The North East may have hit hard times in the last 20 years of the 20th century, but thanks to a series of regeneration projects filtering through the region, an impressive rebirth is under way.

As well as the drive to foster new industries and strengthen the economy, flagship projects for new homes, communities and public facilities are successfully lifting the spirits of North Easterners – and attracting quite a bit of interest from outside the region too.

An example of such a scheme is the recently launched £300 million “North Shore” development in Teesside. This project – unveiled in January – will transform 56 acres of riverside land at Stockton. It is expected to provide 2,500 jobs for the area and will see the construction of hundreds of new homes as well as offices, leisure facilities and hotels over its eight-year development.

The redevelopment also includes plans to expand the Durham University Stockton campus, currently just across the river at Thornaby, with the addition of residential and conference buildings and an academic research centre. It is an ambitious project that hopes to provide a “state of the art” showpiece for the area and raise the bar of design and quality for developments of this type. A dramatic cycle and pedestrian bridge that will link developments on either side of the Tees demonstrates the vision of delivering an infrastructure that provides aesthetic value, not just a practical functional value.

The organisation behind the project is Tees Valley Regeneration (TVR). It is just one of a number of bodies which have been brought together under the “Tees Valley Partnership” to breathe life and ambition into neglected sites in Teesside.

The partnership was set up in 1999 with the active involvement of key business leaders, local authorities, and other public and voluntary interests in the area. Its “Tees Valley Vision” guides the area’s physical and economic regeneration.

TVR is a unique urban regeneration company in that it works across five different local authority areas. In addition to North Shore, the group is spearheading four similar schemes including the £170 million “Central Park” project planned for Darlington and the £500 million “Middlehaven” project planned for Middlesbrough. Middlehaven will develop a redundant area of Teesside into a landscape featuring apartments, hotels, a theatre, and restaurants. The project encompasses design elements on an especially ground breaking level. A hotel in the shape of a champagne bottle and a space invader-inspired museum of digital media are just two of the headline-grabbing concepts put forward under the plans from architect Will Alsop.  The playful architecture is a form of urban branding, and he is keen to point out that even if he doesn’t get to build all that he’d like to in Middlesbrough, his designs have brought the kind of media attention and investment from developers that may not have otherwise been received by the town. 

And Teesside isn’t the only area of the North East undergoing a community-wide makeover. Ex-coalfield sites across County Durham, Tyneside and Northumberland are also benefiting from public money aimed at regeneration and provision of much-needed new homes and jobs.

East Shore village, a 500-home development of a regeneration site opened in 2003, is an example that is successfully up and running. It is located on the site of the old Vale Tempest colliery near Seaham in County Durham, a mine that as recently as 1990 employed 900 people, but which had lay derelict since its closure in 1993. It is part of English Partnerships’ National Coalfields Programme – introduced in 1996 to revive parts of England’s old coalfield communities that had been hit by job losses, contamination and dereliction in the wake of pit closures of the 1980s and 1990s.

The ambition was to make East Shore a blueprint community, blending residential and commercial properties and drawing on the area’s heritage as part of the design. The result is green open spaces laid out to fit round a mix of property types and shops, a home for the elderly and a community centre and footpaths and cycle ways, as well as public works of art commissioned locally that reflect the coal mining history of the site. Houses in East Shore sold quickly and the standard for redevelopment of industrial sites has now been set. The re-birth of the region is well and truly under way, and people are starting to sit up and take notice of a quiet, but determined, North East revolution.