Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough was born from iron and grew with steel. In 1801, it was a farmhouse; by 1901, it was a city of 100,000 built on the discovery of ironstone in the Cleveland Hills. The transformation was so rapid that Gladstone called it 'the infant Hercules'—a town that grew from nothing to industrial giant in a single generation.

Steel became the city's identity. Dorman Long & Co. produced the steel for Sydney Harbour Bridge; the same works supplied the Forth Bridge and London's Tyne Bridge. At peak production, the Teesside steelworks employed tens of thousands. ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) built its empire nearby at Wilton, Billingham, and Seal Sands—at one point the largest chemical company in the world.

Ridley Scott, who grew up in nearby Hartlepool, based Blade Runner's opening shot on walking past the ICI plant at Wilton at night: the flames, the cooling towers, the industrial sublime. That landscape is largely gone now.

The collapse came in stages. Steel production shrank as British Steel privatized and consolidated. ICI disintegrated in the 1990s, selling off divisions. Energy prices—£66 per megawatt-hour for UK steel versus £43 in France—made the remaining operations uncompetitive. The government's 2025 Industrial Strategy promises £2.5 billion for steel and reduced energy levies from 2027.

By 2026, the Teesside process cluster—35,000 direct jobs producing 50% of UK petrochemicals—will test whether government intervention can reverse four decades of decline.