Area fortunes pull apart: Southside and West-City

There is no better illustration of the contrasts of the 1990s than the stories of Southside, the cluster of small towns in heavily industrialised Teesside, and West-City, the densely flatted inner London neighbourhood close to the City.

Southside had traditionally been poor, but in the 1950s and 1960s it was enjoying a post-war boom. We were told that Borough View’s main shopping street had about 360 shops, including branches of national retailers, and that jobs were readily available in the steel and chemical industries. One former resident described how people could expect to finish one job and walk into another on the same day, such was the demand for labour. All of this collapsed in the next two decades. Half the total jobs, and nearly two thirds of male full-time jobs, disappeared. People moved away, undermining the basis for shops and services, while the building of a new bypass cut off Borough View’s town centre and effectively killed it off as a commercial area.

But it was in the 1990s that the area reached a critical point. Jobs continued to be lost throughout the decade, as ICI and British Steel underwent further rationalisation. The location of the area and its heavily industrialised past and contaminated land gave it no relative advantages for inward investors. Although incentives were offered for inward investment, similar opportunities were also available throughout the sub-region. New developments tended to locate in the North Tees rather than the South Tees area. The entire sub-region was doing badly compared to the national picture, but Southside was even worse off than its local neighbours.

The calamitous population losses also continued. Southside’s population diminished by an estimated 12% between 1991 and 1998, Borough View’s by 23%. By the mid-1990s it was estimated that the town had only about 7,000 people, about a third of its post-war population. Empty homes were appearing in large numbers on the main council estate, which initially had about 550 homes, and to a lesser extent in an area of pre-1919 terraced properties (about 1,200 homes), which were mostly privately owned. The nearby town, Furnace Walk, also had large numbers of empty homes.