Tees Heritage Park

 

View in Tees Heritage Park

The Tees Heritage Park stretches from Yarm to Stockton in the Tees Valley, taking in all of the open land along the River Tees including the Leven Valley and Bassleton Beck. For the first time, this attractive stretch of green space in the heart of Tees Valley now has a clear identity and formal planning designation so that it can be promoted as a single ‘park’. Created through a partnership between Friends of Tees Heritage Park, Groundwork North East, Environment Agency, the Canal & River Trust, Natural England, Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council and Tees Valley Wildlife Trust, the park officially opened in September 2012 with the completion of the first phase of the project.

Originally a thriving rural community based around the busy market towns and ports of Yarm and Stockton, the character and economy of the lower Tees Valley was transformed by the iron, steel and chemical industries. But despite this transformation, the River Tees remained the common thread around which the communities grew and thrived, and it was only with the demise of riverbased industry that it lost its unifying power and communities turned their back on the river.

People started to see the river corridor as an unpleasant place and this only got worse as it became a dumping ground for rubbish. Land was developed on a piecemeal basis with limited interaction between sites under different ownership and footpaths were created with little consideration given to wider connectivity. Even more recent developments were built with their back to the river, further segregating communities from this valuable environmental asset. Some of these communities are classified among the worst performing areas on the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which provides a relative measure of deprivation between areas in England in terms of factors such as income, employment, health, education, housing and crime.

Website: Tees Heritage Park

A full case study is available here