The Northern Echo editor, PETER BARRON, grew up on Teesside as the son of a South Bank steelworker. He reflects on a way of life which is in danger of being lost

AS a boy, growing up in the suburbs of Middlesbrough in the 1960s, the "mountains of South Bank" were our playground.

They were vast, rocky wastes – cowboy country where we rode our imaginary horses and hunted for grasshoppers in the coarse grass that grew against the odds of the harsh terrain. The Virginian, Trampas, Big John and Buck Cannon, Shane, and The Man With No Name all rode across those bleak outcrops.

Except, of course, once we passed into grown-up land, we came to understand that our mountains were actually slag-heaps, formed from the waste produced by the steel-making process upon which proud communities such as South Bank were forged. It's why outsiders called our home Slaggy Island, a nick-name which has hung around for generations.

You see, steel was all we knew in South Bank. It was where our dads worked, their dads before them, and their dads before them. Our bread and butter. The smoky, noisy, backdrop of our lives. The reason for shops like Kenny Greenup's grocers, Maloney's butchers, Birkbeck's, where we rented our first colour telly, and Smollans, where we used to buy our school shoes and snake-belts. The foundation of happy childhood memories.

Through the night, the skyline would be lit up by a reassuring, pulsing sunset created by the non-stop blast furnaces.

As a boy, I'd sit on top of the "mountains of South Bank", waiting for the figure of my dad – head bowed, in his grey, flat cap, and with his bait-bag over his shoulder – as he walked home from another long shift as an electrician's mate at the Dorman Long plant.

He'd gone there straight from St Peter's School and never did anything else, apart from when he went off to Anzio fight the Germans as a mere 17-year-old. It was what was expected of a South Bank lad – a life with British Steel, as long as the war didn't get in the way.

For a century and a half, with the support of the long-lost Smith's Dock Company, steel has provided a way of life for communities like South Bank, Normanby, Eston, Grangetown and, of course, Redcar. Indeed, South Bank owes its very existence to the establishment of the steelworks by Messrs. Bolckow, Vaughan & Company Ltd and the associated Clay Lane Iron Company.

But this morning, at 10.30am, our newsdesk received the telephone call the whole of Teesside, and many in the wider North-East region, had been dreading. It confirmed that the steelworks were being mothballed, with 1,700 people being made redundant. In all honesty, we knew the statement was coming but still the words were chilling.

We have been here before. Teesside's steelworks were mothballed four years ago, only for Thailand's Sahaviriya Steel Industries (SSI) to ride to the rescue, like heroic cowboys on the slag-heaps, and switch the blast furnaces back on a year down the line.

But what now for Teesside's steel communities? What now for all those families who rely on those jobs? What now for the shopkeepers whose income will dry up? What now that SSI, for all the effort and all the investment which has gone into re-establishing the Redcar steelworks, could not overcome the slump in global steel prices?

The fight will go on, of course, because the people of Teesside are as resilient as they come. They are used to fighting for their lives – but help is needed.

The Government must appreciate how much is at stake because this is a way of life that surely can't be allowed to die and be consigned to history.