“It was like the HBO series Chernobyl. Everybody had been told to get up off the seat and leave, and you still had cups and jackets on the back of chairs.”
Walking beside a mound of iron, the only thing that’s left of the blast furnace at the former SSI, Mayor Ben Houchen recalls his first time visiting the now-demolished Redcar steelworks.
He might not have been Tees Valley Mayor on October 12, 2015 - the day a chapter was closed on 170 years of steelmaking - but he remembers the years that followed well.
For a region that has iron and steel in its blood, the fallout was devastating; 2,200 immediate jobs were lost, livelihoods shattered, and the core of the region’s economy ripped out.
Its impact has continued to ripple over the last decade - and, for some, is still felt today.
But Mayor Houchen hopes that, in years to come, it will be looked back upon as “a new beginning” - and thinks diversification is the way to avoid history repeating itself.
‘Frozen in time’
It was roughly 19 months after the closure of the steelworks that Mayor Houchen was elected.
When he first arrived to look around, he had a unique chance to immerse himself into a once-bustling ironworks now “frozen in time”.
“When it closed, everybody was marched off site. I first remember wandering into Steel House and it looked like somebody had got off the chair and left,” he said.
“The way it closed was so damaging in that nothing was ever taken offline over a period of time, which is what you would do as a managed closure.”
Since then, explosive demolitions have brought down several landmarks of the Teesside skyline, reducing steelmaking history to rubble in hope of a new future.
The scale of the site is hard to imagine until you actually visit.
The Echo went to look around what’s left of the blast furnace; a once remarkable feature standing tall above the Teesside seafront; with Lord Houchen.
Now, all that remains is a mound of solid grey iron, which is “highly likely” to be removed.
It looks like a structure made up of large bricks - due to an imprint - and is proving so difficult to demolish that teams at Catterick Garrison are testing how to best do it.
Mayor Houchen said it took three years to do anything with the site due to various complexities, but thinks becoming mayor after the closure helped in his approach.
He said: “Having had no involvement in the process beforehand, I was able to articulate a different future for the site.
“Had that time not passed, I don't think we would have been able to do that [because] of how immediate it was, the impact, and the emotion.
“A community is never going to want to talk about a different future when the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
“We've got the jobs here, we have the industry here, let's keep it. If I'd been there three or four years beforehand, you wouldn't have been able to talk about that.
“It would always have been, we just need to rescue the steel industry that we've got. I don't think the community would have bought into it in the way that it has.”
‘Green shoots’ in Redcar - but town ‘lost identity’
We drive in a Land Rover up a mound and onto arguably the highest vantage point at Teesworks.
You can see the whole of the mammoth site, including the new SeAH factory, the remains of the blast furnace, and, in the distance, Redcar.
The seaside town was one of the hardest hit following the closure, with the effects of unemployment filtering down to the high street.
Some feel it still hasn’t quite recovered.
“It did lose its identity”, he argues. “And to some extent, not just the months afterwards, but for years and years.
“For families and communities, this was our identity. It is what we were here for.
“It was the thing that grounded us, and everybody has a family member and a story and a community anchor that disappeared when the steelworks closed.”
2,200 jobs were lost when the site was closed in 2015, which reportedly went up to 4,000 including the supply chain.
To help, the SSI Task Force was set up with £53 million of Government money, helping to retrain and refocus former steelworkers.
Two years later, 315 new businesses had been started and more than £9 million was invested in 23,000 training courses.
Mayor Houchen said every steelworker found alternate work within three years.
Employment rates in Redcar and Cleveland have gone up, with 74.3% of people aged 16 to 64 years employed at the end of 2023. This is almost 10% higher than ten years prior.
But he said this still presented its own set of issues: “Redcar still went from having the highest average wage in the Tees Valley to the lowest.
“It ended up having lots of semi-skilled and skilled people who found work, but they're all massively underemployed from a skills point of view.
“Instead of being on £60,000 to £100,000 a year, they're on £25,000 a year.
“While it's a positive story, that long tale of being overreliant on a monolithic industry like steel is still felt 10 years on.”
So, has it recovered? Mayor Houchen said no; but there are “green shoots”.
He explained: “In the next 18 months to two years we’ll have nearly 4000 construction workers [at Teesworks]. We are starting to see a difference.
“You go into the town and you're seeing more things supporting the site pop up.
“It definitely hasn't recovered. A significant factor is the closure of the steelworks, but also post-industrial decline that you see in industrial towns across the country.
“How do seaside towns rebrand themselves in the 21st century? I think Teesside has struggled since the closure to re-identify itself.”
Overreliance and diversification
The steelworks were central to Teesside’s heritage for decades, with steel from our region building the likes of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and London’s Shard.
But Mayor Houchen argues that the overreliance on this industry ultimately impacted the devastation when more than 4,000 jobs were lost in one fell swoop.
He explained: “That's when it's devastating. That's when it's really difficult to recover.
“The economy on Teesside, because of it being overly reliant on old school monolithic, traditional industries, means that when it goes wrong, it's extremely fragile.
“And a much more developed modern economy, particularly a regional economy, needs much more diverse players in it.”
Now, ten years later and knowing the severe impact of job losses, how does Teesside avoid history repeating itself?
Mayor Houchen said there is only one answer; diversification.
“You cannot put all your eggs in one basket”, he explained.
“We had one business employing 3,000 people. If you have 30 businesses employing 3,000 people, even those 3,000 jobs that are lost are not felt as much.
“I think, in years to come, people will look back at the closure and see it as a new beginning.”
He said this is the tactic employed now at Teesworks: “We don't just want one employer on the site.
“Will a business over the next 40 years go out of business? Of course it will, but it won't matter in the bigger scheme of things because you'll still have another 15,000 jobs on the site.
“That means that the local areas and local communities are resolute enough to be able to withstand a shock of a few 100 jobs being lost.”
But does steel have a future on Teesside?
Many will remember when Mayor Houchen promised to “bring steelmaking back” to the region through British Steel’s plans for an electric arc furnace.
These plans were thrown out earlier this year in a move Mayor Houchen described as both “disappointing and frustrating”.
“We are still the perfect place to be able to do that”, he tells me as we finish up our tour with a visit to the Seah wind factory.
“We’re the most efficient place to be able to deal with that within the most economical place to be able to do that. The only thing that will stop that is politics getting in the way.”
You can read more on our series of features as 'SSI: Ten years on' continues later this week.
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