This photograph nicely follows the photograph posted on 1st March. At the top left hand side, on the north bank of the River Tees is Bells Foundry also recently mentioned.
Photograph and details courtesy of David Thompson.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
The buildings to the north east of the bridge between the bridge and the clock tower (one of them has a white coloured roof) are the old British Steel Dock Street offices. This is where I started my working life in 1970
This is a brilliant photograph, that in one frame, clearly illustrates how the original idea of Edward Pease and his associates in the 1830’s to develop the land around the isolated Middlesbrough farmstead into ‘Port Darlington’ for the shipment of Durham mined coal, then turned into an important new town, river-port, dock, iron-manufacturing, and ship building centre, after a supply of suitable ore was discovered in the Cleveland Hills.
The grid-iron pattern of the new-town, with it’s parish-church (St Hilda’s) and Town Hall can still be seen in this photograph, though many of the original street houses have already been replaced with blocks of local-authority flats. In the 1980’s these too, were then swept away for a new ‘social’ development of private and local authority homes, called ‘Tower Green’.
This ‘experiment’ failed badly and within only a few years the area, known locally as ‘over the border’, had become a largely criminalised community, with the private housing plunged into sub-negative equity. As a result, less than 20 years after Tower Green was built, it too was demolished, with only the Town Hall and the original Customs House building in North St now remaining,
185 years after it was first built upon, much of this area has returned to open swathes of grass land.
Iron manufacturing, shipping and coal exporting having all ceased long ago, it’s almost as though the original Middlesbrough civic-motto ‘Erimus’, meaning ‘We shall be’, should be changed to ‘We were’, as technically there is no reason for the town to actually still exist.