Smokestack lightning
How Middlesbrough reclaimed its post-industrial landscape and embraced a digital future
What the DigitalCity project is doing for Middlesbrough
This street, Tom Beardsmore tells us, used to be “an alley of prostitutes and drugs.” The CEO of Sunderland-based developer and publisher Coatsink is talking about a road that runs alongside the train tracks near the top of the high street in Middlesbrough; beyond it there was once a post-industrial wasteland, framed by the flare stacks of the chemical plants beside the River Tees. This area inspired the opening shot of Blade Runner, Beardsmore points out. “And it literally looked like that.”
Crossing the train tracks into this part of town was known locally as ‘going over the border’. But the past decade or so has seen the area undergo a turnaround, thanks in part to Middlesbrough’s DigitalCity project. “It’s completely transformed now,” Beardsmore tells us. “And if they go ahead with all these building projects, it’s going to transform even more. It’s amazing.”
Daniel Watson manages what’s become known as the Boho Zone, seven buildings that are the heart of Middlesbrough’s fast-growing digital sector. Coatsink started here before moving to bigger offices in Sunderland, and it’s currently the home of indie studios including Double Eleven, SockMonkey and Cardboard Sword, plus app developers and other digital firms. Watson says DigitalCity has supported over 700 start-ups, and over 800 digital businesses, throughout the region.
It’s a heartening success story for the Northeast, an area that has the highest unemployment rate in the UK and suffered terribly through the decline of the steel and coal industries. And naturally, everyone wants to be associated with DigitalCity’s good fortune. “If you ask who started
DigitalCity, you’ll get at least ten different names,” Watson says. “Everybody’s trying to credit themselves with creating it.”
The initiative originated from nearby Teesside University 14 years ago as a way to kickstart the careers of its graduates: Watson estimates that 90 per cent of Middlesbrough-based digital companies have a link of some kind with the university. The institution has made a name for itself through its game-design courses and already has its own incubation space for start-ups, but “you got to the point where the companies that were incubated within the university didn’t necessarily have a future home,” Watson says. That led to the construction of Boho One, the flagship building of the new Boho Zone.
Boho One was purposebuilt with digital businesses in mind, offering ultra-fast broadband and 24/7 access, as well as an accompanying block of flats, Boho House, that offers a live/work space with a dedicated office. DigitalCity also provides a fellowship grant to help developers get off the ground. Beardsmore and Paul Crabb, Coatsink’s chief design officer, each received £4,000 to cover their living expenses while they were getting the company up and running in Boho One. “They also provided mentorship,” Crabb says. “They had some really good people to teach us about the general setting up and running of a business.” Olly Bennett, CEO of Cardboard Sword, lauds the benefits of being surrounded by likeminded, creative people: “There’s a real sense of community, of people knowing each other, knowing about start-ups.”
If anything, DigitalCity may have become too successful. “One of the issues that we have at the moment is space,” Watson says. “We have seven buildings within the Boho Zone, and the majority of them are full. Boho One was never designed to be at 100 per cent occupancy; it was always designed to kind of have some level of churn and support businesses through an acceleration-type process.”
There are plans to expand to ten buildings. The expansion would include refitting the currently derelict old town hall, which was at the heart of the city when it was built in 1846, at a time when the population rose from 150 to 5,000 over ten years as people flocked to the town’s booming coal and iron industries. Repurposing it as part of the digital hub would be symbolic of Middlesbrough’s shift away from the heavy industries of old.
Brexit, however, is casting a pall of uncertainty over the venture. The EU’s European Regional Development Fund has provided a large portion of the capital for DigitalCity: between 2007 and 2013, for example, it contributed around £3.9 million, which helped to pay for construction of the Boho Five building, among other things. If that funding is cut off, it could have a big impact on DigitalCity’s plans.
That would, needless to say, be a tremendous shame: Crabb acknowledges how central DigitalCity has been to Coatsink’s existence, and his is far from the only story of its type. While much has been made about the potential impact of Brexit on the UK game industry, discussion has understandably been focused on large, established companies. Yet it is about much more than that – about not only protecting the developers and publishers that are already around, but through initiatives such as this, ensuring new ones can also flourish.
The seven buildings of the Boho Zone are the heart of Middlesbrough’s fast-growing digital sector