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Planning Teesside

A Jaguar driving reporter on a road to nowhere discovers that planning in 70s Teesside arouses strong emotions from locals and politicians alike.

Documentary 1970 20 mins

From the collection of:

Logo for North East Film Archive

Overview

Is this β€œa nightmare future of science fiction horror”? With a sound track of Hammond Organ funk, local government politicians, Maurice Sutherland and Tim Thornton, trade strong words over planning in the 2 year old Teesside. Meanwhile, on the streets of the new county borough towns of Middlesbrough, Stockton and Billingham, the β€œgrumbling and grousing” of local residents is heard in a series of vox pops.

β€œThe future is bound up with the storage tanks, the network of pipes and the water coolers of petro-chemical manufacture.” From Max Locke’s 1944 Middlesbrough Survey to a vision for the heavily polluted industrial area set out in the 1965 Teesside Survey and Plan, an increasing array of national and local government policies tried to influence the development of Teesside. This Tyne Tees TV feature (with titles and credits missing), made 4 years before architect John Poulson was jailed for corruption, discovers optimism and cynicism in equal doses over planning for the future. As further chemical industries are due to open on the estuarine mud flats of Seal Sands, no one seems too worried about pollution.