It took less than 18 days from start to finish. From a planning application that led to a local grassroots campaign successfully gaining a spot listing through Historic England, to the newly appointed secretary of state de-listing the structure, and the demolition contractors blowing up the Dorman Long coal tower in the dead of night.

I’m old enough to remember the heady days of late 2018, when the South Tees Development Corporation (STDC), now rebranded ‘Teesworks’, published a masterplan to redevelop 4,500 acres of landscape along the South Bank and the coast. Under the leadership of Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen, the plan aimed to bring 20,000 jobs to the site as part of a comprehensive redevelopment. Knitted within, among the acknowledgements of the site’s importance in over 100 years of steel and petrochemical manufacturing, the plan ‘supported the retention of iconic structures and major artefacts within the overall cultural, community, and open space strategy’. The two key structures specifically highlighted were the Redcar Blast Furnace and Dorman Long Tower.

The first to come under the spotlight was Redcar Blast Furnace. A distinctive towering form made up of an assemblage of conveyors and outbuildings feeding into a tall furnace tower strapped with metal supports, it forms the prominent backdrop to the walk from South Gare to the seaside town of Redcar. As a child I can remember walks along the beach and the bellows of steam hovering low over the North Sea.

Sensing its vulnerability, a local campaign group formed. It was a grassroots campaign, led by former steel workers, social scientists, industrial historians, and a local politician calling for the blast furnace to be saved for future generations. The group eventually pressured the mayor (whose ‘plan’ had proposed keeping the blast furnace) into assembling a Heritage Task Force (HTF) ‘to capture and celebrate the unique history’ as part of the Teesworks site.

The HTF, formed in late 2020, was not a collection of Teesside’s most qualified heritage advisors. It was headed up by Jacob Young, the Conservative MP for Redcar, who sat alongside a panel of three members whose expertise included haulage (one being a director of Eddie Stobart Logistics who coincidentally had recently been gifted a 25 percent share of the publicly owned Durham Tees Valley airport by the Mayor). Another panellist was credited with writing the ‘definitive book’ on parmos, and the final member was a former manager at SSI, the Thai steel firm that acquired the steel production site in 2011.

For anyone who has ever been involved with a heritage campaign, the following months included the usual performative acts. A light-touch, technical report was commissioned to explore a throwaway idea that it could be reimagined as a visitor centre. The report concluded that to keep the blast furnace, £25 million of investment would be required. And while deeply regretful, they had absolutely no other choice but to accept the findings and ask Whitehall for a modest £150 million to oversee the wider demolition works across the Teesworks site. Demolition of the structure is ongoing.

In the meantime, attention turned to the Dorman Long Tower: a prominent 55-metre tall functional structure built in the 1950s as a coal bunker to supply a coking plant as part of the steel production on Teesside.

On 3 September, a prior notice of demolition was submitted for the tower. Heritage activists mobilised a campaign and applied for spot listing to protect it. Historic England awarded it Grade II, and described it as ‘a deliberate monumental architectural statement of confidence by a newly denationalised Dorman Long… [and] clearly of architectural and historic special interest’. The spot listing came late on the Friday afternoon, prior to the planned demolition. A quick government reshuffle then took place over the weekend, and on Monday morning, the new secretary of state for the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS), Nadine Dorries, sometime just after her breakfast, ruled to overturn the listing. Less than five days later the mayor’s team pushed the button to demolish the tower by controlled explosion.

The confidence of the tower and its swift and sudden loss marks a firm blow for the built legacy of the post-war era across the North East. Teesside’s prominence as a manufacturing powerhouse was symbolised in the dramatic structures of the former steelworks, almost all of which has now been razed to the ground. This is in the context of the failed listing of Ahrends Burton and Koralek’s superlative Redcar Library—a hymn to steel—again consigned to the scrapheap by a one-term Liberal Democrat leader on the grounds of a technical report defining the cost of refurbishment as prohibitively expensive.

Others have thankfully survived the cull. The pioneering agora of Billingham Forum, by Middlesbrough practice Elder Lester and Partners, a visionary civic building that gathers ice rink, swimming pool, endless sports facilities, library, bars, a theatre, and club under one roof—a first of its kind in Europe—was saved from demolition. The recent refurbishment though shows little confidence or regard for the original building, with bright blue and yellow panels cladding over the original tiled exterior and a cash-strapped council leaving many of the services closed.

These recent decisions have had little, if anything, to do with the buildings themselves. As Teesside mayor, Ben Houchen has stated that those fighting to retain these buildings for their role as part of the region’s heritage want this in place of the jobs that will be created by their removal. Heritage or jobs – the two are apparently incompatible, the decision binary.

The only building that will now be left standing on the vast Teesworks site is the aptly named Steel House, a bullish, hexagonal building with prison-like windows which opened in 1978, designed by Middlesbrough architects Middleton, Fletcher and Partners. While retaining and refurbishing buildings like this is welcome, it’s a not a structure that conjures any specific reference to the industrial history of the site. It used to house the executives and managerial staff of the British Steel Corporation (and later SSI). After its makeover it will be the central office for the Teesworks executives and house a room featuring a multimedia exhibition about the history of the steelworks.

Described by Teesworks as an ‘iconic’ structure, a sensitive refurbishment has begun to over-clad the brickwork with gaudy, shiny perforated metal, lit up like the Vegas strip – a statement that has nothing to do with sensitivity to regional heritage, and everything to do with the image of the mayor and the Teesworks brand.

Houchen has recently proclaimed that he would like ‘to send a message to those that think trying to stop these developments is the right thing to do’. According to him, ‘our heritage does not lie in a rotting coal bunker, our heritage lies in the people that built this great region. It lies in the structures that stand tall across the world, from the Shard to Sydney Harbour Bridge and One World Trade Centre.’

The only problem here is that the kids of Grangetown and Park End don’t often get the privilege to fly around the world to learn about their local history. Nor do they get invited for drinks at the Shard, and nor could they afford the £25 admission fee to the viewing platform. None of these celebrity structures are in Teesside. Indeed, in the past 30 years, almost nothing has been built here that has any potential to be listed in the future, perhaps aside from Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.

The clearance of the Teesworks was solely about de-risking the site: creating a blank canvas for potential investors to install whatever they need for whatever future they envisage. It is unmistakably commercial, designed solely to maximise the profit from the sale of the surrounding land for a commercial development – it’s an agenda shaped without people. It’s also a decision that ran against the recommendation of the government’s expert advisors, Historic England, that listed the site (and still stands by its listing). The hasty, cavalier path towards demolition last week was motivated by one risk in particular – the risk of disruption by heritage activists calling for a say in the future of this building, a few locals staking a claim to both the past and future of this area.

Almost certainly the worst to come out the past fortnight has been MP Jacob Young, chair of the Heritage Task Force, who spectacularly nailed his colours to the mast to campaign to save the Dorman Long Tower, raised a petition, featured in endless local press opportunities (each with its own unique PPE hardhat and jacket moment). Yet he spent the final week deleting his internet records from existence, so he could sit comfortably behind the technical report. In the days running up to the demolition, Young again took to social media to announce that he would ‘salvage what is possible from the original DORMAN LONG lettering on the side of the tower […] to be used close to the site’. And as the tower came down, the distinctive logo came crumbling too, along with Young’s ability as local MP to achieve even the smallest of acts.

This scorched earth exercise and the way in which it was executed—swiftly and without remorse—leaves Teesside eviscerated of its past. Doubling down in the days after the scramble to quickly remove the structure and under the headline ‘demolishing to deliver jobs’, the Mayor claimed residents and grassroots campaign wanted to ‘see the area fail’ by saving the tower. In many ways, he has done an exceptional job at stultifying the imagination of a local electorate with the perpetual cycle of the promise of jobs or the Tees Valley Airport, a pet project which is currently subsidising every passenger it handles by £920.

For all the confidence exuded and every press release benchmarked by a large number of jobs and millions of pounds of investment, the vision being created is a cheap one. The tower’s likely replacement with disposable architecture speaks of a lack of confidence, commitment, and certainty in those  commissioning it and for the future ahead. For all the hubris of the Mayor, Teesside is a region operating on a wing and a prayer. This ruthless evisceration of the region’s history to make way for the big sheds of the future is yet another part of this cycle.