Author: David Walsh

Visions of the future from T. Dan Smith and his ‘lesser known Teesside twin’, Tim Thornton, through to sci fi fiction in the North East….

Ben Houchen, Tees Valley Mayor claims that workers rights are excluded from freeports. Is this really the case?

A look to what the future might hold for our new Red Wallers in the North East.

It was a fascinating cultural mix involved with the work camps: well-meaning aristocrats, trade unions, desperate unemployed miners, European students and now a group of upper-middle-class, left-wing, London musicians thrown into the cultural melting pot.

The feast is normally celebrated on 6 January (marking the 12th day of Christmas), or on the Sunday following. It was popularly characterized as the weekend when ‘the world was turned upside down’; market towns and cities elected by lot ‘a Lord of Misrule’, masters became servants and servants masters – on a strict leash of course and normally for one day. This wasn’t just something we Brits got up to – it was similar to the continent

A 1967 plan for holiday islands in the Tees Bay

Another piece on lost communities. This time more on Seaton Snook and its wartime past.

David Walsh goes in search of another lost Tees community – this time the intriguingly named Seaton Snook

In the first part of his history two-parter we visit the lost communities of Warrenby and Barnaby

The day that modern war came to Hartlepool

Health secretary Sajid Javid wants to create ‘community pharmacies’. Is this to release pressure on GPs or a US foot in the door?

This weekend’s papers will be full of by-election news. The nationals will dissect the North Shropshire result until the cows in that lush green countryside come home. The Hexham Courant will devote, rightly, a deal of space to a by election there which deprives the Tories of an overall majority on Northumberland Council, whilst, if we […]

We’ve seen one of the timeless rituals of British politics played out yet again this month. The death of a young boy trapped in an effectively dysfunctional family, young Alfie Labinjo-Hughes, sparks a call for heads to roll in the local Solihull Council Children’s Services Department. Meanwhile MPs call for the keys to the cells […]

Viewers on Monday night may have seen on BBC1’s Panorama, a programme about a company, whose operational HQ is in Darlington, and which runs 39 residential care homes in our region. Stretching in an arc from Morpeth to Middlesbrough and across Tyne and Wear and Co Durham, this firm, HC-one, is a company predominantly concerned […]

A ‘go see’ for those able to make it is a coming exhibition at MIMA in Middlesbrough. It’s marketed under the less than catchy title of “Art/Chemical City” and relates to Teesside and its long links with chemical manufacturing.  MIMA says in their blurb: “Opening with a focus on the development of plastics in the […]

Oh dear. Why does history carry on repeating itself? It seems this is particularly true when it comes to Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen. Only last week I wrote of him stepping into dangerous waters of which he apparently knows little, with an ambition to become the promoter of a scheme for the Tees Valley […]

Anyone buying the Journal, Chronicle or the Teesside Gazette today is greeted by a synchronised front page, modelled on the old ‘Trainspotting’ film poster showing Boris Johnson  in the ‘rent boy’ Renton pose, along with other cabinet members being ‘sick boy’ and ‘spud’. The target? The government’s effective abandonment of the northern sections of HS2.  Good artwork […]

Amongst the great and the good at the Government’s Global Investment Summit 2021 in late October, one of the preparatory sessions to COP26, was a man in a dark flannel suit seemingly looking round for people to impress. Who was this man? The CEO of a vast multinational firm? A President or PM of a […]