How the future of Stockton is being redrawn

Town planning can be a delicate balance at the best of times.
As councils across the region will know, reshaping a favourite part of the place where you live by removing an eyesore building can overnight become a row about heritage and bulldozers careering through our past.
So it is a brave and confident set of councillors who decide to redraw the whole thing and replace offices and shops with parkland.
At Stockton this is open-heart surgery, taking out the centre of the town and breathing new life into the patient by transplanting a completely new core. Life expectancy will be considerably enhanced because the patient was at risk of flatlining after the loss of Debenhams and Marks & Spencer but as with any major surgery, there are risks involved. Anaesthetic may be needed in large doses.
The man scrubbing up at the side of Stockton’s operating theatre is Nigel Cooke. As Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Housing he will need a surgeon’s steady hands.
Take a deep breath and I’ll walk you through his new town centre…
The dramatic plan is to remove the two landmark buildings next year - the Castlegate Shopping Centre and Swallow Hotel and open up the town to the river through open-plan parkland and pathways covering a site three times the size of Trafalgar Square.

A new look for the town

The seven-storey Swallow was opened in 1972 with the Castlegate following a year later.
Stockton Splash leisure centre will be closed and replaced by a £15m facility on the southern end of High Street with a pool and gym. That development will also be home to a new library, a register office, meeting spaces and customer service centre.
An early plan to have new council offices on the site has now been ‘revised’ and most staff will instead move to Dunedin House, former home of the Teesside Development Corporation on the other side of the river.
Instead of Castlegate, the town’s main retail offer will be focussed on Wellington Square, the 700-year-old market, and other parts of the High Street and town centre, such as Silver Street.
Talks have also taken place with North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust about opening a ‘health on the high street’ facility combining clinical and administrative functions.
The work is being funded by the Tees Combined Authority and a provisional allocation from the Government’s Future High Streets Fund of just over £16.5million, supplemented by £5million from the council.
Got that? It is almost too vast to take in. Sensational, visionary and almost surreal at the same time.
So how do schemes like this start? Who has the first idea and then who takes that to the next level, and then the next one until they finally reach Stockton level?
“It’s certainly bold – and has got a lot of people talking, which is a good thing,” says Nigel.
“But I’ve only been a cabinet member since 2015 but the journey started well before that, probably when Woolworths on Stockton High Street closed in 2008. People of my generation – I’m 61 now – just never imagined that would be possible because it was something that we grew up with and loved.
“But rather than just dismiss that as a one-off, the leader of the council and the chief executive at the time began to drill down to see if this might be the start of things to come. They realised early on that there was a massive wind of change coming for retail – particularly big chain stores.

Another view of the redesigned town
“So with that information and a slow move towards internet shopping, they set about preparing for a future where there was quite a bit of uncertainty.”
With the very popular Teesside Retail Park about two miles away in one direction, Middlesbrough town centre five miles in the other and Darlington only a few more miles back down the A66, Stockton was at the centre of the perfect storm. Those competing centres had their own challenges as the likes of Marks & Spencer and Debenhams started to pull out, so the warning signs were pretty clear, but Stockton knew it needed action rather than only reaction.
“We were determined to get our heads around all that and find other ways of getting people to come into the town if it wasn’t just to shop,” he added.
“Our events programme is really important to us, as is leisure, eateries, music and theatres, so we wanted to create a High Street where shopping could still play a part - with the independents and the market become even more important - but living, working and playing became essential elements as well.
“Then they dug up the high street and created an events space and a better home for the market. That wasn’t a popular thing to do, but as the old adage has it – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs – and we knew it had to be done as part of rethinking the centre of the town.
“Then when I came into my position in 2015 the predicted ‘death of the high street’ seemed to have taken other councils by surprise. But we’re not short of ideas here in Stockton, we just needed the options available, so when developers were leaving some town centres like lemmings off a cliff and the Castlegate Centre became available for a song, it provided us with that option.
“We did the due diligence on the finance and thought ‘well let’s buy two, knock one down and consolidate all the shops into Wellington Square at the North end and then we can start work on the South end.”

Nigel Cooke
The simplicity of that sentence belies months of hard work, consultations, persuasion and planning. But it also sums up where councils like Stockton need to be. If such large-scale decisions are to be of the most benefit then there has to be swift action, not tangles of red tape and a lack of confidence. If you know it’s the right thing to do, then let people know, get on with it and handle the equal measures of support and criticism when it follows.
“We didn’t give the public a blank piece of paper, because they would have come up with a thousand ideas and we had to move quite fast, but one thing that was always important to me as the political lead was to have a conversation with them,” said Nigel.
“Of the various options as to how we could do it and what mix worked best, around 80 per cent went with the plan we have now of a park, some commercial, some office space and bridge it over to the river, which is now a beautiful place with seals and salmon returning along many stretches.
“I ride my bike along the banks and you meet all sorts of people who might never go to the town centre, and then when you’re in the town many people don’t think about the river. So the opportunity to do this is not something that comes along too often and because I don’t believe politicians are elected to manage decline, I know we are here for the long haul.
“This is a big moment in time for us all.”
His family have this place in their blood. Dad Jim was an old-school politician who also knew about the importance of big moments, representing the people of Stockton for decades, fighting social injustice and being made a Freeman of the Borough in 1991.
When he was made Mayor in 1979 Jim’s younger brother Derek was appointed deputy and other brothers Jack, Peter and Keith backed him up on the council. Jim’s own dad Jack was a staunch Labour man who was involved in the party for more than half a century.

Stockton is a popular town centre
So for Nigel this is more than rubberstamping blueprints and putting on a high-viz vest and hard hat for some photos. This is family, heritage and a willingness to fight for what you believe is right.
He admits that Covid has become a key factor in the shaping of Stockton’s own plans as well as other town centres around the country. As people’s lifestyles were altered by lockdowns and isolation, the pattern of how they lived – where they went, who they saw and how comfortable they felt – changed radically. For some that will be a temporary change, but for many it opened their eyes to the potential of options like internet shopping, grocery deliveries, saving up local journeys to perhaps once a week instead of more regularly, and finding time for themselves to relax and reflect on a quiet walk.
In Stockton that meant a changing town centre layout driven by the council’s vision of how they saw the future started to make much more sense because people were valuing their surrounding instead of just using them.
“In my own family, my wife would never do internet shopping,” said Nigel.
“But now she’s taken to it like a duck to water because for a while it became the only thing out there. Now she and many other people are wondering why they would ever go back. Understandably, that has accelerated the decline of big chain stores that maybe didn’t have the same affinity with our community. The hard fact is we are just a line on a spreadsheet for them.”
On the street and in the shops, the level of engagement is much different. The 80 per cent vote supporting the new plans revealed an aspirational surge to take local ownership of the future, and the shops and businesses directly affected have also shown they are as forward-thinking as the council has been.
When the council took over Castlegate, they brought in Knight Frank to run it alongside Wellington Square. There then followed a period of consultations with owners, some of them national chains and some SMEs to let them know they would be supported if they wanted to move. That suited some who might have been considering it anyway but it also worked well for the likes of Iceland and the family-owned Blue Corn bakery who will both now have Wellington Square addresses.
Stockton Market will still be at the heart of the town as ‘Queen of the North’ as it has been for the last 700 years, with more of it at the North of the High Street to give it the connectivity it needs.
The removal of the Swallow and Castlegate will also give smaller businesses a clearer view of their futures, and they will be encouraged to put down their own roots alongside the park and start growing the next generation of traders. Places like the 140-year-old Fountain Mall on the High Street - where fledgling businesses can test their plans and access business support – have shown that the entrepreneurial spirit in Stockton is as important as ever and the new plans will have local businesses at the centre of the map.
With the continuing rise of microbreweries alongside established pubs, and with the return of the Globe theatre for the first time since 1975 after its £28million refurbishment, the cultural heart of the town is pumping the lifeblood back into this resilient community.
Pulling all those threads together to keep the big guns and the foot soldiers happy, maintaining the character of the town at the same time as you are completely redrawing it, is no mean feat but it has attracted high praise.
The Build Back Better report put together by an expert team led by outspoken retail expert Bill Grimsey, agreed the pandemic has simply accelerated the shrinking of town centre retail and that local leadership, fewer cars, and more green and open spaces are needed.
Grimsey said: “Covid-19 has exposed the weakness of private equity owned high streets that have squeezed all the value from their businesses and left communities hollowed out. We need to build local economies around people who have a proper stake in their communities, not distant investors who only see them as a number on their portfolio investment.
“Many town centres are still wedded to a 20th century mindset, but in places like Stockton the penny has well and truly dropped. Stockton’s shift towards a community hub concept, no longer simply reliant on retail, has been remarkable. The Council just gets it – and more need to follow.”
This Stockton rebirth needs courage, pace, drive and an openness to radical ideas from people who know the hard work has only just begun.
But they’ve never been afraid of that in this borough.

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