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Area Focus: The North East
Bright Sparks and
Northern Lights
Bill Hilton heads to Teesside in the north east of England to discover some
remarkable young entrepreneurs and find out about the huge potential they
offer the SME community as suppliers, partners and customers.
T
eesside is one of those parts of civic buildings mingled with the worst of 1960s conurbation and saw the vast dirty yellow
England that is never going to win a architecture. Behind everything, it seemed, cloud that is the result of so much chemical
beauty contest. were the pipes, chimneys and cooling towers processing. Admittedly, with modern pollution
I lived up here for a while, and I vividly of the chemical industries that have sustained controls the bad air has faded and thinned in
remember the first time I ever drove along the the local economy for a century. recent years, but Teessiders retain the nick-
A66, past Stockton-on-Tees and into the I remember even more clearly the first time name – ‘Smoggies’ – that they earned in the
centre of Middlesbrough. I climbed Roseberry Topping, a sharply pointed days when it was virtually impossible to hang
It was a drizzly Sunday afternoon in Febru- hill on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors that has washing on a Middlesbrough clothesline with-
ary, and the place looked like a wasteland – become an iconic local landmark. From the out it discolouring in minutes.
scruffy, dilapidated Victorian warehouses and summit I looked down on the Teesside
32 • issue 164 Business Matters
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