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Opening up the Ironopolis Archives

No community is more identified with a single industry than Middlesbrough is with iron and steel and its history is worth preserving for future generations, writes Huw Richards.

It was the discovery of local iron deposits on the Cleveland Hills along with new techniques to produce steel in the 1870s that turned Middlesbrough into the last of the great Victorian boom towns – growing from a population of 25 in 1800 to a few thousand mid-century to close to six figures when the Queen died in 1901. In the 19th century Middlesbrough was known as ‘Ironopolis’ and by the 20th century the town and companies like Dorman Long became famed for building steel structures like the Tyne, Sydney Harbour and Auckland Bridges. In 1929 this single district was producing around one fifth of Britain’s national steel output. An entire suburb, Dormanstown in Redcar, was built out of steel.

History has left that world behind, but it remains the decisive element in how Middlesbrough emerged and what it is like today. And much of that story is to be found in a giant archive in the keeping of the º£½ÇÖ±²¥ Archives which is being opened up with the help of University of º£½ÇÖ±²¥ academics Joan Heggie and Barry Doyle. The British Steel Archive was gifted to º£½ÇÖ±²¥ Archives in the 1990s by the former British Steel Corporation (BSC). It contains records dating from long before the formation of BSC in 1967 to the heyday of Dorman Long, the private company which came to dominate locally, and others like Bell Brothers, Bolchow and Vaughan and Cargo Fleet Iron and Steel Company.

The sheer size is daunting. Dr Heggie, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences & Law, says, ‘There are about 600 linear feet of shelving and once everything has been taken out, classified, repackaged and cleaned it will take up around twice that’.

This is much more than a dry commercial archive. There are lease and partnership agreements and a wealth of material illustrating every aspect of the companies and their workers. Dr Heggie says, ‘There are 20,000 pictures, 80 albums of photographs, 100 cinefilms, boxes of print blocks for catalogues, maps, plans and 16,000 engineering drawings, including the original blueprints for the Sydney Harbour Bridge’.

Following a University-funded feasibility study, she and Dr Doyle have put together a programme for opening up the archive to the public, preserving, conserving and cataloguing it.

The whole project will cost around £1.5m. Corus, the successor to BSC, and Community, the union of the iron and steel industries, have each donated £60,000 and Dr Heggie hopes further funding will be raised from various grant-giving sources. If this is successful she hopes that the nine-strong team she envisages – incorporating conservationists, archivists, a micrographic technician and two learning and access officers – could start work this autumn.

‘Community involvement will be central to the cataloguing process’, says Dr Heggie. ‘We have thousands of photographs and we want to know who is in them, what they are showing and when and where they were taken. We’ll be looking for former steelworkers, going into workingmen’s clubs and asking the pension funds to send out fliers asking people to get involved. It will enhance the cataloguing process. If 10 or 12 people in a position to know reckon that a picture is of the North Side of the Clarence Works, we will be pretty sure that is what it is.’

They will also want to record memories of Middlesbrough as a steel town, using those oral histories to teach school pupils about the community where they now live. Regular temporary exhibitions will be used to raise awareness. Dr Heggie says, ‘There is such a story to be told and a sense of identity to be built on the pride people can take in their local heritage’.

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