In Redcar, in north-east England, the remains of the nearby Teesside Steelworks are a lasting reminder of the town’s proud past position at the heart of industrial Britain.
The facility – once one of the largest in the country – is an abandoned reminder of the days when its metal was used around the world, including for the Sydney Harbor Bridge.
As Prime Minister, Boris Johnson pledged to equate long-neglected post-industrial areas with other, more prosperous places.
But the people of Redcar and elsewhere have long memories – and faint hopes of success.
“When the steel mill collapsed, it was just horrific,” said Sandra Cottrell, 64, who has witnessed the complex’s gradual demise from her home on Church Lane Estate, a public housing complex.
“My son and everyone else worked there…[he]always just knew he worked at the steel mill, then he had to go to Manchester for work,” she said, a two-and-a-half hour drive away, she told AFP.
Cottrell said Redcar town center, where many stores have either closed or been turned into charity or discount stores, sums up its decline.
But there are tentative signs of renewal.
Work to clean up the housing development – which had earned a local reputation for crime, poverty and neglect – is progressing, funded in part by Johnson’s flagship “leveling” agenda.
“That’s what we need here. I just think we got left out a bit but they’re kind of after us now,” said Cottrell’s neighbor Cath Smith, 60.
Smith has lived on the estate since she was young and remembers his better days.
“Everyone worked,” she said of the area’s heyday in the 1970s, when state-owned British Steel employed her father and most of the other local men.
The company was privatized in 1988 and the steelworks gradually passed into the ownership of several successive companies.
Governments have since been blamed for failing to help replace the thousands of jobs lost.
“They didn’t care,” Smith added. “It’s as if we don’t exist.”
None of the neighbors were convinced places like Redcar could bounce back under Johnson’s plans.
– ‘Forgotten’ –
In Bradford, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) southwest, it’s a similar story, but with the loss of the once-mighty wool industry.
“When I was a young girl, it was just amazing,” said Judith Holmes, 69, near the 19th-century Venetian Gothic-style town hall and distinctive bell tower that dominates the city center.
“Trade, wool… all shops were open. It was blooming… it was humming, it was fabulous, absolutely fabulous.
“But unfortunately it seems to have only gone downhill in recent years.”
The city – the sixth largest in England, with one of the youngest populations in Europe and set to be Britain’s ‘City of Culture’ in 2025 – also suffers from some of its most persistent problems of deprivation and unemployment.
“I think Bradford has definitely been forgotten,” said Holmes, echoing her contemporaries in Redcar.
“We made a lot of promises and it never happened.
“It’s going to cost a lot to bring it back. I think they could do it, but they have to start now instead of saying maybe, and they’re investing money here and there.”
A former Royal Mail postal worker in what used to be the center of the city, Holmes now cleans an office twice a week to make ends meet.
Holmes is skeptical that Johnson and the government really understand the daily struggles of those affected by the city’s decline.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said of the promises of transformation now jeopardized by Johnson’s imminent departure.
“I might not see it at my age. But I hope it comes for everyone else, for my grandchildren. Hopefully it will be a brighter future for them.”
