Middlesbrough St Hilda's by Araf Chohan Reviews

4.3 Rating 3 Reviews

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(01626) 897100

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6 Battle Road,
Heathfield Industrial Estate,
Newton Abbot
Devon
TQ12 6RY

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“Being a native of Middlesbrough but moving away for work i found this really interesting. All the old places (mostly demolished now, rebuilt and then rebuilt again) that we used to live among. Some of it was laugh out loud funny - but i won't tell you what!!”

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Posted 2 years ago

“In 1971 I left student life in Coventry, bought a pinstriped suit, and started work as a trainee accountant with a part of British Steel, based in Bedford, that designed and built bridges and power stations. It had been formed out of part of Dorman Long of Middlesbrough, and about half of the people in the office were from that area of Yorkshire. They talked about national service in the local Green Howards regiment, Tees Dock Road, the new steelmaking plant at Lackenby, the bridge fabrication works at Britannia, the Autofab beam works, the Transporter bridge and the massive Tees Newport bridge, Smiths Dock shipbuilders, the coke ovens, the mines at Eston and the big blast furnace at Redcar. I actually met an old gentleman, Mr Bolckow, who had been a director of one of the ironworks, and was a direct link to that Victorian era and the families and workers who made Teesside such an outstanding success. After I'd been working there a few years I felt I had become familiar with those Teesside places through all the stories and the occasional visits to Teesside Engineering Works, the new developments at the Lackenby steelworks and the Linthorpe Dinsdale yard that built oil rig modules for the then new North Sea oil rigs, plus Stockton, Port Clarence, ICI at Wilton and the petrochemicals area at Seal Sands, and all the other heroic industrial places that have mostly been demolished now. I was made redundant in the early 1980s, and had to switch career to working in the much less interesting world of Insurance in Liverpool. But this book and its excellent photographs of a small (if central) part of that world of at least 50 years ago, brought back fond memories of all those Teessiders who introduced me to business life, to the history of the Dorman Long that had built the Sydney Harbour Bridge (and were still proud of it), and the stories about the heavily industrialised world around Middlesbrough and the St. Hilda's parish in which they grew up.”