A view of Newport Bridge and the River Tees. In the bottom left hand corner, it looks like the 6 lane duel carriageway of the A19 is still being completed. The Tees Flyover was constructed from 1973 – 1975 so we believe this photo to be taken early 1970s…
Photograph by John W Chesney, courtesy of Joyce Chesney.
As Bill Mann says, you can just see the structure of the A19 flyover being built at the bottom left corner. I worked on the project as a teenager and used to clamber up terrifyingly high ladders to get to the top. As an engineer’s chainman, I had to carry all the equipment with me too – not much health and safety in those days. If the weather was too bad, we’d spend hours hanging around in the huts that are also visible nearby.
It looks like the site for the portrack incinerator is already cleared ready for its construction, when you think how much money it would have cost to build, and how it had such a short life, I remember going with my dad, we always came home with something, happy memories.
The triangular area between the river and railway on the far side of the bridge belonged to Dorman Long. The remain of blast furnaces from Victorian times could be seen, these presumably having been built by Bolkow Vaughn ( the fore ruuner of Dorman Long)
The indiistinct blob which is close to the bridge was the main scientic establishment of Dormans, and was known as Central Research, It housed reseach into steel, chemical analysis, refractories and plastic coating of steel. This is where I started work as student apprentice. The reason why the shape is indistinct is that the building may have been in the process of being knocked down at the time.
The plastic coating work was done in some old offices about half a mile from Central Research. This is where I had some intersting encounters with 40kW industion heating machine where a short circuit led part of some dexion frame works melting.
The small rectangular building on the other side of the bridge was the creep lab, where the long term strength of boiler tubes steels was being measured. This might have been one of the last buildings to be shut down. It was built around 1964 and the aim in creep testing is to get enough data to estimate the 100000 hour life ( over 12 years continuous)
The bottom left hand corner looks like the main flyover structure prior to the actual road surface being fixed…
To the top-left of the photograph the small Bamford’s Wharf can be seen with a cargo boat appearing to be docking. This is where much of the ICI fertiliser products from Billingham, were exported from.
Just as the ‘spaghetti’ of railway lines converges under the roadway to the bridge, there once stood a group of Elizabethan granary buildings with a jetty for loading onto ships, hence the ‘New Port’, these were demolished I believe in the 1920’s-1930’s.
There was a similar such ancient facility further downstream toward the North Sea where grains and cereals were also loaded, this was called Cargo Fleet, ‘fleet’ meaning a ‘large stream’, that joined the river Tees at that point from it’s headwaters nearer the Cleveland Hills.