Steel working on Teesside dates back to the 1870s and has been the mainstay of the local economy ever since, at its height there were 91 on Teesside but at the time it was built the one at the Redcar site was the last but it was the second biggest in Europe and state of the art. At the time the plant was built the British steel industry had been nationalised since 1967 under the British Steel Corporation. In 1988 it was privatised under British Steel Plc with a national workforce of 55,000, by the time British Steel merged with a Dutch company to form Corus Group in 1999 the national workforce had fallen to 28,900. In 2007 Corus were taken over by the Indian firm Tata Steel and in February 2010 Tata mothballed the Redcar plant with the loss of 1,700 jobs. In April 2012 the Thai company SSI acquired the Redcar site and restarted production but this lasted only until October 2015 when the company went into liquidation and the plant finally closed with the loss of more than 2,000 direct jobs and a further 800 in the supply chain. By 2019 much of the site has been acquired by the South Tees Development Corporation that hopes to regenerate the area with clean energy initiatives including a potential carbon capture energy plant that proposes to pump the carbon dioxide from burning natural gas into former North Sea oil fields. The photograph shows construction is still in progress on the blast furnace itself but has been completed across much of the site.
This image was catalogued as part of the Breaking New Ground Project in partnership with the John Laing Charitable Trust in 2019-20.
This is part of the Series: JLP01/10 John Laing Photographic Collection Colour Negatives and Transparencies; within the Collection: JLP01 John Laing Photographic Collection
Contact Historic England Archive
Photographer: Powell, J
Late 20th Century Steel Works, Aerial View, Construction, Industrial Heritage
Our website works best with the latest version of the browsers below, unfortunately your browser is not supported. Using an old browser means that some parts of our website might not work correctly.
