Teesworks, at 4,500 acres, is the largest brownfield site in Europe, and it’s going to bring 20,000 jobs. You can’t avoid this statement. It’s been in the news almost every day for five years. We’ve had five years of questionable news about Teesworks from Ben Houchen, the TVCA media operation, and numerous journalists.
If you repeat it often enough …
The claims appear on the home pages of all of their sites, and they’re repeated ad infinitum in press releases spoon fed to the local Teesside media by the TVCA press office. The PR exercise is so insidious and pervasive that nobody questions the narrative anymore. Did I say nobody? Not quite. There are still a few of us asking questions, so let’s run through the greatest hits:
The largest brownfield site in Europe?
So Teesworks is the largest brownfield site in Europe? You won’t be surprised to discover that Teesworks isn’t the only one to make this boast. The Rolfe Street development in Birmingham uses identical language. So does this one in Bristol and how about London’s Docklands and its 8.5 square miles? That’s 5440 acres and 120,000 jobs. Real jobs by the way, that involve actual people making a living. As opposed to the 20,000 jobs that have been promised by Houchen in Teesside for nearly eight years. At the time of writing, not one permanent manufacturing job has come to fruition at Teesworks. The 20,000 jobs are in the ‘pipeline’, where most of them will probably remain forever.
So, about those 4,500 acres …
The second major surprise is that Teesworks doesn’t possess 4,500 acres of land, or anywhere near it. The correct total is 2,400 acres. So, how does Houchen get away with his claims that it’s nearly twice as big as it is? It’s quite simple really. He persistently conflates Teesworks with the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC) zone, and nobody ever picks him up on it. His staffers do it too. Here’s the STDC COO John Barnes on LinkedIn, stating that he’s responsible for a 4,500 acre brownfield site. He isn’t:
What is the STDC zone?
The STDC was created in 2017 in an attempt to revive economic prospects in an area devastated by the closure of Redcar steelworks two years earlier. The STDC zone runs to 4,500 acres (1,800 hectares), but it’s no more than a line on the map. No single entity owns the land within it. In fact, the 4,500 acre zone contains such assets as Tees Dock. Keen fact-checkers will notice that this isn’t even land. Maps of the STDC zone and Teesworks are shown below so that you can make a comparison.
The ‘developable’ land conundrum
The measure of land that is ‘developable’ is a crucial metric for Teesworks. This is because it lets potential investors know how much land is ‘shovel-ready’ for potential building projects. Unfortunately Teesworks is inconsistent about providing this information. For example, its website claims that 1,630 acres of the 2,402 acre estate is developable. But, according to the STDC’s Business Rates analysis shown below, it’s actually 1,273 acres:
Numberwang
Houchen’s publicity would have us believe that most of the 1,630 developable acres have been or are about to be developed. This is far from the case. On 20 December 2024, a report to the TVCA Cabinet claimed that 612 acres had been remediated as of June 2024. The report doesn’t say which sites these were and it’s impossible to verify this claim. Houchen’s own Facebook post on 31 December said that the correct total was 455:
However, when the STDC and Teesworks were asked to supply this number to the Tees Valley Review at the end of 2023, it stated that 450 acres had been remediated or was ‘in remediation’. Leaving aside these weasel words, there doesn’t seem to have been much progress in the past year. Houchen claims that Teesworks has only remediated five acres of land in this time. I’ve linked to the review in ‘Further Reading’ below.
We demand a recount
So, we appear to have gone backwards. I wasn’t sure about the TVCA’s statistics, so I raised a question with the TVCA Cabinet to find out how much land has been remediated at the various Teesworks zones. They haven’t got back to me yet, disappointingly. In the meantime, let’s try to break this down. We’ll start with land that we know has been developed in Teesworks. It’s not a difficult calculation, because there are only two sites.
My brain hurts
The first of these is the South Bank complex, which is 508 acres. The other one is the Net Zero Teesside site at the former Redcar steelworks, and that’s 150 acres, an overall total of 658 acres of remediated land. Maths fans will have twigged that this is neither the 612 acres nor the 455 acres that Teesworks mentioned above. It’s important to get the details right when you are running the biggest brownfield site in Europe. Which Teesworks is, if you disregard the ones that are larger.
So, what is land remediation?
This isn’t a simple question to answer. The 2,600 acre Teesworks estate consists almost exclusively of former iron and steel works, but the land that Teesworks acquired is complex, and varies widely from site to site. In this excellent piece of research, Simon Gibbon argues that Teesworks isn’t remediating any land at all. Instead, it is burying contaminated land, and storing problems up for the future. On a recent tour of Teesworks, their spokesman Neil Young confirmed that the site isn’t being excavated to the commonly used industry standards. Depending on which industries decide to relocate to Teesworks in the future, some infilled material will need to be temporarily lifted so that another metre depth of earth can be removed. This would risk unearthing previously sealed contaminated material.
Teesside’s waste problem
We’ll assume, then, that 1,630 acres of Teesworks’ land are developable. This means that 772 aren’t. This 772 acres consists of numerous slag heaps and landfill sites scattered throughout the estate, alongside critical infrastructure such as roads and waterways.
Blast furnace slag
The former Cleveland Iron Works at Dorman Point began with the construction of blast furnaces as early as 1850. Teesside soon became the ironmaking capital of the world. Cleveland ironstone was only 30% pure and the blast furnaces generated enormous amounts of waste. Blast furnace slag had little resale value at this time and waste from the Cleveland ironworks was dumped on the neighbouring South Bank site in almost unimaginable quantities. Some of it is still there within the Teesworks estate, and could date back 175 years.
Slag bricks and slag wool
As technology improved, new uses were found for the slag. Darlington industrialist Joseph Woodward invented a method of making bricks from slag. Scoria bricks were patented in 1873, and a Scoria brick factory was built in South Bank. The bricks were exported all over the world. Slag could also be spun into fibre to make an insulating material known as slag wool. Slag wool factories opened in South Bank and Redcar. But, despite all of the recycling, surplus slag continued to be dumped in large quantities.
The clean up begins
During the early 1950s, much of the slag at South Bank was removed to make way for the new coke ovens and ancillary buildings. Towards the former Cargo Fleet works in the west, it wasn’t recovered until the early 1970s, when it became economically viable to recover blast furnace slag for use in the construction industry. But some slag remains in the area east of the former Smith’s Dock, as can be seen in the photo below:
On the other side of the site, behind the new SeAH factory, large deposits of blast furnace slag have never been recovered due to contamination. They are still there in the form of High Tip, which contains four million cubic metres of waste. The land at High Tip won’t be developable for some considerable time. Next door, Highfield Environmental operates the ‘Impetus’ tip, first opened by ICI in the 1950s. It still accepts both hazardous and non-hazardous waste and causes a dust nuisance to surrounding properties.
South Lackenby Effluent Management System (SLEMS)
The third tip in a row is SLEMS. From the late 1950s until 2015, an aqueous suspension of BOS oxide sludge and blast-furnace waste (slurry) was pumped via a pipeline from the Lackenby BOS Plant into settlement ponds here. Large quantities of refractory bricks were also dumped at SLEMS. BOS oxide sludge is considered a hazardous material. Teesworks intends to remove the waste from SLEMS and transport it to High Tip, which already contains contaminated waste. It would then be able to remediate the SLEMS site for future development. But this transfer has been put on hold while Teesworks seeks advice from HMRC about whether such a transfer of waste would be subject to Landfill Tax.
Metals Recovery Area
The fourth tip in the area is the Metals Recovery Area, which at one stage recycled metals from the SLEMS site. In the autumn of 2022, 71,000m³ of toxic sludge was dredged from the river Tees and dumped here. It remains on site. This land isn’t developable right now. The Materials Processing Institute (MPI) in Grangetown has produced an ‘activity data’ survey of all of the above sites. It is well worth a look, and can be found in ‘Further Reading’ below.
In Part Two of ‘The largest brownfield site in Europe’ I’ll review the key role played by Joint Venture partners Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney in the development of Teesworks.
In Part Three I’ll analyse the 11 Teesworks zones, detailing what has happened there in the past, the current state of play, and the future plans for the zones. The plans are hopelessly unrealistic, obviously.
Thanks to James Waterson for contributing to this article
Further Reading:
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