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Mysteries of the Southside

By Friends of Teesside International Airport

Saturday 1st July / Thursday 20th July

With the Southside starting to gain momentum after several false starts and rehashes of what is essentially the original 1995 plan (with staff and enthusiasts alike believing it wouldn't happen in their lifetime!) there were concerns that the southside might be blanket-flattened, as opposed to the various WWII-era buildings, Lancaster pans etc being allowed to remain in areas where they naturally fall around the planned infrastructure. With this in mind, and with the site now "landside" and not requiring security processing to access, the Friends of Teesside International Airport hosted two separate tours over there for our members for what may be (but hopefully isn't) one last look.

A few eyebrows were raised ("there's nothing left over there but rubble and wasteland") but it turned out to be one of the highest demand visits the Friends group have embarked upon and certainly when we got over there we all got what we were looking for from the visits.

The land remains owned by the airport, but is under the management of the construction company GMI, and they initially blocked our planned visit on the grounds of health and safety, and this turned out to be well justified as the terrain is unforgiving, but history and heritage is far more important and sometimes you just have to turn your head. Luckily, the Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen saw our cancellation newsletter and stepped in, personally requesting that the visit went ahead, to which we extend our gratitude.

Under the previous local authority ownership, the whole area was well kept, with no undergrowth and any hard surfaces such as the cross-runways (one of which was still active at the time) and bomber "frying pans" etc regularly maintained. Under Peel, where costs had to be more justified, this was stopped and some buildings, including the "A Sheds" bomb storage units were demolished, including a building which was the only one of its kind and under some kind of protection, when a JCB just happened to 'accidentally' reverse into it...! The cross-runway was also closed around 2004. Despite this, there remained a level of care and maintenance throughout the Peel tenure as Stuart Reid can remember some of the tracks, roads and old taxiways over there being easily driveable when he worked for airport security, whereas we found that to no longer be the case during our visit in many parts.

Whilst we found what we were looking for - bunkers, bomber pads, aircraft parts etc, it was more about what was hidden in plain sight but not accessible and/or completely overgrown that was of real intrigue. I know surveys and radar-mapping have been carried out over the years, but there MUST be rooms, voids, underground storage, buried materials etc still undiscovered, as when you're over there looking at various man-made raised mounds, you realise there can't NOT be. The evening before our first visit I'd been to see the new Indiana Jones movie and it very much felt like we were operating in his domain!!

One thing I intended for us to do but ultimately forgot (hopefully there will be other opportunities) was to take some cuttings of the famous flowers that were left behind by the bombers. If you're reading this you're probably familiar with the story - that the shockwaves from the bombs sent the seeds up into the aircraft, then once back at base were washed out and took root. By that thinking every ex-bomber base in the country should have such flowers, but my understanding is that for whatever reason it's only Teesside. Some years ago David Bellamy was brought in to investigate the origins of the flowers after someone noticed they were not native.

I believe that should the builders discover anything during construction, they are legally obliged to bring in archeologists or otherwise declare any findings (whether they do or not is a different matter), but should light get shed where it was not before, we will be pushing for it to be photo-documented prior to being cleared to make way for industrial units.

We identified a number of buildings that should not be in the way of anything and will hopefully survive the construction, and when they do, FOTIA will be on hand to restore and make presentable these reminders of our heritage, having already identified a number of similar northside areas earmarked for the same treatment.

FOTIA would like to extend our thanks to the Mayor, GMI and the airport authority for accommodating our visits.