When television production company Love Productions arrived on Stockton’s Tilery estate in late August 2014, their choice of location for series two of “poverty porn” documentary Benefits Street was probably more symbolic than they realised. Fifteen minutes’ walk from Kingston Road, through neighbouring Portrack and across the river into Thornaby, is the scene of Margaret Thatcher’s famous “walk in the wilderness” on the southern bank of the Tees in 1987. The iconic photographs taken that day captured for many the essence of Thatcher’s Britain: once a bustling centre of heavy industry, now a derelict post-industrial wasteland.
Thatcher visits Teesdale, September 1987. Photograph from the Evening Gazette.
The old engineering works of Head Wrightson, along with other industrial giants such as ICI and British Steel, once employed tens of thousands of workers across Stockton and Teesside, yet within the space of a generation they were gone. In Head Wrightson’s place today stands Teesdale Business Park, home to call centres and offices for the likes of Barclaycard, Churchill Insurance and Atos Healthcare, and though the concrete boulevards and riverside canals are more pleasant on the eye, the jobs there are far fewer and less secure. Taken together, Teesdale and Tilery exemplify the legacy of Britain’s transition from an industrial to a service-based economy, a violent historical rupture which transformed both the landscape and the lives of its inhabitants, many of whom were consigned to the kinds of 'low-pay, no-pay' existence charted extensively by local researchers in the decades since.
