East Cleveland Image Archive

A picture taken without the benefit of flash and against the internal lighting, it still shows the Gas Turbine-driven alternator and in the background those beautiful Gas Motors that used to thud out night and day! This was a most beautiful building inside and although the picture doesn’t show it very well, the whole of the back wall was covered in 1900’s instrumentation. The floor was red earthenware tiles and there was lots of Victorian/Edwardian woodwork. I used to collect water samples from the feeds that were just as you came into the building, behind the photographer (who is on the balcony), walk along the tiled floor, past these monsters and out through the door within a door within the huge doors to sample the water in the brick outside reservoir tanks every morning for about six or seven months – it was a time capsule!
(image courtesy of Reg Dunning)

Here is a picture that is familiar to me, a train of slag wagons tipping their loads at the Tarmac Roadstone Plant on Skinningrove Iron and Steel Works. One wagon is already being tipped while the others wait their turn. Reg Dunning’s father worked the Bucyrus crane that fed the crusher plant that produced roadstone, that was transported in Tarmac Roadstone lorries, which my father-in-law used to service and maintain.
(image courtesy of Reg Dunning)

This is the cutting to go with the previous  image.  As usual the Gazette writer has forgotten that without the Steel Works ”scar” there would be no villages, just a group of farms and outbuildings, and the coastal outline would have changed dramatically due to coastal erosion (Skinningrove used to tip slag over the cliff edge at Cattersty) and he wouldn’t be talking about the new Finishing Department anyway!

(image courtesy of Colin Hart)

(cutting copyright Evening Gazette)

This is an aerial view of Skinningrove works showing the new Finishing Departments nearing completion.

(image courtesy of Colin Hart)

(image copyright Evening Gazette)