012.

SSI wanted as much of the steel slab as Redcar could produce so it could be shipped to Thailand where its sister company would use it to produce consumer goods for the Thai market.

Paul, who worked at Redcar steelworks for 26 years on the plant’s coke ovens and later as the Multi Union Convener told me, how this had worked:

We supplied the steel to Thailand, they made their goods, and then they paid for it (the steel) that’s how it worked. The 2 companies had separate accounts.

This business model proved problematic and also very misleading for the Redcar workforce between 2012 and 2015.

Yes we were breaking (production) records, but when the final product reached its destination (Thailand) wasn’t doing anything it was just sat there.

SSI also changed their business practices, so as the price of steel from other markets dropped, Redcar’s product was no longer just destined for Thailand.

What we realised was happening was that SSI could buy cheaper slab from China and Russia to make their products with and they could sell our slab which was higher quality on the open market.

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This, however, was the beginning of the end as steel prices slumped in 2015.

In December 2014 the price of slab was $525–$530 per tonne, by the time we finished the price had come down to $285 a tonne. It was costing us $400 a tonne to make so at $525 everything was fine, to be honest if the price had stayed at $400 things were okay for a while we could have even carried on and around the $375 mark.

Instead, SSI, which had been plagued with cash-flow problems throughout 2015 and pursued by their creditors, chose to shut the plant in October 2015. They were not in a positon either to finance the moth-balling of the plant as had occurred in 2009. Instead, 2066 direct employ-ees and 849 supply chain company employees were made redundant. The government business minister Anna Soubry offered sympathetic words but no practical help for the industry,

The steel industry across the UK is facing very challenging economic con-ditions. The price of steel has almost halved over the past year, with over-production in the world market. While government cannot alter these conditions, I have called a steel summit to see what more can be done to help our steel industry. (The Guardian 28/09/2015)

The government also argued that EU rules prevented it from interven-ing to save the plant. Anna Soubry told the BBC in an interview on 20/10/2015:

“There are extremely strict state aid rules, which especially apply to the steel industry, so we are limited as to what we can do” BBC News (20/10/2015).

This was in fact not the case, whilst EU rules forbid direct subsidy of the production of iron and steel, national governments are allowed to fund research and development, or provide funds in order to deal with and reduce the environmental impact of such industries. Italy has man-aged to protect its steel industry by such means. The Financial Times reported in January 2016 that in 2015 the Italian Government had taken control of the Ilva plant in Taranto, which employs about 16,000 workers,

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after a court sequestered sections of it on the grounds it failed to contain toxic emissions (The Financial Times 20/01/2016).

Anna Turley, MP For Redcar and Cleveland, told me when I spoke to her in July 2016 that she believed that this was the main reason that Redcar hand Cleveland had voted overwhelmingly (66% of those who voted) to leave the EU in the referendum held in June 2016.

It wasn’t surprising to me that 66% of people in Redcar voted to leave. All I got on Teesside every day for 3 months was “well it (the EU) stopped the government from saving the steelworks”. People bought that and it was also the first chance they had to give someone a bloody nose.

Paul described the failure of the UK government to support SSI, or at least mothball the plant, as short sighted and ill considered.

In my eyes this was industrial murder, just vandalism. They just thought, shut it down, clean it up and then move away without taking into consid-eration what it’s going to cost to clean up the site.

Cleaning up the site is going to be very expensive due to the nature of the pollution that a century of steelmaking on the site has produced and was estimated by a study produced by SSI, Paul told me, to be around £1 billion. However, the global financial complexities surrounding SSI’s operations mean that the site effectively belongs to several Thai banks who have ended up with the company assets in lieu of debts owed to them. This means that the Redcar site clean-up may be years away, with redevelopment something even farther into the future.

Ana Turley, MP for Redcar, shared Paul’s view:

The frustration with the government is that we told them all this at the time and they didn’t listen, they could have spent 20 million mothballing the blast furnace until the market picked up again which it is starting to do now.

What the example of SSI shows is that it is misleading to view globalisa-tion as just a simple process that causes the wholesale movement of indus-tries across spaces in the search for lower and lower costs, in a “race to the bottom” (Jessop 2001: 441). This does occur, but the process is not just a

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one-way street. Something as complex as a modern steelworks cannot be built simply and cheaply in a place that may well have low labour costs, but this not the only consideration; logistics, infrastructure, capacity, skills political ideology and a woeful failure of communication and understand-ing by central government of the regional economy are all part of the story.

Instead the idea of a ‘spatial fix’ as suggested by the geographer Doreen Massey (Massey 1973, 1984, 1986, 2007) is far more convincing. She uses it to refer to the historical processes through which industrial production has located and relocated to specific geographical areas. This of course has been part of Teesside’s decline, but it was this combination of place, oppor-tunity, resources and technology that drove the rapid rise of what became Teesside in the nineteenth century. In many ways then this can be seen as having a degree of continuity with the past rather than being a decisive break. SSI took advantage of the capacity, skills and resources and infra-structure available on Teesside, and used the low transportation costs that made it viable to take steel slab to Thailand. Globalisation then made the operation possible, but it also contributed to its downfall, and national government was not prepared to intervene in order to mitigate the out-come, except by funding redundancy and retraining.

The reality of globalisation then on Teesside in the early twenty-first century is not clear-cut; it is messy and has changeable meanings and boundaries. Whilst high-profile large employers such a SSI have failed, others such as SABIC the Saudi Arabian-owned chemical petrochemical producer have recently invested £250 million to overhaul and modernise the polyethylene ‘cracker’ plant that processes carbon into the raw material for plastics manufacture, a plant that it acquired from what was once ICI on the Wilton International site (ICI Wilton). For SABIC the Teesside provides the Deep Water Port to import feedstock to the plant (the current overhaul will allow the plant to use very low cost imported shale gas), a secure site to operate from (access to the Wilton International is strictly controlled and security checks operate for health and safety reasons.) The site also offers available secure power sources, as it has sev-eral power stations and crucially the area has an available and highly skilled workforce that has long experience of the petrochemical industry, which it continues to train via enterprises such as TTE an Industrial training provider initially formed by ICI and British Steel in the 1980s.

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Again the notion of the ‘spatial fix’ rather than that of the ‘race to the bottom’ is a more convincing explanation.

However, the very powerful narrative of industries seeking ever-cheaper labour and privileging that commodity over all the other factors involved with running a successful operation is a very powerful one. As the geog-raphers Castree et al. (2004) point out, within all capitalist enterprises:

locational decisions of capitalist firms are infinitely more complex than simply seeking out cheap workers. The skill levels, compliance, initiative and work rate of labourers are all vitally important, as are the regulating environment and the relative location of the place being considered. Nonetheless the myth of cheap labour exerts a powerful hold. (2004: 138)

What is undoubtedly true though is that the movement of capital and labour across national boundaries brings with it a sense of insecurity for employees and also for the regions and states within which industries are located. Globalisation then can be seen as a process that cannot be stopped but might perhaps be managed. The neo-liberal agenda that has dominated British industrial policy since the 1980s has largely encour-aged globalisation by providing support and incentives for transnational companies to locate in the UK, but done little to mitigate the negative impacts from the outflow of capital, industries and jobs from areas like Teesside. Globalisation has instead served as a justification for neo-liberal non-intervention.

What is clear is that the past three decades have also shattered the social relationships that underpinned the social fabric of the lives of those living and working on Teesside. Old certainties and assumptions about the security of work and the seeming permanence of the industrial base that provided them have disappeared, replaced instead with a diminished version of the past that cannot offer certainty or security. Instead, indi-vidual enterprise offers rewards for those with skills who are in demand, but rapidly shifting conditions mean that this is an increasingly precari-ous existence. It is this uncertain economic backdrop against which the transition to post-industrial life is played out against, and it is this inse-curity and a feeling of being left on the margins that I encountered time and again throughout my research. ‘Brexit’, as MP for Redcar and

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Cleveland Anna Turley explained, can be seen as an expression of the anger and disenfranchisement that people across Teesside feel. But it is also worth noting that other areas within the North East that did not experience largescale industrial closures, at least in the recent past, also voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. For example Sunderland voted 61% in favour of leaving, despite a major local employer, Nissan making it clear that the preference of the company was to remain in the EU as access to the Single Market was a priority for them. The common factor in both places is globalised capital, which makes its decisions far away from the North East.

People were angry, they feel cut off from the economic benefits of globalisa-tion. Globalisation has just meant our area is losing out and not thriving, people feel swept aside and cut off from any economic upturn that might be happening in the rest of the country.

Being Post-industrial

Teesside undoubtedly remains an important if diminished industrial area compared to what it once was; if it can be called post-industrial it means that the post-industrial is not signified by the absence of industry. The area has of course suffered from de-industrialisation, but what that change means is difficult to sum up as it is about more than just counting the numbers of jobs lost or gained in particular industries. Byrne (2005), in a paper that discusses the wider North East region, has argued that post- industrialism is not qualitatively different to industrialism; it is instead a modified, and diminished version of what went before.

It is also important to question the underlying premise that is evident in the theories of post-industrialism, which is an assumption of social and economic progress. Put very simply, progress can be said to be the idea that working conditions, life and society in general with the passage of time for each subsequent generation is meant to be better than the past. To anyone growing up in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s this was exem-plified by the BBC television programme Tomorrow’s World, those old enough to remember the show (which always preceded Top of the Pops

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on a Thursday evening) will need no further explanation, but for the benefit of everyone else, the programme tried to show us a glimpse of things to come via the demonstration of science and technology and new inventions. The idea of the future that Tomorrow’s World promoted was one that was brighter, cleaner and shinier, and resembled something from science fiction. If you had told me and my school mates in 1978 that 2017 looked like this, we would have been very disappointed.

In the interviews and focus groups that I conducted whilst researching this book, the themes of both progress and the past featured prominently; one of the comments was:

Is progress always a good thing?

Such a reaction can of course be viewed as nostalgia, a selective viewing of the past, or a general critique of change. However, it is very important that this is taken seriously, and not just dismissed out of hand. The past is powerful and visions of it exert a strong hold regardless of whether they are true or accurate. It may also tell us about the present, and suggests that looking to the past has become more appealing to many than believ-ing in the future. This intersection of personal biography, collective memory and an uncertain view of what the future for Teesside and its residents may be was central to my research and an important part of try-ing to form a view not only of the legacy of the industrial past, but what kind of futures were possible.

Biographies of Place

From 2009 until 2012 I spent much of my working life evaluating health initiatives commissioned by the National Health System (NHS) within the region. It appeared to me as a relative newcomer to the world of public health that many of those involved with it were asking some interesting questions. For example, why do some localities have a much higher incidence of impairment and chronic illness than others? Why do some policy initiatives and health interventions work in some areas and make little impact elsewhere? However, as a social scientist I

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was surprised about where they were looking for the answers, particu-larly in the way in which they focused on individuals and their behav-iour, i.e. seeing smoking, drinking alcohol and a poor diet as a cause rather than a symptom or reaction to something deeper rooted in the communities these individuals were part of. It seemed that what was being sought was a quick fix, a ‘magic bullet’. Any discussion of the places people lived in was at worst absent, and at best highly superfi-cial. Yet multiple geographical analyses of the labour market, health and social deprivation in the UK show us that location is highly signifi-cant and that major inequalities are evident. As a result I began to consider and question the way in which public health researchers and geographers had tended to focus on composition or contextual effects (Macintyre et al. 1993 and 2002) instead of seeking a more integrated understanding of spaces and places.

Subsequently, Kayleigh Garthwaite and I have argued that there is a need to understand places as possessing specific identities with intersec-tions between environment, history and culture, which can be under-stood as a ‘biography of place’ (Warren 2011; Warren and Garthwaite 2014). The core of this idea is that places have biographies in the same way as individuals. Furthermore, the intersection of individual and spa-tial biographies is particularly significant for understanding the structure and impact of disadvantage and social exclusion. Additionally, the rela-tionships between collective and individual biographies, the place in which they live and the potential individuals have to improve their per-sonal situation and overcome the barriers within those spaces must also be considered.

It is often the case that place is commonly taken for granted and often subsumed by the needs of policy makers, with place becoming ‘whatever policy says it is’. Because of this, there is a need to re-imagine place in order to provide a viable counter-narrative to the dominant one that sees place as little more than an administrative category. It can be argued that this in turn has led to a failure to challenge the ‘one policy fits all’ approach that national governments have pursued in Britain since the early twenti-eth century. In order to begin this process, we can usefully draw on what Wright Mills (1959) termed the ‘Sociological Imagination’. Wright Mills (1959: 4) asserts that:

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no social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intel-lectual journey.

Mills also declared that:

neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be under-stood without understanding both. (1959: 5)

This statement of how the history of society shapes the lives of indi-viduals is applicable not only to whole societies but also to communities, and in order to fully comprehend an issue such as the health of those who live in a place, we need to understand that place; not only the history, but the narratives of work, locality, culture and being that exist within it. It is these parts that can be said to constitute a ‘biography of place’. Mills also urged us to study the critical points where biography and history inter-sect and the junctures where private troubles become public issues. Mills made this point with his discussion of unemployment.

To understand unemployment in a place such like Teesside, space is highly significant as its labour market was dominated by two industries, steel and chemical, with diminishing demands for semi-skilled and unskilled labour from the 1970s onwards, within wider a regional con-text of industrial decline that had been going on for a lot longer, in fact for most of the twentieth century. Without an account of place the dynamics between personal troubles and public issues, any explanation is rendered unintelligible. It is important to point out that a place’s biogra-phy is more than just the sum of these parts; but neither is it a one-way street process. The action of individuals also shapes the social structures they inhabit:

By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely to the shaping of society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and its historical push and shove. (Wright Mills 1959: 6)

In order to explain the present in a locality and the lives of those who reside there, it is necessary to understand the area’s past as well as their individual and collective experience. It is also crucial to recognise that the

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way in which a place has been conceptualised and administered is part of this process as this, too, contributes to any biography of a place. My argu-ment seeks to show that these processes are only part of a wider story that needs to be understood. Biographies of place become embedded over time and are revealed and manifested in individual life stories.

It would appear to be self-evident that the underlying circumstances and characteristics of a place need to be considered before potential solutions are offered; this may be an area where something could be learnt from medical practice. Medicine routinely takes patient histories in order to diagnose problems and prescribe remedies. Within medi-cine, it is accepted that whilst there may be an accepted course of treat-ment for a condition, the way in which it is applied to individuals will vary, according to their present condition, prior experiences and behav-iours. If a similar approach was applied to policy it is place that pro-vides these answers allowing a convincing ‘case history’ to be established. Such an approach would allow a path to be trodden between the ‘one size fits all’ approach that discounts difference, and a ‘complexity’ approach that sees the problems of each place as being a unique and atomised ‘case in itself ’. Instead, an intervention that draws upon best practice in the policy field but is equally aware of the biography of the place within which an intervention is to be deployed becomes possible. In summary, the idea of a ‘biography of place’ in order to construct a holistic account of what it is like to live in a particular area with a par-ticular context, is essential. Otherwise, contextual and compositional arguments, whilst to a degree helpful, can be argued to be essentially attempting to account for a place’s deviation from an idealised imag-ined norm by considering each place as unique and then asking what it may have in common with other places. For example, ill health is often the product of a complex interaction of several factors: the environ-ment, the social and the economic context, and also individual life-styles: the compositional, the contextual and beyond. In other words, we need to pay attention to the elements that make up an area’s history and culture.

Personal histories are both constrained and enabled by the character of place. Place, in turn, is shaped by, and actively shapes, the health of resi-dents and visitors (Andrews and Kearns 2005: 271). Accordingly, we

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need to search for ways in which histories are etched in the record of places and, cumulatively, contribute to the local ‘becoming’ of place (Pred 1984). The lesson for those seeking to understand the relationship between individuals and the places they inhabit is that these histories are intertwined with all the processes that contribute to the evolution of a place, and to its character. As a result, environment, history and culture and their intersections are key points for research. Indeed, it is only by understanding the past that is it possible to understand the future; a place’s past and the processes of how it developed, that is it possible to understand its present and the situations of those whose lives are played out within it.

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3Industrial Teesside’s Biography

For Teesside and the wider North East of England, the basis of the region’s biography is both geographical and geological. The region’s plentiful deposits of coal and iron ore and minerals such as anhydride used in the chemical industry allowed it, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to become one of the world’s first industrial regions. For Teesside, or rather what was to become Teesside, the path to industrialisa-tion and the place that it became differed from the rest of the North East region.

Becoming Teesside, 1820–1920

The process of what can be called industrial transformation happened very quickly from  the early to mid nineteenth century, but it is impor-tant to recognise that Teesside did not emerge from the riverbanks over-night. Prior to the nineteenth century the Tees Valley was an agricultural area, with Stockton-on-Tees as its established market town, Stockton’s history can be traced back to medieval times, with the Manor of Stockton being established in 1138. The town later became a Borough in 1189

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when the area was purchased by the Bishop of Durham who established a castle at Stockton. The castle later became an important strategic strong-hold for Royalist forces during the English Civil War until its capture in 1644 and its demolition in 1646 by Parliamentary forces (Discover Stockton 2014).

Stockton-on-Tees earnt its living from its foundation until the nine-teenth century as a market town. A  charter granting it a market was bestowed by the Bishop of Durham in 1310. The combination of this and its access to the river meant that Stockton developed as a port, exporting wool and importing goods not easily sourced locally, such as wine and brandy. It was rivalled as a port by its neighbour further upstream at Yarm, then a North Yorkshire market town, which in modern times became assimilated into greater Stockton and now part of the current Borough of Stockton-on-Tees. The town also developed a successful shipbuilding industry that expanded from the sixteenth century onwards; this in turn stimulated the allied industries of rope making and sail making. By the eighteenth century the town was prospering and expanding. Many fine buildings were built in the Georgian style, the Town hall was built in 1735 and in 1771 the new bridge across the Tees at Stockton was opened. At this point this was the furthest point downstream at which the Tees was bridged. So Stockton entered the nineteenth century as a prosperous and expanding town with established industries. Things were about to speed up though, both literally and metaphorically, with the coming of the railway.

The Railway arrives

As a boy I was taught that the first passenger railway in the world was the Stockton to Darlington railway, but told little else about it, nor did I have any inkling of the significance of this landmark in the development of industrial society.

So why did it happen in the Tees valley? Why not on the Tyne? After all, the great railway and locomotive builders George Stephenson and Timothy Hackworth were both from Wylam in the Tyne valley and both had worked on numerous colliery railways throughout the wider North East region. The answers involve people, places and capital.

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The Pease family of Darlington were prominent in the manufacture of wool and had interests in coal, manufacture, banking and commerce in general in the region. Joseph Pease (1737–1808) and his son Edward Pease (1767–1848) had considered schemes to improve the navigability of the lower part of the river Tees in order to make the transportation of goods, especially coal, more efficient. Prior to the adoption of the idea of a railway in 1818, there had been several schemes to build canals in order to improve communication. The parliamentary Bill to allow the building of the railway passed in 1821. Edward Pease became the principal direc-tor of the Stockton & Darlington railway company, backing the venture with a £7000 investment.

A railway was also viable due to the nature of the land in the Tees valley, which was largely level, without severe inclines, and had a stable geology. George Stephenson was approached to survey the route for the line; he proposed some changes to the original planned route, and these were accepted. Stephenson was appointed as the railway company’s engineer in January 1822 and the first rails were laid at Stockton on the 23rd May the same year. The line took 3 years to construct. The railway finally opened on the 27th September 1825 and was immediately hailed as a triumph. Despite its name the line did not just go from Stockton to Darlington, it reached well beyond the town to Shildon, deeper into County Durham and closer to the coalfield that it was built to serve (W.W. Tomlinson 1915).

The coming of the railway was highly significant for Stockton-on-Tees. The railway is an important part of the town’s heritage, and in 2016 a new piece of public art named the ‘Stockton Flyer’ was unveiled in Stockton High Street. At 1  pm every day a sculpture that resembles Georges Stephenson’s ‘Locomotion Number 1’ emerges from a plinth and proceeds to produce noise and steam to the delight or sometimes the indifference of local shoppers. The new railway brought about a boom in the coal trade for Stockton, but this was short lived; the volume of coal that could now be delivered via the railway meant that the town’s coal staithes were overwhelmed.

In 1827 a proposal to extend the railway was accepted due to the need to expand the coal export operation and build new staithes further down-stream. An area of land on the south bank of the Tees chosen for this expansion was bought by Joseph Pease. In 1829 the Middlesbrough Estate

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Company began trading. In due course the small hamlet that was to be found in this area would become modern Middlesbrough. A settlement in this area had existed for centuries, even being recorded in Saxon times as ‘Mydilsburgh’, a stopping point on the pilgrimage route between Durham and Whitby, but by 1801 according to the census of that year the settlement consisted of only four houses and 25 residents. Pease and his partners bought the 500-acre estate for the sum of £30,000 and set about developing it as ‘Port Darlington’, its primary function being to export the products of the Durham coalfield to London and further afield. The new development thrived and grew rapidly over the next decade, as Beynon et al. (1994) point out:

In 1831 Middlesbrough had a population of just 154; at the next census, in 1841 this had risen to over 5000. (Beynon et al. 1994: 11)

The 1840s bought about an important shift in the development of Middlesbrough as it saw the establishment of iron and steelmaking in the area. This development was brought about by two men who are intimately connected with the town, its expansion and the subsequent development of the industry on Teesside. Henry William Ferdinand Bolckow (1806–1878) and John Vaughan (1799–1868) purchased 6 acres of land from Pease’s Middlesbrough Estate company for £1800 in May 1840 and began operating a year later in 1841. Their iron foundry pro-duced anchors, chains, cables, rails, bars, wagons and even steam engines (Tomlinson and Williams 1997). Bolckow was the entrepreneur and financier of the venture. Bolckow was an immigrant to not only the North East but to Britain; he was born in Sulten Meckleberg in Germany. Bolckow worked for a merchant called Christian Allhusen; in 1825 Allhusen set up in business as a corn merchant, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Bolckow followed Allushen to Tyneside and from 1827 worked as his accountant. The business was clearly successful, as by 1840 it is reported that his personal fortune was somewhere in the region of £40,000. The successful Bolckow met John Vaughan in 1839; Vaughan bought the tech-nical know-how to the partnership. Vaughan was born in Worcester and was the son of an iron worker. Vaughan followed his father into the trade and by his early 20s had risen to become foreman at Dowlais ironworks in

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South Wales. Vaughan moved north in 1825 working in Carlisle before arriving on Tyneside to become a manager for Losh, Wilson and Bell at their works at Walker. Bolckow and Vaughan built their first blast furnace for the production of iron in 1846, but they did not do it at Middlesbrough, the development was in fact at the opposite end of the Stockton and Darlington railway at Whitton Park, and it smelted local iron ore from the mines in Weardale. Things changed fairly quickly, and by 1848 higher quality iron stone was being transported from Skinningrove, Cleveland on the North Yorkshire coast, first by sea to Middlesbrough and then the length of the railway to feed Bolckow and Vaughan’s furnaces. As most of the pig iron produced at Witton was destined to return to the Middlesbrough works, it is not hard to see why by the end of the 1840s the partners were seeking to integrate their operations in Middlesbrough. To this end they employed a geologist called John Marley and set about making a systematic search for a local supply of iron ore. It did not take them too long to find it and they discovered a viable seam of iron ore at Eston to the south east of Middleborough on the 8th June 1850, a date which film maker and author Craig Hornby (2004) has described as the start of the great ‘iron rush’. That iron ore should be found in the area is not particularly surprising, there were already established mines at Grossmont near Whitby in the Esk Valley and at Skinningrove, as previ-ously mentioned; what made the difference was its proximity to the Tees. Iron ore mining began in earnest straight away in the Eston hills and only a year later a branch line down to the Middlesbrough–Redcar railway had been completed. Initially iron ore was transported to the blast furnaces at Whitton Park, but all this was to change when in 1852 the company opened its new blast furnaces at Vulcan street in Middlesbrough. These furnaces consumed as much ironstone as the mines Eston could produce and by 1854 they were consuming somewhere in the order of 1000 tons per day. As Hornby further notes, the comparison with the ‘gold rush’ in America was so strong that the new settlement which grew up at Eston in order to house the new mine workers was named California!

These developments were in 1854 followed by the construction of more blast furnaces between Eston and the Tees. These areas would become the districts of Grangetown and Southbank, and would become synonymous with iron and steel on Teesside. Southbank eventually

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earned the nickname ‘Slaggy Island’, due to it being surrounded by the slag tips from the iron and steelworks.

This dramatic industrial development meant that the population of the Teesside area was growing at a phenomenal rate; Middlesbrough’s population at the 1851 Census was 7600, by 1861 this had reached 19,000 and by 1871 had grown to more than 40,000. The area received migrants from not only the surrounding rural areas but from all over Britain, most notably from East Anglia, Scotland and Ireland.

Throughout the nineteenth century there was also development on the northern bank of the Tees. A rival railway to the Stockton Darlington line to bring coal to what became Port Clarence was estab-lished. The Clarence railway (named so after the Duke of Clarence who would later become King William IV) was founded 1828, and opened in 1833; it offered a much shorter route from the Durham coal fields, although it never prospered due to the fact that its trains had to pay tolls on the sections of Stockton and Darlington railway track it used to access the collieries. However, the Clarence railway did stimu-late new industrial development. In 1853 Bell Brothers, who were already established iron makers on Tyneside, opened three blast fur-naces at Port Clarence, and later developed a salt works that they used in the production of caustic soda. Bell’s became a major industrial player in the area along with Bolckow and Vaughan, who also interest-ingly had their own salt works close to the Vulcan street works on the south side of the Tees.

The development of railways to the north of the Tees also provided the opportunity for the small fishing port of Hartlepool to expand. As Tomlinson and Williams (1997) explain, during the 1840s the Stockton and Hartlepool railway was formed to connect the Clarence railway to Hartlepool. This in turn led to the development of new docks at West Hartlepool, which quickly became an important centre for coal export. Unsurprisingly, the expansion of the docks also meant that ships were in demand. The businessman who would expand Hartlepool into a major shipbuilding centre was William Gray. Gray began his career not as a shipbuilder but as a draper! Gray became a major investor in shipping before establishing a shipyard with John Denton, a local shipbuilder. The business proved incredibly successful, and by 1884 William Gray and Co

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employed over 2000 people. The scale of the operation meant that in 1878, 1882, 1888 and 1898 they constructed the highest tonnage of shipping for any shipyard in the world.

Hartlepool, or to be more accurate West Hartlepool, also became the base for the Ropner merchant shipping line; this became so large that it earnt the nickname ‘Ropner’s little Navy’. Robert Ropner and his companies had a major impact upon both Hartlepool and Stockton. His life story is remarkable: Ropner was born in Magdeburg in Prussia in 1838, but both of his parents died of cholera when he was 10 years old. They left enough money for him, and his nine siblings, to get a basic education, but at the age of 19 he and friend decided to run away to Australia. However, when they reached the port, there was only one passage to Australia available, which Ropner’s friend took. Ropner, so the story goes, boarded the next available ship and shortly after arrived in West Hartlepool. Ropner initially went to work in a bakery, before getting a better job working for Thomas Appleby’s firm of coal exporters. Ropner’s rise and success was rapid, and in 1875 he launched his own line of ships. By the 1880s, Robert Ropner  had one of the largest shipping  lines in the world. In 1888, he bought the North Shore shipyard on the Tees at Stockton and began to produce his own vessels. The yard thrived, building ships for other parts of the Ropner Empire, and for other customers around the world. At the outbreak of the First World War the shipyard employed 1500 people (Northern Echo 06/05/2014).

By this point the Tees from Stockton downstream had become an important shipbuilding river. The Smiths Dock Co had been formed in 1899 by the amalgamation of three Tyneside shipyards; they opened a new purpose-built yard at South Bank in 1909 and transferred their Tyneside operations there. Another large and modern facility was the Furness shipyard at Haverton Hill on the north side of the river, which was opened in 1918.

It would be wrong though to give the impression that the develop-ment of industrial Teesside was just centred on the Middlesbrough. As has been shown above, the fortunes of all of the towns around the Tees were becoming increasingly intertwined as they expanded, and commu-nications between them became ever easier. It can be argued that this

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process of industrial growth and integration culminates with and is at the same time symbolised by the Transporter Bridge, which opened in 1911. The bridge links Middlesbrough and Port Clarence, and was built by Sir William Arrol & Co. of Glasgow between 1910 and 1911 to replace the existing ferry services (Howes 2009: 20). Ironically, this Teesside icon was built of steel Arrol sourced from his own foundries near Glasgow, and not as many imagine from local producers. As the example of Robert Ropner illustrates, Stockton-on-Tees also continued to develop throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, and not just through ship building. Iron production boomed throughout the 1850s and 1860s on Teesside as a whole, it was not just confined to Middlesbrough, and several iron foundries were also established in the Stockton area. The Ironworks at Norton can also claim to have cast the first ‘Big Ben’ bell for the newly constructed Houses of Parliament in 1856; unfortunately the Bell cracked whilst being tested and was subse-quently recast in London at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry (Heritage Stockton 2015).

In 1860 the Stockton Malleable Ironworks opened at Portrack and by 1889 it was producing around 200 tons of steel per week. The south bank of the Tees opposite Stockton at Thornaby-on-Tees also attracted a huge amount of industrial development on a site that had previously served as the town racecourse. The Teesdale ironworks was established there as early as 1840 for the manufacture of iron goods and tools. Iron making on the site soon followed when in 1859 William Whitwell and Co established their ironworks with three blast furnaces. In 1866 the Teesdale ironworks were bought by Charles Arthur Head and Thomas Wrightson; their company would grow and become Head Wrightson Engineering, this company would come to dominate the Thornaby site. The company would be in operation for over a century until its takeover by the Davy group in 1977. Head Wrightson pro-duced bridges, viaducts, piers, landing craft and even built large parts of Britain’s post-World War 2 nuclear power plants. As Williamson (2013) comments:

at its height more than 5000 men and women were employed at six sites around Teesside. (2013: 1)

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From ‘Ironopolis’ to Steeltown

Whilst Middlesbrough’s status as ‘Ironopolis’ was well established by the 1860s, it was not until the later part of the century that steelmaking took over. The transfer to steelmaking was also initially problematic for the industry as the iron ore from the Eston hills had a high level of phospho-rus making it difficult to process this, which resulted  in ore being imported from elsewhere. In fact, the first steel produced by Bolckow and Vaughan in 1875 used Spanish ore. However, this problem was quickly solved by two enterprising inventors, Sidney Gilchrist Thomas and his cousin Percy Gilchrist. As Beynon et al. (1994) comment:

Four years later it was demonstrated that a basic slag could absorb the phosphorous from the local ore provided that the converters were lined with a basic material such as dolomite. The technical problem of using Cleveland ore in steelmaking had been overcome. (1994: 27)

It is also important to point out that the iron and steel companies were becoming industrial complexes in their own right with their own supply chains. They had interests in or owned outright their own collieries and iron ore mines across the region and beyond. The 1896 ‘List of Mines’ compiled annually by the government reveals that Bolckow and Vaughan owned 19 pits and drift mines employing 11,846 workers. This practice was something that continued well into the twentieth century with Teesside steel producers, until the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947.

Despite the slump of the 1870s, by the end of the nineteenth century a company that is still in existence and has become synonymous with Teesside had appeared—Dorman Long. Dorman Long was founded in 1876 by Arthur Dorman and Albert de Lande Long. They initially began by producing ironwork for the shipbuilding industry but quickly became involved with steel production, opening seven ‘open hearth’ furnaces at their Britannia works on the south bank of the Tees upstream from Bolckow and Vaughan’s works. The company expanded its operations significantly by merging with Bell Brothers, which allowed the develop-ment of a new steel works at Port Clarence. By the turn of the twentieth

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century Dorman Long had a labour force of about 3000 and an output of about 180,000 tons of finished material a year (The Times, Sep 05, 1902—cited by Graces Guide). The company grew very quickly in the early twentieth century: in 1902 it opened a new steelworks at Cargo fleet, which became known as the Cleveland works. More new works were to follow and in 1917 the Redcar works opened using the ‘open hearth’ method of steelmaking. The company also build a new settlement for the plant’s workers, which was unsurprisingly named ‘Dormanstown’. Dorman Long also remained a major player in heavy engineering famously using its steel to build bridges, amongst them the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which was completed in 1932 and the Tyne Bridge in 1928; closer to home it constructed the Newport Lifting Bridge across the Tees, which was opened in 1934. In 1929 Dorman Long merged with Bolckow and Vaughan who had been in financial difficulties for some time. The result was a huge company, as Beynon et  al. (1994) observe:

After this take-over Dorman Long employed some 33,000 men and had an annual steelmaking capacity of 1.5 million tonnes. (1994: 29)

Dorman Long would remain the dominant force in steel on Teesside until the nationalisation of the industry in 1967 to form the British Steel Corporation.

Teesside, New Industry, Slump and Revival 1920–1945

The fortunes of Teesside were similar to the rest of the North East of England throughout the 1920s and 1930s with a common experience of an initial post-war boom being followed by the effects of the depression caused by the Wall Street crash in 1929. There was, however, one very important difference, this was the development of the chemical industry on a grand scale with ICI at Billingham turning an empty site into a factory, which by 1930 covered 1000 acres and employed around 10,000 people (Phillips 2008, in Williamson 2008).

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The spur to develop a synthetic ammonia-producing plant had been the need to produce more TNT for shells during the First world war. Germany already had the capacity to synthesise the ammonia required for such explosives, but Britain did not. Instead it refined ammonia from guano, essentially bird excrement, which was imported on ships from South America, and British merchant shipping was of course vulnerable to attack from U boats. The government favoured the construction  of a synthetic ammonia plant and appointed the Brunner and Mond com-pany of Cheshire to do this. The Billingham site was chosen and acquired. Situated on the north bank of the Tees, east of Port Clarence and Haverton Hill, the site was largely level and had good access to water and coal. There was also a plentiful seam of anhydrite (calcium sulphate) waiting to be mined. Other reasons for the site being chosen, Phillips suggests, are the fact that there was also a recently commissioned power station avail-able at Haverton Hill and that Sir Hugh Bell, whose company had recently merged with Bolckow and Vaughan, was also a director of Brunner and Mond. The war ended before the factory could be built and what had officially been a Ministry of Munitions site was swiftly sold off to Brunner and Mond, who created a separate subsidiary, Synthetic Ammonia and Nitrates Ltd., to run the Billingham plant. But it was sev-eral years before production commenced. As Beynon et al. comment:

considerable technical difficulties had to be overcome producing ammonia at high pressure and a temperature of 500 degrees centigrade with the then contemporary technology. The first ammonia and sulphate of ammonia were nonetheless  produced at the end of 1923, By 1924 production had increased to 30 tonnes per day. (Beynon et al. 1994: 34)

In 1926 Brunner Mond merged with three other chemical companies, Nobel Explosives, United Alkali and British Dyestuffs Corporation, forming ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), a name which would domi-nate Teesside for decades to come.

The Billingham plant grew steadily throughout the interwar period. The need for synthetic ammonia as a component in the manufacture of explosives had receded, but production increased as the company devel-oped nitrate-based fertilizers. ICI also began producing cement and sul-

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phuric acid. ICI did of course experience a fall in demand during the early 1930s as the Great Depression’s effects were felt on Teesside, but it and the town of Billingham that the company had created fared relatively well. Billingham developed into what can be described as a company town; growing from a small village in the early 1920s, ICI built over 2000 houses, shops and leisure facilities for its workers.

The effects of the slump on the wider region meant that there was no shortage of workers from the coal mines, ship yards and steelworks for ICI to choose from.

Other industries on Teesside fared very badly during the 1920s and 1930s. Shipbuilding fared particularly badly as the industry was experi-encing low demand prior to the Wall Street crash. Even Ropner’s Shipyard on the Northshore at Stockton had closed in 1925, along with all the rest of the town’s shipyards.

The author JB Priestly on a journey through the Britain in 1933 visited Stockton and observed:

the shipyards and slips, the sheds that are beginning to tumble down, the big chimneys that have stopped smoking, the unmoving cranes, and one small ship where once there were dozens. The other men who are standing on this bridge, they have just shuffled up from the Labour exchange, used to work in those yards and sheds as riveters and platers and fitters, used to be good men of their hands but now as you can quickly see not good men of their hands any longer, but are depressed and defeated fellows sagging and slouching and going grey even in their very cheeks. (Priestly 1934: 343)

Fortunately, the situation described by Priestly was not a permanent one and by the end of the 1930s things had changed significantly. Teesside’s economic recovery in the wake of the great depression was largely due to the re-armament policies Britain pursued in the late 1930s in the expectation of the Second World War. Steel production was con-solidated and revived with Dorman Long reshaping its operations, as Beynon et al. explain:

The Clarence steelworks the Grangetown blast furnaces, and Carlton iron works closed in the depths of the depression and new investment was con-centrated on larger production units. The first of these was a new battery of

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coke ovens, opened in 1936 at Cleveland followed by a new mill to pro-duce light sections and bars. The rolling of plate was concentrated at Redcar and that of heavy sections at Britannia. Port Clarence became a centre for the recovery of coke by-products principally tar. (Beynon et al. 1994: 29)

Much of the tar produced at Port Clarence did not have far to travel. ICI had laid off around 6000 of its 10,000-strong workforce at Billingham between 1931 and 1932. However, the company recovered and further diversified opening a plant to produce oil from coal and tar in 1935, by using a high pressure chemical process. The plant also pro-duced the high-octane petrol required by the RAF. ICI Billingham would prove to be a very important resource for wartime Britain alongside the synthetic ammonia that fed the munitions industry. Billingham also developed Perspex during the 1930s, which was supplied to the aircraft industry for cockpit covers and gun turrets. Phillips (2008) in his brief history of the company tells us that Billingham’s research division was also involved in the British contribution towards the ‘Manhattan proj-ect’, the building of the atomic bomb. The war also meant a major boost to female employment at ICI Billingham, with an estimated 2500 female workers from a work force of 13,000 being employed at the plant by the end of 1945.

Post-war Teesside, 1945–1970

Teesside’s major industries, steel and chemicals and heavy engineering, all emerged from the second world war in good shape, with very high levels of employment. The steel industry did, however, face challenges both economically and politically.

The original supply of iron ore from the local area was drying up, and the ironstone mines were closing. In 1949 the Eston iron ore mine, which had done so much to spark Teesside’s industrial development, closed. The last mine at North Skelton closed in 1964. The need to import iron ore was not as problematic as it might have been for an inland location such as Consett in County Durham. The Tees and its estuary meant that steel

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could for the meantime continue to thrive in the area. Beynon et  al. (1994) point out that as early as 1938 the industry was confident that this issue could be adequately addressed:

even today when local supplies of ore are reaching exhaustion, the region can maintain its predominance because of the ease which foreign ores can be imported to works situated along the riverbanks. (Gleave 1938: 454, cited in Beynon et al. 1994: 30)

There was also the question of nationalisation and whether the indus-try would come under state control or not, as many industries had been as part of the Atlee Government’s 1945–1950 and 1950–1951s economic strategy, a strategy that saw the need to plan essential national industries in peacetime, just as it had done in wartime in order to maintain indus-trial output for both reconstruction and export in a new ‘mixed econ-omy’. Coal, water, electricity, gas and the railways had all been nationalised before steel’s turn finally came in 1951. However, this did not last long as the industry was returned to the private sector by the incoming Conservative government in 1952. Beynon et al. (1994) argue that this uncertainty about the industry’s future was why new investment plans and infrastructure construction did not take place on Teesside until the mid to late 1950s.

ICI had no such concerns, and embarked on a great expansion of its operations on Teesside. ICI had acquired a 2000-acre site near to the vil-lage of Wilton on the south bank of the Tees from Colonel John George Lowther; the deal even included a castle, in the form of a Victorian man-sion rebuilt in the nineteenth century (K.W.G 1973:12). The castle ini-tially served as offices from which the new site was planned. Wilton developed quickly; ICI Chairman John Rodgers, speaking in 1952, called this expansion “A great adventure, a great experiment”.

So why did ICI choose Wilton as the site for its new plants rather than developing existing sites such as Billingham?

The location had a number of positive attributes for ICI, apart from the obvious proximity to Billingham, (the 2 sides rapidly linked by a 10 mile pipeline under the Tees). Its 2000 acres of flat land were sufficient for

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planned developments, water supplies were locally available and port facili-ties existed. With government approval came deemed planning permission so that ICI could avoid the usual planning procedures. In short Wilton was an ideal site. (Beynon et al. 1994: 38–39)

Throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s ICI Wilton developed rap-idly. It used a model whereby one part of the company took care of infra-structure and the maintenance of services such as water and power to the site, effectively providing a ready-made environment for other ICI sub-sidiary companies, which then built plants according to their require-ments. Output and employment on the Wilton site grew.

The Wilton site was based upon the production of ethylene. Ethylene is a building block in the production of plastics such as polythene, ethyl-ene oxide and ethylene glycol.

By the end of the nineteen fifties a major petrochemicals complex was emerging at Wilton. Output had increased from 5000 tonnes of products in 1950 to 346,000 in 1957 500 of the 2000 acres of the site had been developed at a cost of £58 million. By 1958 some 6000 workers were employed at ICI at Wilton in production and a further 3000 ICI and pri-vate contractors engaged on ongoing construction activities. (Beynon et al. 1994: 39)

The 1960s—Industrial Teesside’s “Golden Age”?

The remarkable expansion of the petrochemical industry continued apace during the 1960s. ICI developed its own oil-refining operations at North Tees, unsurprisingly on the north bank of the river. This meant that by the early 1970s the three ICI plants now formed one of the largest petro-chemical complexes in the world. Shildick et al. report that by 1965 ICI “was employing 29,000 workers in its Teesside plants” (Shildrick et al. 2012: 40).

The steel industry  was also modernising, with both Dorman Long and South Durham Steel and Iron building new plants, and  opening new facilities to replace older ones. The rolling and beam-making mill complex

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at Lackenby had been developed in the late 1950s; additionally three new blast furnaces were built at Clay Lane between 1957 and 1962. In 1966 just prior to their amalgamation into the nationalised British Steel Corporation in 1967, Dorman Long were producing 1.5 million tonnes of steel and South Durham Steel and Iron 1.3 million tonnes per annum. It is also important to remember Teesside’s other industries, which were also booming at this time, with engineering firms such as Head Wrightson and shipbuilding concerns such a Smith’s Dock having full order books.

It can be argued that the late 1960s for Teesside represented the area’s high point with expansions to industry resulting in very high levels of employment, higher wage levels and the social improvements brought about by the post-war political consensus.

The whole area seemed, in the eyes of industrialists at least, to be participat-ing in this growth process. In many senses a strongly self-fulfilling proph-ecy was emerging wherein  continued expansion would lead inevitably to continued prosperity. (Beynon et al. 1994: 40)

Shildrick et al. (2012) agree, further arguing that Teesside was amongst the best places in the whole of the UK to live during this period, due to a unique combination of factors, as they explain:

Nationally and locally driven government strategic plans to expand key industries meant that the nineteen sixties was, therefore, a period of great optimism in and for Teesside. Gross value added (GVA) statistics are a key indicator of the wealth of an area, reflecting industrial and occupa-tional structure levels of employment and unemployment, company profitability and earnings. Chiefly  owing to its low levels of unemploy-ment, the success of its core industries and the relatively high wages paid to the skilled workforce, in the early nineteen seventies GVA in  Teesside was well above the national average (and 3rd highest in the country after London and Aberdeen) (Tees Valley Unlimited 2010a). In Shildrick et al. (2012: 41)

So how did the fortunes of this area, which looked so good during the 1960s, change so dramatically in the years that followed? In order to understand this, we need to examine another important strand within

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Teesside’s biography, namely the relationship between industry, local structures of governance and the plans they produced for the area.

Industry and Local Government on Teesside

Ever since the beginning of Teesside’s industrial development the rela-tionship between local industry and local governance has been a close one to say the least. This can be attributed to the fact that prior to industriali-sation there were few established institutions and interests. So civic devel-opment followed industrial development. In 1853 just as the great ‘iron boom’ took off, Middlesbrough received its ‘charter of incorporation’. This gave the town the right to have a mayor, aldermen and councillors. Unsurprisingly the first mayor was Henry Bolckow. He was swiftly fol-lowed by his business partner John Vaughan in 1855. Bolckow later became the town’s first MP in 1868, serving in that office until his death in 1878. Industrial development and civic institutions were closely linked as the town owed its existence to its industrial foundations and what was good for business was seen as good for Middlesbrough. Sadler (1990) demonstrates the extent of this relationship in the late nineteenth century:

In these years the iron producers dominated the Town Council: its mem-bership comprised ten ironmasters and seven shopkeepers in 1872. Effective power resided in a small group of men who controlled the local economy. In the following three decades a subtle shift was wrought wherein local merchants filled a vacuum in local politics left by an increasingly dis-interested group of local manufacturers. By 1912 there were fifteen shop-keepers and just one ironmaster on the Council, but the influence of the staple industry upon the overall environment remained overwhelming. (Sadler 1990: 331–332)

This pattern, by which those who controlled the economic interests of the area also acquired control of the civic and political offices, became the norm within the region and persisted well into the early twentieth century. The same thing happened in other parts of Teesside too;

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William Gray served as Mayor of Hartlepool and also of West Hartlepool, he also made an unsuccessful attempt to stand for parlia-ment in 1891. Robert Ropner had more success in Stockton-on-Tees, being elected as the town’s MP in 1900 after having previously served as its Mayor in 1893. Sadler (1990) argues that this state of affairs con-tinued throughout the early part of the twentieth century within the area with industries’ needs dominating local development. He cites the development of housing at Billingham for the needs of ICI’s workforce and the establishment of Dormanstown to house Dorman Long’s Workforce at Redcar as being prime examples of this practice, and he concludes that even by:

the eve of World War 2 corporate control over the local economy remained effectively unchallenged. (Sadler 1990: 335)

After 1945, Industry, Governance and Modernisation

The relationship between local government began to change in the wake of the Second World War. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1944 and its successor in 1947 gave local authorities new powers to acquire land and also put an obligation upon them to plan and prepare for renewal and redevelopment. Middlesbrough responded quickly and commissioned Max Lock, a town-planning consultant, to produce the ‘Middlesbrough Survey and Plan’; its aim was to produce a plan for the subsequent 30 years. Beynon et al. (1994) argue that the plan recognised that corporate domination was a key contributor to many of the area’s socio-economic problems. They cite Glass (1948) who, as a member of Lock’s planning team, observed that:

Not only are Middlesbrough’s problems all intertwined but they also derive from one common cause: nineteenth century laissez-faire. Uncontrolled development has caused all the cumulative maladjustments; it has continu-ally widened the social cleavages of the town. It cannot be allowed to per-sist. (Glass 1948: 187 cited in Beynon et al. 1994: 59)

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In other words, the industrial past and its political consequences that meant the interests of the region and its people were always subordinated to those of industry. But those days were now numbered and a new settle-ment had to be reached. As Sadler (1990) further explains:

Lock’s survey and plan were significant as the first step in a period when increasing emphasis was being laid upon planning—in this case, of land use within the town. Like many other such documents being drawn up at the time, it represented the first expression of a political shift, coloured by experiences of recession in the 1920s and 1930s and the Victorian years, which was to see steadily increasing intervention in the economy as a whole from local and national government alike. (Sadler 1990: 325)

Modernisation and Diversification

The planning of industrial development on Teesside was also high on the area’s agenda in the immediate post-war years, and it is important to acknowledge that the economic progress of the 1950s in the region did not happen due to the efforts of industry alone. As Hudson (1990) has pointed out, the Teesside industrial development board, which had been established in the 1930s during the Depression, achieved a new promi-nence after 1945, serving as a forum within which local authority repre-sentatives, those from chambers of trade and commerce and trade unions could come together and find common ground. Hudson (1990) points out that the board had a clear objective:

it advocated growth through the modernization of the Teesside economy. (Hudson 1990 in Harloe et al. (eds) 1990: 68)

The modernisation of industry was arguably a very convenient vehicle for the interests of industry, local government and organised labour to coalesce around. It was difficult to disagree with such a stance and it had broad support across the political spectrum. Hudson describes the broad objectives of this modernisation project.

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The new economy would still be focused around the chemical and steel industries, but these would  be transformed by massive state subsidised investment to provide a centre of technologically sophisticated modern manufacturing industry. New industries would diversify employment opportunities. Furthermore, the built environment would be transformed by local authority planning and expanded, public expenditure on roads, houses, shopping centres and educational and health facilities. Modernisation was seen as embracing all aspects of economic and social life. (Hudson 1990 in Harloe et al. (eds) 1990: 64)

Hudson goes on to explain that this in turn allowed a powerful alliance to develop between companies, trade unions and local councils. Effectively the modernisation project on Teesside was also a modernisation of the old relationship between industry and local government. But now it was remade with wider support and increased resilience. It was now as Hudson terms it:

a truly hegemonic project. (Hudson 1990 in Harloe et al. (eds) 1990: 64)

The nature of this project also meant that often the needs of employers such as ICI were prioritised over other issues such as the need to diversify employment on Teesside. Sadler (1990) notes that the 1949 Outline Plan for the North East Development Area prepared for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1949 commented with regards to ICI’s devel-opment at Wilton that:

the development of such a large unit as Wilton on Teesside, the one area where labour is in short supply, must entail some influx of population if its labour requirements are to be fully met. (Pepler and Macfarlane 1949: 100 in Sadler 1990: 334)

This is supported by Beynon et al. (1994), who tell us that in 1948 labour turnover in the region was around 20%. A high figure; in other words labour was in short supply and nothing should be encouraged that might drain labour away from the dominant industries. The report fur-ther noted:

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it would be unwise to prejudice the redeployment of Cleveland labour in heavy chemicals by offering it alternative male employment. (Pepler and Macfarlane 1949: 76 in Sadler 1990: 335)

The development of a culture of mutual interest around the needs of industry is illustrated by the way in which housing was provided for the Wilton site. ICI did not build its own company housing as it had done at Billingham in the inter-war years. Instead it took advantage of the post- war expansion of council housing that was occurring across the country, coming up with a mutually beneficial agreement with Eston Council, as a letter of the time illustrates:

We appreciate the fact that your Council are not permitted to enter into a binding agreement to let these homes to our employees, and that the arrangements in this connection must therefore rest on the basis of a ‘gen-tlemen’s agreement’ between the Council and the Company. If you will let me know when the first of the houses are nearing completion I will arrange to supply you with a list of our employees in the order of priority in which would like the tenancies allocating. (Gofton of ICI to Potter of Eston council in Beynon et al. 1994)

In other words, it was clear that unofficial ‘gentleman’s agreements’ were a common practice and a way of getting things done on Teesside. Thus the issue of industrial diversification, whilst welcomed as a good thing within the modernisation project, was subordinated to the needs of existing industries with their growth always prioritised. Throughout the late 1940s, the 1950s and into the early 1960s, growth, as has already been discussed, was certainly the order of the day. This is turn meant that there was no serious challenge to the modernisation project.

Planning the Future

The modernisation project that was underway on Teesside was in keeping with an age within which British governments, both Labour and Conservative, saw economic planning as a key part of a national indus-

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trial strategy. A plan that had a profound impact upon Teesside and the wider North East region was what became known as the Hailsham Report (HMSO 1963). Named after the Conservative politician charged with its compilation (Lord Hailsham), the plan proposed a programme for regional development and growth. It was a response to the long-term decline of the region’s traditional industries and in particular the large colliery closure programme, which the National Coal Board was plan-ning for the North East during the decade. Teesside was envisaged as a growth zone within the wider region, in other words growth on Teesside would absorb  of workers from older declining industries.

On many levels this was a sound assumption; it had happened in the 1920s and 1930s as workers from older industries came to work at ICI Billingham from across the region and beyond. More recently the work-ers from the declining Cleveland ironstone mining industry had trans-ferred to new developments. For example, Eston ironstone mine closed in 1949, but many former miners found work at the nearby ICI Wilton development. It can be argued that the Conservative Hailsham did not wish to be seen as imposing or trying to impose central government’s will upon Labour local authorities, consequently the report tried to support existing initiatives.

Beynon et al. (1994) quote John Gillis who worked in local govern-ment on Teesside at the time:

to a large extent the Hailsham proposals were a recognition of what was already happening. It was a strategy produced from the bits that were already there, rather than a national strategy. In the 1960s local authori-ties saw themselves as the facilitators of development. Teesside was a unique location with large areas of flat land for capital intensive indus-try. The new era of economic development was taking place here. It was an obligation on the area for it to take place here. (In Beynon et  al. 1994: 70)

The Hailsham proposals then sought to support local authorities in pursuit of the modernisation of industry and the areas infrastructure in general. Hudson (1990) summarises the suggested proposals for Teesside in the Hailsham report as being:

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construction of roads to improve access to and links between industrial, commercial and residential areas; construction of new industrial estates; and provision of land for chemicals and steel industries by opening up the Teesmouth area and reclaiming derelict sites. (Hudson 1990: 68)

Hailsham also recommended that port capacity at Teesport be upgraded in order to provide an improved deep-water port that would aid the region’s exporters. Hailsham’s conclusions then were broadly wel-comed. The message of Teesside’s potential as a centre of growth in a wider region of industrial decline was also made clear in the 1965 National Plan (HMSO 1965), which emphasised the modernisation of industry across the UK. Additionally, there was a recognition from cen-tral government that local authorities needed assistance if they were to be able to adequately plan for the future, and it did this by making funds available for a comprehensive urban development and planning survey.

This offer was quickly taken up by the local authorities in the Teesside area and in 1964 work began on Teesside Survey and Plan, which in time would become known simply as Teesplan. The planners had a very wide brief and considered land use, industrial development, transport, housing and how to redevelop and modernise the urban centres, in particular Middlesbrough and Stockton. The planners consulted widely, thought broadly and considered no less than seven different possible approaches. The Teesplan team was radical in its initial approach and this seemingly upset numerous interests, for example it reported on pollution, a sensi-tive issue for both industry and local authorities and an issue that was rarely confronted directly. This was because high levels of pollution meant local authorities could not build housing in certain areas and reducing pollution meant increasing costs for industry with potential impacts upon jobs. Matters were further complicated during this era due to the reorganisation of local government during this same era. Reaction to the proposals was divided. The councils of Middlesbrough, Stockton, Thornaby, Redcar, Saltburn and Marske, Billingham and Eston, all merged together in April 1968 to form the County Borough of Teesside. Teesplan’s original director, Franklin Medhurst, had also been controver-sially sacked from the project in January 1967 (for a full account see Medhurst (2011)).

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Despite these setbacks Teesplan was eventually completed in 1969 and it served as the basis for all of the subsequent local authority structure plans until the mid-1970s. Teesplan was also very much a product of its time, its tone bold and optimistic, as this passage from the final plan shows:

Teesside, born in the Industrial revolution, offers to the second half of the twentieth century both a tremendous challenge and an almost unique opportunity. The challenge lies in the legacy of nineteenth century obsoles-cence; the opportunity is to make it one of the most productive efficient and beautiful regions in Britain; a region in which future generations will be able to work in clean and healthy conditions, live in dignity and content and enjoy their leisure in invigorating surroundings. For Teesside already possesses in abundant measure those fundamental characteristics which provide the foundations for a full life. In few places does one find such modern industries, providing for man’s economic prosperity, in such close proximity to a beautiful and spacious countryside, which can be the means of satisfying his recreational and spiritual needs. (Teesside Survey and Plan HMSO 1969: 3)

Teesplan was highly optimistic about the growth of the area’s popula-tion forecasting that it would grow from 480,000 to 700,000 by 1991, with an additional 120,000 jobs being created (Beynon et al. 1994: 72). This of course was not to be. The next section examines Teesside’s long decline from the 1970s until the present.

1970–Until the Present: Teesside’s Long Decline

Less than 20 years after Teesplan’s publication in 1987, unemployment in Middlesbrough had reached 21%, in 1965 it had been only 2%. The area’s decline as a centre of manufacturing employment had been very rapid. Between 1971 and 2008 Shildrick et al. (2012) report that close to 100,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the area but only 92,000 were created in the service sector, predominantly in the public sector via local government, health and education, new forms of white collar work such as call centres, and also in retail and leisure. As a proportion, the number

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of workers employed in manufacturing declined from 43% (about 105,500 jobs) in 1975, to 9.3% (25,000 jobs) in 2015 (Nomis 2015).

This collapse happened very rapidly. Foord et al (1985) point out that “Total employment fell from 206,000 in 1978 to 178,000 in 1981 a loss of 13%” (Foord et al 1985: 17). This is even more shocking when we consider that Teesplan had forecast that employment would rise from 197,000 in 1966 to 316,500 in 1991 (Foord et al 1985: 17). So why did this prediction turn out to be so badly wrong?

It can be argued that this occurred as the plans of the 1960s were based upon a number of assumptions about the continued importance and sta-bility of the area’s core industries of steel and chemicals. Hudson (1990) argues that there was an acceptance that as these industries modernised, although their output might grow, it was unlikely that employment within them due to technological advance would also expand, in fact it was more likely to decline, but:

The quid pro quo for this was however a political commitment to provide alternative employment in manufacturing and services. This was reflected in the promise of local authority resources to help diver-sify employment opportunities. (Hudson 1990 in Harloe et al. (eds) 1990: 71)

But diversification on the scale envisaged did not happen, despite efforts to attract alternative employers to Teesside during this period, and steel and chemicals remained the dominant industrial forces within the area.

As Foord et al (1987) point out,

Regional policy had focussed attention and resources on steel and chemi-cals, but had signally failed to diversify the local economy and left the area dependent upon a group of industries experiencing decline, rationalisation, internationalisation and above all else the shedding of jobs. Foord et al (1987: 34)

As predicted there was expansion as ICI embarked on a major period of restructuring. It replaced older chemical plants at Billingham with new

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modern facilities, notably four new ammonia plants that used naphtha, an oil-based feed stock, rather than coal (Phillips 2008). The new plants were also more efficient and required less process workers. ICI no longer required the anhydride mine at Billingham, which closed in the early 1970s. ICI had also made the fortuitous decision in 1970 to convert all of its plants to run on natural gas, which in turn made it less vulnerable to the global recession that followed the oil crisis of 1973. In fact, ICI expanded further with the development of its petrochemicals complex on reclaimed land on the north bank of the Tees at Seal Sands, opening its joint refinery venture with Phillips in 1981.

The planners also failed to forsee the changing world economic condi-tions that arose in the early 1970s. The slump that followed the oil crisis resulted in a fall in demand for manufactured goods  in general. Steel in particular was badly affected, as any basic product is in such conditions. Engineering suffered too as demand fell. Head Wrightson was in trouble by the late 1970s, and in 1977 it was taken over by the Sheffield-based Davy group.

There was of course increasing competition from overseas, as the first signs of globalisation began to appear. One method that was tried was to make industry more competitive by reducing industrial capacity. This lay behind British Steel’s strategy to rationalise production at coastal sites around the country and to build bigger plants, hence the decision to close all of their Teesside blast furnaces and concentrate steelmaking at the Redcar site. Initially three furnaces were planned but only one was ever built and commissioned. The strategy of reducing capacity in order to promote efficiency was not new, it had been tried during the 1930s with government schemes such as ‘National Ship Builders Securities’, a government- backed company that bought up shipyards and demolished them—perhaps the most famous victim was Palmers Shipyard in Jarrow- on- the-Tyne, which was demolished in 1933 (for a full account see Wilkinson (1939)). The policy of rationalisation was tried again in the shipbuilding industry in the 1960s; however the Geddes report (HMSO 1966) was not primarily about closures; instead it attempted to reorgan-ise the UK’s shipyards into strategic clusters that would specialise in par-ticular types of vessels. As a consequence, Swan Hunter, a Tyneside ship builder, merged with Smiths Dock, and also took over the Furness ship-

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yard on the north bank of the Tees. Teesside ship building was now wholly controlled by the Swan Hunter Group. Similar attempts at ratio-nalisation in the engineering industry were made. To reduce steel casting capacity, the Lazard scheme of the early 1980s offered financial incen-tives to firms who were prepared to close plants and reduce capacity (Baden- Fuller 1989). Amongst those firms was the Davy corporation; the reduction in capacity diminished the size of the former Head Wrightson group on Teesside. Davy group survived but the number of former Head Wrightson sites on Teesside diminished, with the Thornaby site eventually closing in 1984.

The economic downturn also meant that industries that had been seen by Hailsham as having the capacity to absorb redundant workers from older declining industries such as coal were increasingly unable to do so. The changing economic landscape also meant that an even greater share of older declining industry ended up under state control. Despite the efforts of a decade earlier, the UK shipbuilding industry was nationalised in 1977. Hudson (1986) makes the point that from the late 1970s onwards the nationalised industries, far from protecting jobs, were effec-tively vehicles by which the government from 1979 onwards accelerated the run-down of industrial capacity, and with coal, steel and ship build-ing shedding both capacity and thousands of jobs.

The planners of the 1960s could not have anticipated the very differ-ent political atmosphere that would drive not only industrial policy but also local and regional planning and government from the 1980s onward. After 1979 the policies of the Thatcher governments and all subsequent national administrations have all broadly accepted that mar-ket forces, not only at the national level but also internationally, should be allowed to drive the UK economy. This attitude is illustrated by the way in which the new Conservative government withdrew a promise made to Cleveland County Council in 1977 to relocate a government department to Middlesbrough. The relocation of the Property Services Agency (PSA) had been expected to bring with it around 3000 jobs. Instead of economic planning at the national level, with local authorities then being charged with implementing policy, the emphasis would be placed upon local and regional development through promotion schemes such as Enterprise Zones within which business could benefit

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from tax breaks and incentives. These were to be administered by Urban Development Corporations, which were quasi-autonomous non-gov-ernmental organisations (Quangos). They had their own unelected boards, had the power to purchase and develop land, and were outside of Local Authority control. Teesside’s own Urban Development Corporation was founded shortly after Margret Thatcher’s infamous ‘Walk in the wilderness’ in 1987 on the derelict former Head Wrightson site at Teesdale, Thornaby. The Teesside Development Corporation undoubtedly had some success in redeveloping the corridor of derelict and polluted industrial land that stretched along the banks of the Tees between Stockton and Middlesbrough. Amongst the corporation’s flag-ship developments were the Tees Barrage, which aimed at making the river between Stockton and Middlesbrough a centre for leisure and water sports, Hartlepool Marina, Teesside Park, a large out of town retail park at Thornaby, and the Teesdale Business Park, which provided office space on the former Head Wrightson site and its surrounding environs in Thornaby. After the election of the first Blair government in 1997, the Development Corporations were abolished, and their roles were given to the local authorities. Cleveland County Council, which had succeeded the County Borough of Teesside in 1974, had been abolished in 1996, so Teesside for the first time in nearly three decades was with-out a unitary authority. Instead there were four local authorities: Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton-On-Tees. Local authorities were expected to work with the new Regional Development Agencies, in the case of Teesside the agency was ‘ONE  NorthEast’. The new set-up led to more attempts at trying to attract investment to Teesside; in 2002 Tees Valley regeneration was set up and again used the method of attempting to ‘pump prime’ inward investment into the area by showcasing the area with ambitious infra-structural projects such as the Millennium footbridge at Stockton and ambitious pieces of public art such as the Temenos installation at Middlehaven dock in Middlesbrough by sculptor Anish Kapoor and structural designer Cecil Balmond. Tees Valley Regeneration was wound up in 2009, with responsibility for regeneration passing to local authori-ties and a new Local Enterprise partnership, Tees Valley Unlimited, in 2010, an arrangement which survives too date. Tees Valley Unlimited

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differs from its predecessors in that it also includes the area covered by Darlington’s local authority within its remit.

Changing Patterns of Work on Teesside

By the mid-1990s the very high rates of unemployment Teesside had experienced in the 1980s had subsided slightly, but they remained stub-bornly high. The local economy was beginning to look rather different too. This was partly due to the emergence of some new industries within the area. Shildrick et al. (2012) note that during the 1980s and 1990s alongside the growth of service and retail employment, there were also increases in employment in textiles, electronics and food processing. But crucially it was about the emergence of different working practices within these industries—the abundance of labour meant that employers could demand more of workers. This new ‘flexibility’, as it was termed, was not confined to new industries either; it was also found within the steel and chemical industries, with the increasing use of short-term contracts and the use of subcontractors becoming more and more commonplace. As Beynon et al. (1994) comment:

as with ‘modernisation’ in the 1960s the search for flexibility emerged a shared goal for employers in the 1980s. While their workforces might be unhappy with these developments they had little choice but  to comply. (Beynon et al. 1994: 121)

Not only were steel and chemicals looking to become leaner indus-tries, they were also attempting to encourage new business start-ups in the area. The British Steel Corporation set up BSC industry, which was aimed at creating new jobs in areas with declining steel production. ICI ran an extensive in house ‘resettlement scheme’ to help workers retrain or even move out of the industry to start their own businesses. The com-pany also created a new small business park at Billingham, the Belasis Hall technology park, which encouraged chemical and technological research start- ups. Both steel and chemicals were also conscious of the need to maintain the pool of skills that their industries might require, but

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without maintaining traditional apprenticeship routes inhouse  instead  strengthening links with local further education providers and establish-ing new training providers such as the TTE Technical Training Group at Southbank.

Something that certainly could not have been foreseen in the mid- 1980s, let alone the 1960s, was the dramatic demise of ICI. In the mid- 1980s ICI had appeared to be in good shape, it was a worldwide business that was highly profitable. On Teesside, ICI was still a formidable pres-ence, although employment had steadily fallen since the 1970s, more than halving its workforce, which in 1975 had been 23,000 strong, but in 1992 it still employed 11,000 people on Teesside (Beynon et al. 1994: 97). Yet by January 2008 ICI no longer existed. Between the late 1980s and 2008, the company had been broken up, with its constituent busi-nesses sold off to new or existing companies who wanted specific parts of company.

Phillips (2008) argues that changing international trading conditions in the 1980s prompted this process; he points out that there was no longer as much demand for fertiliser products. Increased food production in Europe had led to grain and beef “mountains”. Maximising food production was no longer the goal it once had been. Additionally, the USSR in its final decade began to export urea with a much higher nitrogen content, which made bulk fertiliser production less profitable. Consequently, ICI’s strategy was to move away from bulk chemical production in general and demerge parts of the company into new entities, the most notable being the setup of Zeneca in 1992 (now Astra Zeneca), which took over all of ICI’s Pharmaceutical division. The company had also resisted a hostile takeover from Hanson Trust in 1991.Year by year ICI sold off more and more of its operations on Teesside to other companies, with many maintaining the plants and inheriting ICI employees. The following chronology of ICI’s breakup compiled by the North East paper the Evening Journal in 2006 gives an idea of the scale of this process from the early 1990s until 2006.

July 1993: Nylon business sold to DuPontMarch 1994: Polypropylene operations sold to BASF,August 1994: Engineering services business sold to Redpath Engineering,Feb 1995: Union Carbide buys ethylene oxide and derivatives business1997: Fertiliser business sold to Terra Industries

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1998: Polyester intermediates business sold to DuPont,Air Products buys methylamines and derivatives business.1998: Enron buys ICI Teesside utilities and services businessJuly 1999: Huntsman buys polyurethanes, titanium dioxide and selected

petrochemicals businesses,Oct 1999: Acrylics business sold to Ineos Acrylics,2000: Petroplus takes over ICI stake in PIP refinery joint venture.2001: Methanex takes over methanol business.2002: Sale of Synetix catalyst businessFeb 2006: Puts up Uniqema business for saleThe Journal (15/02/2006).

Essentially many of the former ICI plants and sites have continued to operate, many using ICI staff who were transferred to the new companies and could expect substantial payouts in the event of redundancy. However, for those starting out in the industry, there was no longer the prospect of a ‘job for life’, which ICI had been known for in its heyday. I will not dwell upon the decline of steelmaking on Teesside as that has already be covered in Chap. 2.

Concluding comments

The failure of the project to modernise Teesside that attracted a broad consensus from industry and government at both the national and local levels 50 years ago can be argued to be due to the failure to diversify the local area’s economy. Chapman writing in 2005 sums this up very well:

The need to diversify the Teesside economy has been a consistent theme of policy statements for more than forty years (see Beynon et  al. 1994; Hudsons 1989). Converting these statements into effective action has, however, proved difficult. The difficulty derives not so much from any col-lective lack of vision on the part of economic development agencies and institutions over this period, but rather from the fact that the regional economy had, in a sense, passed a point of no return by the late 1960s in the extent of its dependence upon the twin pillars of chemicals and steel. The problems facing those involved at the ‘sharp end’ of public policy delivery have been exacerbated by the reduced commitment of central gov-

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ernment to regional policy in the United Kingdom since 1980. In these circumstances, locally and regionally based institutions have had very lim-ited room for manoeuvre. In effect, they have been trying to cope with the decline of the chemical and steel industries on Teesside for almost a genera-tion. Faced with the dramatic and immediate impact of job losses, it is not surprising that ‘coping’ has involved various attempts to support these industries. Such attempts do not indicate myopia, but a rational response to the political and economic realities created at local and regional level by path dependence. (Chapman 2005: 614)

The legacy then of the modernisation project with its assumptions of diversification and a failure to see that the core industries of steel chemicals and engineering would not be able to maintain their share of industrial output and employment in the region has essentially been one that has seen Teesside become a region with persistent levels of high unemployment, underemployment and increasingly unsecure and precarious work.

Foord et al (1985) identified this shift as what they termed a “Quiet Revolution”:

People have had to live through economic decline and have responded to it in various ways. There has been a ‘quiet revolution’ which has taken place in attitudes and expectations. Inevitably the impacts have been uneven. Some have had to come to terms with the prospect of perhaps never working again, others have stayed in work but it has become more precarious and there are those in jobs whose expectations have been down-wardly revised. (Foord et al 1985:9)

Shildrick et al. 2012 argue that the social consequences of this decline were quickly felt and have persisted:

During this period of decline, sought after neighbourhoods constructed to house industrial workers and their families have metamorphosed into ‘hard to let’ estates of residual social housing marked by poverty worklessness and all other indicators of severe social deprivation. (Shildrick et al. 2012: 58)

These conditions can be argued to have been further exacerbated by not only the lack of demand for labour, but also by changes in the type of

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work that became available and the relations of production within the local economy.

In broad terms we have seen manual working class jobs (for men) in manu-facturing industry that were, typically, full-time, skilled, unionised, long lasting and relatively well paid become replaced by service sector and “new” manufacturing jobs that were more likely to be undertaken by women and to be non-standard, non-unionised, low skilled and relatively poorly paid. (Shildrick et al. 2012: 59)

The changes to established patterns of work have occurred very quickly, in the space of four decades, and their consequences have been far reach-ing, particularly for working-class communities in areas such as Teesside. Byrne writing in (1995) sums up the extent and nature of this change very well in his discussion of education and its relationship with work:

In 1971 most school leavers in Middlesbrough had no formal qualifica-tions but had access to an employment system in which many well paid jobs did not require such qualifications. Now things are very different. (Byrne 1995: 112)

As has been shown, the birth and very fast rise to maturity of Teesside combined geological resources and technical innovation, it was here that modern railways and the locomotives to move coal and ore were invented. Those resources allowed iron and steel production to flourish. Being at the forefront of the industrial revolution gave the Teesside a place in his-tory, and also allowed it to accumulate material, technical and human capital. But there was also a legacy of environmental damage and a depen-dence upon the industries that had come to dominate the area, steel, chemicals, and heavy engineering, so as the twentieth century progressed the advantages of being one of the first places to industrialise began to disappear as other regions of the world industrialised. The end of steel-making at Redcar in 2015 can be argued to be the end of this process or at least the start of its conclusion. The region’s geology has in recent years been seen as having little part in its future; instead, the wider industrial infrastructure, technical skills and an available workforce of the region

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have been promoted in an attempt to attract inward investment. Yet the region’s geology may yet prove to be a future resource, with huge reserves of shale gas, polyhalite and the potential for coal to be exploited once again by ‘gasification’ technology. Place has not only obvious spatial dimensions, but temporal dimensions too. These are themes which I shall return to in the concluding chapter, which examines amongst other things Teesside’s future prospects.

References

Baden-Fuller, C. W. F. (1989). Exit from declining industries and the case of steel castings. The Economic Journal, 99(398), 949–961.

Beynon, H., Hudson, R., & Sadler, D. (1994). A place called Teesside: A locality in a global economy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Byrne, D. S. (1995). Deindustrialisation and dispossession. An examination of social division in the industrial city. Sociology, 29(1), 95–115.

Chapman, K. (2005). From ‘growth centre’ to ‘cluster’: Restructuring, regional development, and the Teesside chemical industry. Environment and Planning A, 37, 597–615.

Discover Stockton. (2014). Stockton castle. Retrieved from http://www.stock-tonteesside.co.uk/stockton-castle.html

Foord, J., Robinson, F., & Sadler, D. (1985). The quiet revolution: Social and economic change on Teesside 1965–85. Newcastle upon Tyne: BBC (NE).

Foord, J., Robinson, F., & Sadler, D. (1987). Living with economic decline: Teesside in crisis. Northern Economic Review, 14, 33–48.

Glass, R. (Ed.). (1948). The social background of a plan: A study of Middlesbrough. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Graces Guide to British Industrial History. (n.d.) Stockton Malleable iron works. Retrieved January 16, 2017, from http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Stockton_Malleable_Iron_Works-

Heritage Stockton. (2015). Big ben and the Norton foundry. Retrieved from http://heritage.stockton.gov.uk/stories/big-ben-norton-foundry

HMSO. (1963). The North East: A programme for regional development and growth. Cmnd. 2206. London: HMSO.

HMSO. (1965). National plan. London: HMSO.HMSO. (1966). Shipbuilding inquiry committee, report. Cmnd 2937. London:

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HMSO. (1969). Teesside survey and plan. London: HMSO.Hornby, C. (2004). A century in stone [documentary film]. Pancrack pictures.Howes, B. (2009). Building the past – Middlesbrough transporter bridge. Best

of British: May, 73, 1–27. ISSN: 1355-6681.Hudson, R. (1986). Producing an industrial wasteland. In R.  Martin &

B. Rowthorn (Eds.), The geography of de-industrialisation. London: Macmillan.Hudson, R. (1989). Wrecking a region: State policy, party politics and regional

change in North-East England. London: Pion Limited.Hudson, R. (1990). Trying to revive an infant Hercules: The rise and fall of local

authority modernization policies on Teesside. In M. Harloe, C. Pickvance, & J. Urry (Eds.), Place policy and politics. London: Routledge.

The Journal. (2006, February 15). ICI’s influence on Teesside lives on. Howard Walker. Retrieved from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-east-news/icis-influence-teesside-lives-4585402

K.W.G. (1973). A history of Wilton Castle. Billingham: Billingham Press Limited.Medhurst, F. (2011). A quiet catastrophe: The Teesside job (2nd ed.).Great Britain,

Citizens Papers.Nomis Employee Jobs. (2015). Tees Valley ONS Business Register and

Employment Survey: Open access. https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/The Northern Echo. (2014, May 6). The rise of Robert Ropner Chris Lloyd.

Retrieved from http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/11193788. The_rise_of_Robert_Ropner/

Pepler, G., & MacFarlane, P. W. (1949). The North East Area Development Outline Plan Ministry of Town and Country Planning: Interim confidential edition; copy in Durham University Library, Durham.

Phillips, J. (2008). ICI at Billingham – A brief history. In M. Williamson (Ed.), Life at the ICI: Memories of working at ICI Billingham. Hartlepool: TIMP, Printability Publishing.

Priestly, J. B. (1934). English journey. London: Heinemann.Sadler, D. (1990). The social foundations of planning and the power of capital;

Teesside in historical context. Environment and planning D; Society and Space, 8, 323–338.

Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Webster, C., & Garthwaite, K. (2012). Poverty and insecurity: Life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.

Tees Valley Unlimited. (2010). Interim worklessness assessment. Middlesbrough: Tees Valley Unlimited.

Tomlinson, W. W. (1915). The North Eastern Railway: Its rise and development. London: Andrew Reid and Company. OCLC 504251788.

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Tomlinson, D. M., & Williams, M. (1997). Who was who in nineteenth century Cleveland. Guisborough: Peter Tuffs Publishing.

Wilkinson, E. C. (1939). The town that was murdered: The life-story of Jarrow. London: Left Book Club.

Williamson, M. (Ed.). (2013). Life at Head’s: Memories of Working at Head Wrightson Thornaby-on-Tees-. Teesside Industrial Memories Project, Billingham Press

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4Exploring Teesside’s Visual Legacies

As outlined in earlier chapters Teesside in comparison to many other parts of the country and the wider North East still retains a recognisable industrial landscape, with chemical plants, power stations, factories, oil and gas storage facilities, and steel mills all retaining a place on the Teesside skyline. This of course contrasts with Teesside’s rural backdrop of the Eston Hills and the North Yorkshire moors beyond. It can be argued that for better or worse the industrial landscape is inextricably linked with the local area and is part of its core identity.

One of the focus group participants commented on this issue specifically:

If Middlesbrough (football club) are ever on the television playing at home, they cannot resist spinning the camera round onto the Nitram tower (part of a chemical fertilizer producing plant), and then they will try and get the steam from the plant into the shot too. It’s just steam not pollution! Why can’t they show a view of the hills, or Roseberry Topping (a local beauty spot) or the moors? (Mima Focus Group)

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Others had a much more positive and affectionate view. One of the photographs used in the focus groups showed a view of the local chemical plants at night and prompted the following comment:

Beautiful, an industrial beauty. You know you’re nearly home when you’re travelling up from the south and you can see the lights of the chemical industry. (Stockton Library Focus Group)

As is evident from the comments above, issues of industry, identity, how Teesside is portrayed and the motivations that might be behind such por-trayals, convinced me that the use of photographs as starting or departure points for discussion was a viable strategy. Consequently, using images of industry in the past and present in order to elicit responses seemed both practical and sensible. It also allowed an alternative way in which one of my key research questions: “What is the legacy of Teesside’s industrial past?” could be explored. Furthermore, a series of contemporary photographs commissioned specifically for the project allowed the exploration of my other main question: “How do the legacies of the industrial past influence the area today and shape its possible futures?” I would argue that the use of the photographs allowed a larger and more diverse group to participate in the research, as participants could begin with the photographs in front of them, rather than direct personal experience. This meant that 19-year-old students who had no direct experience of industry were able to participate in the groups alongside retired ICI and British Steel workers who had spent their entire working lives within industry.

The Groups

In all, seven focus groups were conducted between September and December 2016. This was more than I had initially envisaged; however, I felt it impor-tant to try and gain a broad range of views and perspectives, in other words to maximise the ‘instances’ or viewpoints. The seven groups were:

• A group at a local community project that met on a weekly basis—a colleague already had access to this group and introduced me. Seven individuals participated.

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• A public event held at Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art (MIMA). This gallery is located in the heart of Middlesbrough and hosts international and local exhibitions. This event was held in the ‘office for useful art’, a space in MIMA, a slightly restricted, but still public space within the gallery. There were ten participants.

• A public event at Stockton Central Reference Library. The library has an excellent track record of hosting events looking at local history and culture, and I had attended several of these as part of my general research for the project. So approaching the library to host the event was straightforward. The library was able to make a large room avail-able for this event and they also advertised the event extensively. Thirty-two people attended the event and participated.

• Three groups were arranged with students at Teesside University; this was done via colleagues who put me in touch with other colleagues of theirs who were involved with teaching a research methods course to first-year social science students. Thus the aim was to demonstrate the photo elicitation method to the two groups as a technique as well as garnering a response from them. Another group were doing a course called ‘Teesside Studies’. The advantage of talking to students at Teesside University rather than my own institution was that they were far more likely to have roots and connections with the local area, and those who did not, could give a contrasting viewpoint as they were living in central Middlesbrough. One group had 20 par-ticipants, another 17 participants and the third group had five participants.

• The final research group was held at a regular monthly meeting of a local history society, and was facilitated by one of the local council’s heritage officers. There were ten participants.

The Method

Prior to beginning the focus groups, I had given a lot of thought about how to conduct them in order to get responses from the participants. I quickly realised that there was no simple formula that would ensure success. Prior to running the groups, I spoke to someone who had conducted similar research some years previously and asked them if they had

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any advice about how to run the groups. Their answer was very simple, they said:

Try and show people something they might be interested in and if they a have a tale that they want to tell you, then they will.

Other practical tips included having a decent quality digital voice recorder to record the proceedings with. I spent a great deal of time selecting the photographs that would be used within the groups; I also considered which format would allow the photographs to be best shared and discussed within the groups. Three formats for the images were used in each group; the photographs were presented on traditional 7 × 5-inch prints, this allowed them to be passed around as a set of photographs in a manner that was very commonplace until relatively recently, and which older participants would undoubtedly be familiar with. The photographs were also presented in A4 format, and lami-nated; this allowed larger versions of the images to be seen and handled by participants without them having to have too much concern for the prints. Additionally, I arranged to project digital versions of the images via a data projector at the venues; these would run as a looped slide show and be a backdrop to the discussions. But despite all the prepara-tions and considerations, I eventually had to concede that I would only really know whether the method was successful once the first group had taken place.

The initial group took place in the last week of September 2016 and proved both successful and informative. The small group was a manage-able size and plenty of comments were made about the photographs, the voice recorder managed to capture the conversation to a high quality, which could be easily understood. However, it was clear that there were things that I had to modify. Firstly, I had given a minimal introduction about my research and what I was trying to achieve, inviting the group to look at the photographs and consider my two basic research questions about the legacy of the industrial past and the influence of the past in shaping possible futures. This clearly did not give enough direction or instruction to the participants as I was asked very early in the proceed-ings: “What do you want us to talk about?”

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I was a little surprised by this but responded with a fuller outline of the project and stressed that I was not looking for a particular answer of any kind, rather I was interested in the participants’ thoughts and reac-tions to the photographs. As a consequence of this experience I gave a short powerpoint presentation about the project, its central ideas and what I was trying to achieve at each subsequent research event. There were also other issues that I had not considered at all. This group was already well established and the members had particular roles that were routinely played out within their meetings. As a result, there was an established way of doing things; one member spoke a great deal more than the others whilst another took the role of a sceptic questioning every comment that any of the other group members made. I quickly had to adapt to this dynamic, being careful to try and keep the discus-sion within the general parameters of the subject but without appearing too bossy! It also became clear that even in small group discussions some individuals were uncomfortable talking in front of the whole group, but quite happy to talk to other individuals or me on a one-to-one basis. At the initial group I got around this by circulating and speaking to indi-viduals personally and noting their comments; at the subsequent groups, many of which were much larger, I employed a different strategy, as well as listening, recording conversations and taking notes, I provided ‘post it’ sticky notes that participants could write their thoughts on and attach to the reverse of the relevant photograph. This proved a very successful strategy. After all the groups were complete, field notes were compiled about each of the events. The participants’ reactions to the photographs that had been recorded in all forms were written up and a thematic analysis was carried out.

The Photographs

Selecting the photographs to use within the groups was a long process; I was anxious to choose the ‘right’ photographs, but I was also very con-scious that I did not know what the ‘right’ pictures were! I did know that I wanted to present a wide range of images relating to Teesside and indus-try past and present. But I was also very clear that I did not just want to

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present a narrative that showed an impressive industrial past, its decline and dereliction, and finally its remnants. I felt that if I did this, all I would be asking participants was to confirm or deny this narrative rather than to use the photographs as a departure point from which they could express whatever they wanted. But the trick was to also keep the discus-sion within the parameters of my research questions. Eventually I selected 49 pictures to use within the focus groups. Twenty-four were archive photographs that focused on industry; they came largely from the ICI photographic archive, which is held at Beamish Museum in County Durham. Several other photographs from Beamish’s extensive collection were also used. North East photographer Keith Pattison also gave permis-sion for several of his photographs of Haverton Hill in the 1970s to be used in the discussion groups. The 25 contemporary photographs cov-ered industrial sites, former industrial sites and the current landscapes at sites in Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, Port Clarence, Billingham and Redcar. These photographs were taken on a number of visits to the area between 2015 and 2016 by Michele Allan, who is a professional photographer employed by Durham University.

Responses and reactions to the archive images

It was no surprise that the different groups due to their profiles particu-larly in terms of age and direct experience of the industrial past tended to have more to say about some of the pictures than others. There were, however, some pictures that generally drew comments from across the groups, and it is those pictures I will now discuss (Image 4.1).

This picture which was the only illustration that featured in the focus group materials, all the others were photographs, is the front cover of a small brochure issued by the Tees-Side Industrial Development Board in the late 1940s. The board was a formed by local councils in 1931 to attempt to attract new investment into the area. It was finally wound up in 1969 when its functions were taken over by the newly formed County Borough of Teesside. Participants in all of the groups were drawn to this image, with many remarking on how the illustration shows Teesside at

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Image 4.1 Tees-Side Industrial Development Board brochure cover 1947

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the centre of the UK. For some participants this was logical, as one remarked:

Teesside, yes -obviously the centre of industrial Britain. (Stockton Library group)

Another participant described the picture as showing Teesside as British Industry’s ‘Beating Heart’. However, the majority of comments saw this image as being about the past, a past that seemed increasingly remote, as this comment shows:

Growing up in the 1980s I had no idea that Teesside had been a wealthy area and was important to the nation’s economy- we commonly referred to it as a ‘shithole’ compared to other more beautiful, pretty places. (Stockton Library group)

Others talked about the past not as something they had not known, but as something which had now been lost:

How the map of industry has changed since this publication! (Teesside University group 2)

Change was a theme that was evident throughout all of the group dis-cussions and emerged around many of the photographs. What partici-pants attributed change to was sometimes expressed or hinted at:

Yes we were and are an important centre, but it’s a pity that most south of Luton never knew it. (Stockton Library group)

This comment points to two themes that became more apparent within the discussion. One is about the neglect of the region, the other is about how this is explained as being caused by the political establishment, which is seen as serving the interests of London and the South East at the North and North East’s expense.

There was also a strong sense that the past was a very different place to the present. This was at times nostalgic with the view that there had been

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a ‘better yesterday’ for the region. The nature of nostalgia and the ways in which it is expressed is important as the past is always viewed from the standpoint of the present. As Mah (2012) puts it:

The literature on nostalgia also suggests that memory is an experience of the present: nostalgia always tells us more about the present than it does the past. (Mah 2012: 15)

In this way memory itself can be seen as a legacy informed by the past but shaped by the present (Image 4.2). The idea of a ‘better yesterday’ was by no means universal there was also a more ambiguous view of the past as a place which also had many challenges and life was hard. The next image of ICI workers provoked discussions about how work and life have changed since the 1950s.

This picture from the ICI archive generated a great deal of comments from the participants, some had memories of the location and what had

Image 4.2 Workers leaving the West Gate at ICI Billingham in the early 1950s (ICI archive)

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gone on there. Some comments were descriptive, informing the group in detail what was being shown:

This is Agric (agricultural division ICI) my dad was in the pipe bridges division and his office was just to the right of the buildings shown. (Stockton history group)

The photograph prompted several former workers and residents of Billingham to talk about payday customs and rituals at ICI:

Thursday lunchtime was when you got paid, and women would come down and wait for the lads to give them their wage, or part of them at least, that was a common sight. (MIMA group)

On payday wives met their husbands to get their pay packet at lunchtime. (Stockton Library group)

Where wives met husbands for their pay. (Stockton Library group)

This practice, they told me, whilst not universal, was still very com-mon well into the 1970s. Everyone said it happened so wives could get bills paid and shopping done, and it also ensured that the men didn’t get the chance to go and spend too much in the bar at the ‘Synthonia’, ICI Billingham’s Social Club, before they got home. This example provides an insight into how the worlds of work and domestic life met: the gate is a boundary and also a transition point from one to the other. They also highlight the gendered division of labour at this time, with husbands as breadwinners and wives controlling and organising domestic life.

As one of the University group participants commented:

Industry, very male very few women. (Teesside University group 2)

Well, this was certainly the case within this picture at least, although it would certainly not be accurate to portray ICI as a place of predomi-nantly male employment, as will be discussed later. Other participants commented more directly about the image itself, the expressions of the people in it and their dress:

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Clocking in or out, they look happy so they are probably clocking out! (Teesside University group 1)

These people are in working clothes and they depict the era as clothes were difficult to keep clean and immaculate, because of the pollution and the coal fires everyone had. Hardly anyone had washing machines either. (Community project group)

They are working clothes, but these days most people who are in works or factories are given a uniform. But here there is no uniform, just old clothes, old bikes, the car at the back is old, there is one with a suit and tie so he must be a manager. (Community project group)

The discussion of clothing promoted further comments about how wash days and clothes-washing facilities were limited in the past and also how clothes became work clothes once they had become worn or past their best, unlike now when work clothes and leisure clothes are less likely to be appropriate for both settings.

These comments I think reflect how a different time was remembered or located by the participants. One individual at the community group was very keen to narrow down the exact year the picture was taken (the ICI archive just lists it as the early 1950s). I wondered why this was; after a while it emerged that this was a way to make connections with both the area and their own past:

My Dad had a pub in Billingham and most people who worked at ICI would come in. The coats the women are wearing are not those that I remember in the sixties so it must be earlier than that. (Community project group)

People were keen to locate the pictures within their own biographies and, as I had anticipated, this often led to wider discussions. It could, however, lead to frustration on the part of the participants. I was asked on several occasions why I did not have more images of their area, hometown or their former workplace; the answer was of course variety, otherwise I would have had to produce a different set of images for each individual, something that was clearly not possible.

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This photograph (Image 4.3) of Stockton High Street provoked a lot of discussion, particularly but not exclusively amongst the two Stockton focus groups. This is because of the modern history of Stockton High Street. The featured photograph was taken prior to the controversial rede-velopment and modernisation of the High Street in the 1960s. The High Street lost some of its oldest and most historic buildings, which were demolished rather than preserved and restored, in order to make way for a modern shopping centre, something that remains contentious to this day (for a full account see Medhurst (2011)). In recent years the High Street has undergone a multi-million pound redevelopment in an effort to revive the area and attract shoppers back from out-of-town retail parks. Many of the reactions were nostalgic:

The High street of my youth, much missed, however many of the buildings were past their best. (Stockton Library group)

That’s when the High street was the High street, market days were best as the pubs were all open from early on, that was a favourite day to skive off work. (Stockton Library group)

Image 4.3 Stockton High Street in the 1950s (Valentine of Dundee, St Andrews University)

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Other comments whilst still nostalgic had a more philosophical angle:

Vehicles and people all nourished on the teats of Tees Industry. Do all their successors now watch screens? (Stockton Library group)

This theme of comparison between ‘then’ and ‘now’ was common, the picture of the High Street was representative of not only another time but also a different way of life. Some saw both continuity and change:

Funny to see certain aspects like the market stay the same, but it looks busy in the past, the buses look very retro. (Teesside University group 3)

Others saw a much greater degree of continuity:

Stockton High Street, it looks the same now, just modernised. (Teesside University group 2)

Within several of the groups the picture led to a discussion about the decline of the High Street and the market over the years:

It’s so sad that Stockton has lost it magic with the markets and visitors. (Teesside University group 2)

Two individuals in different groups talked about working on the mar-ket. One had worked with his cousin at a number of markets all over the North East selling socks and stockings—he remembered Stockton as a good market to work on compared to the market at South Shields (fur-ther north at the mouth of the River Tyne).

There were lots of small businesses, Stockton Market and Middlesbrough market, out in all weathers and they were hard working people you know, we went everywhere even up to South Shields, I remember working there on a stall, my fingers were frozen, we only made about 30 shillings and the stall was 15 shillings rent so once we’d paid for petrol too to get there we didn’t really make anything! (MIMA group)

The other individual who was at the community project group had had her own clothing stall on Stockton market for a number of years.

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Both saw the market as in an irreversible decline. I asked why they thought this was so; both of them gave me the same answer. They both saw the decline of the market as being due to the rise of ‘pound shops’, they both argued that pound shops had effectively taken over the role the market had traditionally played and essentially sold the same type of goods, but the problem was that the pound shops could buy in bulk and sell cheaper than the market traders. Nor did they have to deal with the issues of storing and transporting stock that the traders did:

It’s the pound shops that have really killed the markets. (Community group)

In the MIMA group, the discussion about Stockton market and its decline over the years and the rise of ‘pound shops ‘led into another theme, that of work and the quality of jobs available now compared to the past (Image 4.4). One of the participants who had been a lifelong ICI worker commented that:

Image 4.4 Apprentices at ICI Wilton, Training Centre Machine Shop—1960 (ICI archive)

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Nowadays there are people who have been to University that are working in in cafe’s or supermarkets, there are no jobs around with decent pay in this area anymore. The people who aren’t academic, they are the ones who are working in the pound shops now. (MIMA group)

Whilst his statement contained a great deal of generalisation, what it expressed was how opportunities for young men from working class background have changed and become much more restricted in the past 50 years:

At ICI when I started none of the lads had academic qualifications from school and there were two intakes of 150 apprentices per year. (MIMA Group)

This sentiment was echoed by others in the group who had served apprenticeships at British Steel and Head Wrightson engineering, although it is important to point out that apprenticeships were not given to everyone. Getting an apprenticeship often depended upon passing exams, passing an interview and having good references, nor did it stop there. An apprenticeship took at least 5 years and individuals were expected to pass tests and attend day-release courses at local technical colleges. However, successfully completing an apprenticeship was seen as a passport to a ‘job for life’ for those who wanted it. Those who didn’t make the grade went instead into unskilled jobs that apprenticeships were not required for. Unskilled work was not as well paid and less secure, when times are tough unskilled labourers are the first to be laid off. This was what was being described as equivalent to working in a pound shop now. Apprenticeship then was seen as the transition from school to work, from childhood to adulthood, an extended rite of pas-sage that inducted individuals into a trade and more often than not a particular firm. Consequently, those who trained via these kinds of apprenticeships will talk of ‘serving their time’. There was also broad agreement from older people in several of the groups that they were glad that they were not leaving school today, they felt that there were far less opportunities for young people, particularly those who were ‘not aca-demic’, but University education was not seen as particularly desirable

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either as it meant accumulating large amounts of debt with no guarantee of a decent secure job at the end of it, as this comment shows:

it seems you need a degree just to work in Tesco’s nowadays. (Stockton library group)

This comment is not so much about where people work now, it is instead about how opportunities have become increasingly restricted for school leavers on Teesside compared to what they were a generation or so ago, and how the opportunities that do remain do not offer the type of rewards or job security that a time-served skilled worker was used to in the 1970s:

you got a job with paid holidays so you could book Benidorm or wherever else you wanted to go. You could go to the bank and get a bank loan as they knew you had a decent job and would get paid every week. (MIMA group)

Other reactions stressed how things had changed since the photograph was taken:

Apprentices? Full employment, only a dream now. (Stockton library group)

Whilst some offered explanations for why the change had happened:

50 men equals one robot now! (Stockton library group)

Before they had machines and robots to do all the work people had jobs and unemployment was low. (Teesside University group 3)

I think that this technological explanation is interesting, it is certainly the case that many routine manual jobs have been mechanised in the past 50 years, but might these reactions reflect the image that shows an order and conformity between men and machines, the apprentices appear almost robotic? It is clear that the decline in demand for industrial labour on Teesside is not just a matter of technology replacing people, it is more complex than that. The final comments regarding this picture suggests that industry and those working within it were also part of the story of decline:

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Training to work themselves out of a job. (Stockton Library group)

I asked the group to elaborate about what this meant. A former British steel engineer told me that one of the things he had been involved with was the design and building of steel plants in India and the Far East. This he felt had been one of the reasons why the British steel industry had become uncompetitive. The industry then had contributed to its own downfall. But, as he also added, if British Steel hadn’t designed and built the overseas plants then someone else would have.

It is important to recognise that Teesside’s industries employed thou-sands of women in both white-collar and blue-collar roles. This picture from the ICI archive shows the summarising office, which dealt with accounts in the early 1960s (Image 4.5). A number of women in the groups had worked in similar settings, at ICI or for British Steel. In many ways clerical training for young women worked in a similar way to

Image 4.5 Women working in the summarising office at ICI Billingham (ICI archive)

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industrial apprenticeships for young men; participants also recalled a fairly smooth transition between school and the world of work:

When I was 16, nobody left school without a job, I left school and walked straight into a job at ICI, I worked in the Bonus Office, a lot of my friends did the same. (Community Project group)

Working in the steel and chemical industries was also seen as highly desirable:

that was where you wanted to get in ICI, British Steel or the Council offices, they were the best jobs with the best wages and the best prospects, you didn’t want to end up working for a small firm or worse still in shop or something like that. (Stockton Library group)

The picture had particular memories for one of the participants at the MIMA group as it was her office! She explained who all of the women in the picture were and that the only reason she was not there was that she had just got married and was on her honeymoon. She also explained that the machines they used in the office were used for compiling figures and accounts:

Women did the majority of the office based jobs, this was the summarising section but there were many other offices like it. (MIMA Group)

Other participants commented on the fact that the office was entirely staffed by women. This was particularly the case in the Teesside University groups, amongst the comments were:

Typing pool womens’ work.All women, no males.It seems like men couldn’t check figures. (Teesside University groups 1, 2 and 3)

This degree of gender segregation surprised some, but others pointed out that many of these clerical roles have now disappeared due to technological

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advances, such as computing and changing working practices, e.g. most workers are now expected to do their own typing:

In the 1960s my section had a computer it was a huge thing that took up a whole room and there was also a whole team of women who prepared the paper punch cards that made it work. Well of course all those jobs went. So in some ways there are less jobs available now than there were. (MIMA Group)

On the other hand, it can also be argued that women now have much better access to a much wider range of jobs than they did in the past. What was clear from the discussion was that things had changed a great deal in the world of work since the photograph was taken, with the division of ‘mens’ work’ and ‘womens’ work’ diminishing with the passage of time.

This amazing image which shows a 340-ton boiler being launched into Tees from Head Wrightson’s Thornaby site was discussed at length in several of the groups (Image 4.6). It raised the theme of scale, the

Image 4.6 Launching a Bradwell boiler into the Tees—Head Wrightson, Thornaby 1950s (Remembering Thornaby group)

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idea that in the past industry was concerned with big projects, big prod-ucts, employed a large labour force and there were also grand occasions like this launch. These huge boilers destined for the Bradwell nuclear power plant were too difficult to transport by road from Thornaby to Teesport, so instead Head Wrightson had the idea of launching them into the river and then towing them downstream to the port. One of the par-ticipants at the MIMA had been present at these launchings as a young apprentice; he recalled them as exciting occasions. This sense of scale and occasion was picked up on by many of the participants:

Head Wrightson, a launching, next year the Queen Mary! (Stockton Library group)

Just look how much work there was for all those men in those days! (Stockton Library group)

Hundreds of men involved. (Stockton History group)

A big occasion, how the hell did they steer it when it launched? (Teesside University group 1)

As well as showing the scale, the picture can also be interpreted as a reflection of its times, one of the University group participants com-mented upon the Union Jack flying on the left of the picture, something I had barely noticed when choosing the picture:

nationalism, the British flag, British power, innovation and community. (Teesside University group 3)

Whether this perceived nationalism is intentional is not clear; it can be argued that what is on display is the pride and self confidence that British industry and companies such as Head Wrightson had in the 1950s. Head Wrightson after all advertised themselves as ‘Engineering for World Industry’, with subsidiary firms in South Africa, India, Venezuela and Spain until the company’s final demise in 1984.

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This photograph of ICI workers raised a number of issues (Image 4.7). Firstly, what were they doing? The fullest explanation anyone offered was from a former ICI engineer who thought that this may show a pro-cess control test, i.e. a sample is being taken while a chemical process is running:

Image 4.7 ICI workers doing maintenance, one in full protective clothing the other with basic protection (ICI archive)

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Taking a sample for quality control? A very common but not terribly effec-tive way of ensuring good process control. (Stockton Library group)

However, what caused more comment was the fact that one worker in the photograph has a full body protective suit on while the other has only overalls, gloves and a hard hat; this inevitably led to a discussion about danger and ‘Health and Safety’.

Minimal health and safety. (Teesside University group 1)

Would health and safety allow this now? (Stockton Library group)

a relaxed attitude to health and safety compared to now. (Stockton History group)

heavy industry, hard labour, hard work, a proud history. (Teesside University group 3)

The discussions of health and safety were ambiguous in that on the one hand people felt that increased health and safety could only be a good thing, in fact several participants spoke of friends and relations being injured or even killed in industrial accidents. But on the other hand there was also a concern that increasing regulation had perhaps reduced com-petitiveness, as one participant put it:

lots of places (in other countries) don’t have the kind of safety regulations that we have now, I’m not saying they are right and we are wrong, but it means they can probably do the job quicker and cheaper. (Stockton Library Group)

Again, theme is that of a different world of work that had different rules, regulations and ways of doing things. A world remembered and understood by most people in varying degrees according to their proxim-ity to it, but something that is now gone and will not return.

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ICI took on apprentices twice a year, those who had been accepted as apprentices but were waiting for their training to start worked as mes-senger boys, collecting and delivering the companies post across the Billingham complex, and they were supervised as part of ICI’s internal post service (Image 4.8). This photograph got a number of reactions, one of the participants had actually been a messenger boy at ICI some years later, whilst others commented how boys on bikes delivering messages of goods were once a common sight in and around Teesside:

I worked for a grocery firm in Middlesbrough, and we had to do deliveries on bikes like this. It was difficult to balance them and to get back on and started again after a delivery! (Stockton library group)

Others reflected that our deliveries were now much more likely to be carried out by workers in white vans than by young men on bicycles.

Image 4.8 Messenger boys at ICI Billingham 1950s (ICI archive)

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We now have supermarkets who deliver food to homes and also we order food etc from the Internet this can potentially put people out of work. (Stockton library group)

Authority. (Teesside University Group 3)

This was an interesting comment, I asked the person who made it to explain further—they said that their comment was based upon the two older men in the background due to their uniform. They were not the only person to make such a comment, another asked:

is this a borstal? (Teesside University Group 4)

I was initially surprised by this comment, but it soon became apparent that they had interpreted the older ICI postal workers as being prison officers! However, the theme of younger men being supervised by older men in order to integrate them into the workplace and the established customs and practices of the organisation is certainly relevant as this was central to the apprenticeship system, not only at ICI but throughout industry as a whole.

There was also a nostalgic reaction from some of the participants and there were several comments such as:

A more hopeful time compared to now. (Teesside University Group 3)

This view of the past was tempered by a dose of reality by several people who had worked at the Billingham site. Their advice regarding bicycles at ICI was:

If you leave it, then someone will steal it. (MIMA Group)

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The steel, chemical and engineering industries employed a very large number of professionals in areas such engineering, design, research and management. This industrial middle-class were very important but are often absent from industrial imagery, and also accounts of industrial change. This photograph showing a meeting during the 1950s drew com-ments from a number of different angles (Image 4.9). The all-male makeup of the meeting was pointed out:

All men, it looks very serious. (Teesside University group 3)

Safety is a serious business. (Teesside University group 1)

Act natural, accidents are falling, men making decisions. (Teesside University group 1)

Image 4.9 ICI Safety Committee meeting—1950s (ICI archive)

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Others found it fascinating that everyone in the meeting has an ash-tray, and smoking was permitted; however, one participant dated the pic-ture as much later than the 1950s:

Smoking was permitted whilst at work and they have a blackboard, prob-ably the 1980s. (Teesside University group 2)

This comment led me to question how younger people view the past, perhaps for many of them the 1980s are just as remote from their experi-ence as the 1950s?

Finally, how genuine the meeting shown is was also called into ques-tion with several participants commenting that the picture looked ‘staged’ and had probably been taken for publicity purposes. Looking at the ori-entation of the name cards and the lighting that had been used, this could well be the case.

Other reactions to the archive images

The photographs were discussed in a number of ways. Some viewed them with a mixture of nostalgia and reflection, seeing the pictures as representing a remembered but lost past whilst others had a more critical view and questioned the nature of the past that they saw in the photo-graph, for example:

Was this really the good old days? (Stockton History Group)

Others noticed the details in the pictures and used them to locate it temporally:

This must be the 1970s, I can tell by the hair. (Community project group)

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Whilst locating the image spatially was a priority to others, some for instance noticed the cooling towers in the background of one photograph:

I think these two ICI cooling towers were nicknamed ‘Gert and Daisy’ by the workers. They were characters on Jack Warner’s radio show ‘Workers Playtime’. (Stockton Library group)

Others differed and remembered different names:

Cooling towers at Agric division, they were nicknamed ‘Pinky and Perky’ (after two popular children’s TV characters from the 1950s). (Stockton History group)

I did not manage to find a definitive answer about which towers they were. But what is interesting in the way in which the cooling towers, as part of the industrial landscape, inspired enough affection to be nick-named and how those names are still remembered. They are not just things, they are part of the landscape and the community.

The changing nature of the industrial landscape was discussed in most of the groups with different individuals remembering the land-scape in different ways. One former ICI engineer saw this as reflect-ing the long slow decline of the company before its eventual break up in the early twenty-first century. He had been involved with building a new pipe bridge at Billingham in the 1970s (a structure used to carry pipes to deliver feed stocks to different plants). As time went on he recalled that the bridge carried less and less as more plants were decommissioned. Whilst the industry still exists and is still visible on Teesside, it was in his view diminished, not what it once was.

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Responses and reactions to the contemporary images

Image 4.10 Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge (Michele Allan 2015)

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This photograph of the Transporter Bridge was taken from the Port Clarence (north) side of the Tees in Autumn 2015 (Image 4.10).

Although a contemporary photograph it could equally be an archive picture in many respects, as the bridge has stood here for more than a cen-tury, opening for the first time in 1911. It was not surprising that this pic-ture was widely admired at the focus groups. The bridge is widely seen as, and often used as a symbol of, Middlesbrough and Teesside’s identity (for example, it forms part of Middlesbrough council’s official logo). Participants largely agreed that the bridge and local identity were strongly linked:

Symbolic this identifies the Boro. (Teesside University group 1)

Iconic, this represents home to the people of Teesside. (Teesside University group 1)

Symbol of Teesside. (Stockton Library group)

Others made comments on the utility of the bridge:

The transporter it connects people, transporting goods, contributes to trade, exports and imports. (Teesside University group 3)

Shortens the journey to Hartlepool. (Teesside University group 3)

The picture of the bridge also triggered memories for some people:

The transporter bridge reminds me of when I was a young boy. (Stockton Library group)

I used to work in Port Clarence I had to get the bus to St Hilda’s, walk over the Transporter Bridge then another mile to British Steel. (Stockton library group)

Nearly everyone was positive in their response to the picture of the bridge, apart from one dissenting voice who commented:

I don’t see what all the fuss is about. (Teesside University group 3)

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Overall, though, the bridge was seen as part of the area’s identity and an important part of and link to the region’s industrial heritage, although many saw the irony that the steel used to build this symbol of Teesside came from Glasgow rather than Middlesbrough.

At the start of this project, the EU referendum, let alone the prospect of Brexit, was something that I had not envisaged. However, as the cam-paign went on I spoke to more people who were considering voting to leave the EU. As it turned out all of the local authorities in Teesside voted to leave in the referendum held in June 2016.

This photograph was taken a couple of weeks later. As we were passing the now derelict Windsor ballroom on Redcar seafront I spotted the UKIP adverts on the building and suggested to Michele that it would make a topical and provocative photograph (Image 4.11). The building has a long history—it was the site of Redcar Jazz club in the 1960s and 1970s and attracted big name bands from all over the country such as Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and The Who. The ballroom later became a gym. The building was featured in the 2007 Second World War

Image 4.11 Say No to the EU—The Coatham Hotel/Windsor Ballroom Redcar seafront (Michele Allan 2016)

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Film Atonement, where the exterior was featured along with the rest of Redcar Seafront as part of scenes depicting the British withdrawal from Dunkirk in 1940. By 2016 a different sort of retreat from Europe was being advertised on its exterior. I thought the slogans and the state of the building would provoke some interesting reactions:

After Brexit, who do we blame now? (Stockton History Group)

Political notions and run-down buildings. (Stockton Library group 3)

Broken down, a dead place. (Teesside University group 2)

Derelict buildings, businesses closing, job losses. (Teesside University group 2)

Nationalism, opportunism, exploitation and misdirected anger. (Teesside University group 1)

There was not much vocal enthusiasm for Brexit amongst the groups, no-one said that they thought it would make a great difference to the area, although several people told me that they had voted to leave, but they explained that they had done so as a protest vote and that they never thought that it would really happen. There were also some comments that were clearly hostile to the ‘leave’ campaign. In the Stockton History group, the following comments were made:

Migration is nothing new, all of us have immigrant ancestors. (Stockton History group)

Insularity is not the answer; open minds create opportunities. (Stockton History group)

The Stockton History group discussed how it was rather ironic that an area largely built upon immigration in the nineteenth century was now seeing this as problematic. It was pointed out too that nineteenth century founders of industry in the area such as Henry Bolckow and Robert Ropner were in fact immigrants from Europe.

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The dynamics of Brexit on Teesside are complex and contradictory and a theme I will return to in subsequent chapters; perhaps another com-ment made at one of the groups sums things up:

I think people didn’t really think about the consequences too much, they voted with their hearts not their heads, a lot are just fed up and feel forgot-ten. (Stockton Library group)

I took this picture myself in June 2016. Stockton was hosting the National Cycling Championships (Image 4.12). Many of the local roads in the town centre had been closed in order to create a circuit for the event, including the recently redeveloped High Street. This picture prompted a range of comments and discussions, but few of them were about cycling, instead people wanted to talk about Stockton High Street and give their opinions about it. For example, one of the participants at the Community Project group commented:

This is Stockton Today.

Image 4.12 The National Cycling Championship Stockton High Street—June 2016 (Jon Warren 2016)

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Initially I thought, well yes it is, that’s obvious isn’t it? So I asked “how’s that then?” Which provoked an interesting reply:

because there are a bunch of men standing around doing nothing, and there is a pawn shop in the background. (Community project group)

I must confess that I hadn’t really noticed the pawnbrokers or any of the shops in the photograph, they were just shops. I asked how this was different to the past? They replied:

In the past people would have been too busy working to go to events like this. (Community project group)

I was intrigued by the comment but not totally convinced by it as in the past people had attended plenty of leisure activities, indeed the likes of ICI, British Steel and Head Wrightson had all had active social and sports clubs that workers participated in. Instead what was being expressed was an unease with the idea of a sporting/leisure event as a business opportunity for the area, a very different kind of industry. Some com-ments about the picture were negative, bordering on hostile:

Nobody cares, even the spectators look bored. It makes people’s lives harder too as they can’t cross the road. (Teesside University group 2)

I asked the participant to elaborate on this was their reply was;

Events like this aren’t for people from here, they are for people from out of the area. (Teesside University group 2)

This is certainly true on one level, events like this are designed to bring people from outside of the area into Stockton; however, the idea that local people feel disconnected or even excluded from such events is difficult to explain. Other comments were more positive but still scepti-cal about the value or potential of events like these for the area:

The cycle event was a nice idea, but really for Stockton High street every-thing is too late. The best buildings have been pulled down, the nice shops

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from when I grew up in the 1970s have all gone. No amount of fountains or quirky public art will bring it back to how it was. There has never been any capitalisation by the council on the wealth of history in Stockton. (Stockton Library group)

Again the flawed redevelopment of Stockton Town centre in the 1960s and 1970s comes to the fore. Again the theme of a ‘better yesterday’ that is remembered but cannot be reclaimed is apparent. There were optimis-tic comments too:

Redevelopment in Stockton High Street, now even national events occur in the High Street. (Teesside University group 3)

The reactions to this photograph can again be argued to be an example of the tension between what Raymond Williams (1973) termed ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultures.

Whilst part of the community looks to preserve the past and looks backwards for its reference points, another part of it is looking to move on and replace the old culture with a new one.

Image 4.13 A view of Middlehaven dock Middlesbrough from the North bank of the Tees (Michele Allan 2015)

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This photograph taken from the North bank of the Tees adjacent to the Transporter bridge looks towards Middlehaven Dock (Image 4.13), in the foreground is the now derelict floating nightclub ‘Tuxedo Royale’; it has been moored here since its closure in 2006. The dock is used by ship repair and dismantling firm Able UK, the stern of a ship in the dock can be seen on the left. At the centre of the picture is ‘Tenemos’, a piece of public art by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond. It was commissioned by the former regional development agency One North East at a cost of £2.7 million. It has been at Middlehaven since 2010. On the right is the Dock Clock Tower; this was commissioned in 1903 and replaced the original tower built in 1847. On the left of the picture is Middlesbrough Football Club’s Riverside stadium, which first opened in 1995. As is apparent there is a lot going on in this picture, and I was interested to see what the groups would make of it. One of the participants located their workplace within the picture:

I work in a nice shiny modern office building across the dock from Temenos with a view of the Transporter bridge. Modern redevelopment side by side with a working dock. (Stockton library group)

This mixture of the old and the new was seen as positive by several participants, who saw it as a successful redevelopment. Others felt that the picture had a metaphorical quality:

A metaphor for North East shipbuilding with the ‘now’ and the future in the background. (Stockton Library group)

I found this comment difficult to understand, I think it means that the semi sunken derelict Tuxedo Royale represents the current state of North East shipbuilding, and soon its memory will be swept away even further by modern redevelopment. I was unable to talk to the person directly as the group was very large and the comment had been left on a ‘post-it’ note. The derelict ship was the focus for a number of participants at one of the Teesside University groups. Some recounted their involvement with the ship in its previous life:

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The Tuxedo, a floating nightclub! I was thrown off for wearing white jeans! (Teesside University group 3)

The nightclub boat now derelict, a sense of lost heritage. (Teesside University group 3)

Again the theme of a recent but now lost past emerges. Another com-ment proved to be fairly prophetic:

The boat is an eyesore; it needs getting rid of. (Teesside University group 3)

In March 2017 Middlesbrough Council announced plans that would see the remains of the Tuxedo Royale removed from Middlehaven. This was thought be linked to ambitious plans for further redevelopment at Middlehaven including an indoor ‘snowdome’ for skiers and snowboard-ers (BBC News 02/03/2017).

Image 4.14 The Village Deli—Hartburn village, Stockton (Michele Allan 2015)

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Teesside today is a place of ongoing change and there are also high levels of social and economic inequality. The most affluent areas are comparable to the most affluent parts of England and the most deprived areas mirror the most deprived parts of England. The Stockton district of Hartburn village is amongst the most affluent areas of Teesside. This photograph shows the Village Deli, which is also a popular coffee shop; until a few years ago it had been a local newsagent (Image 4.14). Several of the participants knew the place and commented favourably upon it:

a new development in my local area. (Teesside university group 3)

Hartburn Deli, very nice we often go there. (Stockton History group)

Other commented upon what the appearance of coffee shops like this might indicate about the area.

The new café culture! (Stockton History group)

Yuppies! (only kidding) Gentrification, coffee culture. (Teesside University group 1)

I was surprised by the use of the term ‘Yuppies,’ as I associated it with the 1980s and felt that it was a rather dated term. However, the idea of gentrification and changing social habits and customs as indicative of wider social economic and structural change is definitely important and relevant to explaining how areas like Hartburn prosper:

Have we become a post –industrial ‘café society’? (Stockton Library group)

This was said with a certain degree of irony, but in a subsequent dis-cussion the point was made that many new developments in the local area were either cafes or restaurants rather than industrial enterprises, it was also pointed out that jobs in catering often only paid the minimum wage.

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This street of private houses in Port Clarence made headlines in 2014 when one property, a three-bedroom semi-detached house, became the second cheapest property in England and Wales at the time being offered at auction for just £5000 (Image 4.15). (The Gazette 5/02/2014).

The area is one of the most deprived in the Borough of Stockton-on- Tees and comparable to the most deprived places in England. The picture led to a number of comments about the area;

Port Clarence, boarded up houses, abandoned properties and poverty. (Teesside University group 1)

poverty, family orientated and close knit. (Teesside University group 3)

Image 4.15 Derelict housing at Limetrees Close, Port Clarence, the Transporter Bridge in the background (Michele Allan 2015)

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decline, forgotten areas and communities in the shadow of industry. (Teesside University group 1)

what happened, it looks terrible, I think the people of the past would take care of their area more. (Teesside University group 3)

I found it interesting that participants felt able to make comments about the community in general after looking at one particular image. The groups had not made, or felt able to make such generalisations about Hartburn on the basis of the picture of the ‘Deli’. Notably in the last comment the theme of a ‘better yesterday’ is again evident. Further com-ments tried to explain why the dereliction shown in the photograph had come about:

Poverty and a lack of help, isolated and left to decay. (Teesside University group 1)

Poor environment, a lack of respect for property, deprivation and a lack of investment in the area. (Teesside University group 2)

Regeneration after regeneration but nothing seems to make the cake rise. (Teesside University group 3)

This is a prime example of local government or council mismanagement. (Stockton Library group)

I found it interesting that the comments tried to diagnose what they thought was the problem. The comment about the persistence of depri-vation is interesting, but it does beg the question, if regeneration doesn’t work then what will? Again the Local Authority came in for criticism and was held responsible for the situation. However, it is worth pointing out that the houses shown in the photograph are privately owned or privately rented, and not council or social housing.

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This photograph was taken from the south side of the site, in order to get this view Michele had to point the camera lens between the bars of the perimeter fence (Image 4.16). The steelworks closed in October 2015, the blast furnace seen on the right hand side of the photograph had been the second largest operating in Europe. By the time this photograph was taken any hope of saving the plant had long passed. Instead a dispute about ownership of the site and its remaining assets had begun between former owners SSI and their creditors. A skeleton staff remained on the site in order to maintain safety and security. Unlike the majority of the photographs I have discussed in this chapter, I have included this photo-graph not because it provoked a great deal of discussion, but rather because it didn’t. People certainly identified what the picture showed but there was not very much comment about the site or speculation about its

Image 4.16 Redcar steelworks—July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016)

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future. This comment was made by a former steel worker at one of the Teesside University groups:

It makes me sad that this industry is disappearing from the North-East. I worked at the coke ovens at Southbank for 18 years. Problems are now being faced by hundreds of people finding work as it was a very specific industry to work in and skills are generally not transfer-able, as they are unique to the steel industry. (Teesside University group 2)

Another comment focused on what the diggers in the foreground of the picture might be doing:

Digging the grave for heavy industry? Or prospecting for cheap local iron ore and renationalisation? (Stockton Library group)

This I think was a ‘tongue in cheek’ comment, but there is some degree of optimism in it, a sense that somehow the region will manage to re- invent itself, that the end of steelmaking marked the end of chapter but also the start of a new one. As another participant argued:

Change is permanent, the speed it happens is the key and flexibility is the answer. (Stockton History group)

This was not the only view, another comment on the photograph sim-ply said;

Our heavy industry has been stripped from us. (Community project group)

The discussions and comments left the impression that the loss of the steelworks also meant the loss of part of the area’s identity and what the future would bring was uncertain for Teesside and its people.

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This battery of wind turbines sits just off of Redcar beach to the south of the mouth of the river Tees (Image 4.17). The beach is long and was very quiet on the day of our visit, apart from a few dog walkers, a lone figure can be seen in the left of the photograph. The wind turbines drew a large number of comments, particularly in the university groups, with a number of different emphases. Some saw the industrial and commercial potential of the technology:

Redevelopment, renewable energy, wind turbines. The start of a new devel-opment, producing energy for industry. (Teesside University group 3)

Now the industrial sector has broken down could wind turbines replace it? (Stockton Library group 2)

A new wave of industry energy rather than steel. An important sector. (Teesside University group 1)

Some saw this as a logical part of the area’s ‘post-industrial’ development:

Image 4.17 Wind turbines at Redcar beach, bench in the foreground, July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016)

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Technological development, a new way of being. (Teesside University Group 3)

New eco-warrior industry stands offshore from the old industry of steel by the sea. (Stockton Library group 1)

Other comments were more concerned with the environmental impact that the wind turbines may have, either locally or more widely:

Technology overshadowing nature, the view is spoiled hence no one uses the beach. (Teesside University group 1)

Nature wins in the end. Wind farms are great but too little, too late, the sea is rising. (Teesside University group 1)

We need to create employment and protect the planet by investing in renewables! (Stockton Library group)

Some comments were more personal:

They don’t offend me the wind turbines, some people say that they kill birds. (Community project group)

I’d rather look at them (wind turbines) than a nuclear power plant I think they are peaceful. (Community project group)

Others commented about the beach instead of the wind turbines:

Lovely but desolate beaches. (Teesside University group 3)

Redcar, wind turbines, deserted, cold, lonely and unkempt. (Teesside University group 3)

It is perhaps worth giving some further context to the photograph in the light of this comment. The picture was in fact taken on a day in July 2016, the weather on the North East coast is highly changeable and good weather cannot be guaranteed at any time of the year!

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When this picture was taken, the demolition of the estate, which is very close to the town centre, had begun (Image 4.18). The majority of the residents had left but a significant number remained awaiting re-housing. The site is earmarked for re-development by a local housing association. There were numerous comments about this photograph from across the groups:

Gnomes, families, identity and plants, the elephant in the room is the boarded up parts. (Teesside University group 1)

Image 4.18 The Victoria Estate, Stockton-on-Tees, Summer 2015 (Michele Allan 2015)

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This sense of life carrying on even though decline and demolition was drawing nearer was picked up on by a number of participants with vary-ing degrees of optimism and pessimism:

time to give up and move. It makes me feel angry that local councils aren’t doing enough to regenerate rundown areas. (Teesside University group 2)

Others made comments that seemed to be a lot more judgemental:

Deprivation, social housing, and crime. (Teesside University group 2)

Some expressed a sense of sadness and their statements framed change as a threat rather than an opportunity:

people forced out of their houses, we find this very sad especially for older people when they have to be uprooted from their homes they have lived in for many years. (Stockton Library group)

Progress, is it always a good thing? (Stockton Library group)

Image 4.19 The mouth of the Tees viewed from South Gare, July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016)

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This photograph shows a ship emerging from Teesport, the petro-chemical complex at Seal Sands on the north bank of the Tees provides a backdrop (Image 4.19). This contemporary picture provoked a number of discussions about the areas around the Tees estuary. Many of them reflected on past holidays and days out:

views of industry walking towards South Gare lighthouse, I remember pleasure swimming in the bay with friends and my brothers, and ideal free day out. (Stockton Library group)

This is South Gare, we used to go to North Gare. There used to be houseboats at Greatham Creek and people used to have holidays on them. People wouldn’t do that now; they have different expectations. (Community project group)

Looking across to North Gare. North Gare is really beautiful, but danger-ous there is quicksand in lots of places. (MIMA group)

Others remarked on the contrast between the industrial and natural landscapes;

from concrete grows roses. (Teesside University group 1)

Power and productivity, it makes me think about our strength, but also the impact we have had on the natural environment. (Teesside University group 1)

Yet again the theme of place and identity appeared:

heavy industry, still here today, a visible history. Industry always a reminder of the past. Smoggies for life. (Teesside University group 3)

The last comment clearly viewed the industrial landscape in the photo-graph as more important than the natural landscape surrounding it. They also use the term ‘Smoggie’, which refers to all people from Teesside. The term apparently originated on the football terraces when visiting Sunderland supporters referred to the Middlesbrough fans as ‘Smog monsters’ or ‘Smoggies’ because of the town’s industrial pollution. Boro fans adopted the name and it has become widely used amongst Teessiders (McKeown 2009).

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This scene was captured by Michele Allan at Warrenby in July 2016 (Image 4.20).

The Wilton International chemicals complex sits behind the railway and in front of the Eston Hills. Participants commented on the way in which the natural and industrial environments interacted within the scene:

refreshing green space and nature living with the industrial. (Teesside University Group 1)

Others noticed the amount of things and themes featured in the image:

Many levels of industry and urbanisation, mining, chemicals, trains and farming. (Teesside University Group 2)

However, it was this comment that really stood out for me, as the par-ticipant had seen the image as representing two centuries of Teesside, past and present:

The Eston Hills, iron, chemicals, the railway in a cutting, and rural begin-nings, Teesside in a nutshell. (Stockton Library group)

Image 4.20 A view of the Eston Hills from Warrenby—July 2016 (Michele Allan 2016)

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Further comments

Throughout the group discussions there were comments that were made by participants that were not specifically tied to any one image. When the photographs of industry in the past were discussed in the Stockton Library, Stockton History and the Community Project groups, the sub-ject of the abundance of work and the availability of jobs before the late 1970s came up. On several occasions the comment was made that:

you could leave your job one day and walk into another the next day. (Community project group)

I had often heard this, indeed my own parents had made similar state-ments, but they had never actually done it. So when this statement was made I asked if the group knew this to be true, or if anyone had actually done it. There were in fact several individuals who had done this; there was even a case of someone who ended up getting a job after giving a friend a lift to an interview. Whilst he was waiting for his friend someone asked if he was there for an interview too, as someone hadn’t turned up—they had another vacancy and he ended up being offered a job too!

There were also a number of comments about what might have been if different decisions had been made at certain points in the past, for example:

What if Nissan had built their factory here on Teesside instead of at Sunderland? (Stockton library group)

If we hadn’t demolished the old flour mill, we could have redeveloped it like they have done with the Baltic Mill in Newcastle (Stockton History group)

A Summary of the Themes that Emerged from the Visual Focus Groups

The groups generated a great deal of information in the form of both written and spoken words. A number of themes occurred and re-occurred across the groups despite their different demographics.

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• The importance and centrality of work to the identity and biography of individuals and the region.

• Change and continuity in the region, also the speed at which things have happened.

• The scale of industry in the past, the size of the projects and products and number of people required to complete them.

• Industry’s relationship with the natural environment.• Decline of the region’s industries and the loss of identity linked with

the neglect of the area in general; why has this happened, who or what is to blame for it?

• A better yesterday, a different way of life that had greater job security, much more certainty, and a better community.

• Memories of a recent past, but one to which there can be no return.• An uncertain future, what happens next? This was often linked to an

opinion about what might happen, some were pessimistic others more optimistic.

This chapter has outlined the ideas behind the visual focus groups that used the photo elicitation method, the methods were explained, as were the groups and the materials. The discussions and comments that were made about a selection of the images used in the groups have been recounted and discussed. Finally, a summary of the themes that emerged from those discussions was presented.

References

BBC News. (2017, March 2). Tuxedo Royale: Removal plan for River Tees ‘eye-sore’. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-39145589

Gazette Live. (2014, February 5). £8,500 Port Clarence house was second cheapest sold in England and Wales last year. Retrieved from http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/8500-port-clarence-house-cheapest- 6671348

Mah, A. (2012). Industrial ruination, community, and place: Landscapes and lega-cies of urban decline. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McKeown, S. (2009, June 22). Ich bin ein Smoggy: Reclaiming regional pride. Macmillan Dictionary Blog. Retrieved from http://www.macmillandictiona-ryblog.com/smoggy

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Medhurst, F. (2011). A quiet catastrophe: The Teesside job (2nd ed.).Great Britain, Citizens Papers.

Williams, R. (1973). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. In M. G. Durham & D. M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 130–143). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

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5Changing Industry, Transforming Lives:

Social and Cultural Legacies

As was discussed in Chap. 2, the question of what happens to societies when their ways of working change has been a question that has been central to the social sciences since the nineteenth century, initially con-sidering the phenomenon of industrialisation and progressing to debates in the twentieth century about the transition to a post-industrial society, and the nature and consequences of this change.

As was shown in Chap. 3, Teesside was transformed into a major indus-trial area between the 1820s and the beginning of the twentieth century. Further industrial development happened with the rapid rise of the chemical industry on Teesside in the early to mid-twentieth century. Since the 1970s another sort of change has been apparent with the decline and contraction of the industries that dominated Teesside as recently as the 1960s.

The nature and strength of the linkage between the change in work and wider social changes and the speed at which such change happens has been disputed within the social sciences, but their linkage is not in ques-tion. Of course there have been numerous attempts to theorise the mech-anisms and potential outcomes of such change. For the classical sociologists of the nineteenth century Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim

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rapid social change pointed towards the collapse of existing social structures.

To attempt to explain the type of change that has been happening in places like Teesside since the 1970s a theoretical account of how continu-ity and change occur at the same time is required. It can be argued that the ideas of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu are able to provide such a framework. Bourdieu argued that individuals and their communities are moulded by the culture that surrounds them and they develop a particu-lar mode of living. Bourdieu used the related ideas of capital, habitus and field in order to explain this.

Briefly, Bourdieu sees capital consisting of several elements: economic capital, i.e. material resources, assets and earning ability; social capital, circles of friends, memberships of groups and social networks; and cul-tural capital, individuals’ skills, knowledge, life experience, taste and manners that are acquired by being part of a particular social class. Cultural capital is a powerful mechanism that leads to social exclusion and inequality as some forms of cultural capital are seen as much more valuable than others. So for Bourdieu the more capital one has, the more powerful a position one occupies in social life. “Habitus” is the ingrained habits, skills and dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences, it is the manifestation of capital that we effectively carry around with us. It is our habitus that allows us to successfully navigate social environ-ments; however, if those environments are beyond our experience this does not work, i.e. it is dependent upon context. Bourdieu argued that habitus was often taken for granted and mistaken for being natural rather than cultural. The final element is what Bourdieu called ‘Field’. The social world consists of multiple fields that overlap, such as workplaces, institu-tions such as school, family, education and religion, and practices like art, law and politics, i.e. the spaces within which social life occurs and make up society. Bourdieu contended that each field had its own rules and practices, which he termed “Doxa” (Longhofer and Winchester 2013).

However, what is uncertain is how capital and the related habitus formed in areas dominated by industrial work and the social relations that underpinned them endure or change as the field of work changes.

For example, high status and well paid working class jobs such as print-ers. Working in this trade once carried high economic, social and

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cultural  capital. These jobs were extremely difficult to get, apprentice-ships were only granted to restricted social groups, usually only men and often relatives of those already in the trade; restrictive practices within the trade also meant that the craft was very powerful and able to resist the demands of management (Cockburn 1983). However, technological changes that made metal typesetting obsolete in the 1980s, along with a determined push from management to break the power of the print unions once and for all, meant that the printers lost money, jobs and status due to radical changes in their field of work.

Does the old form the basis of a new modified habitus? If so, how sig-nificant is this, and what happens when the goalposts are shifted radi-cally? Does this mean the industrial past has more to do with the present than we might like to think? Or is the habitus of the past an obstacle to be overcome?

This chapter tests these assumptions and ideas by exploring them with those who have lived and worked through the changes that Teesside has undergone since the 1970s. The topics covered include: attitudes to work; work and status; job security; and whether people believe their working lives are better or worse than they once were. This chapter also explores the themes that emerged from the visual focus groups and attempts to make sense of the relationship between the past and the present. Is it helpful to talk of an industrial culture of the past and a ‘new’ post- industrial culture that has emerged from it, or are things less clear cut than that?

The Interviews, My Approach

Personal biographies are important as they allow an insight beyond the recorded facts and figures about the structure of the region and its economy in the recent past into the lived experience, the social action that shaped and influenced lives, and the consequences of those experiences.

I began the process of interviewing by acknowledging how much I did  not know, as an outsider and as someone who was not from the area or who had worked in industry. I felt that it was essential for me to

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do this as otherwise I could all too easily end up asking questions, which I already had or thought that I already had the answers to. My aim then was to try and understand how the biographies of individuals connected and intersected with the biography of the place.

I was also aware of the need to do this too; in the 25 years that I have spent living in the North East, the industrial landscape has largely disap-peared. The colliery villages have their memorials and pit wheels, but little commemorates the shipyards of the Tyne or the Wear. Teesside, however, has retained its industrial landscape, its ‘castles of industry’ as one of my participants described the chemical plants on the Wilton International site. However, what is undeniable in all parts of the region is that workers who spent their entire working lives within the traditional industries are not getting any younger. I was aware that it was important to document and discuss individuals’ experiences with them whilst I still had the chance to do so and to let them drive the conversation. To this end I kept the interviews relatively unstructured; we largely discussed industry, its legacies, and their working lives, but we also discussed change, their opinions about the present state of things, and how they saw the future for Teesside.

The Importance and Centrality of Work

I interviewed a range of participants—men, women, skilled manual workers, white collar workers, managers and self-employed people. Some had retired but others were still working in industry and others had moved into different careers, some by choice and others by necessity.

For most of the people I spoke to the world of work was never far away from them, and for some the transition from school to the workplace happened quickly and at a relatively young age. Leaving school at 15 or 16 and beginning an apprenticeship or a trainee position was common, but there was also competition for the best positions with the big companies.

For George who began his engineering apprenticeship at Head Wrightson in the 1950s getting into an industry other than coal mining was seen as a ‘step up’ and highly desirable.

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We lived in Blackhall (a mining village in East Durham) my family didn’t want me to go down the pit, as my dad and his brothers all worked down the pit. My dad’s one ambition was that me and my brother didn’t go down the pit. So my family encouraged me to get an apprenticeship, we sent let-ters everywhere. Head Wrightson replied and said to get in touch when I had finished my studies at Stockton Technical School. I was invited to Head Wrightson for an interview. That in itself was an experience. These were places I didn’t know, across the river from Stockton in the murky depths of Thornaby. It was said they interviewed 600 to get 60 apprentices in my particular year.

Travelling the 20 miles from Blackhall to Thornaby and back every day by public transport was not feasible, so starting work for George also meant leaving home.

It was too far for me to travel from Blackhall every day to Thornaby, so the company helped me to find digs in Norton. We started at 7.30 every day and there was night school too.

For others it was a case of following family to the works; Keith’s dad worked at ICI Billingham, and he was keen to leave school as soon as possible and start an apprenticeship:

I had an interview with ICI and they said that I could start straight away, I was only 15, but the way they did it was that they had two intakes a year into the apprentice programme. If you started between intakes like I did you worked a messenger until you started your apprenticeship, so I left school and that’s what I did. Then a few months later I began my appren-ticeship as a plumber.

Keith recalled these times and how being a messenger was sometimes challenging. Particularly if he was sent to deliver messages to the fertiliser packing plant:

I used to hate going in there as a messenger boy, to go across the packing floor to the office for the letters, all the women would be whistling at you,

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It didn’t put Keith off too much though, he completed his apprenticeship and then got promoted, first to the drawing office and then to the main-tenance division. He stayed with ICI and its successor companies for the whole of his working life.

Apprenticeships were by no means easy to come by, there was competi-tion for them. Initially you had to get through the door for an interview, frequently having a family member or friend of the family working in the company was helpful in achieving this. Ian Roberts (1993) describes how this worked in the shipyards of his home town:

It was always a common understanding that if your father was a craftsman within the shipyards you would stand a good chance of getting employ-ment there upon leaving school, if he would ‘speak’ for you. (Roberts 1993: 3)

Even so this was no guarantee, there was usually an interview to pass and/or a series of tests. Bob, a highly accomplished professional photographer, reflected that maybe the reason he has always done his own developing and printing was because he was ‘turned down for three apprenticeships when I left school.’ Thus for him being a master of all aspects of his cho-sen craft had taken on an added significance.

Kevin began his general engineering apprenticeship in the late 1970s, and still works in engineering on Teesside today:

I didn’t have any family connections, I sent my letter to everyone asking for an apprenticeship ICI, British Steel and at the time Head Wrightson. Because they had their own training centre, Head Wrightson was seen the best engineering apprenticeship you could have. So I served my time at Head Wrightson’s training centre just across the river at Teesdale. We did a little bit of everything, welding, foundry work, electrics, fitting, machin-ing, milling and we went everywhere and had a go at absolutely everything and eventually they came to you and said “well, we think this is where you want to be” and that’s what happened, we did six months going through all of them and then you chose one. There was a bit of everything there were sites all over the place to see, you could go to Hartlepool or Teesdale or a number of other sites, it was a great place. I started at the end of 76 and the beginning of 77.

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It is interesting to note that despite George and Kevin’s experiences as apprentices at Head Wrightson beginning 20  years apart, the way in which they were trained was remarkably similar:

For the 1st year of your apprenticeship went to different parts of the works, you followed general engineering until you found something you liked. I spent time in the tool room and I liked that. There was a vacancy and I went to work there. That became my career for 28 years. (George)

Nor was this process of leaving school and starting in industry something that just happened to young men via the traditional apprenticeship route. Young women also made the transition to industry from school at a simi-lar age, although their destination was usually different. Clerical work within the big companies was seen as highly desirable and was well paid. Cheryl who began working for British Steel in 1969 told me:

That’s where you wanted to work, British Steel, ICI or the council offices. You didn’t want to end up working in a shop or anything like that. Better money, better prospects.

She and her friend Norma had begun as trainees at British Steel at the same time and they described what happened:

We had 2 weeks’ induction at British Steel then we went round the different offices and factories to see what was available. That was irrelevant really as they decided where you went anyway. You have to decide to be clerical or commercial, that was either shorthand and PA work or book keeping and accounts and all that sort of thing, which is what I did. (Cheryl)

I ended up at Port Clarence at British Steel chemicals. (Norma)

I went all over the place and ended up at the British Steel research centre at Skippers Lane right next to Newport bridge. (Cheryl)

They were well paid as trainees, and very well for women too. British Steel it seems had anticipated the Equal Pay act of 1970.

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We were paid £7 a week my mum said ‘that’s nearly as much is your Dad is earning!’ British Steel were ahead of the game when it came to equal pay, and we got the same as all the apprentices. I gave my mum £3 a week. (Norma)

Nicola left school and quickly joined ICI, working as a registry clerk at their Billingham site and then at Wilton after the closure of the Billingham offices in the early 1990s, in fact she continued to work for the compa-nies that succeed ICI after its demise until her retirement:

I left school in 1963 and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. A friend of mine my closest friend at school said “oh, I’ve got a great job at ICI.” So I sent a letter of application in and a month later I had a job. I actually applied for a job as a tracer as I was good at doing fine drawing, and they put me in registry! When I joined there was a woman in charge of the reg-istry and she would look at school intake and anyone with more than five O-levels would go to the registry.

Nicola explained that ICI had developed its own registry system; a way of filing and retrieving documents across the whole of the organisation, it was a complex operation:

The registry was ICI’s in-house filing system; it wasn’t just filing, there were lots of skills involved. You had to read sometimes very technical documents and pick out keywords and write a precis index to enable people to find those documents. It was a very skilled job but some people just saw it as filing. Other girls went into the secretarial service but if you had more than five O-levels you went straight into registry, no discussions, that was where you went. (Nicola)

Luckily the work suited her very well: “I found I loved it and had an aptitude for it and I stayed there over 40 years!” (Nicola).

As Nicola began work some years before the Equal Pay act she and her colleagues in the registry service faced some barriers concerning pay:

We never had men in our department, it was women’s work and when I started we were paid 80 or 90% of the male rate, despite the fact that there were no men doing that kind of work! (Nicola)

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It is interesting to note how although there were clearly more opportuni-ties for women to work in Teesside’s industries by the 1960s, there was much more gender segregation, with women being confined to either clerical roles or semi-skilled or unskilled work in factories and assembly plants. Also, during the 1950s and 1960s there were increasing opportu-nities for women on Teesside in the textile and garment finishing indus-tries, and in electronics. Some things, though, were beginning to change, as Nicola recalled:

When I first began ICI had one female chemical engineer, just one! And because of this she was always being wheeled out in front of the cameras for publicity and all of that sort of thing. (Nicola)

Other practices though were shockingly arcane:

when you got married, you had to get in touch with HR and ask them if you could keep your job! (Nicola)

ICI assumed like many employers at the time, assumed that married women would not need or be able to work. I followed up by asking Nicola what would she thought would have happened if an employee didn’t tell them they were getting married?

‘I don’t know!’ was her reply, it appears that this was not a practice that was questioned or challenged.

It is strange to reflect how only a couple of decades before, during the Second World War women had worked at the heart of Teesside’s industries.

June told me:

My auntie is 92 is and I asked her “where did you meet your husband?” She said “at work.” I said, “what did you do?” She said “I was a welder was dur-ing the war.” They both worked at the Malleable ironworks.

Nicola told me that her mother and her aunt had worked in the same place.

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My mum and her sister worked in the Malleable ironworks during the war. My aunt was a foreman, forewoman!? foreperson?! My mum worked on an x-ray machine checking the steel for faults. When the war ended they both left.

Thus women’s employment was plentiful but restricted in many aspects on Teesside in the 1960s and it would take another generation for them to be readmitted to the trades their mothers and aunts had been part of during wartime.

Becoming Part of the Organisation

It became clear from my interviews that the process of transition into work-ing for the likes of ICI, British Steel or Head Wrightson was not just about an employer-employee relationship, at least not in the sense that we think of it today. All the big companies had what would be termed a paternalistic concern for their workforces, providing a wide range of perks and additional facilities for their workforces. Apprentices and trainees were expected to com-plete night school or day release courses as a core part of their training, but I was surprised to find that these big companies offered other activities too.

Keith told me how he and other ICI apprentices spent 2 weeks in the summer of 1970 on one of ICI’s “Discoverer” courses. These courses were held annually in August under canvas at a camp near Ingleby Greenhow on the North York Moors. Activities included rock climbing, abseiling, forestry skills—which included tree felling, constructing wooden struc-tures, night hikes and a 3-day hike. As Keith explained

it was what they called character building!

At British Steel, young women were just beginning to enjoy similar opportunities:

The big thing for us was that halfway through our induction they bought in a guy whose day job at the time was being a crane driving instructor, and he was running the Duke of Edinburgh Gold award scheme. We were the first girls to do the Duke of Edinburgh award at British Steel. I was prob-ably the only person who had never heard of it before! (Norma)

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That’s how a group of us all met, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. We went out to do camping weekends and we were also the first girls to join the Cleveland search and rescue team because of it. Up till then only the apprentices had done the Duke of Edinburgh award it was well- established for them, but not for girls. We started in 1969 and got the award in 1971 we did this in the evenings and at weekends but British Steel provided all the equipment which we needed. (Cheryl)

The experience of completing the Duke of Edinburgh award had a lasting effect on both Norma and Cheryl. When I spoke to them they brought along photographs of the trips they had gone on during the course and a copy of the British Steel Corporations in-house newspaper ‘Steel News’, which featured an article about the group’s trip to Buckingham Palace to receive their awards from the Duke of Edinburgh in person. This occa-sion, which had happened over 45 years ago, still retained great signifi-cance for them, and they recounted it fondly and in detail:

If you got your picture in ‘Steel News’ you had to tell everybody, it was really a big thing (Cheryl).

Norma told me:

I had left British Steel by the time we got the award so asked for the day off and explained I was going to get my award, the director sent £10 towards my travel expenses.

As well as giving trainees and apprentices these opportunities, there was also an expectation of hard work, and discipline was enforced both informally and formally. As Bruce, who trained as an instrument artificer at British Steel in the 1970s, explained:

as an apprentice there was a lot of watching and listening, if you didn’t pay attention or messed about you wouldn’t last the course, the older blokes kept you right.

Bob recalled his time working with a road maintenance gang on the ICI Wilton site:

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I was working with this group of older blokes I was by far the youngest and they had all worked together in the ironstone mines the last of which had closed a few years earlier. They had their own ways of doing things, and they sort of adopted me. They all had half an hour’s sleep at lunchtime I remem-ber thinking ‘what the hell for?’ but before long I started doing it as well!

Sometimes, though, trainees pushed their luck too far and there were resulting consequences, as this story, Cheryl told me illustrates:

I got caught having chair races in the corridor by one of the managers, and a few days later Middlesbrough were playing Man United in the FA cup. I knew I wouldn’t get the day off, so said I was going to the dentist and went anyway. But a few days later, I was called into the manager’s office, he said ‘how’s your tooth?’ So I lied, I told him I’d had to have to have a filling. Well, he just turned the evening paper, The Gazette, around and said ‘well who’s that?’ And there was a picture of me getting on the bus to the match! I said ‘oh she looks like me!’ He said ‘no, it is you, and you will be starting work at Dock Street on Monday.’

This was another site, so effectively Cheryl was being ‘banished’, but she didn’t care:

It wouldn’t have mattered if got the sack as I had been to the match, even though my mother would have killed me. No, even though we got beat I was happy I’d been to the match.

Welcome to the Club

Finishing a traineeship or apprenticeship meant completing a rite of pas-sage into a trade or into the company as a fully-fledged worker; this usu-ally brought with it higher wages and better privileges.

At 21 I was out of my time and a tradesman. This was the peak of Head Wrightson in the early sixties, they were employing about 6000 people throughout Teesside then. (George)

This, plus the seeming abundance of employment meant that most work-ers were confident about their future prospects:

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Once I was working for ICI, I didn’t have to worry, I could afford to get married, I could afford to buy my first house, that was actually something that the company encouraged, when you bought your first house they would pay the legal fees for you, you just had to get a receipt and send it in. You got ICI shares every year too, that was great, I usually sold mine and used the money to pay for our summer holidays. (Keith)

Amanda, who began working at ICI Wilton in 1977, also remembered the annual distribution of shares to employees:

When the ICI shares came through there were always a lot of people in the town the next weekend, there were queues outside the stockbrokers.

She also added:

I used them to pay for my summer holidays quite often.

Those destined to be senior managers at ICI came via other routes; there was a strict structure but some encountered some rather surprising inter-view content. Julian Phillips recounted his interview for a trainee manage-ment position at ICI in the mid-1950s. After staying the night at Norton Hall, the ICI management club, he was ushered in for his interview:

… he looked at me and said ‘where do you play?’ I didn’t really know what to say but I did play a bit of tennis and I played on a park near where we lived at Raynes Park, so I said this. ‘No, no,’ he said and suddenly a rugby ball whizzed across his desk. I didn’t tell him I’d given up rugby aged 14 through sheer terror and taken up cross country. So I said ‘Well I don’t play much rugby, sir,’ and he said, ‘ha, playing at Catterick on Saturday and we need a fly half, you look as if you’d do.’ ‘Oh’ I said I’m going to Switzerland “Do you play squash?’ ‘Not as such sir’ the whole thing was going downhill, but he picked up on Switzerland. ‘What are you going to Switzerland for?’ ‘I’m going to climb; I’m going to climb the Dom which is the highest mountain.’ Oh you climb, jolly good, we’ll look forward to seeing you in September.’ That was the end of the interview! (Julian Phillips in Williamson 2008: 8)

It appears that the emphasis was not just on technical ability for manag-ers, but on ‘being the right sort of chap’. But not everyone subscribed to or approved of these informal codes and hierarchies. Andrew joined ICI

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in 1964 after completing his degree in chemical engineering; his introduction to life at ICI was a shock, not in terms of the work, but the place he was living and the manner in which he was expected to behave:

ICI stuck me in a building which housed new graduate starters and there were also about six confirmed bachelors who lived there too. The place was run sort of like an officers mess I couldn’t stand it! After about 24 hours, I could stand it no longer. I went out and joined the local Boys Brigade in Norton as an officer and then moved into digs then I moved into a flat in the High Street.

Bob, who worked for both ICI and British Steel doing manual jobs, told me that there was a real contrast between the two giant companies, they had different cultures:

ICI it seemed wanted to know a lot, everything about you, British Steel didn’t really care as long as you turned up on time and got the job done!

Regardless of what their respective cultures were like, ICI, British Steel and Teesside’s other large employers seemed for most of those that I inter-viewed to offer at the outset of their careers, secure, abundant employ-ment with good prospects. For them, the idea that this state of affairs would disappear within a generation would have seemed unthinkable.

Change and Continuity in the Region

It should also be remembered that during the post-war era on Teesside throughout the 1950s, 1960s and the early part of the 1970s, not only was there plentiful work due to the national economic policy of ‘full’ adult male employment, but there was also  the recognition of the legitimacy of the role of trade unions not only within the workplace but at the level of national economic planning too. There were also better opportunities and a rising standard of living due to the social settlement at the heart of the post-war political consensus. This meant that there was for the first time a degree of social security due to the benefits system,

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also  educational opportunities had increased hugely after the 1944 Education Act, which made secondary education available to all, and by the 1960s the Robbins report had  expanded Higher Education and implemented a system of free tuition and student grants, which made getting a degree a real possibility for working class students for the first time. As has already been discussed in Chap. 3, post-war Teesside boomed, the population expanded, and was projected to grow further, so old hous-ing was being demolished and new council houses built. So coming to work on Teesside was an attractive prospect for many people, and actively encouraged by the Local Authority.

Susan recalled how her family came to Teesside in the early 1970s:

My dad was brought in by Cleveland Council as a teacher in Southbank and given a council house as an incentive. They needed teachers in the area to teach the children of the workers at the steelworks. So my dad, a Londoner, ended up on Teesside.

Tim found himself out of work on Tyneside in the mid-1970s. He was pleased when he found a job as a metallurgist and inspector at Head Wrightson Stampings, an industrial forge based at Hartlepool, but there was also an added incentive:

They were desperate for people in the area in those days, desperate, so I also got a £150 resettlement grant to move down from Tyneside which was a lot of money in those days, I think it was from the local council and the government.

Andrew and I discussed the changing nature of work in the area. Andrew had begun work in the 1960s, he felt that what had really disappeared over the last few decades was the type of skilled manual work, which had offered good jobs and good standard of living:

The number of people employed in the chemical industry has shrunk dra-matically, shipbuilding is gone, Head Wrightson and many of the other engineering firms in the area are gone. It seems to me it’s technical work and skilled work which has gone. Those jobs were good jobs, they provided a good standard of living, stress free living, there were secure. Their kids

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could get a good education. Now the same people earn less money, in less pleasant and less secure employment, and a lot of the jobs you don’t even get your hands dirty if you are working for someone like Sports Direct or Amazon. There’s also less chance for progression and promotion so there’s less systems of motivation at work now.

The relationship between where people lived and where they worked also came up for discussion on a number of occasions. People felt that travel to work was restricted in the past. People were able to work not only because work was available, but also because public transport was geared to transporting workers, and car ownership, it must be remembered, was far less common:

People just didn’t have cars, everybody walked and got the bus. There would be loads of people walking to or from work then. People thought you were a manager or rich if you had a car. (Norma)

You worked near to where you lived, that was how things were. (Tim)

This was not the case for everyone, of course; Amanda had left Teesside as soon as she could and went to work in London:

I wanted a bit of adventure something different, I just wanted to get away from here, and I did it. Anyway I ended up as a nanny in Chelsea in the swinging 1960s it was the place to be, we even had a Rolls-Royce!

As the 1970s progressed there were increasing opportunities for skilled craftsmen to work offshore as the North Sea Oil and Gas industries took off. For many like Bruce this was the start of a new working life:

I first went to work offshore in 1976, I left British Steel and I’ve never looked back really, I’ve been all over the place.

He had just returned from working in the oil industry in Azerbaijan; I asked how he coped with being away from his home and family?

you get used to it, and you get used to the money too, so it gets more dif-ficult to get off the ‘merry go round’ so to speak.

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There is a widespread impression that Teesside has a large remittance economy, with many people working offshore or outside of the UK. Comments such as this were commonplace:

In sixties and seventies you worked locally, but they have Poles and Italians working here and local people working away. People are a lot more mobile now. (Cheryl)

Travel to work information from the 2011 census reveals that if we com-bine information for Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, and Redcar and Cleveland, there were 2941 individuals who gave their usual place of work as an ‘Offshore Installation’ and 673 who said their usual place of work was ‘Outside of the UK’ (Nomis 2017). Whilst these num-bers are certainly not insignificant over the whole Teesside area, they are not as large as I had been led to believe, nor as large as many people seemed to imagine.

Undoubtedly, the biggest change over the past four decades has been the number of people employed in chemicals, steel, engineering and other manufacturing industries on Teesside. What is most noticeable about the area is that these industries have survived, they have not disappeared com-pletely, but they employ far fewer people than they once did. However, there is a much greater degree of continuity  than in other parts of the region. Teesside Industries have not experienced sudden dramatic, almost overnight, extinction in the way in which the Coal and Shipbuilding indus-tries in the North East did in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Therefore, it can be argued that the pace of change on Teesside, whilst still relatively fast, has infact been much slower than in other parts of the North East.

The Scale of Industry in the Past, the Size of the Projects and Products and the Workforce

One of the key things about the industries that dominated Teesside was just their sheer scale, they were large organisations employing a lot of people and were engaged with large scale production and projects. For

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George, who moved the 20 miles from a coastal pit village, this change of scale was a shock:

Coming from Blackhall I found this all a bit all awe inspiring, the dense housing and the intenseness of Head Wrightson, all the noise and the den-sity of it all. It was busy, noisy and frightening, we just had to get on with it and do what we were told, yes it was frightening, awesome and awe-inspiring.

Also the big companies, presence was visible and felt everywhere, Keith explained: ICI was really a town within a town, it had its own structures, its own way of doing things.

In many ways Billingham was a classic ‘company town’, a place where practically all shops and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer. As writers such as Garner (1992) and Crawford (1995) have explained, company towns are often planned with a suite of amenities such as shops, churches, schools, markets and recreation facili-ties. Billingham and ICI were intimately linked. The company provided many social amenities, and built the majority of the houses in the area. It dominated the place to the extent that it was the place. Keith had seen a local news report that he had been amused by:

A few years ago there was a hydrogen fire on one of the chemical plants that are still on the Billingham site. Anyhow there was this bloke on the news being interviewed who lived in one of the houses in Billingham near the works, and this bloke was saying ‘We’re living next to a time bomb here!’ I just laughed, he was living in one of the ICI houses that were built there, to be next to the plant, he clearly had no idea, I think he thought the plant had been built next to the houses rather than the other way round.

In fact, some workers rarely left Billingham or only knew certain parts of the town and the ICI site:

I was working with this guy once and he wasn’t well and I was told to take him home in the works van, so I drove out of the East gate and said, ‘right where do you live?’ Well he couldn’t tell me, he hadn’t a clue because he always went in and out of the West gate! (Keith)

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ICI also provided additional facilities for its workers on the site, there was a doctor’s surgery so workers could be seen as quickly as possible, there was health screening too, and even a dentist:

We all had regular chest X-rays and things like that, there was also a phys-iotherapist there too you could see them so you didn’t have to wait for an appointment from the NHS. (Keith)

All of these services also benefitted ICI and reflected the company’s cor-porate philosophy, which was about efficiency and avoiding potential industrial conflict if possible. Andrew said:

During shut downs when plants were closed for maintenance and overhaul I was the guy that co-ordinated the activity, to make sure everybody was safe and we didn’t have any strikes.

Strikes were relatively rare at ICI; instead of getting to the point of con-frontation, management and the unions preferred to negotiate through the works councils and later the joint consultative committees on an ongoing basis. However, this wasn’t always the case. In 1975 there was a fairly major strike at ICI involving the craft unions that lasted 3 weeks (Pettigrew 1985). The strike was problematic as the non-craft unions refused to support the strike. As Andrew explained;

There was a craft workers strike in 1975, all the craftsmen came out on strike I can’t remember why, but it lasted about three weeks. The craft unions went on strike but the non-craft unions wouldn’t so it became a very bitter strike. The main bulk of people were the process workers whose line was, ‘the T and G (Transport and General Workers Union) know what they are doing.’ and they were never going to get involved. The main objec-tive is to keep the plants running. So the craft conveners and the non-craft conveners were at each other’s throats, no communication at all.

But things between the unions were eventually resolved, via a somewhat informal route. Bill Wright was an industrial chaplin who had been involved with ICI since the middle of the 1960s. Bill was a former indus-trial worker himself and part of the church industrial mission. He had

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begun working within ICI initially in the apprentice school and then the wider plant. To do this Bill had to have good relations with all of the Shop Stewards at the plant. Andrew takes up the story:

Well Bill Wright had done his back in and ended up in hospital, in a ward, in bed and he couldn’t get up. The two craft conveners decided to go and visit him. The same afternoon the non-craft conveners decided to do the same so the four of them spent the afternoon in the hospital talking to each other and things improved. A good example of what these sorts of roles can achieve!

Industry, the Environment, and Health and Safety

The scale of industry on Teesside in the past and the higher levels of pol-lution that were tolerated also meant that the environment was very dif-ferent. Amanda’s comment was fairly typical:

there’s a lot less stuff in the air and the skyline looks different these days.

Already by the 1960s pollution was falling on Teesside and local industry was beginning to clean up. ICI’s switch from coal as a fuel and feed stock to Naphtha, a low-grade petrol, the use of natural gas to run new plants and its closure of older plants meant there was less impact on the envi-ronment. However, at the same time there was also an acceptance that of the impact that living in close proximity to industry was having. In the late 1960s after a long campaign by local councillor Maureen Taylor and her colleagues, the local authority agreed to demolish the Haverton Hill Estate and rehouse its residents. It is said that at this time Haverton Hill had a reputation for being ‘the place where even the birds coughed.’

Cheryl remarked about the British Steel Cleveland works at which she served part of her traineeship:

the place was always dusty, everything was covered in dust all the time and of course everybody smoked all the time.

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The prevalence and normality of smoking was something that had also been commented on by the focus groups, but of course within many parts of industry smoking was simply just too dangerous to tolerate. Norma told me:

At Port Clarence smoking was a sackable offence, as it was BSC chemicals, it had been Dorman Long chemicals, it made all the chemicals involved in steel hardening and things like that. It was an odd piece of British Steel as it didn’t make steel. You could smell it in the air, everything was covered in a yellowish dust every morning.

These everyday encounters with pollution and potentially hazardous sub-stances were not seen as anything particularly remarkable. There was an acknowledgement that this would not now be acceptable, but no real shock that they had been exposed to hazardous substances, it was just a fact of life, an occupational hazard. Nicola told me that in order to get to the part of the ICI Billingham works where she worked, she and her col-leagues had to walk past a number of chemical processing areas and under pipe bridges. This meant that sometimes she got splashed by various liq-uids including acids and alkalis:

it was quite common for you to get splashed by this stuff walking to work, and it wrecked your stockings. In fact, it was so common that ICI had a compensation scheme. If your stockings got wrecked you filled out this form, which said what make they were and how much they’d cost. Then you had to send your stockings off with the form, then they would give you the money back.

It seemed that ICI thought of everything! I found the idea that there was someone at ICI Billingham whose job involved spending the day examin-ing worn ladies stockings and casting judgement upon them amusing to say the least! However, ICI certainly had a serious attitude to safety for those working on the shop floor.

Keith commented that as time went by ICI issued more and more equipment to workers, such as overalls, boots, gloves, hard hats and safety glasses. They also incentivised safety by rewarding good practice, as Keith found out; whilst working on pipework, his safety specs ended up covered

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in solder, but they protected his eyes from a very nasty injury. This inci-dent led to Keith being given a ‘Golden Eye award’, which involved being presented with a certificate that reads:

you are hereby enrolled as a life member of the Golden Eye club, and are acclaimed for the wisdom displayed in protecting your eyes from serious injury in a works accident by wearing the safety equipment provided.

The incident and Keith’s award were also reported in the ICI newspaper the ‘Billingham Post.’

Whilst we think of hazards being more commonplace in the past and Health and Safety being less rigorous, there are aspects that are difficult to comprehend to those who did not experience things directly. In all of these interviews I asked people what the big differences between the Teesside of the past and the Teesside of today was. One reply that took me by surprise was George’s—he mentioned noise:

There was noise at Head Wrightson, there was noise in the street, you don’t get that now. Noise used to equal activity but not anymore.

This was something that I had not considered to a great extent before, archive pictures of the industrial landscape are very common and acces-sible, this is not the case with sound. The industrial soundscape is just not preserved in the same way.

Work and Death

This issue was raised in the focus groups and in several of the interviews. Just as work seemed to be more central to life in general in the past, death was also something that was no stranger to the workplace. Most of the people I spoke to had worked in industry during a time when standards of safety were rap-idly improving, but accidents and injury were still seen as routine occupa-tional hazards. It was also something I had some arm’s length experience of as my father worked as a project manager in the engineering industry; sometimes I would get home from school and find my Dad home early, when I asked why, it would be because someone had been killed on site,

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the custom was if this happened to shut down for the remainder of the day. It didn’t happen often but it wasn’t unknown. Jim, who had worked as a fitter in the steelworks, told me:

I can think of three fitters that died doing jobs, that quite easily could have been me.

Sometimes things were less immediate with the consequences taking years to become apparent. Anne told me what had happened to her father:

My Dad was an inspector at ICI Wilton. He went into the Terylene plant, it was a new plant and the whole workforce turned yellow, they all had what looked like jaundice, it was due to some sort of dyeing process for Terylene they were experimenting with. Later it was found that there was a cancer associated with this. There was never a link proved but my dad did die of cancer in the end. (Anne)

In terms of health and safety and risk in the workplace there was definitely a sense amongst those I interviewed that things had changed for the better, and that this was due to a combination of improvements in the workplace in conjunction with the decline of manual jobs. George put it this way:

There are now more white-collar jobs now, more clean jobs. You used to see people walking around in overalls, who wears overalls now?

Decline of the Region’s Industries, Loss of Identity, and the Neglect of the Area in General. Why Has This Happened and Who or What Is to Blame for It?

The decline of Teesside’s industries, how it had happened, when it had started and the nature of the key factors involved within it was something that most of the interviewees had opinions on, but apart from a general agreement that things were not what they once were these opinions var-ied greatly. Some like George traced the start of the decline to the 1960s, rather than being a ‘golden age’, it was the beginning of a long decline:

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Things began to change, there was a company called Metrovicks that used to make railway carriages, they closed down, then Ashmore, Benson and Pease closed, the collieries were closing my dad was made redundant, ship-yards were closing too all over the North-East. It was a general trend, a lot of changes in engineering, we were an old company with old attitudes, the problem was that we didn’t change fast enough. Head Wrightson were innovators though, they had to be, that’s why there are the last of the major engineering companies on Teesside to close.

Things didn’t improve and Head Wrightson’s decline during the 1970s accelerated:

I could see that Head Wrightson wouldn’t survive by the late seventies. So I went back to night school to get some more qualifications, don’t know why I did it, I just wanted to prepare myself. I did modern maths and eng-lish language and english literature. I broadened my attitudes. I wanted to get out of engineering. Then in 1984 after a long decline Head Wrightson finally closed, one of the reasons was that there was less need for steel foundries because of the way fabrication was being done. (George)

George embarked on another very different career, in finance and insurance:

I ended up working for a company called Sun Alliance, selling! And I had a difficult time grasping how to sell things. I did it for 15 years and ended up as an Assistant Branch Manager.

He felt that the decline of Head Wrightson and heavy industry on Teesside was really just one of those things, it’s time, George thought, had come and gone:

Head Wrightson, it’s past caught up with it. Try and name companies that have survived for more than a hundred years? I can only think of one, that’s Marks & Spencer! But that’s the natural way of things in life, we have to be open to change. There will always be change, it ain’t no good fighting it!

Others like Alf who worked in the research laboratories at ICI and later with its successor companies saw things rather differently, he saw the

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1980s as pivotal, firstly because of its politics and because of the changes that occurred at ICI:

it’s the me, me, me culture. I blame Maggie Thatcher.

He explained that what he meant by this was how the community and the effects of unemployment upon it were ignored by government as any semblance of national planning or government intervention disappeared. It should be remembered that by 1985 Middlesbrough had an unem-ployment rate of 22% (Foord et al. 1985).

Ironically, it was also around this time that ICI became the first British company to make £1 billion pounds profit. It must have seemed implau-sible to anyone that the company would have disappeared within 20 years. Alf argued that the departure of the flamboyant and high-profile chair-man of ICI Sir John Harvey Jones in 1987 was the turning point.

For ICI I think the end was when Harvey Jones left, that was the pivotal time. (Alf )

There was a change of direction in the late 1980s with ICI seeking to get out of the bulk chemicals market. Alf felt that this was not handled well and things went downhill rapidly in his opinion:

what happened at ICI was that they wanted to do specialised products. The managers for each division were vying for more people and more resources, but no-one was overseeing what was going on.

Keith agreed that by the late 1980s ICI was not the employer it once had been:

ICI looked after its people, at least it did when I first worked there, things changed over the years, I remember there use to be an ICI Logo and it said on it ‘our greatest asset is our people’ then at some point, I think it was in the 1980s it was changed to ‘our greatest asset is our customers’. That sort of summed up how things went after that.

Interestingly, Keith thought that the relatively long decline of ICI had protected the area from a major shock.

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ICI didn’t disappear overnight it just sort of faded away, there was no sud-den shutdown, so I don’t think people really miss it that much.

Others were not so sure. Robert, whom I met at one of the focus groups, told me:

In 1982 I moved away from Teesside for 18 years, and when I came back I noticed a difference and the difference was the way ICI had changed.

The Forge—A Teesside Engineering Company in a Changing World, 1975–2015

Industrial change on Teesside has not been a fast process, it has taken decades, also the fortunes of some industries have ebbed and flowed. The following case study of one particular company illustrates this and some of the issues that Teesside’s remaining industries now face.

During my research I was lucky enough to interview three people who worked for the same engineering company. They all started with the com-pany in the late 1970s; one stayed until 1990, whilst the other two stayed over 30  years. Ian had been the company’s managing director, Tim the metallurgist was the quality manager and Kevin had worked on the shop floor before becoming the company’s senior draughtsman. Together their accounts provided a fascinating picture of a Teesside engineering company’s changing fortunes from the 1970s until the company’s closure in late 2015.

Head Wrightson Stampings was established in 1939, it was part of the wider Head Wrightson group. It specialised in making forgings for indus-try. A forging is made by hammering or pressing a metal billet into shape, this can be done hot or cold, more usually hot, a drop hammer or a press will press the metal into the required shape by using a die, a premade former. Throughout the second world war Head Wrightson Stampings were involved with numerous military contracts. By the late 1940s the company had moved to premises at Brenda Road close to Seaton Carew, Hartlepool. The company made forgings for other parts of the Head Wrightson engineering group and also developed a market supplying the transport industry, including a long-term relationship with Scania and Volvo, which the forge retained right up until its closure in 2015.

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By the late 1970s the Head Wrightson engineering group as a whole was in trouble; but many of its constituent companies were doing much better and essentially keeping the company afloat. Consequently, when Kevin began working the forge in 1977 things seemed good:

Head Wrightson’s stampings was ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the company at the time it couldn’t fail to make money, it was barmy. If the five-ton ham-mer worked all week it would be able to pay the wages for the whole site, it was silly money. That’s why stampings survived to become Davy then Clydesdale, and then Caparo.

Indeed, Head Wrightson Stampings was helping to keep the company afloat, sometimes by the use of some unorthodox business practices. Tim told me about what became known as the forges ‘Golden Gates’. In 1976 the forge had commissioned Head Wrightson at Teesdale, Thornaby to fabricate a new set of gates for the forge, it paid them a quarter of a mil-lion pounds for the job, a substantial sum now but an absolute fortune in 1976. This of course was essentially just a way of transferring funds from one part of the business to another.

Things did not carry on like this, despite the economic downturn brought by the recession of the late 1970s, the forge remained busy, but this activity masked harsh financial realities. Head Wrightson were taken over by the Davy Corporation, and all of the group’s operations were reviewed. Ian told me that by the time he was brought in to become the forge’s managing director things had deteriorated considerably.

“In 1978 Head Wrightson stampings were losing £100,000 per month.”

I was surprised by this as it seemed to contradict the picture painted by Kevin and Tim, I asked Ian to elaborate.

The reason they lost so much money was that the market had collapsed, but the sales director at the time persuaded the board this was just a point in the cycle and everything that went down would come back up again. The com-pany was not in high-volume manufacture, it was in small to medium vol-ume. One of its main markets was off highway vehicles, the only volume parts were bits for trucks and buses. At the time it was also into agriculture, things like combine harvesters. The sales director foolishly persuaded the

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board to build huge stocks up in anticipation of the market’s resurgence so then they would all be organised. It never occurred to any of them that in the interim a lot of these products will be designed out and all these com-ponents they had made would be obsolete!

This explained why the forge remained busy but was losing so much money. Drastic action was needed; Ian explained:

All this stuff was rusting away, and they were still banging away on three shifts a day! So I came in and no one could believe it when I immediately closed the third shift down. Then I said we were closing the second shift down. My accountant said the company wouldn’t survive and couldn’t pos-sibly make money, so I persuaded him to go away! And we made the model work.

This of course meant redundancies and changing the wages structure. Within the forging industry workers were traditionally paid on ‘piece rates’, the volume that they produce determined their wages, so each job was priced according to its complexity:

We immediately renegotiated the re-numeration schemes and the bonuses as these guys were being paid an absolute mint, every time they jumped they got a wage increase. It really needed a hard-nosed punch-up, and that is what we had!

This was a time of great upheaval, Tim told me how the company changed:

When I first started, there was a directors dining room, senior management dining room, a junior management dining room, and works canteen. That was the culture and hierarchy at the time. All that went, which was a good thing. (Tim)

The forge’s fortunes revived in the 1980s. The forge was also able to embark on a programme of modernisation. Ian had also been given the task of closing the Iron Foundries that the Davy corporation had acquired along with the rest of Head Wrightson, under the Lazard’s Scheme,

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which  offered financial rewards to companies who were prepared to reduce their foundry capacity by closing operations and destroying fur-naces. Ultimately the process proved helpful for the forge:

When I closed the foundries, I had a £3 million closure budget, and I did it massively under that, so I was able to do all sorts of things for the forge. For example, I acquired some forging presses from an old friend and the business could then move into high-volume press forging and get into the aerospace and defence markets. Plus  we started doing our own die design and using modern CNC equipment we embarked basically on modernisation.

Then we got a very big nuclear contract, then we got the Queens award for export in 1986 and then the investment programme from Davy, the new footing business on was the only way forward. (Ian)

The forge successfully moved into new markets and added new facilities, including a metallurgy lab in 1990, which Tim was in charge of. Kevin worked there machining test pieces.

Meanwhile, Ian departed to work elsewhere. He looked back on his time at the forge with satisfaction:

It was a Victorian industrial slum when I arrived, it was an engineering company when I left.

Kevin got increasingly involved with matters of design, especially the use of CNC (Computer Numerical Control) equipment, which allowed greater automation, better accuracy and quality control:

I had an HNC so I got promoted and moved up to the drawing office and I ended up being the senior draughtsman which is hilarious as I was the senior draughtsman in the team of one. I was involved with quality con-trol, when the die shop manager retired I ended up going down to the die shop, because I did all the CNC programming for the two CNC lathes anyway. Then we got the CNC milling machine I used to program that as well. Also Clydesdale at Dudley got this forging simulation software and we got a copy too. The software worked well especially for presses and we never had a failure whilst I was there.

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However, despite modernisation and increasing automation, some aspects of the forging industry remained as they always had. Tim, Kevin and Ian all delighted in telling me about one practice in particular:

If I took you around a forge where they are doing hot forging with a big drop hammer just before the top die comes down the guy will throw a handful of something onto the hot metal, and it looks like sawdust, do you know what it is? Well that’s what it is sawdust..! (Tim)

Me—“Sawdust?”

yes sawdust with a bit of water, what it does is when you throw it on it creates an explosion which blows the scale off the piece and stops the scale from being hammered in. For a hammer forging that’s what you do. (Ian)

Kevin felt that the problem with the forging industry in the UK was that it was now too quick to discount the experience of those who had worked in the industry long term.

They want computerised spray nozzles that use graphite and environmen-tally friendly forging lubricants in exactly the right place at the right time, but sawdust works better, it just does. Also sawdust is free, whereas envi-ronmentally friendly die lubricant costs a fortune. (Kevin)

It was this type of attitude and management that led Kevin to leave the forge after 30 years for another job in engineering.

People wanted to change things for the sake of changing things, there were people who have worked there for 35 years were being told what to do, but when they told the boss why they couldn’t do it that way they got grief, so in the end they gave up telling the bosses and they just did what they were told and the whole place fell to bits very quickly.

Caparo, the forge’s parent company, closed both its UK forging opera-tions at Hartlepool and at Dudley in the Midlands suddenly in November

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2015. Seventy-nine jobs were lost at the forge at Hartlepool. The reasons for the closure are not completely clear. Both Tim and Kevin told me that they had heard that both operations had full order books at the time of closure.

Industry and Identity

Those big industries gave this area a status and a strength, a backbone. (Norma)

It is this connection between industry and the identity of the area and its people that it is essential to grasp. Many people remain proud of the area’s industrial past, particularly if they are of an age to remember it or have family connections:

I stayed in a hotel in Zanzibar, it was an old building as I was climbing up the stairs and I saw this big steel girder with ‘Dorman Long’ written on it, I got quite excited I told everybody that I had to have a photo! (Cheryl)

It can be argued that because the region grew up with its industries, and there was little else here prior to them, that this is the problem, it is not just a case of finding a new economic focus, it is a case of redefin-ing the area’s identity as a whole. This is a connected, but much bigger task.

A Better Yesterday, a Different Way of Life

During my interview with George I asked him whether he had ever imagined at the start of his working life a time when Head Wrightson’s and many other parts of Teesside’s traditional industries would be gone.

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Back then no, we thought that it would be here forever, people would say that you had a job for life. (George)

This of course turned out not to be the case for many people. Whilst there was certainly an element of nostalgia in the conversations I had with people about the past, there was also a reflection and realisation that in hindsight this was just the way it seemed at the time, the idea existed within a different economic, social and political context. Some of the participants reflected that it was not them but their parent’s generation who had had jobs for life. There was also a realisation that this change, which in the 1950s and 1960s had seemed permanent, was just temporary, rather than a permanent change from the economic insecurity that had characterised the labour market before the Second World War:

The time of a job for life must have been wonderful for people as they worked in trades where you could have been out on your ear at a moment’s notice, plus two world wars. So security and stability would have been a big deal. (Norma)

Teesside during this time certainly offered opportunities for all who had the skills required. I met Tariq at one of the focus groups and later did a longer interview with him. His family moved to Middlesbrough in 1959. Tariq’s father had left India shortly after partition in 1947. The family had been wealthy but their land and assets were in the disputed border region between India and the newly formed Pakistan. Tariq’s father had gone to live in Kenya where he got a job working as a colonial police officer; this was at the time of the Mau Mau rebellion. In 1957 the family left Kenya and came to England when Tariq was 4 years old. Tariq’s father found work as a mining engineer at Brampton in Derbyshire. In 1959 the family moved to Middlesbrough and Tariq’s father started work as an engineer at Dorman Long.

I was interested to know what it was like to be an Asian family on Teesside in the early 1960s. Tariq recalled:

When we first came to Middlesbrough in 1959 there wasn’t really an Asian community here so most of our friends were English friends. There was no racism when I went to school in Middlesbrough in those days.

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The family settled quickly and opened other businesses too:

My Dad always said ‘work hard son!’, he worked at Dorman Long and we also had a small garage as a business, and later we opened a shop.

Tariq worked in numerous jobs including stints on Stockton market and for Ralph Sparks, a local bakery company; he recalled how changing jobs was relatively easy, and how he ended up in a job he had always wanted:

I worked at Sparks bakery as a bread packer, one day I went to the job centre just out of curiosity and there were vacancies, they wanted rail-waymen. So I asked and they said, well, we will train you up to be an engineering technician so I went for an interview and a medical. After two or three weeks I thought ‘well I’m not going to get this’ and then the letter came asking me to come down to see the chief engineer then they sent me to Doncaster to do 8 weeks training. I was on the railways 25 years.

Tariq worked across the region examining freight wagons at industrial sites such as ICI, British Steel, Boulby salt and potash mine on the North Yorkshire coast and Weardale cement works, to name but a few; he also commented about how busy things were in the 1970s:

In the 1970s the steelworks were really busy I remember five trains a day, 28 wagons full of steel going down to Corby from Teesside.

I explored the idea that jobs were easy to come by with those I inter-viewed just as I had with members of the focus groups. In general people agreed that they were. Some put this down to the far greater demand for unskilled labour:

In the sixties there was a job for almost everyone I mean even the ‘Thickos’ got a job, that’s not to be disparaging. They were entitled to work and have a wage, now that’s not the case and we may have gone backwards on this. Perhaps we now live in an era when people don’t want to work? But it wasn’t like that in the sixties. (George)

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Norma agreed that jobs were easier to come by:

It might not have been your idea of a dream job but there were jobs, I mean now a lot of places now want a lot of qualifications for a minimum wage job.

Opportunities outside of the area were also opening up as skilled workers were required in developing industries:

A lot of people I knew left ICI and went to work offshore especially once the North Sea oil started in the 1970s and 1980s but I never felt the need to do that. (Keith)

Perhaps the more important point to stress here is that there was a choice, and furthermore people were aware of that choice and felt it to be a tan-gible one:

ICI were paternalistic and looked after everyone and that has gone, do companies do that anymore? The same benefits and the feeling of being looked after? (Nicola)

My Dad went to ICI in his late forties as a process operative, and he retired at 62, he always said he got a lot more out of it than he put in, as he was late going there. He got his pension and every year, the ICI Christmas hamper. (Norma)

The notion of the large employer offering work and support over the course of a lifetime is a powerful idea and one that was very much a real-ity until a relatively recent time. As Susan put it:

when I grew up in the 1980s nearly every one I knew, their Dad worked at ICI or at Seal Sands.

This idea will take longer to fade on Teesside; this is due not only to its demise but also the nature of the labour market that has replaced  it, Norma’s comment was typical:

Now people end up on agency work with no stability and no pension. Teenagers today don’t have that certainty anymore.

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An Uncertain Future, What Happens Next?

It’s quite a young area really we seem to have had this peak, now it’s all gone flat. Suddenly we are left with nothing no big industry just lots of little units. (Cheryl) it seems the area is just going to carry on slowly declining, the companies and businesses that we relied on and that provided the jobs and the money in the area just aren’t there anymore. (Nicola)

The opinion that the area was not what it once was was almost universal amongst both the focus groups and those I interviewed who had worked in Teesside’s traditional industries. Some like Norma linked industrial decline to wider identity crisis for the area:

We’ve lost the ability to push ourselves because we don’t have these things here anymore the big businesses have gone and we have lost confidence. We have gone from being confident to being an underdog. We all feel that we are in the wasteland—we aren’t in the North-East is that Newcastle, we don’t belong to Yorkshire and it’s not Teesside anymore or Cleveland any-more, we don’t actually belong to anything.

However, these responses did not always reflect upon the reality of the situation. In March 2017 the unemployment rate in Tees Valley was run-ning at 4.1% (Nomis), a far cry from the 20% of the mid-1980s. In the same month there were also 1051 new business start-ups in the area according to the Tees Valley Combined Authority. Instead what they are better viewed as are emotional responses. Andrew reflected on this:

The demise of ICI, I was very angry at how the board was behaving. Looking back, I think this was due to my emotional attachment. It’s wrong to think that these industries will always be there. That shipbuilding has gone that steelmaking has gone and that a lot of the chemical industry has gone is to some extent inevitable.

The strength of the emotional response and attachment to the industries of the past that were demonstrated in 2015 over the closure of the Redcar blast furnace, which saw large-scale public meetings, rallies and demon-

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strations, is clearly embedded within the area as it is so central to its biography and identity. However, it can also be argued that this has been sustained as the future has remained unclear, uncertain and unplanned. There has been no mechanism or timescale for managed long-term eco-nomic change, unlike the rundown of the German steel industry in the Ruhr, which was planned over a period of decades:

What is missing in all of this is planning, long-term planning. Redcar steelworks closing isn’t a problem if there are lots of other jobs around. I think there’s an inevitability that things that have been around a long time  are going to change. But the problem is that at the moment  the planning that goes into this is minimal. Back in the 1960s we had  the Teesside structure and plan, now that was an attempt to look at the area think ahead and ask what the changing needs were. That’s the sort of thing that we need now. Organisations don’t realise how important planning is, the future is not something that just happens. (Andrew)

What also becomes apparent once you begin to look is that the notion that ‘all the industry has gone’ simply does not bear scrutiny. What you certainly don’t have is the same percentage of the workforce engaged in manual work, nor do you have several very large employers that are able to offer long-term very secure work over the course of a lifetime. Instead what you have is an area that now has about 11% of the workforce as opposed to somewhere near 30% in manufacturing industry. Kevin remains in the forging industry on Teesside:

I’m still in the forging industry, we are welders and make dies and plant for the forging industry and CNC. It’s proper engineering, not all computers, it’s proper people, working with big lumps of metal, big cranes and big hammers.

Rather than volume production like the forge, this operation deals with specialised bespoke jobs. Kevin continued:

If you can weld it, machine it, we’ll put it together. Everything that we do is a one-off, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s all variety every job is different.

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Also what differs is the scale of the enterprise, especially in terms of the number of people it employs.

We only have 12 people for a five welders, a couple of machinists, the office staff and a couple of labourers. (Kevin)

I asked about where the firm’s workers came from, and I really expected Kevin to tell me that they were older workers; I was surprised when he didn’t. He explained:

We tend to get our lads from Middlesbrough College level 3s who aren’t frightened of the welding set and haven’t gone into the big bad world got into bad habits.

This was very important as the specialist nature of the work demanded a specialist set of skills, it was not the case that any welder could be employed:

You can’t just go and get another welder to do the type of welding that we do. We get all our welders as apprentices and train them up so there’s no bad habits they’re just welders to do what we want to do. They can’t really transfer anywhere else but then again we can’t transfer any sort of bog stan-dard welder in. (Kevin)

This also shows that there is no shortage of young people wanting to undertake the type of training that leads to jobs in skilled industrial trades. Indeed, Teesside continues to produce skilled workers with local training institutions such as Middlesbrough College and TTE based at Southbank offering specialist courses and modern apprenticeships in areas  such as fabrication, instrumentation, machining and electrics. The difference is that those who complete these courses will face a more competitive job market on Teesside than in the past and will be more likely to either travel to work outside the area, or leave the area on a permanent basis.

However, despite this, Kevin did not see a bright future for the forging industry in the UK or UK engineering in general. I asked him what he thought things might be like in 20 years’ time.

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I don’t think there will be anything very much here, I think a lot of it will go abroad. I think a lot of it will go. There’s an awful lot of small indus-trial units standing empty at the moment. We’ll end up a small industry with a few specialist companies. They will keep going as they are the companies their Dad set up 20 years ago that’s the kind of places that we deal with. Small units doing highly specialised stuff, just a dozen machines three or four people that’s the only way I can see it working. (Kevin)

This question of scale, and the idea that things we once did on a grand scale are still being done but on a smaller more specialised scale by ‘men in sheds’ featured in a number of the interviews, and there were varying degrees of optimism attached to it.

George was positive about the future:

The way forward is small industrial parks, there is plenty going on when you start to look around.

Tim expressed a more sceptical view:

You can say that although there aren’t big companies doing stuff on a large scale anymore, but there are lots of people in sheds on industrial estates doing it instead, but you know what, I get the feeling there’s not much going on in those sheds ….

It can be argued that a debate about scale misses the point, although a certain critical mass of engineering skills and services are required to sus-tain such a sector. Instead, the question of being able to produce a prod-uct that people want at a competitive price is the most important thing:

You have to look for the opportunities and have the wit to stay with it, understand it, develop it and get it so it’s technically highly competitive but you mustn’t get obsessed to the point where you can’t manufacture it at a decent price. So the important thing is to identify what’s happened to the market and somehow look for a speciality you can develop and build on get the manufacturing process right then you’ve got the opportunities. But don’t plan to create your own iron foundry. (Ian)

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Consequently, finding a niche market is highly important in today’s highly competitive globalised market.

Tom runs a specialist glass design and fabrication business, they do anything with glass, and have been involved with shop-fitting and the redesign of public spaces such as libraries, University buildings and art installations. He told me:

This isn’t something that the area traditionally did but the specialist fabri-cation and engineering skills which are still here, is what allows me to be able to do these projects.

In this way it can be argued that it is the legacy of the industrial past that continues to provide new possibilities for the area that might otherwise not be possible. However, this does also involve a re-invention and rein-terpretation of the past, it is not about finding the next big industry to take the place of those that have disappeared.

Brexit and the Future of Teesside

As I have mentioned in earlier chapters, in June 2016 whilst I was engaged with the research for this book, the UK voted to leave the EU, the first country to do so in the organisation’s history. The whole of Teesside reso-lutely voted to leave: Redcar and Cleveland by 66.2%; Middlesbrough by 65.5%; Stockton-on-Tees by 61.7%; Hartlepool 69.6%; and if we con-sider the wider Tees Valley, Darlington voted to leave by 56.2%.

Neglected, ignored, abandoned, this came out with Brexit, the people of this area are fed up with being taken for granted, and ignored. We don’t get any infrastructure or money spent on the area compared to the south. (Cheryl)

It has been argued that the leave vote is representative of a new popu-lism, and that those who voted for Brexit tended to be older people who were or had been blue collar workers, and that this political action was born out of a resentment of globalisation, the disappearance of blue col-

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lar industrial work, a decline in living standards and opportunities, an increasingly precarious labour market, and a disillusionment with tradi-tional politics. Whether this is a new populism or something less coherent is debatable. For example, at one of the focus groups someone told me this;

I voted to come out.

I asked them why? Their reply was;

well all the industry has closed round here.

I was rather surprised by this comment, why pin the decline of Teesside’s industries on the EU? Why not the policies of Margret Thatcher’s govern-ments or even those of New Labour or large multinational companies?

Many people I spoke too felt that there was little for the area to lose. In terms of the local economy, Kevin was sceptical about whether it would really have much effect on the specialist engineering firm that he worked for:

I don’t think it will make the tiniest bit of difference for us, I really don’t. I think we will go back to the start, no European Union trying to write our laws for us and all that. We’ll end up again in what we called the Common Market.

Many of the people I spoke to about the issue gave credence to the idea that leaving the EU was largely an accident as so many people had voted ‘leave’ as a protest vote:

I think a lot of people voted for Brexit on the reasonably confident assump-tion that it was never going to happen. A lot of people woke up on that Friday morning thinking, fucking hell, what have we done now! (Kevin)

Yes, I could see that, but I also asked him what he thought the reasons behind that protest were:

From what I can see a lot of people voted for it for all the wrong reasons, immi-gration being the main one. They think as soon as we leave Europe we can kick

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everybody out and we will just have to look after ourselves again, and that ain’t going to happen, never in a million years is that going to happen. (Kevin)

Kevin also felt that there could be serious problems for British engineer-ing if freedom of movement for EU workers ended:

There are a lot of people we deal with who have a totally Polish workforce, and they absolutely love them as they are great workers. They have an abso-lutely superb work ethic.

I was interested in this statement and I asked Kevin what he thought the difference was, he explained that he thought it was due to the way things were done in Poland; a way of doing thinks that seems oddly familiar:

It’s proper good old engineering like it used to be the UK. Proper, dirty, massive, oily and it’s great and it really does work, they are a success whereas, we aren’t.

I asked why he thought this was the case:

because they’re just better at it than we are. Labour is still relatively cheap and you’re bound to the company for life, that’s how it still works out there. You serve your time and you work your way through to retirement with the same company. (Kevin)

In other words, the state of affairs in Polish engineering now resembles how things were in industry on Teesside and the wider UK in the 1950s or 1960s. However, I asked, was it not just a matter of time before things changed in Poland? Kevin was not so sure, the reason being that he saw the current workplace culture as being entrenched and resistant to change. Kevin told me about a British company that had tried to change the way things were done:

They set up an operation in Poland and tried to run it the way they did here and it didn’t work. When, the guy who worked in the die shop left, his dad in the forge shop left too, and his wife who worked in the canteen, and the bloke who used to sweep up who was their son. It is not unusual to get three generations employed in a factory in Poland.

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So upsetting the balance of things in Poland was not an option as the workforce could disappear rapidly.

Concluding comments

This chapter has explored themes around work industry and change on Teesside. It began by outlining Bourdieu’s ideas about cultural capital, habitus and field. What becomes clear in examining the responses and recollections of those people I interviewed was that they saw the process of change as being due to a number of factors. These included the failure of industry to modernise and think ahead, globalisation and the move-ment of industry and capital offshore, a politics that failed to support industry and the area, and a failure to plan for change and to create an alternative vision for Teesside. Consequently, there is a recognition that the ‘rules of the game’ have changed, but they have not done so in the same way for everyone. This suggests a fragmentation of experience instead of a uniform transition. It is also clear that peoples experience of industry in the past informs their view of the present. The idea of work-ing for one employer for a lifetime’, whilst commonplace in the past, may well be both unobtainable and incomprehensible to school leavers today. However, some forms of skilled manual work still retain the cultural capi-tal that they had in the past as they afford the possibility of highly paid work, either within the area or elsewhere. What is different compared to a generation ago is the number of those jobs available or the distance that may be involved to get to them. Essentially the cultural capital remains, but in a diminished or modified form as does the habitus of industrial work. What has changed and continues to shift is the field; this along with the passing of time will continue to diminish the capital and habitus associated with the type of industrial work, both blue collar and white collar, which once dominated Teesside.

References

Cockburn, C. (1983). Brothers. Boulder: Westview Press, Inc.

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Crawford, M. (1995). Building the Workingman’s paradise: The design of American Company Towns. London; New York: Verso.

Foord, J., Robinson, F., & Sadler, D. (1985). The quiet revolution: Social and economic change on Teesside 1965–85. Newcastle upon Tyne: BBC (NE).

Garner, J. S. (1992). The company town: Architecture and society in the early indus-trial age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Longhofer, W., & Winchester, D. (2013). Social theory re-wired: New connections to classical and contemporary perspectives. New York: Routledge.

Nomis. (2017). WU03EW – Location of usual residence and place of work by method of travel to work (MSOA level) 2011 Census ONS Crown Copyright Reserved. [Retrieved from Nomis on 10 February 2017]. https://www.nomi-sweb.co.uk/

Pettigrew, A. (1985). The awakening Giant: Continuity and change in imperial chemical industries. Abingdon: Routledge.

Roberts, I. (1993). Craft, class and control, the sociology of a shipbuilding commu-nity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Williamson, M. (Ed.). (2008). Life at the ICI: Memories of working at ICI Billingham. Hartlepool: TIMP, Printability Publishing.

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6Two Teessides?—A Legacy

of Inequalities

Teesside is a place of contrasts; it is profoundly unequal. In Stockton-on- Tees in 2015 male life expectancy at birth varied by 17.3 years, and female life expectancy by 11.4  years between the most deprived and least deprived parts of the Local Authority, the largest mortality gap in England (Public Health England 2015). This pattern is similar though not as pro-nounced across the wider Teesside region. All the local authorities in the region fall below the national averages for life expectancy at birth and have higher than average levels of deprivation. The poorest places are as deprived as any within England, the richest as affluent as any within England. This chapter examines the economic and social realities and inequalities on Teesside, asks how the industrial past contributed to them and examines whether current national social policies and local initiatives are likely to have an impact upon them.

Teesside and the Tees Valley

Before we proceed it is necessary to resume part of the story that Chap. 3 told, i.e. how different local government structures and development agencies have been given the responsibility for the region’s economic

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regeneration and development. This is also essential for a contemporary picture to be presented of the region’s position now, as data is increasingly being compiled at the Tees Valley level.

The Tees Valley Combined Authority came into being in April 2016. It was the result of a regional devolution deal, something that the former Conservative Chancellor George Osbourne promoted as a device for eco-nomic development, prior to his departure from the treasury in 2016 after the referendum on Britain’s EU membership. Apart from Tees Valley, there are five other Combined Authority areas, Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester, West Midlands, West of England, and Peterborough and Cambridgeshire.

In the region this deal came to the forefront during the fallout from the closure of the Redcar steelmaking plant after the collapse of SSI. This is because the deal was not only signed in the same month as SSI’s clo-sure, but because under the devolution deal regional responsibility for economic development falls under the remit of the Combined Authority and the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) Tees Valley Unlimited. The subsequent inquiry was carried out by Conservative peer, former cabinet minister and perennial Tory leadership hopeful Michael Heseltine. The Heseltine report was commissioned in the immediate aftershock of SSI’s closure and published in June 2016. The report entitled ‘Tees Valley Opportunity Unlimited’ put great weight upon the new combined authority, the LEP and a newly established South Tees Development Corporation. A summary of the report’s conclusion is presented in Chap. 7.

The purpose of the combined authority is to drive economic growth and job creation in the area. It is a partnership of five authorities: Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Stockton-on-Tees, working closely with the business community and other partners to make local decisions to support the growth of the local economy. Under the devolution deal with Government, the Combined Authority will gain new powers from Westminster regarding transport, infrastructure, skills, business investment, housing, culture and tourism. On 4 May 2017, Tees Valley will elect a new Tees Valley Mayor to chair the Combined Authority.

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Tees Valley—Social and Economic Indicators

These  figures were compiled in March 2017 by ONS for all the new Combined Authorities and show key socioeconomic indicators.

Employment

The employment rate for Tees Valley from October 2015 to September 2016 was below the UK average (73.9%) at 68.1%. Darlington was the only local authority within the Tees Valley for which the employ-ment rate was above the UK average at 74.7%. The employment rate in Stockton-on-Tees was slightly below average 72.0% whilst the employment rate in the other local authorities were all between 7% and 11% below the UK average, with the lowest being 62.9% in Hartlepool.

Earnings

Median weekly earnings were highest on both a workplace and a resi-dence basis in Stockton-on-Tees. In other words, the earnings of those employed in Stockton-on-Tees and the earnings of those who live in Stockton-on-Tees were the highest of the local authorities within Tees Valley. However, differences between earnings in the local authorities were comparatively small, and earnings averaged below the UK average of £539 a week in all of the local authorities within the combined authority.

Population

Net internal migration to Tees Valley is negative, with outflows exceeding the number of inflows. Further to this, population estimate growth rates between 2011 and 2015 show that all five local authorities have experi-enced very low population growth and the population of Darlington

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decreased. Darlington, Hartlepool and Redcar and Cleveland also saw increases in the share of residents in the 65 years and over age group. In particular, the share of residents aged 65 years and over in Redcar and Cleveland was 4 percentage points above the average share in the UK at 21.6%, having increased by 2% from 2011.

Life Expectancy

The national averages for life expectancy in 2015 were 79.2 years for men and 82.9 years for women. All of the authorities in the Tees Valley had averages below this level. Middlesbrough—76.1 for men and 79.8 for women; Hartlepool—76.8 for men and 81.3 for women; Stockton-on- Tees—78.1 for men and 81.7 for women; Redcar and Cleveland—78.1 for men and 81.8 for women; Darlington—77.9 for men and 81.9 for women. The overall average for Tees Valley was 77.5 for men and 81.3 for women. However, the overall average for local authorities can be mislead-ing due to very large variations within those areas, as the case of Stockton- on- Tees discussed below illustrates.

Deprivation

All local authorities within Tees Valley also ranked relatively poorly in the Index of Multiple of Deprivation (IMD). Middlesbrough was the most deprived local authority in the Combined Authority, and ranked as the 16th most deprived local authority in England, whilst Stockton-on-Tees was the least deprived, but still ranked at 130 out of a total of 326 local authorities. The most deprived neighbourhoods are clustered around Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Hartlepool. Parts of Darlington and Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton-on-Tees also rank among some of the least deprived neighbourhoods in the country.

(All figures above were sourced from Combined Authority Economic Indicators ONS Release date 14/07/2017).

It is clear then that Teesside faces numerous economic and social chal-lenges. Some issues are heavily entrenched and connected to the area’s economic changes and have developed over decades. Other issues can be

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attributed much more directly to policy, for example the policy of the dispersal of refugees seeking asylum in the UK has led to Middlesbrough having the highest proportion of asylum seekers in the country, which in May 2016 was one in every 167 residents, significantly higher than the government guideline of one in every 200 residents (The Gazette 26/05/2016). This is attributable to Middlesbrough’s high proportion of low-cost housing. Since 2012, three private contractors—G4S, Serco and Clearel—have run ‘Compass’, the Home Office dispersal scheme. They are paid to provide accommodation on a per-night basis. As such, the low cost of housing in Middlesbrough is highly attractive. They also subcon-tract to local providers, one of which came to prominence in 2016 when it was reported that they painted all of the front doors of the properties occupied by asylum seekers bright red (BBC News 23/10/2016). This sys-tem makes an area like Middlesbrough attractive as the low cost of housing makes the service highly profitable for the private contractors involved.

Additionally, all of the Tees Valley local authorities have lost significant amounts of funding or money that would have been spent in the local economy due to reductions in government spending such as cuts to local authority budgets and the process of cuts and increased conditionality for social security entitlements, which has become known as ‘welfare reform’.

Beatty and Fothergill (2016) have calculated the losses to each local authority by 2021. Darlington will lose £53 million, £820 per working age adult per year; Hartlepool will lose £55 million, £950 per working age adult per year; Middlesbrough will lose £92 million, £1040 per work-ing age adult per year; Redcar and Cleveland will lose £71 million, £870 per working age adult per year and Stockton-on-Tees will lose £95 mil-lion, £770 per working age adult per year.

Stockton-on-Tees

All of the five local authorities in the Tees Valley have higher than average levels of deprivation. Ironically Stockton-on-Tees has the lowest overall level of deprivation but has the worst levels of inequality. Stockton is a place of contrasts as it has such a wide variation of social and economic indicators within the borough. It also has a rare thing in the North East

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of England—a Conservative MP, James Wharton, who represents the Stockton South constituency. Labour’s Alex Cunningham represents Stockton North. The political tradition in the area is not a radical one. Stockton was once represented by a Conservative who would later become Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. From 1962 until 1983 Stockton was represented by Bill Rodgers, who was one of the original ‘Gang of Four’ who split from the Labour party in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which eventually merged with the Liberal party in the late 1980s.

Stockton-on-Tees had a population of 191,600 residents in 2011 (Office for National Statistics 2011). 51% of the population was male and 49% female. The population was overwhelmingly White (93.4%), with a small Asian/Asian British population (Indian 0.8%, Pakistani 1.6%, Bangladeshi 0.1%, Chinese 0.5%) (Office for National Statistics 2011). Most of the population of Stockton-on-Tees live in the four principal towns of the borough: Stockton (the largest), followed by Billingham, Thornaby, and Yarm. Stockton has high levels of social inequality, with some areas of the borough being particularly affluent such as Ingleby Barwick and Eaglescliffe and others having high levels of deprivation such as Hardwick and Stockton town centre. These areas are also in close proximity to one another. Of the 117 Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) in Stockton-on-Tees, 34 of these (29%) were in the most deprived quintile of the country. Eighteen LSOAs are in the most deprived 10%. At the other end of the spectrum, around 33% of people are in the top 20% nationally in terms of income (Joint Strategic Needs Assessment 2013). Therefore, Stockton has a relatively small ‘middle’, and large numbers of the population at either extreme.

Unemployment is an issue in Stockton, as it is in the rest of the Tees Valley (Nomis 2015). The jobs’ density figure (the number of jobs in an area divided by the resident population aged 16–64 years) for Stockton- on- Tees is 0.73 (Nomis 2015); 21.9% of children live in poverty, com-pared to 19.2% nationally (Public Health England 2015). Rates of teenage pregnancy, educational attainment and smoking are all worse than the national average, whilst 26.1% of adults are classified as obese, and rates of self-harm-related hospital stays are significantly worse than

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the national average (Public Health England 2015). Figures produced by Stockton-on-Tees Borough council in 2016 revealed that during 2015, 1371 people used food banks in Stockton-on-Tees, with 225 people (16%) having used food banks on three or more occasions. See Garthwaite (2016) for an excellent study of foodbank provision and the lived experi-ence of those providing and using the service in the area.

Deprivation and Inequality in Stockton-on-Tees

It would be misleading to think of deprivation and inequality in Stockton- on- Tees as being a recent problem. In the interwar period the effects of poverty upon the health of local residents was evident, and a radical approach towards trying to solve it was championed by the town’s chief medical officer George M’Gonigle. M’Gonigle was one of the first medi-cal officers to link poor health with poverty rather than to see it as a something caused by poor lifestyle choices or related primarily to poor housing. During the interwar period public health was focused upon clearing slum housing where infant mortality and pulmonary tuberculo-sis were rife, and rehousing communities. As a medical officer, M’Gonigle played his part in advocating, and facilitating, the movement of families from these central Stockton slums to new housing, but this new housing did not bring the anticipated benefits to public health. His research revealed that the higher rents charged to the families who had been moved to this new housing meant that many of them were suffering from acute malnutrition. His results were published in an influential paper entitled ‘Poverty, Nutrition and Public Health’ (1933), and his later work with John Kirby was published in (1936). In effect, the higher rents meant that these families had less money to spend on food and this was causing many of them to die prematurely. M’Gonigle also set up antena-tal services within the borough and championed other initiatives such as the outdoor school in Ragworth, which aimed to improve the health of children who suffered from problems such as rickets and breathing issues. The classrooms had windows that opened wide, there was access to the grounds, children were encouraged to spend time outdoors and were

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provided with three meals a day. M’Gonigle died of pneumonia at the age of 50 years in 1939. His house in the Norton area of Stockton has a blue plaque commemorating his life and there is also pub named after him on Stockton High Street, which opened in 2014 (Heritage Stockton 2014).

It is also not the case that the coming of the Welfare State and full employment eradicated poverty and deprivation in the area completely, despite doing much to mitigate them. Andrew, who was a manager at ICI, told me about how he had become involved with voluntary work on Stockton’s poorest estates during the 1960s and 1970s. He had run a Youth Club for two nights a week and also been involved with a local group called the East Durham Ravens, which worked with families in deprived areas; essentially he was doing advocacy and community work.

Andrew worked on the Swainby Road estate (now redeveloped), the Portrack estate and the Tilery estate (which recently became notorious when in 2015 its Kingston Road featured as the location for Channel Four’s controversial ‘Poverty Porn’ series—‘Benefits Street’). The group also operated on the Bluehall and Ragworth estates:

Portrack was a dead end estate with a small park at the bottom and you never went there unless you wanted to. Tilery was different as the school was there. There were streets in Ragworth which backed along the railway and were very isolated. You found that the areas with nobody moving through them were the places where you found the families with the most problems. (Andrew)

Andrew told me that he felt a lot of the issues on the estates he worked on stemmed from the isolation of the community from what he felt was mainstream society:

What struck me about these deprived disadvantaged communities was that they didn’t really have access to ‘normal people’, for example lots of the roads, you never went down them unless you had a reason to go there. (Andrew)

What Andrew was telling me was that these communities had identified a way of doing things that made sense within the community but only served to isolate them further from the mainstream. We discussed this at

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some length, and Bernstein’s (1971) notion of restricted and elaborated language codes came up; Andrew felt that this is what happened in these communities, they had restricted codes that made sense within the com-munity, but they did not have the elaborated codes that allowed them to access different contexts:

Many of the people in the communities I was working with had restricted language codes. You see, there is a need to understand the context in which you are in. If you don’t set the context, someone will begin in the wrong way. Now, me and you we understand the context so we don’t have a prob-lem. But if someone doesn’t and they begin a meeting in the wrong way, for example by complaining and saying something like ‘I’ve been waiting here 15 minutes!’ Then they are never going to be able to succeed.

So Andrew told me that effectively what he did was act as an interpreter between the people he was trying to help and those who were the gate-keepers to the services they needed. In effect, what he was doing was try-ing to help individuals bridge the gap that was there because of a lack of a certain type of cultural capital. To do this Andrew told me how he tried to organise meetings that today would be commonplace, but were unusual in the late 1960s and early 1970s:

I got involved with families who had been involved with multiple agencies, police, social services, probation, education etc. I discovered one of the children my group was 12 years old and had never been registered with the doctor! I used to arrange meetings, case conferences between these agencies and see what happened. Some agencies just refused to participate but oth-ers did and we got some results. (Andrew)

The sense of this disconnection between the marginalised communities that Andrew was involved with and the mainstream was brought home to me by a story Andrew told me about a family he represented who were living in very overcrowded conditions:

I had a family in Ragworth they had 15 children and they lived in a three- bedroom house with granny, three greyhounds and two rabbits! The court

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ordered the council to rehouse them to a five-bedroom house in Bluehall, but they didn’t use all five bedrooms! (Andrew)

I asked Andrew about where people from these communities worked? This of course is the same time period when so many of my other respon-dents had told me how easy work was to come by and how you could leave a job on Monday and be working in another by Wednesday. Andrew told me that attitudes to work in the communities he worked with var-ied. I asked if any of the people who lived there them worked at ICI Billingham? Remarkably, it seemed not:

ICI was such a big employer and families had generations working there. But this major employer seemed to have passed these communities by. We tried to think of how many people that we actually knew these areas who worked for ICI, and it was actually very, very few. We had assumed that lots would work for ICI. Especially as I had got two or three of them a job as had my friend. But when we thought of it there were only about half a dozen. (Andrew)

I asked Andrew how he understood this?

People weren’t aware of what the options were or that they had a choice, and nothing in their experience helped them to recognise that. School didn’t really help, so we just tried to try and help people widen and broaden their experience and to give themselves some options. To a lot of these people the idea of working ICI was beyond them, they had never done that so they thought they wouldn’t last long or would be kicked out. They had many reasons “why not” but not reasons “why”. (Andrew)

This idea of communities which had been “left behind” but have strong internal codes of culture and ways of doing things was something that I heard from those involved with similar communities in Stockton today.

I interviewed Peter who had worked for Stockton Borough Council dealing with Public Health issues. He told me a similar story to the one that Andrew had about the 1960s and 1970s; however, the big difference was work, or rather the scarcity of it in comparison to previous years. There was, however, an attitude about what forms of work were valued

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and which were not. Peter told me about how he had been involved with an initiative on an estate in Middlesbrough:

I was doing some work in west Middlesbrough, a place called Whiney Banks it was a rough area in the 70s and it didn’t really change, and then ‘New Deal for Communities’ came along in 2002 or 2003. I was on the board and I looked at the place and saw that it was the same as the 70s. I remember talking to residents as we were trying to do work linking employ-ment to health opportunities. So I went to this event and talked about the importance of helping people in the area to take up opportunities to become nurses and teachers and those sorts of professions. I was lambasted by one man in the audience, and I will never forget his words to this day, he stood up and he was really quite aggressive he said ‘we don’t want those sort of posh jobs, we want proper jobs for working men!’ And that has always stuck with me. (Peter)

Again the idea of a certain sort of cultural capital being at work that is resistant to changes in the ‘field’ is evident, with certain types of work being valued above others. I asked Peter what he attributed this attitude to? Where had it come from? Peter thought that this was part of the leg-acy of Teesside’s industrial past, both materially and culturally.

Explaining Health and Life Expectancy

When I look at the health statistics, I’ve long thought there is a group of people society is leaving behind. Whether it’s Stockton town centre people or Whinney Banks people, there is a group of people at the bottom of the lower quartile who stubbornly stay there. No government of any colour over the last 40 years has been able to engage with them. Nor have they been able to address their problems and needs. I think this is partly due to the heritage that we’ve got too, they aren’t separate. A lot of those people previously had opportunities in labouring, those sort of hard-working non-skilled jobs and those options just are not there now. (Peter)

Peter explained that he felt that the problems in health were due to a health legacy directly related to the types of employment that had been commonplace in these communities and also to a culture that had

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developed in a context of heavy manual work, but still persisted even though that work had largely disappeared:

There is a legacy of a burden of poor health with mesothelioma and asbes-tosis type diseases, also high cancer rates, so we clearly have had an indus-trial health legacy. This also left behind a culture which is associated with a working class culture of drinking hard, smoking hard and eating rubbish food, that gets linked in with all of that. It’s associated rather than caus-ative. This leads to other health risks and continuing problems. For exam-ple, eating healthily is seen as ‘posh food’. (Peter)

To illustrate this point further Peter gave another example:

I remember my Dad telling me, and my Grandad telling me when they came out of a 10 to 12 hour shift at the steelworks they were so hot and dirty they would stop at the pub on the way home and have a couple of drinks purely to quench their thirst, because they were dehydrated from the work. Of course people stop working in those industries but they continue doing that because it’s ingrained in their habits, their psyche, and their social network’ the culture that they are in and then that’s a problem. (Peter)

Peter felt that it was these communities helped to explain the wide Health Inequalities in Stockton. For instance, the very poor life expec-tancy figures for men in the bottom decile in Stockton. Peter told me that this was between 67 and 68 in the bottom decile; however, there was a significant gap as the second decile was 74–75. So the bottom 10% was significantly below the next 10%. Something similar is evi-dent at the other extreme as the affluent and desirable areas of Yarm, Hartburn, Wynyard and the huge housing development at Ingleby Barwick have low levels of deprivation and are seen as desirable places to live. In this way Stockton-on-Tees is less like other Tees Valley Local Authorities who do not have these extremes, with more affluent popu-lations who may well work within those authorities commuting into the area from North Yorkshire instead. Peter made a prediction about the future:

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I think we will continue to close the average life expectancy gap, but the gap between the top and the bottom will grow. (Peter)

Peter speculated that the bottom 10% that he was talking numbered around 50,000 people on Teesside, and that this section of the popula-tion could not be ignored for much longer.

Marginalised Communities, Alternative Cultures

This issue about marginalised communities that had developed particular ways of doing things in order to cope with the circumstances that they found themselves in was something that came up on numerous occasions during my discussions with those working in the public and voluntary sector. At times I found some of these ideas difficult to listen to. Was this not just the same notion of a ‘culture of dependence’ that was pro-moted by right-wing commentators such as Charles Murray, Murray and Field (1990)? Wasn’t this just blaming the victims? Isn’t it just a rational response for a community to respond by making their own rules when conventional rules clearly don’t work for them any longer? After all, ideas about a culture of dependency and ‘three generations of wordlessness’ on Teesside and in other parts of the country have been shown to be fiction by the work of Shildrick et al. (2012a, b). What I came to realise as I went on with my interviews was that the people I interviewed were not making a judgement about the communities they were working with that ‘blamed the victims’; however, what they did see was a complex interaction of economic circumstances, cultural practices and types of behaviour that were in the long run not beneficial to anyone concerned. How to deal with that was the important question:

Public health is a combination of people taking individual responsibility and broader determinants and national policy. It isn’t simply individual responsibility nor is it simply government policy either, it’s an interaction of the two. Yet there is a feeling from some people that they have no

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responsibility at all and also a bit of, it’s nothing to do with us, it’s all the government’s fault. (Peter)

However, Peter was also dismissive of the widely held notion of ‘hard to reach’ communities:

Hard to reach, they aren’t hard to reach, we aren’t trying hard enough!

In fact, it can be argued that what we are talking about are communi-ties that are ‘easily ignored’ rather than ‘hard to reach’; what we need to be asking is who has marginalised these places. Peter argued that the media had a great deal to answer for:

We have to remove these obstacles, we have to get away from the idea that they are all out to screw the system, because they are not, the proportion of people at the bottom playing the system is no different to those at the top dodging taxes.

It is worth noting that Peter regarded both ‘benefit cheats’ and ‘tax dodgers’ as being very small groups. What we have then, coming from these communities, it seems is a response to a difficult situation that is itself problematic, but is also logical. As Andrew had put it, people:

develop a ‘self-sustaining active bubble’ and you have within that, the facil-ities for looking after yourself. These subcultures are problematic but con-sistent within themselves.

Working in Easily Ignored Communities

Making contact and engaging with these easily ignored communities was not easy, gaining acceptance and trust was often a long-term process. Louise is a welfare advice worker. I had met her on a number of occasions in the past. I wanted to talk to her about working in the Stockton and Middlesbrough areas. She gave me an idea of just how long the pro-cess of becoming accepted and established in some communities could

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take. She told me about her experiences at Port Clarence, an isolated community that is part of Stockton, but sits on the north bank of the Tees surrounded by industrial or former industrial land:

I did outreach at Port Clarence for five years, and it took me two years to actually get clients. I said to my manager ‘it ain’t working’ and thinking to myself ‘what am I doing just sat here?’ It was quite a dead place and there didn’t seem to be anyone around to talk to a lot of the time.

However, Louise persisted with her visits to the area. Eventually she found out that the venue she was using, or rather someone who was asso-ciated with the venue she was using, was the barrier:

I was advising at the community centre. Then I found out that the person who was running the community centre knew absolutely everybody; so those people who were thinking of coming in to see me were like ‘well I’m not going to see her, as they (the centre manager) will tell everybody I’ve been in!’ So that’s the downside of a very tightknit community.

Things got better when the local GP’s surgery was refurbished and Louise was able to move her advice sessions there, things gradually improved and the service reached a turning point—Louise referred to this as finding a ‘golden client’:

One of the first few clients I got there, I think I got them something like an extra 50 quid a week, that was what I call the ‘golden client’. If you get a golden client in a community that is very self-sufficient, they’re the ones that go round and say ‘Eee she’s all right her, she got me an extra 50 quid you know’ there’s no problems after that, because everyone knows you.

What Louise is talking about is negotiating a ‘rite of passage,’ how she as a professional proved her worth to the community and was consequently accepted by it. Another way to view this is that the ‘golden client’ acts in the same way as a ‘gate keeper’ works within an ethnographic study, vouching for the outsider. Louise also found that this process of making contact and being accepted varied from place to place; all estates were different communities that had different ways of doing things:

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Hardwick was more open, and more trusting and I had the feeling that you’d really feel the repercussions if their expectations weren’t met. Whereas Port Clarence wouldn’t even go near you, Hardwick would sort of ‘prod and poke’ you bit and have a look round. So again it took me a while to get accepted.

The gatekeepers in Hardwick were also different, as Louise told me:

I used to get the referrals in Hardwick from the butchers! I’d helped some-body in the butchers at some point. The butchers was like the epicentre of the community, the butcher seemed to be like the “guru” of the community.

This idea of finding help and advice in what would at first glance appear to be an unconventional place and from unexpected sources was also something that Jill spoke about. Jill was working as a health and wellbe-ing officer for an organisation that facilitated projects, and acted as a broker between the third sector and local government. She had previ-ously worked as a youth worker and a drugs education co-ordinator across Teesside. Jill told me that she felt that one of the issues that the communities she worked with had to resolve was how they sought advice and who from. She wanted to encourage the advice seeking but was con-cerned that appropriate and accurate advice was given. However, she also recognised that the professionals who traditionally delivered such advice were unlikely to succeed with this group:

Young people aren’t going to go to authority figures to find advice so they find advice from where they can, and they may find the wrong role models. But often they don’t see that they can’t. They think it’s okay because ‘my dad, brother, or uncle have all done that.’ (Jill)

The idea that things made sense because of a particular context was stressed by Louise, who told me about an encounter with a young man at an event:

I remember doing an event in Port Clarence, I remember this 10-year-old coming to me and he said ‘what do you sell pet?’ And I said ‘what I do is help people with their problems.’ This is like a 10-year-old and it’s on a

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Wednesday morning and I’m thinking, ‘why are you not at school?’ And he’s like with a proper swagger and says ‘I’ve of got loads of problems me’ and I said ‘I think one of the problems is that you’re not at school.’ And he said ‘I don’t bother with school me’ and I said ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ And he said ‘I want to be just be like me Dad.’ And I went, ‘well what does your Dad do?’ He says,’ well he’s in prison at the moment.’ And I thought I ‘oh my God!’. But he was just so honest and really, well that’s just the way life is, that’s just my route in life, sort of thing. And I just thought, ‘that’s really crap’. (Louise)

That’s as may be, but she also saw the logic within the boy’s statement:

His aspiration was to become like his father, and many of us have aspira-tions to be like our fathers and mothers. (Louise)

It makes sense of course for children to look up to their parents; it would also suggest that family structures are robust within the community too. So the question for professionals like Louise or Jill is how to operate and how to be of use to the community? Jill told me about a scheme that she was involved with which was attempting to locate what she called com-munity champions, the people who people sought advice from, and then trying to ensure the messages they gave were correct. As she explained, this was much easier than changing the behaviour of the whole community:

In the town centre ward in particular, we are trying to find community champions, those pivotal people in the community, they might not be squeaky clean, but those are the people we need to be able to get to, to train up, to say to, instead of giving the past advice you gave, why don’t you do this instead? (Jill)

This seems to be an interesting strategy as it rests upon professionals developing an understanding of place and making sense of the networks and relationships within communities, it is not a one-size fits all model. Instead it is about recognising where to deploy resources and effort. What Jill was talking about was really the same as Louise’s example about the butchers being at the heart of the community when she worked in Hardwick.

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Jill also felt that this type of strategy, one that got the community involved with change initiatives, was the only way forward:

It’s about trying to get the whole community on board, it’s their model, they are going to tell us what the services are going to look like.

This is a highly ambitious strategy, but Jill argued that this was the only way forward if issues such as health inequalities were to be tackled:

Those health inequalities are still there in those communities despite the problematic, dirty work disappearing. The industry is not causing the health inequalities, so what is causing them? I think a lot of it is down to the attitudes and education, and again who they are going to for advice, or perhaps fear of advice. I think that’s part of it, stepping outside of that comfort zone. I’m not going to go outside what I know and talk to some-one because I might not want to know what they are going to tell me or, I’m not going to believe what they are going to tell me because they are not part of my community. (Jill)

I asked Jill what other issues she felt were a priority within the areas she worked  in. She told me that ‘school readiness’ amongst children was something that needed to be addressed. School readiness she told me was about children having the appropriate emotional development and com-munication skills, to be able to attend nursery.

It seemed that there were a number of challenges going on, firstly how to identify who were the key individuals that people turn to for advice in theses easily ignored communities? As Jill put it:

How’d we get these messages to the people that we need to get these mes-sages to?

A closely related challenge is one for professionals. Tom, who is the Director of the organisation that Jill works for, told me:

All people seek advice, good advice is the advice they have taken as far as they are concerned, but professionals, they think that they are the only people who are able to be advice givers. Professionals need to realise people ask advice often within their communities.

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This perspective then recognises the importance of understanding the nature of a place, and its key players; it’s only by coming to an under-standing of its biography that professionals have any chance of making policy effective or empowering any community to take advantage of opportunities. Or as Tom put it:

If we understood what makes behaviour change and culture change than we might have half a chance. There is a need to help create intelligent com-munities that are seeking advice and getting advice that helps them to do things individually and collectively.

Leadership and Attitude

The issues of leadership and attitude came up in my discussions with Peter, Tom and Jill.

The issue of leadership had two main aspects. Firstly, they did not feel that the marginalised communities that they worked with had appropri-ate leadership:

There are people who want to be told by me or by other people, what to do. Most people here respect strong leadership; people want to have people to respect and follow. (Tom)

I was interested by this and asked him to explain further: He felt that an absence of leadership was problematic because if it was not provided by the traditional institutions, such as local politics and the labour move-ment, people would look for leadership from within their communities and might attach themselves to those who had been successful in spite of existing structures, who might be involved with crime or the alternative economy. I was a little surprised by this at first, but the same point was also made by Jill:

Deprived wards are sort of looking for that kind of leadership from the community, they will often make their own leaders in the community and they may not always be the most appropriate people to kind of steer them and advise them.

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I asked her to elaborate on this and asked why she thought that this was the case:

A lot of people need to be led, they do look to that leader to know how to behave. But just because someone shouts the loudest doesn’t mean that they know what they’re talking about.

Jill thought that this vacuum of leadership was in part a legacy from the industrial past as she felt that workplaces, work hierarchies and union structures had provided this leadership especially for men:

Leadership, there was a structure for it at work.

The second aspect was that there was a sense that the political estab-lishment in the region had failed to provide leadership and to address the problems of marginalised communities. Peter was very clear about this:

I think that what the area needs is strong leadership. Combined authorities and devolution are exactly the right idea but it also needs charismatic, exciting leadership too.

Tom agreed:

I see politicians running councils. I don’t see much leadership outside of that.

I was surprised when the issue of entrepreneurialism came up as I was talking to a group of people who were primarily involved with the voluntary and the public sectors rather than with those involved with business and industry. Tom contrasted areas of London he had previously worked in with those he now worked with on Teesside:

The overriding thing that I see as being different is that you would talk to the poorest kids in London and they’d want to be millionaires. If I speak to people up here people talk about the big employers. I think that it’s built into the DNA of the area, you were employed by them and with that came the family and social support.

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Interestingly, Peter told me that his brother, also born in Middlesbrough but now for many years a resident in the South East of England, had similar ideas:

My brother lives in Surrey, he finds down there the entrepreneurial attitude to be much greater than it is on Teesside. His idea is that there is a lack of ambition and drive and for too long we relied on big old-fashioned huge employers, and we never really got over that.

I was interested, but not really convinced by this argument that there was some sort of entrepreneurial spirit that could make a difference, which could suddenly be conjured up, although the point about the area’s dependency on large employers was clearly valid, and an issue I will return to in the concluding chapter.

Social Problems, Inappropriate Policies, Economic Solutions?

The problems that affect the ‘easily ignored’ communities on Teesside were seen as also being exacerbated by wider social policies. Some that were mentioned were fairly straightforward, for example the Bedroom Tax.

In the North-East Region as a whole 68.5% of residents live in social housing. In April 2013 the implementation of the ‘Bedroom Tax’ affected around 660,000 working-age social housing tenants in the UK, and reduced weekly incomes by £12–£22 (Moffatt et al. 2015; see also Beatty and Fothergill 2013). This devastating impact stemmed from an ignorance of the North East’s housing stock—the policy aims to encourage social housing tenants to move to smaller properties, i.e. a single person is incen-tivised to move to a one-person flat if they are living in a larger property. But such properties are scarce on Teesside and in the wider North East which developed its social housing in order to serve the needs of traditional industries. Consequently, the vast majority were three-bedroom family homes, there were never enough homes for single residents; all the Bed-room Tax has done is increase demand for a resource that was already in

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short supply, whilst penalising individuals for utilising the resources available. Social policies such as this stem from at best a fundamental misunderstanding of place and at worst a total disregard of the potential impact of policies conceived in London upon places like Teesside. Or as Peter put it:

Bedroom tax, by imposing a solution for a problem we don’t have, has cre-ated an even bigger problem.

Another issue that exacerbates health inequalities in the area, he argued, is the policy of Patient Choice within the NHS:

Patient choice has an adverse effect on health inequalities because patient choice is great for people who understand the choice and have the where-withal to exercise that choice, but a lot of people can’t exercise choice or make an informed decision. Choice is a very middle-class thing, and choice drives inequality.

Peter had no doubt that the most important thing that could be done to reduce health inequalities within the area was for the local economy to improve.

The best thing to improve the health of the people of Stockton is to have a really revitalised economy, that is what would do the most for public health across the whole of the North-East. If we had the economy of the South-East of England our health problems would disappear within a generation, they really would.

Getting On, Moving Out

The vast housing estate of Ingleby Barwick is located in the south of the Borough of Stockton and lies to the south of Thornaby and to the east of the market town of Yarm. The estate is home to around 21,000 people. It has very low levels of deprivation, it is the area that contrasts with the deprived communities that professionals like Louise and Jill work with, and represents the other extreme of Stockton-on-Tees’ health divide. Ingleby to me is the modern equivalent of the ‘Elm Lodge Housing

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Estate’, a fictional place that featured in the Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais 1973/4 Television series ‘Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads.’ The series relates the adventures of and the relationship between two for-mer school friends and workmates who meet again after losing touch for several years. The stories revolve around their aspirations and their com-mon history; they went to school together and then went to work in the same factory and both were fairly typical young skilled industrial workers. This was how they appeared in the earlier series (1964–1966) ‘The Likely Lads’. But in the later series things were different. Bob Ferris, whilst not ashamed of his working class background, aspires to better himself in terms of both his income and lifestyle. He is a site surveyor for a construc-tion company and has essentially become middle management. Bob is about to get married, buying his own house on the ‘Elm Lodge Housing Estate’, buying his own car and he goes on foreign holidays. Whilst these things are commonplace now they were not in the early 1970s. Bob’s fiancé Thelma is even more aspirational and anxious to leave the past behind. The past is given form and voice in the character of Bob’s friend Terry Collier. Terry has returned home after a period in the army and he’s shocked to find how things have changed. Terry is shocked by how their town has changed, but he is more alarmed by the change in his friend. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that despite their apparent divergences, their common past binds them together whether they like it or not. Today’s Teesside equivalent of Bob Ferris would probably be found living on or aspiring to move to Ingleby Barwick. In November 2016, I spoke to Katy McEwan, a researcher at Teesside University who is currently researching the area as part of her doctoral studies. Katy explained that the people she spoke to were aspirational and from working-class backgrounds, but in a particular way, they were keen to transform themselves into something else by their physical relocation to Ingleby Barwick. Moving there was about leaving the past behind, this physical transition they saw as bringing a new status. Katy told me what she thought lay behind this:

The purpose is to not be where you have come from.

This involved a change of location and also one of mind-set:

It’s about becoming different people, about no longer being one of them.

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In this case ‘them’ means the community you were part of previously, so it is both a physical and a cultural departure.

But moving to Ingleby Barwick from other parts of Teesside, did this actually achieve a change in status? Katy thought not. This extract from a blog post Katy wrote in 2016 explains:

They are, quite literally, put in their place by both their traditional working and middle-class neighbourhood residents by the clear recital of their postcode; TS17, the same as their working class neighbours in Thornaby. In local lore Ingleby has been long known as ‘Spam City’, alluding to the fact that residents may have the external indicators of wealth (and class) but a lack lays behind it. When asked to define what they thought ‘Spam City’ meant, a resident used another more widespread idiom that appears to allude to performance and lack, stating, ‘they think we are all fur coat and no knickers’. McEwan (2016)

Katy told me that there was a preoccupation amongst many of the people she interviewed about ‘keeping up appearances’. It was about having the right kind of image, the right kind of new car, drinking and socialising in a particular pub on the estate. She told me how one of her contacts had told her that they had to get a new car regularly or:

The neighbours would think bad of us.

There was also a fear of being ‘found out’, exposed as ‘fake’ in some way, Katy expressed this through the phrase:

Drinking Carling out of Stella glasses.

Getting to Ingleby though was not the end of the ‘journey’; Katy explained that within the estate there was a further hierarchy related to which part of the estate and which design of house you lived in. Therefore, it is an ongoing project. A project that Katy described as:

Remaking yourself as better.

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Whilst there was a logic apparent to this, Katy wondered what was gained by this pursuit of a new status, which she described as:

Caring about a community which doesn’t care.

What this also captures are Williams’ notions about ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultures:

By ‘residual’ I mean that some experiences, meanings and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue cul-tural as well as social—of some previous social formation. By ‘emergent’ I mean first that new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences are continually being created. But there is a much earlier attempt to incorporate them because they are part—and not yet part—of effective contemporary practice. Williams (1973: 10–11)

I asked Katy how this transition and these aspirations were funded. I was interested in her answer as she told me that many of the people she spoke to worked in or had partners working in the offshore industry. So despite the desire to be seen as different and leave the past behind, the means to do it are the same as they ever were, well-paid highly-skilled manual work, which can demand a premium wage. What of course is different is the circumstances in which these jobs are done, often far from home and on contracts that have only limited duration. The difference then is the precarious nature of the work; furthermore, the construction of this new identity is based upon an assumption of a certain level of income, conse-quently identity also becomes precarious.

‘Precarity’ then its seems has become a fact of life, a new context within which both the ‘left behind’ and the aspirational of Teesside are forced to try and operate within, and which shapes the biographies of individuals and the places in which they live. This diminished ability for individuals to change their own circumstances is due to the lack of a secure economic foundation upon which to build. Consequently, the social mobility that was possible for those from working-class backgrounds in the post-war decades has dramatically declined.

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Social mobility is a critically important aspect of society, it’s not the fault of poor people they are poor, if you don’t give people opportunities they can’t take them. (Peter)

The reduction of those opportunities due to a combination of industrial decline and the failure of national economic and social policy to address this issue has been the story of Teesside since the 1980s. Whether this issue can be addressed in the coming decades presents a huge challenge for policy makers and politicians at the local, regional and national levels.

References

BBC News. (2015, October 23). Why does Middlesbrough have the most asy-lum seekers? Jim Reed. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34597022

Beatty, C., & Fothergill, S. (2013). Hitting the poorest places hardest: The local and regional impact of welfare reform. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University.

Beatty, C., & Fothergill, S. (2016). The uneven impact of welfare reform. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University.

Bernstein, B. C. (1971). Codes and control: Volume 1 – Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. London: Routledge.

Clement, D., & La Frenais, I. (1973). Whatever happened to the likely lads? London: BBC (1995) originally broadcast.

Combined Authority Economic Indicators ONS Release date. (2017, February 14). Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputand-productivity/output/articles/combinedauthorityeconomicindicators/2017-03-14#combined-authority-comparisons

Health Profile. (2015). Stockton-on-Tees. London: Public Health England.Heritage Stockton. (2014). Stockton on tees borough council Dr. M’Gonigle –

The housewives champion. Retrieved from http://heritage.stockton.gov.uk/people/dr-mcgonigle-the-cigarette-card-king/

Garthwaite, K. A. (2016). Hunger pains: Life inside foodbank Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.

The Gazette. (2016, May 26). Middlesbrough continues to home highest pro-portion of asylum seekers in UK, David Ottewell. Retrieved from http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/middlesbrough-continues-home-highest-proportion-11391415

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McEwan, K. (2016). Betwixt & between: Precarious class positions in Spam City. Retrieved from https://medium.com/uncertain-futures/betwixt-between-the-precarious-class-positions-of-spam-city-251b7780fa80

M’Gonigle, G. C. (1933). Poverty, nutrition and the public health: (An investi-gation into some of the results of moving a slum population to modern dwellings). Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 26, 677–687.

M’Gonigle, G. C. M., & Kirby, J. (1936). Poverty and public health. London: Victor Gollancz.

Moffatt, S., et al. (2015). A qualitative study of the impact of the UK ‘bedroom tax’. Journal of Public Health. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdv-031First. published online: 15/03/2015.

Murray, C. A., & Field, F. (1990). The emerging British underclass. London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit.

Nomis Employee Jobs. (2015). Tees Valley ONS Business Register and Employment Survey: Open access. Retrieved from https://www.nomisweb.co.uk/

Office for National Statistics (ONS) (2011) Neighbourhood Statistics – Census. 2011. Stockton-on-Tees local authority. Retrieved from http://www.neigh-bourhood.statistics.gov.uk

Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Furlong, A., Roden, J., & Crow, R. (2012a). Are ‘cultures of worklessness’ passed down the generations. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Shildrick, T., MacDonald, R., Webster, T., & Garthwaite, K. (2012b). Poverty and insecurity: Life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.

Stockton-on-Tees Joint Strategic Needs Assessment. (2013). 2012–15 Unmet needs and commissioning intentions. Tees Valley Public Health Shared Service.

Williams, R. (1973). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory. New Left Review, 1(82), 5–16.

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7Conclusion: Place, People

and the Post-Industrial

This final chapter looks at the what the future may hold for Teesside before going on to present some conclusions. The question of what the political developments that have occurred in recent years may mean for the area is posed—at the forefront of this are two issues. Firstly, there is the issue of the Tees Valley devolution agreement, which will allow a newly established elected Mayor for Tees Valley to oversee a Tees Valley Development Corporation charged with economic revival of the area. This strategy was endorsed further by the publication in June 2016 of the Heseltine Report ‘Tees Valley Opportunity Unlimited’. The report and the devolution deal are significant as they both are centred around the expectation that the new Mayor and the Combined Authority will drive economic regeneration and investment in the region.

Secondly, the issue of what the UK’s withdrawal from the EU might mean for the area. This question is about two main areas: (1) The effect that withdrawal from the European Single Market may have on the local economy. (2) The relationship between the politics of ‘Brexit’ and recent economic and social policy. Additionally, whether the politics that pro-duced an overwhelmingly ‘leave’ vote across Teesside in 2016 mark a

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permanent shift in the region’s political culture or whether this represents something more transitory?

Finally, this chapter attempts to summarise the themes that have been discussed throughout this book and revisits the two central research ques-tions. What is the legacy of Teesside’s industrial past? How do the legacies of the industrial past influence the area today and shape its possible futures?

The Heseltine Report ‘Tees Valley Opportunity Unlimited’ (2016)—A Brief Summary of it’s Findings

The Heseltine report 2016 begins by stating that:

The Tees Valley has a broad range of strengths and local Leaders, working with the Local Enterprise Partnership, have made significant progress in securing a successful economic future for their area.

The report made recommendations in a number of areas and these are summarised below.

Industrial and Urban Regeneration

The report recommended better planning to prevent future economic shocks, with enhanced liaison between the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, the Department of Work and Pensions and her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. It established a South Tees Development Corporation, with a further recommendation for national government to engage with the new Combined Authority on how the former SSI Redcar steelworks site can be redeveloped. A Shadow board for the South Tees Development Corporation was appointed with the objective of formulating an economic strategy for the area by June 2017.

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Growth Opportunities and Wider Regeneration

The report suggested that Universities and local employers should be consulted with regard to setting up further technical-based education provision in the area. It also suggested that local Chambers of Commerce and the Local Enterprise Partnership visit a German competitor city in order to learn about the scale and quality of services available to business. The report encouraged the Tees Valley Combined Authority to work with local Chambers of Commerce and the Local Enterprise Partnership to bring together all business support organisations.

Education, Employment and Skills

The report recommended the establishment of an Education, Employment and Skills board and to encourage collaborative working between local schools and academies. It also recommended Tees Valley become an area of priority for the National Teaching Service in order to attract more teachers into the area. It suggested that the Local Enterprise Partnership and Combined Authority work with employers and schools to promote and increase apprenticeships. The Combined Authority was also encour-aged to coordinate careers advice services through the Education, Employment and Skills board.

The Energy Economy

The report recognised that the withdrawal of government funds for the development of industrial carbon capture technology had had a negative impact on the area and that Tees Valley should present its case for indus-trial carbon capture and storage to government and attempt to secure funding to support such a venture. It also recommended that Tees Valley should continue to explore the potential of heat network schemes on both the north and south banks of the Tees. The report also looked at

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available and potential nuclear power infrastructure and suggested that Hartlepool Council should consider whether the proposed new nuclear site at Hartlepool would be suitable for a small modular reactor.

Housing

The report recommended that the Tees Valley Combined Authority should take advantage of government-funded schemes designed to increase the supply of starter homes and affordable housing.

Transport Infrastructure

The report encouraged Highways England to investigate the possibility of providing a new Tees crossing as an addition to its current A19 Norton to Wynyard widening scheme. It also urged it to consider improvements to the A66 East West Trans-Pennine route in order to improve commu-nications with Teesport. With regard to rail, it encouraged the Department of Transport to investigate the electrification of the Northallerton to Teesport line as part of the Trans-Pennine electrification scheme. Network rail and Transport for the North were urged to consider the redevelop-ment of Darlington station as a key ‘rail gateway’ for Tees Valley. The report also encouraged the Combined Authority to work with the owners and operators of the airport in order to sustain and enhance the site.

Leisure, Environment and Tourism

The report urged the Combined Authority to promote culture and tour-ism within Tees Valley and invest in the area’s cultural infrastructure. It also suggested that Tees Valley investigate the possibility of bidding for UK capital of culture in 2025.

Regarding the natural environment, the report recommended that the Combined Authority take the lead in enhancing the natural environ-ment, in particular the river corridor, riverside and coastal paths, and

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river crossings. It also proposed that the Combined Authority should set a local commitment that within 25 years all infrastructure contributing to pollution of the natural environment will have been replaced.

As you can see, the report makes numerous suggestions and the role of the new Tees Valley Combined Authority and the South Tees Development corporation are extremely prominent. As I wrote this chapter the cam-paign to become Tees Valley’s first elected mayor was well underway with the election scheduled for 4th May 2017.

Possible Futures

The issue of the legacy of the industrial past was something that nearly everyone I spoke to during the course of my research had something to say about. They usually spoke about how work, life and industry had been different in the past, but their point of comparison was usually the present day or the very recent past. In general, as Chap. 5 showed, opin-ions about the future and how the area’s industrial legacy might have a bearing or influence upon it were less forthcoming, and when they were, they were not highly detailed. This chapter draws on interviews that were conducted with individuals who had more to say about the area’s possible futures; this was largely by virtue of their roles, and they include the chair of the local enterprise partnership, a local MP, a local councillor and a public relations officer for one of the area’s biggest industrial sites. In other words, their emphasis was on the area’s biography, which they showed a great deal of knowledge about.

The Past and Teesside’s Future

The discussions that I had concerning the future of the region were interesting; in some ways I found them surprising and they intro-duced me to some complex ideas that I had not previously encoun-tered, such as carbon capture and the idea of a circular economy. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the extent to which they all saw the legacy of the region’s industrial past as something that could contribute

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to the region’s future in a positive way. The place’s past was important and the keys to its success they argued lay largely within the area’s biography. There was a need for restructuring, but not wholescale re-invention; many of the things that had made the area a success in the past had the potential to do so again in the future, if given the correct encouragement and conditions.

In August 2016 I spoke to Paul. Paul had been an engineer and man-ager at ICI Wilton and eventually became managing director of successor company SABIC’s operation on Teesside. Paul was also chair of the Local Enterprise Partnership. I met him at his office at the Wilton centre, a huge office block and research facility that had been developed by ICI in the 1970s. We discussed the idea of the legacy of the industrial past and I also explained how my research had begun with a focus on health and social inequalities on Teesside. Paul responded to this immediately. He saw such problems as being linked to work and the large-scale changes it had undergone in recent decades. I was very intrigued by this as his assess-ment was in many ways more straightforward and decisive than some of the analyses made by the public and voluntary sector professionals whom I spoke to which were discussed in Chap. 6. However, again Paul identi-fied the loss of well-paid and reasonably secure semi-skilled or unskilled work as being at the heart of the issue:

Back in the day lots of people  were employed as day workers, general labourers, whatever, but they had a perception of self-worth and they were well paid relatively. (Paul)

Paul also connected social contexts and individual behaviours, in a very similar manner to the way Peter had in Chap. 6, seeing an important relationship between the two things:

Getting people out of social deprivation and out of poverty and into satis-fying and rewarding jobs, where they feel that self-worth and have better educational standards so they get a better understanding of how to eat and live these two things are symbiotic. That is fundamentally where we need to get back to and once upon a time without putting rose tinted specs on that’s how it once felt to me.

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Consequently, for Paul, rebuilding and securing the region’s economic base was a long-term project, there could be no quick fix:

We could build leisure parks, rollercoaster’s, cinemas and leisure centres. But the kind of jobs that go into the leisure industry tend to be minimum wage and tend to be not particularly challenging.

Paul argued that what was required instead was a strategy that built upon the legacy of the region’s industrial past:

If I build a brand-new power station employing 500 people, I guarantee that that will mean employing 2000 more people in the local community. Legacy is about realising that this is an industrial area. Manufacturing should be a significant part of UK GDP. When I was a boy it was 30%. Will never get back to those numbers? I don’t think. But even 20–25% that would be something, that’s where Germany and other good manufacturing nations are.

He also emphasised that this was an industrial area, culturally too, and that infrastructure could be built without wide-spread public objection or protest, as such things were associated with jobs and prosperity and consequently tolerated and accepted. For him this was part of the area’s industrial legacy and the future too:

So it’s no problem someone building a power station here, because cultur-ally it is seen as good, and that’s part of the legacy. The community under-stands the value of those jobs.

So industrial culture and mind-set were for Paul the key components for Teesside’s future development, the right kind of attitude and an estab-lished understanding was important. He also emphasised how the area had managed to retain the right kind of skills base for the processing industry:

We (the chemical industry) survived because we have people with specialist knowledge about how to do things. What we do requires a lot of knowl-edge and a lot of skill so that’s an important legacy.

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He saw these skills in conjunction with Teesside’s existing industrial base and infrastructure as being the foundation for future growth and devel-opment; it was these things that would allow the region to take advantage of new opportunities:

But above all, it was the region’s geology the foundation of Teesside’s wealth in the nineteenth century which Paul saw as being central to the area’s future. However, this was not necessarily about extracting wealth from beneath the ground. Something which differed from the past was the potential for large holes in the ground to be filled or refilled.

Carbon Capture and Storage on Teesside

The idea of industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) is to allow the development of technology that will allow carbon dioxide to be iso-lated and captured during industrial processes. It can then be pro-cessed and then sent via pipelines for storage in underground offshore cavities. Teesside is an ideal site for such a scheme as it has a high concentration of petrochemical processing industries that currently have high carbon emissions, it also has the engineering knowledge and know-how to build new plants, and infrastructure to process and transport the carbon. It is also important that the issue of carbon emis-sions is dealt with in a relatively short timescale. This is because as the ‘Teesside CO2 collective’, a group for the industries concerned made up of a number of local companies, Sembcorp, BOC, Lotte Chemical UK, CF Fertilizers and Sabic plus NEPIC (North East Process Industries Cluster) an umbrella body for local process industries and the Tees Valley Combined Authority, point out, regional carbon diox-ide emissions are around three times the UK average at present. Furthermore, Teesside process industries are likely to become increas-ingly uncompetitive by 2030 as the cost of ‘CO2 Permits’ (effectively carbon emission taxes) are set to quadruple by that date. Consequently, a Carbon Capture and Storage scheme for Teesside would not only protect existing process industries and the jobs that they support, but

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would also generate the engineering and construction jobs required to build such a system.

The coalition government had launched an initiative in 2012 to kick- start CCS schemes in the UK. It offered potentially £1 billion of govern-ment funding to support schemes that could demonstrate the achievability of  CCS.  However, in November 2015 the then Chancellor George Osbourne cancelled the competition and withdrew the funding (The Guardian 25/11/2015). This of course is not helpful to Teesside and came in the immediate aftermath of the closure of SSI at Redcar. Carbon capture and storage has widespread support in the region. Labour MP for Stockton North Alex Cunningham chairs a parliamentary all-party group on the subject. A journalist by profession, Alex is no stranger to the UK energy industry having worked for British Gas. When I spoke to him in August 2016 we discussed the subject at some length; Alex was convinced the CCS could play a very big part in Teesside’s future.

Carbon capture and storage could be the single biggest job creator for Teesside since the advent of ICI.

I was a bit taken aback by the implications of this statement; for him CCS was potentially revolutionary, a game changer for Teesside’s econ-omy. I asked him to explain further, which he did:

If we can do this, not only can we reduce costs for our industry locally and make it more efficient and encourage greater investment, but we could attract other organisations to come to Teesside if we had carbon capture and storage.

Alex also explained that currently de facto carbon taxes disadvantage many of Teesside’s industries.

Our industry locally is disadvantaged due to additional carbon taxes from government. They don’t feel that they have a level playing field.

In effect then there was a potential net cost to the area if it did not invest in CCS, not to mention the loss of potential benefits. Again the issue of

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legacy came up; Teesside was a viable site for proving CCS technology because of the area’s past.

We have the world’s best innovators around this (CCS) here on Teesside and we can make it happen. Part of that is due to the legacy of the past, we have pipelines and infrastructure which were previously used by the chemi-cal industry which could be utilised for this.

I asked, what then was preventing this potentially transformative devel-opment from taking place? Alex was very clear that it was down to politi-cal will and strategic investment:

It’s not about the technology, that is there, it’s a strategy to deal with the cost of implementation that is required. The government had put £1 bil-lion into carbon capture and storage, and then they took £900 million of it away. That money was meant to be used to prove that carbon capture and storage was practical and viable.

Alex argued that what was required was lobbying from local politicians and industry in order to get the initial investment funding for CCS, and that they needed to make the case that this would benefit local industry, the UK in general, and that it was also good value for money:

The work could be done to prove carbon capture for Britain, if that’s done that would be a really good thing for Teesside. They say it’s a big ask to talk about carbon capture, but it’s not, as an infrastructure project it’s peanuts. Especially when you put start to put it in the context of say a third runway for Heathrow, HS2, or the London Crossrail. It’s certainly not a big ask when people get £5 billion to build a new motorway.

However, despite a pledge to revisit the carbon capture issue in the Autumn of 2016, at the time of writing in 2017 the UK government had not made any new announcements. A report delivered in 2017 by the National Audit Office (NAO) concluded that:

it was ‘currently inconceivable’ that CCS projects would be developed without government support. (BBC News 20/01/2017)

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New Industries and Opportunities for Teesside?

There are a number of new developments in extractive industries that could exploit geological resources in the Teesside area and that offer the potential for future industrial development and jobs.

One that is currently being developed is the proposal by Sirius Minerals Plc to open a deep mine in North Yorkshire to exploit what is believed to be the work’s largest polyhalite deposit. My reaction was, unsurprisingly and like many others, ‘what’s polyhalite’?

Polyhalite is an evaporite mineral comprising a natural combination of four of the six macro-nutrients that are essential to plant growth—potas-sium (14% K2O), sulphur (19% S), magnesium (6% MgO) and calcium (17% CaO)—with the chemical formula K2SO4.MgSO4.2CaSO2. 2H2O. While polyhalite deposits are known to occur elsewhere, we believe that none have the mineral quality or material extent of our defined North Yorkshire resource, which we believe is the world’s largest high-grade known polyhalite deposit. (Sirius Minerals Plc website http://siriusminer-als.com/polyhalite/poly4-explained/)

Essentially polyhalite is a very high grade fertiliser. One that does not need to be synthesised, but it does need to be mined, extracted, trans-ported, processed and exported. The Sirius scheme involves constructing a 37-km long tunnel, from the site on the North Yorkshire Moors, capa-ble of transporting 20 million tonnes per year of the mineral to a process-ing facility on the Wilton International Site on Teesside for processing, before it is moved on to Teesport.

Why, is this happening, well A) the raw material is there. B) the 2nd deep-est port in the UK is here. So the resource and infrastructure are available. Overall it will be £3-£4 million in investments, employing around 2000 people in good quality jobs. (Paul)

This process of extracting, processing and transporting natural resources and adding value to them somehow within the process is clearly something

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that Teesside has been doing since the nineteenth century. Other extrac-tive industrial processes could potentially be of great economic benefit to the area; however, they are controversial due to concerns about their envi-ronmental impact. The extraction of shale gas in the North East region of the UK has great potential, but there have been widespread concerns about the techniques that are used to do this, in particular ‘fracking’, the hydraulic fracturing of rock strata usually by the use of high-pressure water in order to gain access to the gas deposits. This of course under-mines other rock strata, with the potential for collapse and settlement. This technique has been used for many years offshore but it is the poten-tial for onshore land disturbances that have concerned both the public and government; in fact fracking was banned until 2012  in the UK onshore. Scotland imposed a moratorium on all new applications in 2015. In the rest of the UK applications for planning permission to carry out test operations have been relatively scarce since the lifting of the ban, but in 2016 permission was granted by North Yorkshire County Council for a test site near to the village of Kirby Misperton, the first since the lifting of the ban. This decision was challenged in the High Court in December 2016; but the Court upheld the council’s decision and ruled that the tests could go ahead (BBC News 20/12/2016). Protests have continued at the site in Ryedale and a permanent protest camp has been established. However, whatever the politics of shale gas extraction in the UK are, it is clear that shale gas offers a potentially very cheap and plenti-ful energy source, and one that could be highly beneficial for Teesside’s process industries. Paul explained that it could also produce resources for the chemical industry.

What we are blessed with in the North of England is shale gas and when you extract shale gas there are other products such as ethane, and ethane is a really good chemical feedstock.

This development also meant that SABIC had recently converted the Olefins 6 Cracker plant on the Wilton International site to run on ethane feedstock. (The Cracker is fed raw material gases and liquids and ‘cracks’ apart their components at temperatures of about 1000  degrees before cooling them to below −180  °C to produce ethylene, propylene and

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butadiene. These are the building blocks that allow the chemical and plastics industries to create everything from food packaging to car interi-ors, detergents and shampoo.) Paul explained how shale gas exploration had been revolutionised in the USA in recent decades by the develop-ment of directional drilling, and about how he felt the risks associated with fracking for shale gas had been greatly minimised due to advances in technology. So, in his opinion, the important and costly pioneering work had already been completed:

So with shale gas all that learning is done. We have 200 years’ worth of shale gas across the middle of the North of England so the natural resource is here.

The bottom line though was an economic one; the UK was once self- sufficient in gas. However, the replacement of coal-fired power stations with gas fired stations in recent decades has meant that the UK is now a net importer of gas.

Shale gas extracted is about $4 a unit at the moment. In just over a decade the US has become a net exporter of energy.

In fact, US shale gas is now cheap enough for it to be imported to the UK by ship.

Underground Coal Gasification

Another extractive process that is even more controversial than frack-ing to extract shale gas is the process of Underground Coal Gasification (UCG). The North East’s economy was for the greater part of its indus-trial existence based upon the great northern coalfield. Estimates about the amount of coal reserves in the region vary from anywhere between 300 and 1000  years of reserves; in fact no definitive data exists. However, there is general agreement that there are very, very, large reserves of coal available beneath the North East. However, the cost and the environmental impact of deep mining and open-cast mining

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and the high carbon emissions that result from burning coal currently make it unattractive.

UCG converts coal to gas while it is still in the coal seam and avoids the need for conventional extraction. The technique is not new and has been around since the nineteenth century. The process involves introduc-ing oxidants (steam and oxygen) into the coal seam, this in turn causes a reaction that produces ‘syngas’. It is essentially a similar process to that which was used in the production of ‘town gas’ from coal, which was widely used in the UK prior to the introduction of North Sea ‘natural gas’ in the 1960s.

Again, such a development could prove advantageous to Teesside’s pro-cess industries as the gas produced could be used for both energy produc-tion and as a feedstock. So why is a technique that has existed for over a century now seen as viable when it was not before? Paul explained that again the difference was due to advances in technology:

directional drilling technology means you can drill down and gasify coal and bring out syngas, which is basically hydrogen and carbon, so we have huge amounts of feedstock to make anything we want the chemical indus-try. The North-East area has the potential to be the biggest producer of syngas in Europe or on the planet if it wants to be. Therefore, Teesside has the ability to become the biggest syngas consumer on the planet, for me this is the Northern Powerhouse.

However, since I spoke to Paul in August 2016 things have moved on, with the UK government announcing in December 2016 that it was not going to support UGC in the UK (Scotland had already announced a ban in October 2016). The Guardian reported on 08/12/2016 that the:

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said the govern-ment was ‘minded to not support’ the technique. (The Guardian 08/12/2016)

This was because the report found that burning gas from UGC to make electricity would result in emissions of 570–785 g CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour, compared to 400 g for natural gas. So it would seem that UCG is unlikely to make much headway in the immediate future.

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However, it is an issue that will certainly be revisited in the future given the North East’s huge coal reserves. There is also a certain irony that con-cerns about the level of emissions from burning syngas derived from UGC could also be addressed by the development of carbon capture and storage technology!

Greener Alternatives?

Teesside has always had a large-scale capacity for power generation; it has needed to for the industrial processes the area has been involved with. I spoke to Terry, a Public Relations manager for Sembcorp, the utilities company that manages the infrastructure on the Wilton International site. Terry told me how ICI Wilton despite its beginnings in 1947 did not really take off until the early 1950s because the power station for the site did not become operational until 1952. Sembcorp currently manage two of the power stations on the Wilton International site, and are jointly involved with a third in partnership with SITA UK, who are a recycling and resource management company. The Wilton power station is a con-ventional gas-fired power station that produces both heat and power; it is able, for example, to supply steam to plants on the site and it has a gen-erating capacity of 270 megawatts. The other two plants are smaller and less conventional. Wilton 10, as it is known, is a biomass power station; this operation burns waste wood of a very low grade in order to produce electricity and steam, and has a generating capacity of 35 megawatts. Terry saw such operations as becoming increasingly important in the next few decades due to the ‘energy gap’ that will result from the closure of coal-fired power stations and the anticipated lag before new nuclear power stations come online:

We’ve now made the decision to shut all the coal-fired power stations in the UK by 2025 so there’s an energy gap that we have to fill and it can’t just be renewables because if the wind doesn’t blow then you’re in trouble. (Terry)

The third power station is different again. It is a waste-to-energy power station burning domestic waste that is sorted, then brought by rail from

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the five Merseyside local authorities to the Wilton 11 plant, where it is burnt to produce steam and electricity. The station has a generating capacity of 49 megawatts. The benefits of the scheme are that waste is diverted from landfills and the consumption of fossil fuels is reduced; the operation has also created 75 permanent jobs, Terry told me. He further explained:

local authorities cannot just continue putting waste in holes in the ground it’s not a good use of household and domestic waste. We see waste as a fuel, some can be recycled but some just can’t.

Towards a Circular Economy?

There are, however, potentially even more ambitious futures. In my discussion with Paul he talked at length about what he termed a ‘circular’ economy, i.e. an economy that recycles and makes use of its own waste as feedstock. He gave the example of biomass; biomass is basically household waste. Paul was not particularly keen on just burning biomass; to produce power from waste he had something more sophisticated in mind:

You can use waste heat to autoclave the waste, just cook it. Then what you’ve actually done is extracted a sterile biomass source and the plastics. Some plastics you can mechanically recycle, but some get to the point where they have no value then they are burnt which is wrong. De-polymerisation means deconstructing the plastics to a monomer then re-polymerising them again back through a polymer plant to come back refreshed as virgin polymer.

Paul saw this as a major opportunity for the area, again because of the experience, skills and infrastructure that the area already has because of its industrial past:

Why this area? Well, all the skills you need to do that are already here, as well as the infrastructure, biomass is just a hydrocarbon at end of the day.

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You need a clear strategy to understand what the value is to UK indus-try and that has to be worked through. That’s about the UK deciding what to do with 40,000,000 tonnes of mixed waste, it’s a huge resource.

Power generation from biomass could then present further opportunities. Paul talked about the possibility of what he termed a revived steelmaking industry on Teesside based around what he termed ‘Green steel’:

the Redcar blast furnace is no more, restarting it is not going to happen. But the UK exports 5 to 6 million tonnes of scrap steel a year as we don’t currently process it. We also import the finished deal as we don’t have that capacity left either!

Paul thought the area’s knowledge of steelmaking and its power- generating capacity plus its potential to generate even more power meant that there was the possibility of recycling scrap steel using elec-tric arc furnaces. These huge vessels melt steel using electricity; they have major advantages compared to a traditional blast furnace. Firstly, the process allows steel to be made from a 100% scrap metal feed-stock. Secondly, unlike a blast furnace, an electric arc furnace can be switched off at times of low demand. It consequently offers much greater flexibility.

this is a lot simpler as it uses electricity which could come from biomass, nuclear, wind, or anything else for that matter. Is there a raw material close by? Yes, there is, the rigs that floated out from the Tees can float straight back in again. People like Able UK break up ships on the Tees, there are millions of tonnes of scrap steel in the North Sea.

The circular economy could also be seen to  already be  at work with Teesside’s food-processing industries making use of steam and heat from other industries:

‘Growhow’ the fertiliser company, they make ammonia and other fertiliser products. They have excess carbon and excess heat from their processes. So a lot of it gets pumped into greenhouses that a company growing tomatoes

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uses. So, the heat makes them grow and they get sold to the supermarkets. So food and the food industry is a by-product in an area not really known for food production. (Alex)

Paul and Alex both firmly believed in the power of technology to solve problems. They believed in new technologies emerging in the future that we might not yet be able to conceive of.

Persisting with fossil fuels creates problems. There are already carbon cap-ture and storage projects, so you fill a hole in the ground okay. But when it’s full what you do then? It is at best a stopgap. But at some point long after we’re dead some smart arse will come up with a solution, so there will be other ways of doing things. (Paul)

We can fill holes and store carbon for several hundred years. Eventually someone will invent a use for something within the carbon, scientists will do it. (Alex)

Amongst the possible solutions they imagined were ways to generate electricity from captured carbon and to use the by-products as industrial feedstock. The idea was that at some point carbon capture would become carbon conversion, via new industrial processes.

A Question of Leadership?

Paul also raised the issue of leadership, a theme discussed in the previous chapter. I found this interesting as here he was, a business and civic leader who was remarkably critical of the leadership that the area had experi-enced, and very complimentary about the way in which employees had responded to the challenges experienced in the petrochemical industries. Paul argued that the workforce had responded to change in spite of a lack of leadership:

The workforce managed to adapt, whereas their leaders hadn’t. There was a lack of vision, a lack of leadership. The workforce was pivotal in getting

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investors interested in coming here and that’s why the industry survived, we have resilient and adaptive workers.

Paul went further, arguing that a lack of leadership both industrial and political was part of the decline of British manufacturing industry in general:

If we’d had that kind of vision and leadership maybe we wouldn’t have gone from around 25% manufacturing to the 10% we have now.

All of these ideas were plausible, commendable and realistic, but I won-dered how these ideas could get off the ground and make the kind of transition they envisaged?

An Industrial Strategy?

In a number of my discussions people felt that what was needed was an industrial strategy. As has already been shown in Chap. 4, the lack of a clear plan for Teesside in the wake of the decline of the steel and chemical industries was something that has held the area back and prevented regeneration. In general, the problem was seen as having two aspects to it: Firstly, an approach from national government that had effectively abandoned any notion of a national industrial strategy in the early 1980s for ideological reasons. Secondly, an approach from the local and regional institutions charged with dealing with economic regeneration that was structured around solving the area’s economic problems by finding the next ‘big employer’ rather than seeking diversification and less depen-dency on ‘big employers.’ The roots of this issue can be traced back to Teesplan and Hailsham’s report in the 1960s.

Regarding the lack of a coherent industrial policy Alex traced the prob-lem back to the 1980s and the Thatcher years:

For me the failure of planning goes all the way back to when we lost the coal industry, and we did nothing to replace those jobs, so we saw a decline of incomes and wages in the North East in general.

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Alex felt that the dominant policy until the turn of the twenty-first cen-tury had been:

The closure of everything and the opening of nothing. All we did was sweep things away, we didn’t even try to replace those jobs.

However, he felt that much of the work carried out by the Regional Development Agency ‘One North East’ had been very positive for Teesside and the wider North East. During the New Labour years, it had been a successful venture, backing projects such as the Sage Concert Hall, and the Baltic Art Gallery in Gateshead. Alex made the case that there is a need for strategic organisations to spend money in order to create jobs, wealth and eventually revenue.

We needed to make decisions as big industry had gone, so we needed to get on and make decisions, and with the Regional development agency we made them.

It is somewhat ironic then that the idea of ‘Rebalancing the economy’ was promoted in opposition and then in power by the Conservatives, in particu-lar George Osbourne, who initially championed the idea of making the UK economy less focused on service industries based in London and the South East. Another feature of the Conservative Liberal Democrat Coalition was the stated aspiration that part of the strategy to achieve this rebalancing would be the creation of a ‘Northern Powerhouse.’ This idea attracted a great deal of interest on Teesside as the Minister appointed initially  to oversee the project was James Wharton, Conservative MP for Stockton South. The project is about improvement to transport links, investment in science and innovation, and devolution of powers to cities in the Northern region. In this way, it is rather like an umbrella project within which Combined Authorities across a large part of the country fit. However, it has a very wide view of where the ‘North’ is, and takes in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Hull, Doncaster, Leeds and Newcastle. Whether all of these regional centres have anything in common and whether they will be able to put aside historic animosities remains to be seen, especially

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for Teesside and the North East, which rarely identifies itself with any wider notion of ‘The North’. The initiative and Wharton attracted wide-spread criticism on Teesside in 2015 when they failed to make any inter-vention regarding the future of SSI; Wharton even failed to attend the emergency debate on the steel industry that was held in the House of Commons on 17 September 2015. His fellow Teesside MP, Anna Turley (Redcar), called this decision ‘disappointing’, whilst Tom Blenkinsop, MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, branded the Minister ‘pathetic’. And Andy Macdonald, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough, said: “it is about time that Minister (James Wharton) grew up.” The Northern Echo (17/09/2015).

The ‘Northern Powerhouse’ as a concept has at least survived Osbourne’s departure from the Treasury in the wake of the EU referendum ‘Leave’ vote in June 2016. But its future remains far from certain. James Wharton was replaced as Northern Powerhouse minister in June 2016 by Yorkshire MP Andrew Percy. Theresa May, who entered office as the new Conservative Prime Minister in the wake of the ‘Leave’ vote in the EU referendum, has pledged support for a new industrial strategy for the UK. At a meeting in January 2017, May pledged government support for five sectors of the economy, life sciences, low-carbon-emission vehicles, industrial digitalisation, the creative sector and the nuclear industry. In what appears to be a change of approach to a more interventionist stance, May said the new strategy

will be underpinned by a new approach from government, not just step-ping back but stepping up to a new, active role that backs business and ensures more people in all corners of the country share in the benefits of its success. (The Guardian 23/01/2017)

It can be argued that the decision to take a more interventionist stance is something that is necessitated by the decision to leave the EU if UK indus-try is to remain competitive; the same decision also makes more interven-tion possible as EU rules on state aid to industry will not apply post-Brexit.

However, rebalancing the economy nationally is not something that can be done in the short term. Beatty and Fothergill (2016) demonstrate

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that the de-industrialisation of Britain from the 1960s onwards has meant that traditional industrial areas like Teesside have suffered much more than other parts of the country, and furthermore the programmes of pub-lic spending and social security cuts that have been pursued since 2010 have had a disproportionate effect, with such areas losing a great deal more resources. They argue that the ‘rebalancing of the economy’ is pos-sible, but it is not something that will come about by just eliminating the UK budget deficit, which is the policy that continues to override all oth-ers at the current time. Instead it is a long-term project:

A genuine revival in industrial production would be central to any rebal-ancing of the UK economy. This should not be regarded as impossible, even against the backdrop of competition from China. It is salutary to in Germany, where labour costs are generally even higher than in the UK, the share of GDP accounted for by manufacturing is twice the level in the UK. In no small part as a result, Germany has a large trade surplus and a far smaller budget deficit. The UK needs to become more like Germany. A rebalancing of the UK economy in favour of industry would be of direct benefit to much of older industrial Britain because, even after years of job loss, that is where so much of what remains of UK manufacturing is still located. (Beatty and Fothergill 2016: 21)

For this project to be successful they also argue that it must recognise the profound geographical differences within the British economy, and they call for a regional economic policy that is aware of this. In other words, a policy that takes note of the biographies of specific places is required:

The other principle central to an alternative to the Treasury’s welfare cuts is a revival of regional economic policy. The places where welfare claimants are concentrated, out-of work or on low wages, need to be grown fastest. This doesn’t necessarily mean the creation of new administrative structures or adherence to any specific geographical scale of action—regional, sub- regional, city-region. Rather, what is important is that policies are in place to channel economic growth to the places that need it most, where in turn the welfare bill can be reduced most. (Beatty and Fothergill 2016: 21)

They do not see devolution as being in its present form the best way to achieve this, and they argue that this is currently focused around issues of

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governance rather than delivering economic prosperity. However, they are optimistic that:

the economies of older industrial Britain can be rebuilt. (Beatty and Fothergill 2016: 21)

This question of whether a different approach to industrial develop-ment is needed is also one that needs to be addressed more locally on Teesside. A number of the people I spoke to during my research spoke of the way in which the region had a ‘Big employer’ mentality. By this they meant the way in which local politicians and policy makers had attempted to address the decline of Teesside’s large employers like ICI and British Steel. This can be argued to have been the case throughout the wider North East too. The latest example of this is Hitachi, who intend to manufacture railway rolling stock at Shildon in County Durham, which was historically a centre of rolling stock manufacture until the 1980s. The question that this begs is whether Hitachi will go the same way as micro-chip manufacture and the call centres that were seen as the answer to the region’s industrial decline in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Searching for the next big employer also makes sense if the biography of an area like Teesside is considered, as was demonstrated in Chap. 3. The area’s indus-trial founders were also its first civic leaders and historically the interests of the area’s industry and its political establishment were intertwined. However, this relationship has been overtaken by new realities; globalisa-tion means that the type of conversations that were once possible at the local or national level are extremely difficult to have. As Paul pointed out:

when I started four people from BP, ICI, Esso and Shell could walk into Whitehall representing 80 to 90% of the chemical industry, that’s not the case anymore.

Mike, who worked for Redcar and Cleveland council, agreed:

There are very few UK controlled companies left so we have very little influ-ence upon them. Decisions are made in foreign boardrooms and even the government doesn’t have the influence they would like to have. Decisions are being made on straight economic choices and nothing else. In the past

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this wasn’t the case, as there was still a feeling that the government could still be lobbied and things changed.

The question of whether things were possible was also about capacity not just the ability to communicate and lobby effectively. The fabrication of wind turbines was also seen as a potential new ‘big employer’ in the 2000s, particularly because of Teesside and the wider North East’s marine engineering history. However, this has largely failed to materialise. Alex felt that this was due to a lack of integration between industries as well as a lack of capacity.

we don’t have the industry to make turbines, yes we can bash the bits of metal together but we buy the turbines in from abroad. So companies think no we’ll buy the whole package from Europe.

In general, the people I spoke to did not see the return of employers on the scale of ICI or British Steel as possible or even desirable. In Peter’s words:

The place needs to move on from that, the ‘golden age’ of those employers isn’t going to come back.

The question is whether it is as easy as that, just moving on? This is easy to say, but doing something about it in order to change the ways in which things have been traditionally done  is not easy. In particular, planning needs to be approached very differently.

For example, the loss of SSI also had a negative impact upon Redcar and Cleveland as a local authority financially due to the loss of business rates; this in turn has a negative effect on council-funded services, which of course people require more in times of economic hardship.

In terms of business rates it’s a huge prize to get a big company for a local authority because the amount of business rates they will pay. It’s also a huge loss if one closes. So the question is how do we spend the money which we have to best effect? Do we go chasing jobs? (Mike)

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Is the Heseltine Report the basis for a coherent industrial strategy for the Tees Valley?

What struck me most about the Heseltine report and the issues that it highlights, regarding planning, transport, infrastructure and the need for the diversification, was how much it has in common with documents like the Hailsham report and the Teesplan from the 1960s. The idea for a new Tees crossing, which Heseltine urges the Department of Transport to consider, has certainly been around since the 1960s.

The report received in general a cautious welcome from those I dis-cussed it with. It was generally felt that the report had captured the major issues for the region, but that then again it should have, as the local authorities and the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) contrib-uted a great deal of evidence to the report. Consequently, it was not surprising that one of the most common reactions was that it didn’t tell anyone anything that they didn’t already know. Those things largely made a great deal of sense too, for example, the report stressed the need for diversification in the local economy in order to minimise any future ‘shocks’.

We can’t ever be again a region that relies on steel and chemicals. We have survived, but if you diversify sufficiently the shocks when they come are not as severe. (Paul)

There was also a concern that there was a lack of ‘teeth’ and that there was no money attached to the report:

If there had been some substance to it maybe. He said in the report there is a tremendous future for carbon capture and storage in the Tees Valley, it didn’t say and the government should go back to the table and look at the £1 billion withdrawn from the industry and invest it in order to make it happen. It was all, ‘this would be a great idea, this would be good for Teesside,’ but there were no deliverables in it. (Alex)

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In general, though the report was welcome. Paul argued that support and planning at the level of national government would also be needed if real change was going to occur. He also acknowledged that change would be built upon the legacies of the past:

we need to create positive legislation so that these things can happen, you can then try and talk to potential investors so about overcoming the iner-tia. Transferable skills, new resources, circular economy, doing things far smarter and in a more sustainable way, but a lot of it is based upon what we learned 50, 60 or 70 years ago.

This is the challenge that is being presented to the new Combined Authority for Tees Valley and its forthcoming elected mayor.

Will a Combined Authority Help?

As already stated, the Tees Valley Combined Authority and its elected Mayor established by a regional devolution deal in 2015 will have powers regarding economic development, transport, housing, education and skills, and tourism. The Combined Authority, its elected mayor and the new Development Corporation are seen as essential structures by the Heseltine report, which clearly expects them to deliver economic regen-eration and development for Tees Valley. In many of my conversations people were not particularly aware of the new arrangements; however, some such as Peter who worked in Public Health thought it a positive development and that it would allow the area:

To speak with one voice.

This would stop overlap between the five local authorities and also prevent potentially harmful rivalries, and this model has been one that Tees Valley Unlimited, the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), has followed. Alex welcomed the idea in principle, but he was more sceptical about the details and practicalities of devolution for the area, for a start

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the Combined Authority and its Mayor would not have a great deal of money at its disposal:

The amount of money that comes with the devolution deal is minuscule, about £12 million a year for the Combined Authority. £48 million has been cut from Stockton Borough in the last six years!

The other issue that was pointed out to me by several people was that of responsibility, effectively the devolution deal, which is very focused upon economic and infrastructural development, and could end up letting national government ‘off the hook’ about these issues as it would be able to claim that they were no longer its responsibility. As Alex put it:

I feel that there’s been a tremendous amount of buck-passing. I have said to the local authorities, you’re going to end up picking up the bill economi-cally and electorally for this if you aren’t careful.

Wider Futures

The industrial past was for many of the people I spoke to something that they looked back to and remembered, often fondly, but something that they did not feel had any real relevance to their future. Others felt that there was a very clear link to the past with skills knowledge and know- how in engineering and process industries still being present and a major asset for the area, something which is acknowledged in the Heseltine report. However, Alex put it to me that the physical legacy of the indus-trial past was something that was advantageous for Stockton and allowed it to have a potentially different future.

The legacy of the past informs what we should be doing in the future. We had our shipbuilding heritage, so we got the Tees barrage, we have the riv-erside housing and leisure, the river is good enough to hold international championships on. This led to a major redevelopment of the town. We have recently had the British Cycling Championship, so a lot of redevelop-ment happened because of the loss of all that industry.

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This was a different point of view to the one that I was used to hearing, which largely saw the present and future as trying to salvage parts of or reinvent Teesside’s industrial past. Alex was arguing that the demise of some of these industries, because they had occupied large amounts of space on Stockton’s riverbanks, left a legacy from the past that was posi-tive due to the type of possibilities it allowed. This meant that it was part of that alternative future:

It’s actually created a very different sort of world for the people of Stockton today.

That world was not just about industry but about offering something different, about re-inventing the town:

We have to build on our development in Stockton such as the town centre. We need to hold onto big thinking and vision. We need to have big plans, we need to be thinking about getting big cycling championships; music festivals and other large events. We need to think about creating a better quality of life through arts and culture and having a different offer to every-body else so the borough becomes a different and attractive area. We want to get people to want to come here and live, and then investment will come.

Alex was also confident that this could happen:

We have a growing population in Stockton, one of the few boroughs in the North of England that is actually seeing an increase in population.

So rather than trying to emulate the success of the industrial past, might it be an alternative vision of Teesside that looks to promote tourism, heritage and culture, as the Heseltine report recommends, and capitalises on the area’s rich artistic community that emerges in the coming years? This is far from certain; however, it is clear that the Combined Authority will be promoting a bid for the whole of Tees Valley to be the UK City of Culture in 2025. 2025 will be the bicentennial anniversary of the open-ing of the Stockton to Darlington railway (Gazette Live 22/03/2017).

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But What About Brexit?

As I have already mentioned in previous chapters, the whole of Tees Valley resolutely voted to leave the EU: Redcar and Cleveland by 66.2%; Middlesbrough by 65.5%; Stockton-on-Tees by 61.7%; Hartlepool 69.6% and Darlington by 56.2%.

In all of my discussions after June 2016 the question about how much difference Britain’s departure from the EU would make was certainly dis-cussed, usually inconclusively. Whilst those involved with business and industry did not see it as particularly helpful, it was just another issue to be added to the list of challenges the area faces. As one person who worked for the LEP told me:

It’s my job to try and get people to invest in the area, our main point is the port and our closeness to Europe. But the problem is there are plenty of other old industrial cities with ports trying to do the same.

In general, the answer about what the consequences of leaving the EU would be was:

it is too early to tell yet.

However, there was a concern that this uncertainty in itself could delay decisions about Teesside’s future development that might be being made in boardrooms a long way from Teesside in the present.

For Paul, ‘Brexit’ meant that there was even more imperative to utilise the area’s natural resources and move towards a circular economy, because using an:

available resource is less ‘Brexit’ sensitive, it’s here. If the pound is structur-ally weaker it makes exports easier too. We know that the import duties for chemicals into Europe are around 5 to 6%. The challenge is to develop those industries we’ve been talking about using local resources in a smart way so that tariffs become inconsequential because of the efficiency at the margins you get from these industries.

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I put this question to Terry too: how might leaving the EU affect the businesses at Wilton International? Again, he thought it was too early to know what the full extent of the impact would be:

I think everyone is watching it carefully, a lot of the firms on site are trad-ing into Europe and it’s very important for them.

The question of why the region had voted to leave the EU was something I discussed in some depth with Alex, asking how as a MP he understood the decision, something I had already discussed with his fellow MP Anna Turley and with the participants in my focus groups and interviews. Alex had been surprised by the result:

6/10 people in my constituency voted to leave. I was surprised, I really thought we would have gone 50-50 in this part of the country, and London would have carried us through but it didn’t happen.

Alex thought that part of the issue had been that the pro ‘remain’ parties had simply failed to get their message across.

I just don’t know how we fail to get a simple message across. We didn’t take the message to our own people.

So if the ‘remain’ message did not get across to voters on Teesside, which message had? Alex felt that there were:

A mixture of messages around foreign labour undercutting local wages, well it’s a wonderful myth, people believe what they are told, and we didn’t do enough to make sure they got the real message.

Alex illustrated this by referring to a long running dispute on Teesside. Throughout 2016 traffic had been disrupted on the approaches to construction sites by a group called the ‘Teesside Construction Activists’; this had been happening at the Sita/Sembcorp Biomass waste-to-power site, and since the completion of that project at another Biomass waste-to- energy project, this time at Port Clarence on the north bank of the Tees. Alex’s take on the unofficial protests was one of frustration, he told me:

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There are 30 or 40 individuals who are bringing Teesside to a halt at Seal Sands every morning, because they’re protesting about foreign labour on one of the sites. They claim wages are being undercut and this protest is costing a fortune. It’s not sanctioned by the unions, it’s just individuals, but these individuals are getting tremendous publicity and that message, in the lead up to the EU referendum I believe this had an influence on people.

I spoke to a representative from the Teesside Construction Activists group. They told me that the dispute had nothing to do with foreign labour, they insisted that their concern was that various national agreements concern-ing hourly rates and bonuses were not being adhered to by the company involved in the construction and its subcontractors. They felt that bring-ing in labour from outside of the area was also being used as a tactic to pressurise workers into putting up with poor rates of pay. They also insisted that they wanted all of the workers on the site regardless of their nationality to be paid the agreed rate for the job. However, Alex saw it differently. He felt that the dispute and how it had been reported focused much more strongly upon foreign labour than the wages issue:

That message about being overrun by people from abroad was reinforced by the media. What they weren’t saying was that they have X number of foreign workers on site and ten times as many Brits. It was as if it was all foreign workers so the message was just being reinforced.

This dispute, I think, highlights one of the central issues that the remain campaign did not manage to deal with adequately. How could ‘free move-ment of labour’ be advantageous when it could potentially be used by employers to undercut wages or to pressurise workers into accepting substandard pay or conditions? Globalisation as a process and its negative consequences ends up being simplified and becomes understood as ‘for-eign workers are undercutting local labour.’ It also means that this issue ends up getting tied up with issues about immigration, refugees and asy-lum seekers. The problem of globalisation is reduced to an idea that for-eigners are the problem. Essentially, then, the failure to communicate how the potential benefits of remaining in the EU for the area was some-thing that the remain campaign failed to do. Alex felt that at the heart of the leave vote were area’s industrial and former industrial workers:

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Males from blue collar backgrounds, overwhelmingly they told us that they were going to vote to leave. I think that’s because they had this rose tinted view of what it was like in the good old days. Then they roll that forward to today.

So in this way can voting ‘leave’ be seen as a legacy of the area’s indus-trial past? Of course, it should be noted that similar voting patterns were experienced across the North East as a whole. Most other areas had not suffered recent large-scale high-profile closures of traditional indus-tries with high job losses in the way in which Teesside had with the closure of Redcar steelworks. It can be argued that this is because the wider North East has already suffered large-scale industrial job losses over a period of decades. However, the idea that being pro Brexit was essentially a protest about lost jobs is contradicted by what happened in the Sunderland area. A former shipbuilding and colliery area, since the 1980s the area’s economy has been restructured around the automotive industry, which has become the area’s largest employer. It  is centred around the Nissan car plant at Washington, which employs around 7000 people directly and there are around 20,000 jobs connected with the factory’s supply chain. Nissan warned that a vote to leave the EU and the single market would be undesirable and could possibly threaten future production, yet Sunderland voted by a margin of 61% to 39% in favour of leaving the EU. This suggests that this is more than just an economic matter, but the question of what it exactly is, is a difficult one. It is easy to make the case that this is a new kind of politics, and the rise of a populist movement that rejects the politics of the Westminster and Brussels elites who have presided over the policies of neoliberalism and globalisation, which have had such a devastating effect on older industrial communities by accelerating and exacerbating de-industrialisation.

However, is it as coherent as that? Several people told me that they voted ‘leave’ impulsively and as a protest; one told me he did not make up his mind until he was literally in the voting booth. It is difficult to understand why this happened when voters themselves don’t fully com-prehend or are unable to express why they voted in a particular way:

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Anna Turley MP for Redcar when I spoke to her in July 2016 felt that many people had given up listening to the arguments.

People felt that whenever they did, things couldn’t get any worse.

Alex Cunningham, MP for Stockton North, had also come across the idea that I had in my interviews that people had voted ‘leave’ as a protest, they never thought it might actually happen.

The number of people who have said to me personally, I did it as a protest vote!

Alex also told me that he felt some of the voters in his constituency had voted ‘leave’ for other reasons, which to me illustrates the often tribal nature of politics in the North East. One person told him:

I voted against it as David Cameron wanted me to vote to stay.

Whilst another expressed it in similar but different terms:

I’ve never voted Tory my life, so I voted against David Cameron.

These ideas then suggest that there are many and varied reasons that can be found to explain why Teesside voted to leave the EU. However, it is much more problematic to suggest that these ideas represent some kind of coherent populist ideology that has something in common with the politics that elected Donald Trump in the USA in November 2016, and saw the French National Front candidate Marine le Penn reach the sec-ond round of the presidential election in 2017 beyond a general rejection of mainstream neoliberal politics.

The answer to the question of whether the ‘leave’ vote in anyway marks some kind of watershed in politics on Teesside or whether they will return to the familiar patterns the area has known for the past couple of genera-tions is as yet unclear. The first indications of this will be the election for the Mayor of the Tees Valley Combined Authority in May 2017.

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An Industrial Past and a Post-industrial Future?

In conclusion then, I must try and look back at the ground this book has covered. The conversations, discussions and thoughts that I have had over the past 18 months have been wide ranging and reflected many ideas and opinions.

In some ways the legacy of Teesside’s industrial past is uncomplicated, there are plenty of industrial firms on Teesside that are direct descendants from the area’s past. Teesside still is home to 58% of all of the UK’s Petrochemical Industries (Tees Valley Unlimited 2017). As Terry put it:

A lot of the contractor firms still working here were formed by ex-ICI people. If you scratch the surface you will find the ICI connection somewhere.

It should also be noted that while the making of iron and steel slab on Teesside has finished, the area still has important steel mills that are still operating. A company operating under the name ‘British Steel’ operates two mills one at Lackenby, the other at Skinningrove and they employ 700 staff between then. Also Liberty House has taken over and continues to operate two pipe mills in Hartlepool. Capitalising and building upon the region’s heritage then appears to be important to these companies.

The legacy is also apparent by looking at specialised engineering com-panies such as the one Kevin works at and also via the types of training courses offered by providers such TTE, whose lineage can be easily traced back to ICI and British Steel.

Other aspects of the legacy are less direct but still come quickly to the fore. The workforces of ICI and British Steel were very large, and they also offered generous occupational pension schemes to their workers. Consequently, these companies still make a considerable contribution to the local economy and are likely to for years to come. There is also the question of what effect this will have upon the local economy and the demand for public services as this source of income for the area declines.

Mah (2012) has attempted to understand post-industrial change in a number of areas that she studied in Canada, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and in the former Soviet Union. Mah conceptualises an idea of what she terms ‘industrial ruination’; this for her is a lived process that consists of the relationship between:

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community, and place, specifically the landscapes (socio-economic and cul-tural geographies) and legacies (the long term socio economic and psycho-logical implications for people and places) of industrial ruination and urban decline. (Mah 2012: 3)

In many ways Mah’s analysis does not really fit Teesside. The landscape is not so much one of ruins and ruination. The industrial sites remain industrial, have been redeveloped or have been cleared for redevelop-ment. This has been to the frustration of many with an interest in indus-trial history, as it meant that much of the area’s industrial heritage was swept away in the 1950s and 1960s in the pursuit of modernisation. Medhurst (2011) relates how in the early 1960s a proposal to preserve intact and for future generations Gjer’s Mill, a nineteenth century iron-works, in the ‘Ironmasters’ district close to the Transporter bridge, which was founded in 1835 but had just stopped operating, was received.

Discovering this relic of the birth of industrialisation after a century of use was like a trove of diamonds glistening amongst piles of rust. We recom-mended that it should be preserved as the hub of a Teesside industrial museum together with railways and wagons, shunting engines and cranes. (Medhurst 2011: 34)

The local council though did not find the proposal attractive:

The scheme was presented to a committee of Middlesbrough council. The members without exception were horrified. Ironmasters to them was a reminder of heavy labour, filth and pollution of air, land and water. They wanted no memories of what they saw as a blot on the town’s history and refused outright to preserve the structure. (Medhurst 2011: 35)

Fifty years later the question of the use or what becomes of industrial ‘ruins’ is a current one on Teesside. At present, the question of what will become of the SSI site is undecided. The site and the assets on it are cur-rently being claimed by SSI’s creditors, and its long-term future is likely to remain undecided. The site and its proximity to the port make it attractive industrial land; however, the question of who will pay to clean up the contamination on the land will also need to be resolved. Effectively the question is whether the site will continue as industrial land, or

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whether it or part of the steelworks will be preserved in some way as part of a heritage project. There is currently a steel heritage working group that is attempting to address how Teesside’s steelmaking heritage can best be preserved. I have attended several events, and the central tension that has emerged is whether heritage is about preserving physical sites such as the Redcar blast furnace as industrial memorials or about finding a way to relate the story of steel on Teesside in a broader way, incorporating schools, community education, landscapes such as the ‘black path’, which runs along the south bank of the Tees as part of heritage trails, and the contribution of local art and artists such as Len Tabner, Ian Macdonald and Phil Boville, who have all been inspired by and documented indus-try. These tensions around heritage and its meaning relate to Mah’s idea of legacy as a psychological process, it is a process that is about both interpreting the past and projecting a vision of the future.

Between an Industrial Past and a Post-Industrial Future

This book has tried to examine two questions: Firstly ‘What is the legacy of Teesside’s industrial past?’ and secondly ‘How do the legacies of the industrial past influence the area today and shape its possible futures?’

It is clear to me that the industrial past remains highly important to Teesside as a place and to its people, but that the meaning of that past and its legacy are viewed from a number of different perspectives. Almost everyone I spoke to and who attended and commented at the focus groups saw the past as important and felt that the area had declined, it is not what it once was. However, to call this ‘ruination’ would be too strong. Instead what comes across to me from these conversations is a sense of disappointment, a sense that the area and its people, particularly young people, have been let down. This is perhaps because of what hap-pened both nationally and locally in the post-war years, which offered through the post-war consensus a secure future with work for all, some-thing that up until that point had not been available. This alongside improved social security, healthcare, housing and education also meant that those who did not want the same kind of industrial working life that

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their parents and grandparents had experienced had greater opportunities for social mobility and making their own futures than ever before. This of course reached its high point in the late 1960s just as Teesside’s industrial decline began. It is perhaps this that makes the loss of that security and a return of the kind of economic precarity in recent decades for many, which was commonplace for most of Teesside’s history, more acutely felt. This is especially the case amongst those who experienced it directly. If there is any sense of nostalgia at work here, it is a nostalgia not for the type of industrial work that dominated the area but for the type of eco-nomic security and social cohesion that places like ICI, British Steel and Head Wrightson once offered their employees and their communities.

Regarding whether Teesside can be described as a post-industrial place depends upon how post-industrial is defined. In Byrne’s (2005) sense of the term, i.e. post-industrial is a modified and diminished version of the industrial society that went before, Teesside can certainly be described as post-industrial. Otherwise though, it cannot, it remains an important industrial centre but one that faces a future that is uncertain due to the way in which globalisation has affected it. This insecurity has of course been further complicated by Britain’s decision to leave the EU. In addi-tion to this, the non-industrial white collar jobs that became the main-stay of the region’s employment in the public sector, in particular in education and healthcare, no longer enjoy the security and terms of employment that they once did due to ongoing cuts to public spending and services.

So it is clear that the industrial past influences and shapes the way in which possible futures for Teesside are imagined. The industrial know- how, skills and infrastructure of the area are likely to remain important to the area’s economy, and as this chapter has discussed, they also have the potential to provide the foundations for new potentially important pro-cess industries. Regardless then of whether new industrial development is forthcoming, retaining Teesside’s existing industries will surely be at the top of the Combined Authority’s priorities. Industry and industrial heri-tage are also likely to feature in another version of the region’s future, which sees the potential for developing tourism and cultural activities. It is no surprise that the proposed 2025 City of Culture bid for Tees Valley is based upon the area’s common founding point of origin, the opening

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of the Stockton to Darlington railway in 1825. The importance of indus-try to individuals will also change as their direct experience begins to become more distant and less immediate with the passing of time. One of the comments that was made at one focus groups in relation to the archive photographs was:

It makes me realize how little I know about our industrial heritage.

So perhaps the industrial legacy will change, if not fade, in future years. But it seems for now that it retains the ability to capture the imagination, and it remains a powerful source of identity. Peter felt that this was not always a good thing:

I think that it holds us back, I think too many people on Teesside look to the past and not to the present or the future.

He argued, in my opinion quite rightly, that our view of the past tends to be highly selective:

My mum was brought up in Middlesbrough, and when she was eight her friend died of diphtheria, the house she lived in only had gas lighting upstairs and outside toilets. When I tell my 17-year-old daughter about this she just can’t understand it. Is it so great to look back to past where not so long ago, children died of diphtheria? Had outside toilets? And no light-ing upstairs? The past isn’t as special as we think it was, everything is far safer now, people live a lot longer, have healthier lives too for longer and despite the problems, we are still doing better than that generation. Would you swap now, for the life your grandparents had?

But whilst the past is seen by many as more desirable and attractive than the future, this is unlikely to be the case. Finding that positive vision of the future that was evident in the era of Teesplan is both difficult and also essential.

If all places then have their own biographies shaped by their past, by their traditions, their workplaces and their industries, it is unlikely that the post-industrial will look the same everywhere. Teesside faces the chal-lenge in coming years of retaining and building upon its heritage and

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managing to regenerate beyond its current industrial base. Whether the political and economic climate and national and local policy allow this to happen is open to question.

References

BBC News. (2016, December 20). High Court rules fracking can go ahead in North Yorkshire. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-38378400

BBC News. (2017, January 20). UK government spent £100m on cancelled carbon capture project. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-38687835

Beatty, C., & Fothergill, S. (2016). Jobs, welfare and austerity. How the destruc-tion of industrial Britain casts a shadow over present-day public finances. Sheffield: Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research. Sheffield Hallam University.

Byrne, D. S. (2005). The nature of post-industrialism- South Tyneside in the twenty-first century. Northern Economic Review, 36, 1–14.

Gazette Live. (2017, March 22). Crackers or aspirational? Teesside bid to be city of culture 2025 gets the go-ahead. Dave Robson. Retrieved from http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/crackers-aspirational-teesside-bid-city-12781288

The Guardian. (2015, November 25). The UK cancels pioneering £1bn carbon capture and storage competition. Damian Carrington. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/25/uk-cancels-pioneering-1bn-carbon-capture-and-storage-competition

The Guardian. (2016, December 8). Underground coal gasification will not go ahead in UK. Adam Vaughan. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/08/underground-coal-gasification-uk-gas-coal

The Guardian. (2017, January 23): Theresa May’s industrial plan signals shift to more state intervention. Rowena Mason and Peter Walker. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/22/pm-launches-sector-deals-industrial-strategy-of-state-intervention

Heseltine, M. (2016). Tees Valley: Opportunity unlimited – An independent report. London: Department for Communities and Local Government.

Mah, A. (2012). Industrial ruination, community, and place: Landscapes and lega-cies of urban decline. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Medhurst, F. (2011). A quiet catastrophe: The Teesside job (2nd ed.). Great Britain Citizens Papers.

Tees Valley Unlimited. (2017). Innovation in Tees Valley turning ideas into reality. Tees Valley Unlimited.

The Northern Echo. (2015, September 17). Tom Blenkinsop brands James Wharton ‘pathetic’ after Stockton South MP fails to attend Teesside steelmaking crisis talks. Retrieved from http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/13767302

Sirius Minerals Plc website. Retrieved from http://siriusminerals.com/polyhalite/poly4-explained/

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249© The Author(s) 2018J. Warren, Industrial Teesside, Lives and Legacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64540-7

Since I submitted the initial manuscript for this book in early May 2017 there have been a number of significant political developments, and I think that it is important to note these. There have been two events that had a direct impact upon Teesside, the Tees Valley Mayoral election and the UK General Election.

On 4th May 2017, the election for the first Mayor of Tees Valley was held and won by Ben Houchen, the Conservative candidate. Houchen got 39.5% in the first round of the vote and was just ahead of Sue Jeffrey, his Labour rival, who had widely been expected to win and who gained 39% of the vote. The Liberal Democrats came in third with 12.3% of the vote and the UKIP candidate was fourth with 9.3% of the vote. As no candidate gained 50% on the first round, second preferences were redis-tributed, with the Conservative getting 51.2% of the votes compared to the Labour candidate’s 48.9% (all figures from BBC News—Mayor of the Tees Valley).

The Independent (5/05/17) reported that

A delighted Ben Houchen described it as a ‘political earthquake’ in North East politics.

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The same article went on to say that:

The result provided further evidence of the Tories eating into traditional Labour support in an area which voted heavily to leave in last year’s Brexit referendum.

It also speculated that the result would:

raise Conservative hopes of snatching seats such as Darlington and Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland in next month’s general elec-tion—and possibly even Tony Blair’s old seat of Sedgefield.

However, Tees Valley’s new Mayor was elected by less than 22% of the eligible electorate. Just as local politicians were beginning to question how Houchen would find the money to fulfil one his central pledges, to take Durham Tees Valley Airport back into public ownership the General Election held on 8th June 2017 yielded results that were very different to those predicted a month before. The Conservatives failed to win Darlington, a key target seat for them, and Dr Paul Williams, the Labour candidate, unseated James Wharton, the former ‘Northern Powerhouse’ minister in Stockton South, with an 11.5% swing to Labour being recorded, the turnout was 71.2%. However, the Tories also gained a Teesside seat to replace Stockton South. Middlesbrough South and Cleveland East was won by Simon Clarke with a 12.6% swing from Labour. The seat had formerly been held by Tom Blenkinsop for Labour. Blenkinsop the MP from 2010 decided that he would not stand again, due to his dissatisfaction with the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. He told The Independent;

I have made no secret about my significant and irreconcilable differences with the current Labour leadership. It is because of these differences I feel I cannot in good faith stand as the Labour candidate for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. (The Independent 18/04/17)

Blenkinsop’s replacement as Labour candidate, Tracy Harvey, did not benefit from the swing to Labour many seats in the region saw.

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Stockton South and South Middlesbrough and East Cleveland were not the only seats to change hands on Teesside but in the North East of England as a whole. However, the wider General Election result, which produced a hung parliament with no party gaining an absolute majority, may well have implications for Teesside. The first is that another election will soon follow, this is likely to be a very different campaign with a revitalised Labour party, which has now resolved the question of the party leadership. The June result means that Jeremy Corbyn’s position is secure for the foreseeable future. The popularity of the Labour manifesto that advocated tax increases for the most well off, the abolition of student tuition fees and the re-nationalisation of key industries also means that for the first time in a generation the electoral goalposts have shifted, once again there is a real choice in British politics.

The other potential consequence for Teesside arising from the General Election is how the minority Conservative government will approach the negotiations with the EU over ‘Brexit’. The need for the govern-ment to take account of the views of pro EU Conservative MPs in order to remain in office may well mean that a ‘soft Brexit’ with the UK remaining in the EU customs union or even the EU Single Market is much more likely than the ‘hard Brexit’ that Theresa May was advocat-ing prior to the loss of her government’s parliamentary majority. The EU’s position has also been strengthened with the election in May 2017 of Emmanuel Macron to the French presidency, an election that saw the National Front and its populist, right wing, anti-EU platform deci-sively defeated.

Ironically, despite its overwhelming support for leaving the EU in the June 2016 referendum, a ‘soft Brexit’ would prove advantageous to businesses within Tees Valley, many of which rely on the European market.

The future political landscape for the area is difficult to predict as the Mayoral and General elections results on Teesside show the space of a month, and voter turnout can make a dramatic difference. What is clear is that the economic uncertainty that has characterised Teesside’s recent history is likely to continue for some time yet.

252 Epilogue

References

BBC News Mayor of the Tees Valley. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/d06600f0-d912-4ddc-b447-99235fed9615/mayor-of-the-tees-valley

The Independent. (2017a, April 18). Labour MPs announce they are standing down as Theresa May calls for a snap general election – Caroline Mortimer. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-mp-general-election-tom-blenkinsop-not-stand-theresa-may-middlesborough-south-a7688501.html

The Independent. (2017b, May 5). Tories win Tees Valley mayoral race in further humiliation for Labour-Rob Merrick. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/local-elections-conservative-labour-latest-result-tees-valley-a7720201.html

253© The Author(s) 2018J. Warren, Industrial Teesside, Lives and Legacies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64540-7

AAlan (participant), 160, 161Amanda (participant), 149, 152, 156Andrew (participant), 149, 151, 152,

155, 156, 171, 172, 188–190, 194

Anne (participant), 159Apprenticeships, 80, 101, 104, 110,

139–143, 148, 173, 211Astra Zeneca, 80Asylum, 185, 239

BBeatty, Christina, 28, 185, 201,

229–231Bedroom tax, 201, 202Bell Brothers, 56, 59Bernstein, Basil, 189Beynon, Huw, 7, 19, 54, 59–61,

63–66, 68, 70–72, 74, 79–81

Billingham, 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 60–64, 68, 71–73, 75, 76, 79, 92, 95–97, 103, 109, 110, 113, 141, 144, 154, 157, 186, 190

Biography of place, 11, 15, 44–46Blast furnaces, 1, 10, 36, 37, 39, 55,

56, 58, 62, 66, 76, 126, 171, 225, 244

Bluehall, 188, 190Bob (participant), 142, 147, 150,

203Bolckow, Henry, 67, 117Boulby, 169Bourdieu, Pierre, 138, 178Brexit, 4, 41, 116–118, 175–178,

209, 237–241, 250, 251British Steel, 6, 10, 36, 37, 40, 60,

76, 79, 88, 101, 103, 104, 115, 119, 142–144, 146, 147, 150, 152, 156, 157, 169, 231, 232, 242, 245

Index

254 Index

Bruce (participant), 147, 152Brunner and Mond company, 61Byrne, David, 6, 26, 34, 42, 83, 245

CCalifornia, 55Caparo, 163, 166Carbon capture and storage (CCS),

211, 216–219, 223, 226, 233Cheryl (participant), 143, 147, 148,

153, 156, 167, 171, 175Circular economy, 213, 224–226,

234, 237Cleveland, 3, 11, 18, 19, 39, 42, 55,

59, 60, 63, 71, 72, 78, 184, 185, 231, 232, 237

Coal, 7, 11, 28, 31, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61–64, 76, 77, 83, 84, 97, 140, 156, 221–223, 227

Community champions, 197Cultural capital, 138, 139, 178, 189,

191Culture, emergent, 120, 205Culture, residual, 120, 205Cunningham, Alex, 186, 217, 241

DDarlington, 3, 11, 18, 52, 53, 55,

56, 79, 175, 182–185, 212, 236, 237, 246, 250

Davy group, 58, 76, 77De-industrialisation, 4, 9, 10, 15, 18,

27–29, 31, 34, 42, 230, 240Deprivation, 44, 82, 125, 131, 181,

184–192, 202, 214Devolution, 182, 200, 209, 228,

230, 234, 235

Diversification, 69–71, 75, 82, 227, 233

Dorman Long, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 157, 167–169

Dormanstown, 17, 60, 68Duke of Edinburgh’s award, 146, 147Durkheim, Emile, 29, 30, 137

EEaglescliffe, 9, 16, 186East Durham Ravens, 188Employment, 4, 5, 18, 19, 27–29,

31, 63, 65, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 83, 96, 102, 129, 142, 146, 148, 150, 152, 183, 188, 191, 245

Eston, 17, 55, 59, 63, 72, 73, 133European Union (EU), 3, 4, 38, 39,

42, 116, 175–177, 182, 209, 229, 237–241, 245, 251

FFothergill, Steve, 28, 185, 201,

229–231

GGarthwaite, Kayleigh, 44, 187Geddes report, 76George (participant), 140, 141, 143,

148, 154, 158–160, 167–169, 174

Gilchrist, Percy, 59Gladstone, William, 16Globalisation, 34–42Gorz, Andre, 30, 31, 34Grangetown, 55, 62

255 Index

Gray, William, 56, 68Gross value added (GVA), 66

HHabitus, 138, 139, 178Hackworth, Timothy, 52Hailsham report, 72Hanson Trust, 80Hardwick, 186, 196, 197Hartburn, 9, 122, 123, 125, 192Hartlepool, 3, 17–19, 56, 57, 68, 78,

115, 142, 151, 153, 162, 166, 167, 175, 182–185, 212, 237

Haverton Hill, 57, 61, 92, 156Head Wrightson, 58, 66, 76–78,

101, 105, 106, 119, 140–143, 146, 148, 151, 154, 158, 160, 162–164, 167, 245

Heseltine report, 2, 3, 182, 209, 210, 233–236

Hudson, Ray, 7, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81

IIan (participant), 162–166, 174Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI),

5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 40, 60–65, 68, 70–72, 75, 76, 79–81, 88, 92, 95–97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 109–111, 113, 119, 141–147, 149, 150, 154–162, 169–171, 188, 190, 214, 217, 223, 231, 232, 242, 245

Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), 184

Inequality, 6, 12, 44, 123, 138, 181, 214

Ingleby Barwick, 186, 192, 202–204Ingleby Greenhow, 146Interviews, 2, 4, 7, 11, 15, 21–24,

38, 43, 101, 134, 139, 140, 146, 149, 150, 154, 158, 159, 162, 167–169, 171, 174, 178, 190, 193, 204, 213, 238, 241

Iron, 11, 16, 38, 54–56, 58, 59, 66, 67, 83, 133, 145, 174, 242

Ironopolis, 11, 59, 60

JJill (participant), 196–200, 202Jim (participant), 159

KKeith (participant), 6, 92, 141, 142,

146, 149, 154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 170

Kevin (participant), 142, 143, 162, 163, 165–167, 172–174, 176, 177, 242

LLazard scheme, 77, 164Leadership, 182, 199–201, 226, 227,

250, 251Legacy, 7, 10, 24, 43, 74, 82, 83, 87,

137–178, 181, 210, 213–215, 218, 234–236, 240, 242–244, 246

Life expectancy, 6, 12, 181, 184, 191–193

Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), 78, 182, 210, 211, 213, 214, 233, 234, 237

256 Index

Lock, Max, 68, 69Louise (participant), 194–197, 202

MMacDonald, Rob, 16, 65Malleable ironworks, 58, 146Manhattan project, 63Manufacturing, 4–7, 18, 19, 27, 28,

31, 33, 70, 74, 75, 83, 153, 172, 174, 215, 227, 230

Marx, Karl, 30, 31, 34, 137McEwan, Katy, 203, 204Medhurst, Franklin, 73, 98, 243M’Gonigle, George, 187, 188Middlesbrough, 1, 3, 9, 11, 16–19,

54–59, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 83, 87, 89, 92, 99, 109, 114–116, 120, 121, 132, 148, 153, 161, 168, 175, 182, 184, 185, 191, 194, 201, 229, 237, 246

Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art (MIMA), 89, 96, 99–102, 104–106, 110, 132

Middlesbrough Survey and Plan, 68Migration, 117, 183Modernization, 68–73, 79, 82, 98,

164–166, 243

NNational Coal Board (NCB), 72Nationalisation, 59, 60, 64National Plan, 73Nicola (participant), 144, 145, 157,

170, 171Nissan, 7, 42, 134, 240

Norma (participant), 143, 144, 146, 147, 152, 157, 167, 168, 170, 171

Northern Power House, 222, 228, 229, 250

Nostalgia, 26, 43, 95, 112, 168, 245

OOne North East, 121, 228

PPaul (participant), 214–216,

219–222, 224–227, 231, 233, 234, 237

Pease, Edward, 53Pease, Joseph, 53, 54, 160Peter (participant), 190–194,

199–202, 206, 214, 232, 234, 246

Photo elicitation, 24, 89, 135Photographs, 7, 11, 25, 88, 90–92, 94,

96, 98, 105, 107–109, 111–113, 115, 116, 119–121, 123, 125–130, 132, 134, 147, 246

Pig iron, 55Planning, 65, 68–74, 77, 150, 161,

172, 210, 220, 227, 232–234Polyhalite, 84, 219Port Clarence, 56, 58, 59, 61, 63,

92, 115, 124, 143, 157, 195, 196, 238

Port Darlington, 54Portrack, 58, 188Post-industrial, 2, 6–8, 18, 27,

29–34, 41–43, 128, 137, 139, 209–247

257 Index

Poverty, 82, 124, 125, 186–188, 214Precarity, 205, 245Priestly, J. B., 62

RRagworth, 188, 189Redcar, 1–4, 10, 17–19, 36, 37, 39,

41, 55, 60, 68, 73, 76, 78, 83, 92, 128, 129, 153, 171, 172, 175, 182, 184, 185, 217, 225, 229, 231, 232, 237, 240, 241, 244

Regeneration, 78, 125, 182, 209, 227, 234

Registry, 144Robbins report, 151Robert (participant), 162Ropner, Robert, 57, 62, 68

SSABIC, 5, 40, 214, 220Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI),

2–4, 37–40, 126, 182, 217, 229, 243

Sampling, 15, 20–22Sawdust, 166Seal Sands, 10, 76, 132, 170, 239Sembcorp, 216, 223, 238Shildrick, Tracy, 65, 66, 74, 79, 82,

83, 193Sirius Minerals, 219Smoggies, 132Social capital, 138Social mobility, 205, 206, 245Socioscape, 26Southbank, 17, 55, 80, 127, 151, 173

South Tees Development Corporation, 182, 210, 213

Steel News, 147Stephenson, George, 52, 53Stockton–Darlington railway, 53, 56Stockton High Street, 53, 98, 99,

118–120, 188Stockton market, 99, 100, 169Stockton–on–Tees, 6, 7, 12, 17–19,

51–53, 58, 68, 78, 124, 130, 153, 175, 181, 183–187, 202

Sunderland, 42, 132, 134, 240Susan (participant), 151, 170

TTariq (participant), 168, 169Tata industries, 3Teesplan, 73, 74, 227, 233, 246Teesport, 2, 73, 106, 132, 212, 219Teesside, 1–10, 15–47, 51–84,

87–135, 137–140, 142, 145, 146, 148, 150–153, 156, 158–160, 162, 167–173, 175–178, 181–206, 209, 210, 213–216, 219–221, 228–233, 236–246, 249–251

Teesside Construction Activists, 238, 239

Teesside County Borough, 17, 73, 237

Teesside Development corporation, 77

Tees Valley, 18, 19, 51, 66, 78, 171, 175, 181–187, 209–213, 233, 234, 236, 237, 245, 249–251

Tees Valley Combined Authority, 171, 182, 211–213, 216, 241

258 Index

Tees Valley Combined Authority Mayor, 234

Tees Valley regeneration, 78Temenos, 78, 121Thatcher, Margaret, 9, 77, 78, 176,

227Thomas, Sidney Gilchrist, 59Thornaby, 17, 58, 73, 77, 78, 105,

106, 141, 163, 186, 202, 204Tilery, 188Tim (participant), 151, 152,

162–167, 174Tom (participant), 175, 198–200Tomorrow’s World, 42, 43Transporter Bridge, 10, 58, 114,

115, 121, 124, 243Turley, Anna, 4, 39, 42, 229, 238,

241

UUnderground Coal Gasification

(UCG), 221–223

VVaughan, John, 54–56, 59–61, 67Visual methods, 24–27Vulcan street, 55, 56

WWashington, 240Weber, Max, 30Welfare reform, 6, 185Whatever happened to the Likely

Lads ?, 203Whitwell ironworks, 58Williams, Raymond, 7, 120, 205Wilton, 8, 11, 16, 40, 64, 65,

70–72, 100, 144, 147, 149, 159, 214, 223, 224

Wind turbines, 128, 129, 232Wynyard, 192, 212

Y

Yarm, 9, 52, 186, 192, 202