Two hundred years ago, the founders of the Stockton & Darlington Railway envisaged a connection between the two towns. They didn’t mean it literally, but 21st Century property developers seem to be taking them at their word.
Suburban Sprawl
So, for those who haven’t been paying close attention to the property market, something strange is happening to the distance between Stockton and Darlington. It’s shrinking. The town centres remain 9.5 miles apart, obviously. But the green space in between is changing colour before our eyes. The map below shows current developments:
About the map
So first of all, an explanation of some of the features on the map. The route of the Darlington Northern Link Road is indicative only, and is subject to planning permission, and a TVCA funding decision. Not all developments are shown, because the purpose of the map is to focus on the land between Stockton and Darlington. For example, two garden villages are under construction to the north west of Darlington at Burtree, and at West Park. Then, there’s a proposal for 600 houses at Yarm. This has recently been refused planning permission, but the developers, Taylor Wimpey, are almost certain to appeal this decision, and there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to overturn it, as they recently did with a similar application in Redcar.
Teesside Airport
The map shows development in the form of the Airport Business Park, and a new road, Mynarski Way, that connects it to the A67. At the airport itself, a 100 metre strip of hedgerow has just been removed to allow the construction of five hangars in a new Aviation Village being built west of the airport. Further hangars are under construction to the east of the airport terminal.
How it started
Darlington’s modern expansion began with the completion of the town’s southern bypass in 1985. That’s effectively the eastern boundary of the town these days, more than two miles from High Row. Meanwhile, Stockton’s latest territorial expansion has come in the shape of Hartburn Grange and Harebell Meadows on the edge of suburban Bishopsgarth and Hartburn. Some 969 new houses have been completed, or are under construction, taking Stockton’s boundary up to Yarm Back Lane. This road, and the Darlington southern bypass, are 5.5 miles apart.
Smaller projects
There are several small-scale housing proposals popping up between Stockton and Darlington. I’ve included two of these, in Sadberge and Redmarshall on the above map.
Middleton St George
Middleton St George has quadrupled in size in twenty years, and is becoming a ‘scarily busy town’, with 326 new houses under construction. But if the residents of Middleton think that they’ve got it bad, wait until they hear about plans for the 4,500 house Skerningham Garden Village in Darlington, and the Admiralty Ecology Site, an 1,800 house scheme planned for Urlay Nook, to the west of Eaglescliffe. Yes, there’s really a place called Urlay Nook. I’m going to discuss Skerningham Garden Village in a future article. But, for now, the focus is on the Admiralty Ecology Site.
In his Elementis
In December 2025, I reported on Michael Flacks’s plans for the site of the former Elementis factory. You can read that article here. I’ll take this opportunity for a quick run through a couple of CVs. Florida-based British businessman Flacks has a personal wealth of £1.7bn. His company “Flacks Group” specializes in “distressed assets”. Flacks’s “Senior Advisor, UK environmental opportunities” is Phil Forster, CEO of nearby Teesside Airport, who’s also a director of Eaglescliffe Land Development Ltd. Michael Flacks has treated Forster to a Monaco Grand Prix freebie. Phil Forster has also flown to Florida on a private jet owned by an aviation company based at Teesside Airport. In December 2025, Phil Forster boasted about the airport’s 2024/25 profits, but a subsequent revelation by the TVCA’s finance chief confirmed that the airport, in fact, made a loss that year.
You kept that quiet
At the time that I wrote my story, Flack hadn’t applied for planning permission for what was to become the Admiralty Ecology Site. That’s just changed, and the ambitions of the Eaglescliffe Land Development Ltd are far greater than first thought. On 16 January 2026, Michael Flacks’s company submitted a request for a ‘screening opinion’ to the local planning authority, Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council. This request, in respect of a proposed residential-led mixed use development, was the first stage on the route to an application for planning permission. Stockton Council opened a consultation on the request, but didn’t tell anyone about it. Egglescliffe And Eaglescliffe Parish should have been informed, but it wasn’t.
Delegated decision
Unsurprisingly, the consultation period ended on 13 February with zero public comments. The scoping opinion, that an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) would be required, was issued on 27 February. This was a delegated decision made by the planning officer, and Stockton’s planning committee didn’t need to be consulted. No further public comments are permitted unless and until planning information is sought. The local media didn’t pick up on the story until Local Democracy reporter Gareth Lightfoot ran an article in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 13 March.
Ecology Schmecology
Michael Flacks’s Eaglescliffe Land Company says that it’s planning the “creation of mixed-use spaces, residential and commercial areas, revitalization of green space and delivering of renewable energy projects suitable for the 21st century”. In an interview with the Northern Echo on 12 March 2024, Flack spoke of plans for wind and battery storage. Hence the emphasis on “ecology”. But, inexplicably, neither of these appears on the new site plan. Michael Flacks didn’t mention housing once during his interview with the Northern Echo. But suddenly he wants to build 1,800 houses. It’s time to drop the “ecology” name tag, and call it what it is. A housing estate. And a very large housing estate, at that. Here’s the “Indicative Masterplan” of the proposed housing estate:
It’s complicated
- I’ve simplified the plan from the original document, which is almost unreadable via either a phone or a desktop computer. The original can be found here for reference. Even, so it’s a complicated picture. Here are the key features:
- The former Elementis factory site, at the bottom left of the map, isn’t scheduled for development, probably due to legacy pollution issues. There are several other areas that won’t be developed too. There are several former landfill sites, including the site of a quarry, within the Admiralty Ecology Site. Only 269 of the available 480 acres are to be developed. Michael Flacks’s ‘distressed assets’ speciality should come in useful here, In particular, his company’s claim to ‘assume and ring-fence long-tail liabilities’.
- 1,425 “Market and Affordable” houses are planned, but developers have a track record of failing to deliver affordable homes once they have received planning permission. Let’s hope it’s different this time.
- 165 “Executive” houses are also planned. So, 1,590 houses in the Indicative Masterplan, although Flacks states that 1,800 are planned. So, 210 houses aren’t accounted for. There must be an error in the company’s planning documents. No doubt this will be rectified if and when a full planning application is made.
- Coatham Gardens is an existing, ongoing development, and isn’t part of the Admiralty Ecology Site.
Another garden village?
So, the housing estate will host the obligatory executive houses. It’s got a strong hint of the “garden village” about it, although that label has been carefully avoided. This photo looks north across the site. The trees in the background will be razed to provide the executive houses. The houses in the foreground are part of the unrelated ‘Coatham Gardens’ development.
A gated community
An internal road, Loverose Lane, runs across the ecology site from south west to north east. This is the blocked southern entrance to the lane, complete with the developers’ company sign. One of the planned new roads within the new housing estate will occupy the footprint of Loverose Lane.
Horsing about
Illegal horse grazing is an issue at the eastern end of Loverose Lane. You need to watch your step in this salubrious neighbourhood.
Public relations
In addition to the 1,800 houses, there’ll be some small parks, assisted living and a neighbourhood centre, because Michael Flacks cares.
Undevelopable Land
Large swathes of brownfield land are set aside for “commercial/employment”. What’s the point of this? One of Teesside’s largest industrial estates can be found just the other side of Durham Lane, and there’s loads of vacant land available. Flacks’s site also contains several “undeveloped” zones. They may be undevelopable. A history of this site gives clues as to why just only over half of it is being given over to housing. It’s a long history.
The Stockton & Darlington Railway
The land story begins with the Stockton & Darlington Railway. In 1833, just eight years after the founding of the railway in 1825, the Eaglescliffe Chemical Co decided to make use of the new transport connection to set up a factory to make sulphuric acid. The acid was initially used to make fertiliser, but the siting of the factory proved to be fortuitous. Teesside’s steel industry was about to boom, and it needed lots of sulphuric acid to finish steel products. The Urlay Nook site soon branched out into chromium manufacture, because the steel industry needed a lot of chrome too; Chromium eventually became the sole product, and British Chrome & Chemicals (BCC) became one of the UK’s largest suppliers.
Job satisfaction
BCC wasn’t a great place to work; process workers at the plant could pass a handkerchief up one nostril and out of the other because the fumes from the chrome-making process had rotted away their nasal septums. The company subsequently changed its name to the more neutral sounding Elementis. The plant closed in 2013 but 13 years on, the site requires ongoing management of legacy contamination. The premises are guarded by security 24/7. Here’s a photo of the site in March 2026.
Spoil heap
An aerial photo of the chrome plant shows a vast spoil heap immediately west of the factory. The spoil heap has since been removed, and the land concerned doesn’t form part of the planned ecology site.
I see no ships
Shiver me timbers, the Admiralty Ecology Site is a rum name for a land-locked development. It’s so named because the ecology site partially occupies the envelope of a former Royal Navy Supply Depot (RNSD), known locally as “the depot.” But the site actually began life as a Royal Air Force base in 1941, with a runway to back up those at nearby RAF Thornaby. After the Second World War, unserviceable aircraft were dismantled here. This may explain one of the pollution hazards at Urlay Nook, of which more later. The Royal Navy took over in 1948, and operated the depot until closure in 1996.
The site today
The proposed development includes two large “commercial/employment” zones, consisting of the former Witham Hall Quarry and the Elementis site. The quarry is rumoured to have been used as a scrap dump by the RAF. Stockton Borough Council’s Contaminated Land Inspection Strategy 2019-2024 mentions two issues:
- “Large scale remediation of the site (approx. 900 residential properties) as land is affected by Kerosene, asbestos and radiological contamination” Kerosene, also known as aviation fuel, could be linked to the dismantling of RAF aircraft.
- “Former Elementis Site Identification of Chromium VI being discharged into the watercourse. Joint work undertaken with the Environment Agency and landowners to remediate the land”. Chromium VI is a human carcinogen. This may be a reference to an incident where chromium salts leached into local waterways in 2013. The source of the pollution was thought to be one of the landfill sites (see below) not the Elementis factory itself, which was still open at the time of the incident.
Coatham Gardens
At the neighbouring Coatham Gardens development, the unique selling point is the high voltage transmission line, complete with pylons, which slices through the housing estate. Properties are set well back from the cables, to avoid bad hair days.
Traffic issues
The north end of the site is about 400 metres from the Elton intersection of the A66. If the ecology site gets the go ahead, this will add significantly to congestion at this intersection. Traffic is already increasing here on a daily basis, as almost 1,000 new homes in Hartburn and Bishopsgarth become occupied. If Skerningham Garden Village ever gets built, this section of the A66 is in for a world of pain. At the other end of Durham Lane, congestion at the level crossing, already an issue, is sure to get a lot worse if all of these houses are built.
More road misery
Gridlock at the A67 junction will get worse. This is already a major choke point, with queues backing for hundreds of metres along Durham Lane and Urlay Nook Road in both directions.during the morning and evening peaks. The situation will deteriorate further when vehicles start gaining access to the new car park at Eaglescliffe railway station from Durham Lane.
So, what happens now?
Residents of Eaglescliffe, Egglescliffe, Urlay Nook and Yarm will need to keep an eye out for notices of planning applications popping through their letterbox sometime during 2026. The key word is probably “objection”.
Thanks to James Waterson for providing additional research for this article
