Iron, Fire, and the Future is a compelling deep dive into the industrial history, economic struggles, and future prospects of Redcar, a seaside town in North Yorkshire, England. Hosted by Danny Nicholson, a Teesside University student, this podcast unpacks Redcar’s journey from a thriving steelmaking hub to a town searching for its place in a rapidly evolving, greener world.

For over a century, Redcar’s skyline was dominated by the smoke and steel of industry, providing jobs, prosperity, and a unique identity. Historian Dr. Tosh Warwick paints a vivid picture of Redcar’s transformation from a quiet fishing settlement to an industrial powerhouse, driven by the steel industry’s boom.

However, as the late 20th century brought increased foreign competition, economic downturns, and political shifts, Redcar found itself at the center of a nationwide industrial decline. The collapse of the steel industry devastated the local economy, stripping the town of its core identity and leaving many residents questioning their future.

In the search for renewal, Redcar became a focal point in the UK’s transition toward net-zero carbon emissions. Scientist Matthew Cotton discusses the town’s involvement in a government-backed hydrogen energy trial, an ambitious attempt to repurpose existing gas infrastructure for cleaner energy. However, despite the promise of innovation, the project was met with skepticism, safety concerns, and strong public opposition. Residents feared being treated as “guinea pigs” in an uncertain experiment, leading to the project’s postponement in 2023.

With hydrogen energy set for potential revival in 2026, the podcast raises key questions: Can Redcar overcome the scars of industrial decline? How can the government and corporations regain public trust? And what does the future hold for a town caught between its industrial past and a greener tomorrow?

Through expert interviews, community perspectives, and an engaging narrative, Iron, Fire, and the Future sheds light on the challenges of transitioning to sustainable energy while honoring the rich heritage of a working-class town.

Podcast Transcript:

Danny Nicholson: Welcome to Iron, Fire, and the Future, a standalone podcast taking you through the rise, fall, and future of Redcar, a town in North Yorkshire, England. I’m Danny Nicholson, a Teesside University student, here to join you on that journey. Five hours north of London stands a seaside town where people once flirted for the picturesque views, the feeling of waves crashing against their feet, and sand in between their toes, and the prospect of a new future forged in steel.

On today’s podcast, we’re going to hear about the rise, fall, and future of Redcar, a town which has found itself at the center of the nation’s net zero aspirations. We’re going to look at the aborted trial of hydrogen power in the town, why it failed and what might come next. But first, to set the scene, here’s historian Tosh Warwick, Ph.D., to tell us a little bit about Redcar’s past.

Tosh Warwick: Redcar, for the past 150 years, approximately, the skyline has been defined by industry blast furnaces, you know, smoke an industrial river. But if you go back beyond that period, it was a kind of idyllic, scenic, you know, unspoilt landscape, and we see these in a lot of the, the artistic depictions of Redcar before, when it was chiefly, a fishing settlement and surrounded by a largely agrarian, community, very much untouched by the the harshness of industry that, had already started shaping parts of of Britain elsewhere.

By 1846, I think it was, when the railway extended to Redcar that opens up all those opportunities for placing your works along that route as well, And towards Redcar in the in the early 20th century you had the emergence of a company town, Dormanstown, built for those workers.

So that’s how Redcar became a key center of particularly steelmaking that had the furnace set to produce iron. But they had that kind of, aspiration to be integrated, whereby, you have the core ovens, you have the iron, the iron works nearby. So it’s all pretty, a smooth operation. Then the iron goes to be processed to steel.

In the post for decades, there’s major, multi-million-pound investment in the broader Redcar steelworks sites. You know, and there’s huge new, blast furnace furnaces being built. So you have this whole transformation of this land. And Redcar becomes known as the main, certainly by the 1960s, (site of) steel manufacturing on Teesside rather than Middlesbrough, which was the birthplace of iron and steel manufacturing.

Steelworkers were prepared well. So people that could prosper, work the industry, and progress. You know, you wouldn’t be able to do that in other industries. 

DN: The town wasn’t just booming from an industrial perspective. The influx of relatively well-paid jobs in steelworks in Redcar and Middlesbrough meant the town also became something of a leisure destination for workers keen to spend their hard earned cash on the rides and amusements along the seafront.

TW: It was real pleasant, Redcar. Because people went to Redcar to spend their money. There would be organized trains from Middlesbrough when the factories were shut. When, as a day off, people would pile into a train. Some would even walk the eight miles from Middlesbrough to the seaside. And the seaside was an area of release. It’s where people went to escape the smoke and the cluster in the dankness of living in the iron manufacturing town, “Iron-opolis,” as Middlesbrough was known.

You know, Redcar was but thriving but unfortunately, like a lot of seaside resorts and like a lot of, industrial town, the 70s, 80s and onwards have proven to be a lot more depressing.

DN: For Redcar, the prosperity didn’t last forever, and what came next was a damning period of a harsh new reality for this once thriving seaside town.

TW: Yeah, there was a number of factors that led to major industrial decline. Certainly in terms of the iron and steel work. So there was issues around the investment into the site in the 1970s. There’s a rise in foreign competition. There’s disputes with the trade unions. You know, unfortunately the blast furnace was blown in, in 1979, which is the same year that a certain Margaret Thatcher rose to prominence and became prime minister.

And those Thatcher years on this so-called rationalization and this kind of, cutting back of British Steel, as it was. Redcar really felt the brunt of that. It was a real kind of acceleration of decline. In 1975, there was around 300,000 people employed in the in the steel industry, in Great Britain. By around the mid 1980s, that’s more or less halved.

By 1990, that’s below 100,000. It’s not just about the economic side. The economics is- Obviously, you have to be able to pay your wages. You have to be able to keep a roof over your head. That’s key. We get that. But it’s about your kind of your mentality, your pride, your sense of place, your very being.

You know, you exist because of industry. You know, for that to be snatched away and to see this industry decline like it did in the 1980s, it’s devastating. You know, people move away. There’s a drain of skills in the Teesside-Redcar area. But it’s a cataclysmic divorce. It’s a real kind of break with the past.

The break with what you do. You know what we do here. We make, iron and steel. And then to be told that, well, actually you’re making less of that now and there will be less of you making it in the 70s and 80s- It has a major impact. And I think it has an impact in terms of people’s aspirations, in terms of what they believe can be achieved by staying in the area.

I think it, I think it it had a profound impact on people’s wellbeing.

DN: Brandished with the struggles of the past few decades in 2023, the people of Redcar were introduced to the chance of a new future shaped by escaping the smog and embracing green technology. I spoke to Matthew Cotton, a scientist on the hydrogen project who talks me through the project and struggles they faced.

Matthew Cotton: Yeah. So the project in Redcar was, initiated by a company called Northern Gas Networks. So Northern Gas Networks is a company that supplies natural gas. You know, they say they own a lot of the infrastructure for, providing gas that’s piped into people’s homes and businesses, which they use for cooking and for space heating and hot water heating.

And for a while, Northern Gas Works, along with a lot of other utilities, has been interested in, sort of decarbonize their infrastructure. And, one of the ways in which they think they could do this is through, switching from natural gas to hydrogen. But there are some technical challenges involved with that. So hydrogen is a very small molecule- hydrogen atoms are very small.

And so the question about whether or not the infrastructure is going to prevent leaks- it’s very important. It’s also a highly reactive gas. So certain parts of the infrastructure, certain metals might might corrode or there might be chemical reactions that go on within the pipe. So there was a lot of scientific research around the feasibility of that.

And they have a quite a good safety case now. So they’ve sort of developed this infrastructure. It’s safe. But then they need to sort of trial this in real life. And so there were projects that were proposed in Redcar and Cleveland. And one of the reasons for them selecting Redcar was precisely that sense that there is an industrial heritage in this region, that people are used to big infrastructure, they’re used to these sort of big industries, and therefore they thought this would be a good place to trial it.

Unfortunately, both of those projects that were proposed, failed. Now they failed in the sense that the official reason that the former conservative government gave was that there wasn’t enough actual hydrogen supply. You know, it’s a supply of hydrogen to make the project work, but it probably didn’t help that there was a lot of public backlash in Redcar.

And this was happening during an election year when the government of the time was already kind of a bit on the back foot. And so this sort of combination of sort of technical and political reasons is probably why the project didn’t go ahead. 

DN: Like the people of Redcar, I was learning about hydrogen energy for the first time.

So I was keen to find out why hydrogen and what makes it a potential new solution to a greener future.

MC: There’s lots of- we have legally binding commitments to reduce our, greenhouse gas emissions, particularly our carbon emissions. Some sectors, like the electricity sector, have done quite a good job of doing that, switching from first from coal to then gas, and then from gas to renewables.

But some sectors are quite difficult to decarbonize. And heating and hot water, sort of hot water heating and space heating are two of those sectors that have been difficult to decarbonize. And so hydrogen presented a bit of a solution because it’s relatively easy to change a regular gas boiler to a hydrogen boiler or relatively easy to change a gas cooking hub to a hydrogen hub.

And so it did present a bit of an opportunity for sort of reconfiguring the existing gas network that’s already there towards hydrogen, rather than using more electricity. If you like, to heat homes and heat water. The benefits, of course- So when you have hydrogen and you burn hydrogen instead of producing carbon dioxide, it fuses with oxygen and forms a water vapor.

So the only thing coming out of the tailpipe, so to speak, is water vapor. Its overall green credentials are dependent on what type of hydrogen production method you use. So the most common method is what’s called gray hydrogen. Gray hydrogen is really- it’s formed from natural gas. It uses this process- It’s steam methane reformation. That basically takes the hydrogen out of out of natural gas.

And then you’re still left with a kind of waste product, which you can use for other things. But it isn’t the most sort of environmentally friendly from a climate change perspective. A better version is what’s called blue hydrogen, which is to do exactly the same process. But then you combine that with carbon capture and storage. So you’re sort of capturing the carbon dioxide in and storing it, or utilizing it for another purpose.

And then there is green hydrogen, which is formed differently. That’s from the electrolysis of water. So you basically using electricity to split water molecules into component hydrogen and oxygen. And then you can use both of those gases. In theory the greenest version is the green hydrogen, but it’s not produced in huge quantities. It uses renewable energy which you might then use for another purpose.

So there is a sort of question of why would you use the renewable energy to produce hydrogen when you could just use that renewable energy in homes and businesses directly? But again, all of these things need to be produced at such a scale that it can replace all of the fossil fuels that we’re currently using. And that’s one of the big challenges for the industry.

DN: The ambitious project aim to inject hope back into the sleeping giant of Redcar, but it faced backlash and it was quickly postponed in December of the same year it was introduced. 

MC: Some of the research that we’ve done has shown that people are concerned about being early adopters, right. If you’re an early adopter, you take on a lot of the financial risk of this new technology.

If it doesn’t get scaled up and become part of the the normal landscape of energy generation. And so, that was a big concern that people had. The others were around safety risks, of course. As I say, hydrogen is very flammable. One of the things we find is that when you mention hydrogen to people, certainly people of my age and probably older, one of the first things that they think about is the Hindenburg disaster, this, big sort of airship that set on fire, it was filled with hydrogen.

You know, it’s this very big sort of public spectacle at the time. It’s a very old example. But because we don’t have a lot of hydrogen around, that’s the first sort of cultural touchstone that people use to imagine hydrogen. So, there were concerns around risks. There are concerns around safety and concerns around sort of financial adoption.

And so the term that got sort of used quite a lot on social media amongst protest organizations campaigning against the village trials was- we’re being treated like guinea pigs. And that was that’s quite a powerful message locally to a lot of protest organizations. And so that was certainly a factor in why the village trial didn’t go ahead.

Distrust of local authorities or distrust of government in some of the research that we did around community perspectives, some of the distrust was not also about government, but also about utilities. So there was mistrust not necessarily directed at the local authority per se, but towards utilities in general and how they are managed and, and a general sense of, well, would this be better, would this be worse?

So not sort of dismissing hydrogen out of hand, but just in general- How do we know that they’re not just coming here to sort of extract value from the community? 

DN: Two years on from the postponement of the Hydrogen Village project in Redcar, I went back to find out what people had to say on the project now, and what went wrong in the eyes of the public.

Person 1: Well, Northern Gas didn’t make it clear to me it was safe to use. I mean, all I know about hydrogen is it explodes. 

Person 2: Well, I just don’t trust the government. My dad used to work for British Steel and his dad before him and I mean, look what happened there.

Person 3: I really like the idea of doing something good for the environment in Redcar and choosing a renewable energy source. I just think it didn’t go as well as it could have done because of the lack of communication. Like a lot of residents didn’t understand what hydrogen energy was or like how it was beneficial.

Person 4: I think it was a good idea. However, living in a deprived area like Redcar, if the whole thing had gone wrong, the financial burden falling on the residents potentially would have had a massive impact on the area.

DN: Pending approval from the government. The conversion to hydrogen energy in Redcar is set to recommence in 2026, keeping in line with the strides taken towards sustainability commitments in the UK, this project was always aimed at being a learning opportunity. However, rather than being given an education on hydrogen, those involved were shown the key to the success of future initiatives: The people.

Without the trust, support and passion of the local community, no project can truly thrive. And now people like Matthew Cotton and Tosh Warwick are striving to revive the bond between industry and community.