“It was like the HBO series Chernobyl. Everybody had been told to get up off the seat and leave, and you still had cups and jackets on the back of chairs.”

Walking beside a mound of iron, the only thing that’s left of the blast furnace at the former SSI, Mayor Ben Houchen recalls his first time visiting the now-demolished Redcar steelworks.

He might not have been Tees Valley Mayor on October 12, 2015 - the day a chapter was closed on 170 years of steelmaking - but he remembers the years that followed well.

For a region that has iron and steel in its blood, the fallout was devastating; 2,200 immediate jobs were lost, livelihoods shattered, and the core of the region’s economy ripped out.

Its impact has continued to ripple over the last decade - and, for some, is still felt today.

But Mayor Houchen hopes that, in years to come, it will be looked back upon as “a new beginning” - and thinks diversification is the way to avoid history repeating itself.

It was roughly 19 months after the closure of the steelworks that Mayor Houchen was elected.

When he first arrived to look around, he had a unique chance to immerse himself into a once-bustling ironworks now “frozen in time”.

“When it closed, everybody was marched off site. I first remember wandering into Steel House and it looked like somebody had got off the chair and left,” he said.

The abandoned Steel House(Image: )

“The way it closed was so damaging in that nothing was ever taken offline over a period of time, which is what you would do as a managed closure.”

Since then, explosive demolitions have brought down several landmarks of the Teesside skyline, reducing steelmaking history to rubble in hope of a new future.

The scale of the site is hard to imagine until you actually visit.

The Echo went to look around what’s left of the blast furnace; a once remarkable feature standing tall above the Teesside seafront; with Lord Houchen.

Now, all that remains is a mound of solid grey iron, which is “highly likely” to be removed.

What is left of the blast furnace(Image: SARAH CALDECOTT)

It looks like a structure made up of........

© The Northern Echo