BQ2 North East Special Report

2 North East: December 2015

S PEC I AL REP O R T

DA R L I N G T ON: BU ILDIN G A N IN GENIOU S F UTURE

All for one

Working together for Darlington

Ingenious idea

Big brand for a big town

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EDITOR’S VIEW CONTENTS 04

PA R T N E R S H I P S AND PRIDE Council Chief executive Ada Burns talks about Darlington

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A RICH HISTORY

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INGENIOUS DARLINGTON

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FORGING AHEAD

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FUTURE BLUEPRINT

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How a town was built

A big brand for a big town

Darlington’s own university campus adds weight

A new era of collaboration in a new building

MEETING THE CHALLENGE Subsea sector faces the future with confidence

DARLINGTON: BUILDING AN INGENIOUS FUTURE Darlington is a magnet for innovation. Around every corner there is passion and drive from people to create, build, thrive and develop. It is written in every history book that it started with the railways, but now new books are being written and there will be stories of groundbreaking industries that came here or started here and have grown in the town and have brought with them national and international attention. The town has become synonymous with ingenuity for more than 150 years and is now firmly focused on making sure the next 150 are as equally productive and inspiring. Its performance is being recognised at the highest levels, with a recent RBS report showing Darlington had the best performing North East economy for the third consecutive quarter, beating all UK regional averages outside London. That success is the foundation of the united town revealed on the following pages, made up of thousands of companies from every sector, but with a common goal – to take every opportunity to make sure investors and business leaders realise how much is happening here and why its global reputation is so richly deserved. This is their story and their Darlington.

From national headquarters to back-room inventors, they are proud of their town and excited and confident about its future and their part in it. And the whole town is ready to open its doors to anyone who wants to share in that success and be a part of the Darlington story.

In association with

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AN OPPORTUNIT Y TAKEN - INDUS TRIES TRANSFORMED

Ian Williams looks at the history and potential of Central Park

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The multi-platform brand currently reaches entrepreneurs and senior business executives across the North East, Scotland, Yorkshire and the West Midlands. BQ has established a UK wide regional approach to business engagement reaching a highly targeted audience of entrepreneurs and senior executives in high growth businesses both in-print, online and through branded events. All contents copyright © 2015 room501 Ltd. All rights reserved. While every effort is made to ensure accuracy, no responsibility can be accepted for inaccuracies, howsoever caused. No liability can be accepted for illustrations, photographs, artwork or advertising materials while in transmission or with the publisher or their agents. All profiles are paid for advertising. All information is correct at time of going to print, December 2015.

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Ada Burns, chief executive of Darlington Borough Council, talks about the partnerships and pride at the heart of Darlington’s success

Darlington is a partnership – a living and ambition to be a one-stop destination for local breathing example of how working together can residents as well as long-distance shoppers and bring the best out of businesses and people. businesses, with a choice of high-quality places For council chief executive Ada Burns, this is to work, shop, eat, drink, relax and sleep. her proudest achievement, to be one key part “Our aim for many years has been about of the relationship that links all sectors to form building a wider and more diverse economy and the town’s own lifecycle, from start-ups to exploiting the two big advantages we have – multi-nationals and from primary school pupils to connectivity in rail, road and air and the quality of pensioners. life our environment offers.

“It is such an exciting time to be in and around “For example, that powerful combination is what Darlington,” she says in her office, with views makes us a niche place for subsea engineering, that instantly back up her view, with the new when there is no sea around. That strikes people Department for Education building on one side, as odd, but it happened because people who the Feethams leisure development on another loved living here and found the right labour and the vibrant centre of the town just a few market and transport infrastructure chose to steps away. grow their companies here.

“Wherever you go in the town there is change, “The ever-present culture of ingenuity, with but none of it has come out of the blue – it is the talent and skills born in our industrial past, means product of a long-term strategy which is matched the town is, and will continue to be, the home of by the confidence of investors who share our innovation in many different industries. vision.

“These firms show that it is clearly not a short“We have been working with developers for term boost that is happening in Darlington, some time now and it has been a measure of but a long-term plan that perfectly fits a growing Darlington’s underlying strengths that we have town. continued planning even through recession.

“We knew for some time that we could attract We more than bounced back from that – such high-profile projects as the National with growth and opportunities accelerating all the time.”

For the town centre, the key success is in creating an environment which brings in more people to work there, and to increase its leisure facilities. Both are essential parts of the strategy of bridging any gaps in the way the town is developing.

The council shares175x20mm the town’s S3_Layout 1 15/10/2015 10:09 Page 1 D4392_STRIP ADVERT

Biologics Centre run by the Centre for Process Innovation, because we had planned significant sites and places like Central Park. But the opportunity to develop a biopharmaceuticals cluster around the centre wasn’t something we particularly went out looking for – they found us. With GlaxoSmithKline, Fujifilm and Teesside University, they knew we had access to the right labour market and skills opportunities, whether people lived in the town or were commuting in from Newcastle, York or Leeds.

“One of the great benefits of being a small council is that we can be very fleet of foot and when such opportunities arise, we can go for it and capitalise on it. Everyone just downs tools on everything else they were doing and gets together and brings out a really strong proposition.”

Along with the Department for Education, key firms like Subsea Innovation have reaped the rewards of the council’s agility. From the first confirmation that the DfE might have to leave the town for Newcastle or Durham to find a new base, it was only 18 months until they were walking through the doors of the new HQ in the centre of Darlington.

“Wherever you go in the town there is change, but none of it has come out of the blue – it is the product of a long-term strategy which is matched by the confidence of investors who share our vision”

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There’s only one Darlington

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“We need the businesses in Darlington to keep driving, directing, challenging, supporting and advising the local authority in what needs to happen to make it easy for them to grow.”

“We had to take a few risks, for the council to decide to borrow for an office block,” says Ada. “That was not an easy decision, but it didn’t take long to get made because our politicians understand that you have to take a few chances, but you evaluate the risks and you make your move.”

For Martin Moon’s Subsea Innovation, Ada came back from a routine meeting which had touched on expansion and kick-started a search for the right package and Martin’s firm now has 40,000sq ft at the Faverdale Industrial Estate double the size of its previous facility.

“Our council has always been aware that it is not councils that create jobs, it is businesses.

Our job is to facilitate their success. We have always had very close connections to business leaders because the economy is number one, two and three of what we have to get right.

“We need the businesses in Darlington to keep driving, directing, challenging, supporting and advising the local authority in what needs to happen to make it easy for them to grow.”

“A particular example of productive collaboration is through our close relationship with the Local Enterprise Partnership, Tees Valley

Unlimited. TVU has provided great support to us in terms of attracting inward investment, and helping our existing businesses to grow and it works closely with Darlington Council staff to provide a comprehensive service to businesses in terms of finding the right sites and premises, help with site visits and support with funding applications.

One thing the town wanted to put into place was new entry-level space for small businesses, which it now has in Business Central Darlington, neighbouring the biologics centre.

“We are delighted to see it take shape and grow so rapidly, exceeding even its own predictions.

It’s a wonderful place and has already become a great meeting place, along with The Forge at Teesside University just a short distance away,” says Ada. “If we have some key civil servants travelling here, or a business that wants to hold a workshop, Business Central is a stone’s throw from the station and is very accommodating.”

The council’s team brings together a unique house-by-house, business-by-business knowledge of how the town ticks with a pinpoint strategy for how to make the most of

its assets, and brought them together in One Darlington: Perfectly Placed, an over-arching plan for the future of the 100,000 people who live in Darlington, and for the place where they live – one town, twenty four villages and smaller rural settlements, and the surrounding countryside.

The plan was started in 2008, and is being regularly updated by the Darlington Partnership, whose members includes the council, NHS, police, fire and rescue service, business leaders and community and voluntary sector representatives. But in true Darlington fashion it has always been chaired by a local business leader rather than a council leader.

The way such collaborations are run is proof that devolution isn’t a new word in Darlington – for years now the council has been giving its people the recognition and respect they deserve and the freedom they need to care for their town. That unity of purpose matters to investors and potential new businesses and is making the crucial difference that brings innovation and enterprise to our doorstep from all over the country.

Perhaps more than any other town, it is the

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“We are ringed with aspirational places to live, but are also building neighbourhoods that will match people’s high expectations of the area”

Darlington people who make it tick and who feel so attached to its roots and its future.

“I’ve been here for ten years now and have found the people of Darlington have an incredible sense of civic pride,” says Ada. “They are rightly demanding of their leaders to keep their town as a good town. That brings sites for hundreds of new homes while knowing a huge strength and a great feeling of loyalty. where to leave the gaps to make sure the open We are moving the town ahead together, while spaces that are a big part of Darlington’s unique always remembering we have our forefathers to character are looked after. thank for the way Darlington has evolved so far “We respect the traditions of our past, but and for some of the beautiful assets they left us. also know how to reimagine them for future “Places like South Park, Crown Street Library, generations,” says Ada. the Civic Theatre, Lingfield Point and the market “It will always be important to the town that square are gifts and it is our responsibility as there is housing at all entry points. We need a town to respect them, but also to innovate homes to rent at affordable amounts as well as and make sure they can be used by future executive housing and everything in between. generations.

“We have a very healthy housing market here, “It has been challenging, but we have resisted building a significant number every year with out-of-town developments and have worked ongoing interest from developers wanting to so very hard to protect the town centre. It has come to Darlington and the beautiful villages to evolve, but it must stay healthy and keep that surround us, like Hurworth, Heighington, that Darlington feel, so we listen to our retailers High Coniscliffe, Merrybent and Sadberge. about what they need.

“The many developers we have worked with “It’s a compact town with its big multiples to so far have been quick to understand what we give a full choice and then the leisure side at want and have really been in a league of their Feethams which is bridged by the Civic Theatre, own. They don’t just arrive and put in a new and then the wonderful character and history of estate – they work with us to create sustainable the wynds, Grange Road and Duke Street, with new communities like West Park, which Bussey vibrant independent shops. & Armstrong started with a village centre and “We will always remember how much the town all the facilities new homes should be able to owes to those independent retailers, who see gather around. it is the right time to invest their hard-earned “We are ringed with aspirational places to live, money into Darlington.” but are also building neighbourhoods that will The future direction of the town will not only match people’s high expectations of the area. be decided in its own streets and families, it “If we look at our existing and new industries, will come from outside the area, as the town’s right across the Tees Valley, their workforce will ever-growing confidence and louder voice across retire at some stage and they will always need the country attracts more investment and builds new employees – including the likes of Hitachi a brighter future. on our doorstep.

The workforce will come here at all levels, from “There has to be living space for a growing chief executives to apprentices, and they will all population and for the number of jobs that are expect to make their homes and bring up their going to be created here, both new jobs coming families in houses as impressive as the town they to the town and replacement jobs for growing are set in. industries that are already here.

The council has perfected the balance between this hard work10:09 and forward planning means D4392_STRIP ADVERT 175x20mm S3_Layout“All 1 15/10/2015 Page 2 development and curation, finding the right Darlington now has a nationwide reputation for

www.lingfieldpoint.co.uk

being a great place for businesses to grow. We have the right sites and a strong labour market, and we are always developing the housing and continuing to make it a good place to invest.

“We work closely with all our partners in the Tees Valley to make sure that people who commute here to work or travel out of the town are also looked after.

“We have fantastic transport connections, which make it easy to have one-day meetings in London without having to stop over, but we are also working with the Department for Transport and Network Rail on a significant scheme for Darlington’s principal station at Bank Top. “That is about making the East Coast line faster and more reliable and making it ready for HS2 and easier to get from east to west. This is important to keep bringing in these major plans because Darlington is a gateway to the Tees Valley and County Durham.”

The council’s skill in drawing up a holistic strategy for the town also has a huge focus on education, and how that knits seamlessly together with industry, housing, retail and economic policy.

The landmark new buildings housing the college and university at one end of Central Park are not just skin-deep. They are whole environments developed with Ada and the council to stimulate and support the essential training and skills development Darlington’s industries demand.

“The town has a very strong education offer,” she says.

“We wanted to make sure anyone moving here can access really good nursery and primary education, and then move on to secondary and FE education and one of the top Sixth Form colleges in the country at Queen Elizabeth.

“That continuity is a goal for all of our schools as they grow and develop and connect with business. We have developed

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an award-winning scheme called Foundation for Jobs, which we started because businesses were telling us that too many young people were starting with them without a work ethic or the knowledge and understanding of modern working methods.

“So we listened and worked on the foundation to give young people a better chance of finding work by developing more effective links between schools, colleges, universities and encouraging employers to help young people improve their understanding of the world of work.

“All of our schools bought into it and fund a worker who puts together a menu of activities throughout the year linking education and employers and helping children decide what sectors excite them. It is about lighting a spark in Darlington’s next generation to take them into the industries of the future.”

With free schools and foundation schools around the town, education leaders are showing they are ready for independence and to help form policies and strategies with the council. A partnership called schools@onedarlington sees headteachers from all primary and secondary schools in the town meet regularly to discuss issues that affect their children.

Ada Burns is understandably proud of Darlington and the work of the council.

“I celebrate what is happening in this town. I love to walk out and see how much is changing.

But the job we will always have is to think – right, what about the next 10 or 20 years?

“From way back in our history the people who built and run this town have never rested on their laurels. We work with our partners in the town all the time, not just patting each other on the back, but having strong relationships that are productive and constructive.

“By doing that, we develop a team of different disciplines that come together for a single purpose.”

That team is now around 100,000 strong, with voices raised, strategies written and wearing their hearts on their 175x20mm sleeves.

D4392_STRIP ADVERT S3_Layout 1 15/10/2015 10:09 Page 3 Welcome to Darlington. n

“I celebrate what is happening in this town. I love to walk out and see how much is changing. But the job we will always have is to think – right, what about the next 10 or 20 years?”

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Proud of its past and confident of its future David Allaway and Tim Crawshaw tell Mike Hughes about Darlington’s long and rich history

One of Darlington’s unique attractions is its long and proud history, from Neolithic flints to Saxon cemeteries, battling the Black Death of 1349 and the Great Fire of 1585, through to the birth of industry and the independence and reputation that brought.

It would appear that the first major evidence of a settlement on the site of the present day Darlington, was the discovery in 1876 of an early 6th Century Saxon Cemetery at Greenbank. Tim Crawshaw, Darlington’s built and natural environment manager, says: “You can tell the story of the town by the river. It is fairly shallow here, so became a fording point in medieval times and as people waited in a queue to cross, traders sold them goods and a market developed.

“As its reputation as a trading location grew, wool was brought down from the Yorkshire Dales and sold, and a textile industry became established in the cottages off High Row in the centre of the town. The river was a key element again, feeding the industry and allowing waste products to be disposed of easily.

“The Quakers gave huge impetus to the cottage industries. Persecuted in many towns, they

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found a tolerance and acceptance in Darlington and felt safe here, and having seen the textiles work and the skills base here the Pease family masterminded its progress and made a huge amount of money from mills by the river.

“This led to the development of a Quaker banking system in Darlington, and there are still plenty of Quaker mansions to see in South End, which is now Hotel Bannatyne, Polam, which is now Polam House School and Edward Pease’s house on Northgate.

“They also moved into coal and there was a desire to build a railway to take it to Stockton to get it to the sea. But it was in Darlington that the concept was born that the steam railways could be used for passengers rather than only for freight. For that to happen you also needed an engineer. They approached Stephenson, who walked 30 miles barefoot from Newcastle to Darlington to show the Quakers his piousness, then sat in Pease’s kitchen and did the deal.”

“The banking and finance sector was a key catalyst for this idea, bringing the innovation and money into one place, mirroring what we are doing with innovation hubs now. That tradition of bringing radical ideas to market – like the National Biologics Centre – is something where the town was an early pioneer.”

“There is a latin term – genius loci – which

means spirit of place, and that is what Darlington has always had and still has now.

There is a sense that the town has an identity beyond what you can see.”

“We put technology and finance together and they are the threads that tie us all.”

Mayoral support officer David Allaway, adds that the town’s resilient character has faced many tests.

“Records show that The Black Death reached the borough in September 1349, reducing the inhabitants by nearly half and obviously restricted the development of the area.

“The town was radically changed again by the ‘Great Fire’ of 1585, with indications that approximately 273 houses were destroyed in the blaze, the area of the current High Row and Skinnergate being worst affected.

“The Pease family had strong influences within the Borough of Darlington in the 19th century as it started to win back its reputation. It was Joseph Pease who built the Old

“That tradition of bringing radical ideas to market – like the National Biologics Centre – is something where the town was an early pioneer”

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Town Hall in 1853 as a gift to the town; and later added the clock tower and covered market in 1864 at a cost of £16,356.8s.9d.

For almost 100 years, locomotive and wagon building were the major employing industries in Darlington, but with the introduction of diesel traction, Beeching’s decimation of the railway system and new technology in other fields, there was a decline in the basis of the town’s industry in the 1960s when 4,000 jobs were lost with the closure of locomotive and wagon works. But Darlington Council purchased railway land and premises at Faverdale to develop fully serviced factory sites attracting new industries and companies such as Conder, Bowaters, BSA. Foundries and Amdega. On the east side of Darlington, agricultural land was acquired and serviced industrial sites provided to form the Yarm Road Industrial Estate.”

This foresight, coupled with an inbuilt courage to take on any adversity, is in Darlington’s DNA. Its history created the town, just as its continuing development is building a future for tens of thousands of people and industries. n

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Town with an ingenious plan A big town needs a big brand – Mike Hughes looks at Ingenious Darlington It has been a key aim of Darlington’s development strategy to protect and promote the town’s identity and let it retain its own character. So as various parts of the town have grown and new places have been added, the Darlington brand has become more powerful than ever. As one way of uniting the changes, the town is building on one of its key assets – ingenuity. A cross-section of passionate people and businesses of all sizes from all sectors are signing up for Ingenious Darlington – a marketing project setting out to tell the story of the town. They have all recognised that ingenuity is a Darlington word, starting from the textiles and railways and continuing with the Forge and the National Biologics Centre and so many other projects. The brand is on show on letterheads, posters and websites and will be proudly waved as a flag of support for the town.

Rockliffe Hall chairman Warwick Brindle, who has been at the heart of the creation and development of the brand, said the drive to protect the marketing of the town came after the dismantling of One North East.

“A couple of years ago I was at a meeting of private and public sector companies wanting to promote the town and come up with a marketing plan.

“We put together a programme to get us to a place where we could develop a strategy for Darlington and I became the chairman of what was a very collective movement. We created and agreed a brief and David Hawksworth of the Given agency impressed us the most and told us they really wanted the challenge of marketing a whole town. They did a lot of work and came back saying ‘this is what we think the town is about’. And the word ingenious kept cropping up.

“We looked back at the history of the town and at the universities and what was coming up and all the things many people don’t know about and it seemed right. I had been in enough meetings in the past where ideas to promote a town were along the lines of ‘let’s tell them we’ve got transport and trees and electricity!’

The team wants the brand to be smoothly woven into the town’s fabric and have a long

lifespan. “We knew what the task was when Given went around the town asking people to describe it. They got ‘market town’, ‘industrial town’, ‘railway town’.... so many great assets, but we needed the one binding thing that told people that, as a location, it stacked up against anything else in the UK. “Rockliffe does a lot of trade shows and agents in the leisure industry and golf industry wanted to know more about where we were and what was around us.”

The dictionary definition of ingenious is ‘cleverly and originally devised and well suited to its purpose’. That seems spot-on for Darlington, and when you list synonyms like inventive, creative, imaginative, original, innovative, resourceful, enterprising and inspired, you realise that Ingenious should really be next to Darlington in any business dictionary.

wider world.

“To me the Ingenious idea is to get people to ask ‘Why?’. We have such a rich history of inventing things, fantastic facilities in education and then the trees and transport element.

“We can go out and compete with pride and be even better than we are now. That’s why.”

Backing for the brand has come from all sectors of the town, including Bussey & Armstrong; Real Results Marketing; Darlington Building Society; Teesside University; the NECC; Handelsbanken; Hewitt’s Solicitors; The Northern Echo; Mercure Darlington Kings Hotel; St. Teresa’s Hospice; Darlington Credit Union; Lingfield Point; Houndgate Townhouse hotel; Darlington Business Club; Harvey and Hugo PR; Caroline Hinde Accountancy; Festival of Thrift; Willow Tree Gardens and Age UK Sara Williams, Head of Marketing & Business

“Darlington is a town that is bold enough to say ‘that same imaginative spirit, blind to reason, which allowed a small group of railway-men and women to kick-start modernity, is still alive and well” “We have been integrating the word into the businesses and the community,” says Warwick.

“We’ve created a brand and are inviting the whole town to embrace it.

There is a toolkit of information and logos at www.ingeniousdarlington.co.uk and so many firms are going there and supporting it, for a product or an event or just as part of their own marketing.

We are describing Rockliffe as an Ingenious Resort in an Ingenious Town. We are even going to have an Ingenious Cocktail at the bar.

“We want to stimulate interest in the town and draw in people who might be interested in investing. When they ask about the Ingenious tag the whole town will tell them to look at the history of the place, and add ingredients like the universities at Teesside, Durham and Newcastle almost on its doorstep, for instance.

As the support builds locally, the council can use that momentum to get the message out into the

Development at Lingfield Point says: “The story we can tell about our town is simple. In fact it’s ingenious and has allowed us all to tie the town’s past, its present, but most importantly of all, inspire its future.“ Houndgate Townhouse director Natalie Cooper adds: “We’re really pleased to be involved in a new initiative promoting Darlington as a great place to eat, drink, sleep and do business.”

And James Dobson, business & inclusion development officer at Age UK says “We’re incorporating the ‘Ingenious Darlington’ branding into all of our marketing, including our website, promotional materials and within the meeting centre itself.”

The confidence of this new brand is clear and vital. Darlington is a town that is bold enough to say ‘that same imaginative spirit, blind to reason, which allowed a small group of railwaymen and women to kick-start modernity, is still alive and well’. n

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An opportunity taken - industries transformed Darlington’s Director of Economic Growth Ian Williams looks at the history and potential of Central Park

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‘Always plan ahead’ would make an ideal motto for Ian Williams. He is the council director who decides where Darlington’s economic growth should take place and how it should happen - which makes him a very busy man. Pride of place in his office is a plan of Central Park, the linear development zone stretching from the College and University to Business Central and the National Biologics Manufacturing Centre. It is a hugely impressive blueprint, and the perfect example of the town making sure it always has the vision – and capacity - for the next big idea.

“It’s an extremely exciting project – to come from former rail sidings under a number of different ownerships to the developing cluster we now have,” said Ian. We started with a clear vision of a business and education quarter, close to Bank Top Station, supported by new housing in a landscaped setting. We see Central Park being a place of inspiration and innovation that will drive the regional economy.

“From the college relocation some years ago followed by the arrival of the Teesside University campus, which gave the town a renewed impetus and focus, this has always been about the agility of the council to respond to opportunities as they come along.

“We were always going to do Business Central Darlington because we needed incubator space in the right location, but getting the Centre for Process Innovation and its biologics centre next door was a bonus and was testimony to the vision we had.”

CPI is now planning to build the Factories of the Future development, looking at the global potential of personalised medicine and the National Horizons Centre, delivering skills and workforce development.

Together, this high-tech cluster will make Central Park a place that will change the face of these industries nationally and internationally. But, as with so many projects here, one factor which made it all possible was the council’s skill in converting a series of single opportunities into an ongoing wave of development.

“CPI and the university are working together on the National Horizons Centre developing both ends of Central Park connected by a new spine road giving access to new plots that we can aggressively market for other uses for years to

come. Central Park is a development creating something that has a science feel, sitting in a good quality environment, which is why the parkland is so important to the whole site. It is a flagship area, so we want people to be proud that they are there.”

The Government is sitting up and taking notice of Darlington because of how the council has made things happen right across the town. One of the longer-term tasks facing Ian and his team is to let them see the commitment and ambition behind Central Park and keep it growing with the same foresight and at the same remarkable pace.

“Our aim is that developments will house successful companies” said Ian. “With housing sitting cheek by jowl with education and industry, it is easy to see the attraction of staying in the town. We have an integrated set-up backed up by an above-average employment rate, a very diversified economy and that unbeatable location.

“Central Park and its keystone developments are examples of the council working with industry to drive up the quality of the opportunities created.

These companies bring with them a lot of high-

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Then we can create the right employment sites with the right infrastructure and futureproof them for any investors or developers.”

With so many new industries coming to the town and resident manufacturing industries expanding and diversifying, the other sectors that are knocking on Ian’s door at the moment are retail and leisure. People need to enjoy what they have outside their office doors and be able to take their breaks in a relaxing and pleasant environment. Feethams leisure and office quarter in the middle of Darlington radically changes what the town has to offer and will be a big part of the plan to build a vibrant centre that will cater for all needs from early morning to late night. But there is also great potential at sites like Faverdale to the North which have been turned from tired industrial estates into wide open opportunities for everything from small industrial to legal practices and to large-scale warehousing and distribution for Aldi and Argos. With the landmark West Park development just across the road, retail growth is on the agenda here, as the town expands again, with care and confidence.

“You can’t just parachute in new shops in a place

“Central Park is a well planned development creating something that has a science feel, but also a good quality environment, which is why the parkland is so important to the whole site. It is a flagship area, so we want people to be proud that they are there” quality technical and graduate jobs with a very high spec to find the right candidates, whether they come from Teesside University or from further afield. We are carving out opportunities for Darlington, from Central Park to Faverdale and Lingfield Point – but also for the wider Tees Valley. Firms coming here will have a menu of requirements that we are now in a position to be able to satisfy.

“Can I get the right quality of person to come and work for me? Is the financial package competitive with what I am being offered elsewhere? Can I get my goods and services out to market quickly and efficiently? Will my staff be happy and settled here?

“The only way to answer ‘yes’ to all those things is to get to know each business and find out what is top of their priority list and address that.

like Darlington”, says Ian. “On the land we have in our ownership we have to think about what would be best for Darlington in the long term – leisure, retail, restaurants, car parking, office space, residential or industrial.

“The journey never stops in this town, it is about people and what they need to enjoy the town and work and live here. I am passionate about economic development because I know it is the lifeblood of the town.”

When the people who are drawing the blueprint for the future of Darlington say they are passionate about their work they mean they have become part of the town and it matters to them. The town’s growth is not a council project to be rubber-stamped and filed away – it is a legacy to make sure the next generations are as proud and forward-thinking as this one. n

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University forges ahead

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There is a dictionary definition that says Forge means to create something strong, enduring, or successful. That seems to perfectly sum up what Laura Woods is doing at Teesside University’s Darlington campus In 2010 Teesside University had the foresight to build a campus in Darlington. The reputation of the town for far-reaching innovation and highly-motivated students deserved a £13m investment. Now the university is a key part of Central Park, the 30-hectare former brownfield site which is already home to Darlington College, the National Biologics Manufacturing Centre and Business Central Darlington as well as a community forming in the streets of new housing. This is a formidable team – a partnership that has come together to build a national home for the most revolutionary technologies imaginable. For director of academic enterprise Laura Woods, rebranding the campus as The Forge underlined the business-facing strategy that has established the university’s national status and will add to its international standing under new VC and chief executive Professor Paul Croney.

“We wanted to build on our engagement activity to draw in more professional development opportunities – and our research showed this part of the region had potential as far as higher education was concerned,” said Laura in her Forge office facing the college campus.

“We put a lot of effort into establishing the brand in the business world and make it really clear to companies that there is one place to come, one phone call to make or one email to send to start making the right connections

with us. Our Business Innovation Team is based at The Forge and will work alongside their academic colleagues who will deliver whatever businesses need. To know what makes them tick we will spend time with them to find out what the challenges are.

“We also have access to talent for them to work with, in our students and graduates working across our excellent networks here.

“This isn’t just a small adjunct of Teesside University, it is a full campus to add weight in Darlington and turn it into a university town to add to its growing status.

“Central Park will add again to that status.

The way it has grown around us is a massive boost for the university and the town. The opportunities here looked fantastic when we first moved here, but since then a whole new set have opened up for students in the town.

“We have the perfect coming together of industry and education - all the ingredients for an unprecedented opportunity.”

This is a university that is learning as it teaches.

Laura can see that the whole of Central Park is a campus in which the university can gain knowledge and forge partnerships that will be the focus of international attention, starting with the council and the college, where there are already agreed progression pathways from HE in to FE and university-validated courses on the campus. The Forge also has the benefit of clearly measurable success in the town, from the number of SMEs that have walked through the door and left with advice about their growth, to the number of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships they operate, how many R&D operations they have worked with and how many graduates have gone into business as interns.

Every one of those targets is a step forward for the town and a huge attraction for potential students and lecturers.

“There is still so much more for us to go after, and many opportunities to come our way.

With a place like Darlington, you never

“We make it really clear to companies that there is one place to come, one phone call to make or one email to send to start making the right connections with us”

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know what could be coming here in two or three years’ time,” says Laura.

“The National Horizons Centre is a great example of the speed with which an idea can become a development.

“The National Biologics Manufacturing Centre focuses on near-market R&D for biologics companies, but what it does not have is enough people with enough skills to deliver that and handle the changes it will all bring.

“There is already a significant recruitment problem in the sector, so the NHC will be a partnership between the university and the Centre for Process Innovation which runs the NBMC, to deliver that skills provision.

“We will work from FE at the college right through to post-doctorate level for the bio industry across the UK – which is both exciting and ambitious. In the true spirit of Darlington partnerships, we will also work with other providers as well, from FE and university centres

around the country.

“There won’t be anything else like it. What has captured the imagination of the funders is that this is the first – there is nowhere else to go to access the full range of education and training and provide that pipeline of talent right from school age.” The need to feed this new industry is urgent, so the NHC work has already started well before there is a physical building to house it, withcontinuing professional development courses at either Middlesbrough or the NBMC for people already working in the industry to develop their skills with the most up-to-date equipment on the market.

“It is really important for us –and this university town – that The Forge is seen as an anchor for

this national development. Who knows where it will go?

“You just have to take the plunge with projects like this if you are going to work with a supportive and pro-active council to drive economic development in the town.

“Darlington is so perfectly situated for this work and it is such a community-based town where people are proud they belong. The new developments like Central Park just add to the feeling that it is a really progressive place, nimble enough to take advantage of the chances when they are presented.”

The NHC will also help provide two elements essential to the continuing growth of the town. It will be there to nurture the high level

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of managers that these industries will need to bring the very best out of the most highly-skilled people in Britain.

But also, at the other end of the scale, it will be the public face of the sector, which will be crucial in explaining why the work is vital and why it needs to be supported as it grows, and it will be the teacher in the classroom – explaining the benefits of finding out more and directing the right students towards a career that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

This is the evolving face of Darlington – forever at the cutting edge of trading and technology, securing a future for proud people who are eager to learn and grow. n

“It is really important for us – and this university town – that The Forge is seen as an anchor for this national development. Who knows where it will go?”

Flagship sets sail A town like Darlington needs to keep growing to satisfy demand from employers and employees alike. That means developing homes and commercial space in the same area, to build a community and make sure jobs and people stay in the town from the first plan on a piece of paper to a thriving and expanding enterprise. One area that will change the face of the town as well as being home to some of the most remarkable industries in the country is Central Park, a 30-hectare brownfield site, situated between Haughton Road, Yarm Road, Hundens Lane and the railway. It has been selected as one of the regeneration flagship projects for the region. The masterplan will bring 500 new homes, around 2,000 jobs, a hotel and facilities close to the railway station, leisure and community facilities and green open space wrapped around high quality office accommodation. The homes at Central Park North alongside Darlington College and the Teesside University campus, will be provided by Keepmoat Homes, working in partnership with Darlington Borough Council and The Homes and Communities Agency. The first phase of the scheme will see the development of 327 two, three and four bedroom homes over several years, providing a mix of house types to cater for the senior management as well as the start-ups. Keepmoat is a national market leader in community regeneration and housing solutions, operating in four key areas; new builds, community regeneration, property services and sustainability. The merger of Apollo and the Keepmoat Group of companies in March 2012, brought together some of the industry’s most successful organisations to form a new £1bn company with the capabilities to deliver community regeneration schemes on the sort of scale needed to provide what Darlington needs.

As the Central Park plans grow, Keepmoat will also build a community of homes around the business hub on the enterprise zone at Central Park South.

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The arrival of the National Biologics Manufacturing Centre in Darlington is the clearest sign yet that the town is on the nation’s radar. Mike Hughes reports

Chosen to be at the cutting edge Darlington has been a town of pioneers for generations. But now the world’s attention is being brought back to the town by three letters – CPI. The Centre for Process Innovation is a key part of a national infrastructure to support process industry clients by using its vast bank of knowledge in science and engineering combined with state of the art facilities to help companies develop, prove, prototype and scale up cutting edge pharmaceutical products and processes. The CPI, which also has centres at Redcar and Sedgefield, de-risks innovation by allowing products to be proven before they go to market – an essential step, particularly for small companies. As part of the Government’s ‘Strategy for UK Life Sciences’ launched in 2011, the CPI, led by CEO Nigel Perry, was given the job of establishing and managing a £38m

National Biologics Manufacturing Centre – and a site at the southern end of Darlington’s flagship Central Park enterprise zone was chosen as its base – Number One Union Square. Thirty sites around the country had been considered – everyone wanted to be the new home of such groundbreaking technologies. The list came down to the final six and Darlington got the unanimous vote – a remarkable tribute to its progress and an indication of how highly it is regarded nationally. Darlington Borough Council leader Bill Dixon said: “This sends out a clear message that people want to invest in Darlington. We beat off tough competition to secure this national centre and it will provide the foundations for a biomedical and pharmaceutical industry to prosper in Darlington.”

Biologics – or biopharmaceuticals – are medicines that come from plants or other biological sources, a sector that is growing rapidly. Alongside its own work, the new national centre will mirror the goals of the CPI in supporting companies bringing products to market. The man who will run it all is CPI director of Biologics Chris Dowle, who has a clear enthusiasm for the project and the effect it could have on the area – which even comes down to the building’s design.

“The brief for the centre always was that I wanted it to be open, with lots of glass, so people could walk up, press their noses to the windows and see it is not scary – it is part of Darlington.

“We are having STEM events for schools and bringing post-graduate students in as well, so if

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“We would like the whole Darlington cluster to be a Northern science centre. The town has the people with the right attitude and the willingness” I can make it available for use by other schools and colleges then I’ll do it because it gets teachers inside and lets the education sector see what we are doing.

“The word is getting out and we have already been engaged to do a lot of work for UK and international companies, from multinationals to SMEs.The centre has certainly hit the ground running, going from the first spade on a bare plot in April 2014 to worldwide commissions within 18 months.

“When we spent a lot of 2012 talking to industry and academia about what was needed and what was missing, it was very clear very quickly that we needed this facility,” says Chris.

“We appointed a super industry advisory board and worked out a brief and a design and then gave them the shortlist of possible sites and they chose Darlington, which I was delighted with. It is an outstanding location with fantastic access.

“But also a lot of the UK’s manufacturing is based in the North East and the universities are located nearby, so people are getting used to these decisions not being given to the Golden Triangle around Cambridge, Oxford and London.

“The whole town has been very welcoming and the extent of the support from the council has been really good for us. It is important that the centre is part of the town and that the town feels part of the centre.”

Chris has been with the CPI for more than 11 years, and was its third employee after Nigel Perry and his office manager Val Briggs set the company up and in 2007 set up the National Industrial Biotechnology Facility at Wilton.

“It has grown from nothing into something quite special,” he says.

“We have grown 50% year-on-year with staff that have a great desire to succeed and a common understanding of our business.

“The Darlington centre came about because we did industrial biotechnology for oilbased petrochemcials and started to look at alternatives, fermenting things and growing them in cells.

“That was bigger and dirtier than what we are about here, which is biopharmaceuticals, but that interest started because we had some spare capacity and started to get approached by some smaller companies who just couldn’t get hold of the facilities they needed.

“The big guys had their own kit and a lot of the little guys couldn’t find it, so we started doing work with them and realised that while our research and ideas were among the best in the world, they weren’t getting to market.

“Developing a biopharmaceutical to such a stage that it could be ready for clinical trials is highly complex and could cost many millions of pounds. But now they can come to someone with the assets, skills and capability to help make that breakthrough.

“As any normal business, we also develop our work and go to market actively and pro-actively. Throughout our history we have come up with ideas and inventions ourselves for industry to use and if everyone prospers, hopefully they come back to us again and there is a virtuous circle.”

He adds, “We are setting up relationships with universities on the relevant cutting-edge technologies and managing projects with them.

But we are equally working with colleges to cater for the more vocationally-orientated

training. There are tremendous skills involved here, and we need to make sure there are enough workers and that it is all delivered in an integrated way.

“Such new technology means skills are a difficult thing to forecast, but there are some overwhelmingly clear needs we can help with.”

There is certainly no let-up in the pace of technology-led work in the Central Park enterprise zone. The CPI’s work will be boosted by the National Horizons Centre, to be run by a partnership between it and Teesside University, along with Darlington College, the Borough Council and subsea training body C-STATE that will look at skills, leadership and innovation in emerging technologies.

And then will come the CPI’s £20m Factory of the Future development, backed by £10m from Tees Valley Unlimited, the Local Enterprise Partnership. This will back companies looking deep into the field of personalised medicine, which involves a move away from one-size-fitsall to therapies that may ultimately specifically match a single person’s DNA. “We would like the whole Darlington cluster to be a Northern science centre. The town has the people with the right attitude and the willingness. “There is the undeniable air of innovation all around the centre and he believes in giving his staff a certain level of freedom in their work and “letting them have a go” to encourage a close feeling of involvement. Those beliefs could have been written in the days of Pease and Stephenson and it should give the whole town a sense of pride to know that investors today will see those same values and want to pump money and jobs into the town. n

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Talking to a gentleman of leisure

“It’s all about timing and this time they got it just about perfect. The occupier market was strong and the corporate side to the town was ready for more.

They received the plans very warmly”

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Simon Hawkins of developers Urban & Civic guides Mike Hughes around Feethams - one of the most important projects in Darlington town centre Darlington is evolving, with a non-stop line of major projects to keep it at the top of the league for regional towns.

One that particularly epitomises the way forward for the town is Feethams, a landmark £14m leisure development that expands the heart of the town. Inspired by the council’s vision, the scheme has been masterminded by Urban & Civic and built by McLaughlin and Harvey.

On the site of the former Arriva bus depot, it dominates the area alongside the Dolphin sports centre, the council’s own buildings and the DfE offices and provides a stunning new quarter for residents and visitors and opens up the riverside.

With a nine-screen Vue Cinema, 80-bed Premier Inn hotel and seven bar and restaurant units snapped up by such big names as Bella Italia, Nando’s, Hungry Horse, Chinese Buffet, Purple Pig and Prezzo, the plan shows there are no limits to Darlington’s ambitions.

The 400 people who will find work here is a key investment in the future of the town, along with 70 full-time construction jobs provided by the building work.

“The council had the vision to identify the land and mastermind the whole area,” explained Urban & Civic’s development director Simon

Hawkins, who was brought up in the town and went to college here.

“Personally it was very rewarding to be able to work on a project on my own doorstep, but the company has an office in Stockton as well, so it is an area that we all know very well. In development terms, we have been working in the Tees Valley for more than 15 years.

“One thing the council was always clear on was that the town needed a leisure development, anchored with a multi-screen cinema, so people had the viewing choice that they had been leaving the town to find.

“It was back in 2012 that the council put the scheme out to tender, which shows the remarkable amount of time and effort that is needed to complete a site on this scale.

“Darlington has been looking for this type of offer for many years. Markets always have development cycles and there are only certain points where this size of project is actually deliverable.

“It’s all about timing and this time they got it just about perfect. The occupier market was strong and the corporate side to the town was ready for more. They received the plans very warmly.”

Top of the ‘to do’ list for developers looking

at Darlington as the right place to come to is research. Like Simon Hawkins, that could come from personal experience, or it might take a slice out of that lead-in time from the first tender announcement.

Either way, developers won’t be brought into the town until they know it well.

Urban & Civic made sure they talked to the shops and the shoppers as well as the authorities so they knew the way the town ticked.

Darlingtonians are fiercely proud and have strong opinions of how it should be developed, thankfully regarding themselves as custodians of its history.

The council shares that pride, so while there would have been cheaper and simpler options for Feethams, they chose one that the town could be proud of.

“The first thing we did was to test the market by also talking to potential occupiers and getting a flavour from them about what they feel about the town and the location and potential of Feethams,” said Simon.

“There has been an in-built demand for the right space in the town. The council’s vision is exactly in line with national planning guidelines, which move away from the 1980s and 1990s out-of-

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town developments and bring leisure back into the town centres.“But that brings obvious knockon effects, so we worked with the Highways Authority to make sure there was a variety of ways to get to the site easily, the capacity of junctions and roads - all the things we wanted to make sure were in place.

“The train station is a two-minute walk away, there are bus stops just outside Feethams and there are taxi ranks nearby, all to go alongside the private cars, which will use the new multistorey car park here just over the road where there are 650 spaces.

“It really is perfectly located. And this was very much a leisure site, so right from the start we made sure we weren’t stretching the town centre and that Feethams wouldn’t take away from existing businesses.

“It is a compact town centre that only takes five or ten minutes to walk across, not like a big city at all. In my opinion, the new development is the perfect bookend with Northgate for everything going on in Darlington.

“The rest of the town works so hard to keep people here, and this will help that whole-day offer and stop people leaving the town for something they can’t get here.”

These high-profile projects also highlight another factor – that Darlington is a destination for shoppers and diners from well outside

“This is a first-class town and it is now getting a first-class development that everyone – including the council – can be proud of” the catchment area. It puts its residents and businesses first, but by helping them grow, the council is also drawing in families from other towns and cities. As the town centre mix develops, they will get all they need here, but they also get what they are missing – the feeling of a friendly, caring, customer-first town with a heritage that you won’t find anywhere else.

“This is a first-class town and it is now getting a first-class development that everyone – including the council – can be proud of,” said Simon.

“The council has been hugely supportive – from their first vision of what they wanted, they have been working closely with us to deliver and promote the scheme. It is hugely important for all Urban & Civic’s programmes that we have that infrastructure around us from local authorities.”

The company has existed in its present form only since 2014, but its experience in the sector goes much further back. It was formed through the combination of Urban & Civic and Terrace Hill, and then the further acquisition of Catesby

Property Group in February 2015.

The merged management team and board has an outstanding track record and an ambition as big as the council’s - to grow a new “Best in Class” business.

It focuses on strategic residential-led sites in locations that benefit from strong transport links and robust local economies, as well as commercial development and investment assets focused on mixed-use schemes in cities and towns. As well as Stockton, it has offices in Glasgow, Manchester, Warwick, Huntingdon, Bristol and London, giving it the perfect blend for Feethams of national experience and local knowledge.

Executive chairman Nigel Hugill sums up its philosophy as “strong enough to punch hard but small enough to care passionately. We work with local stakeholders to craft places for the long term and ensure that the combined intellectual capital invested from the outset maintains throughout the life of the project.”

While forward-thinking towns and cities continue to think as ambitiously as Darlington, they will call on companies like Urban & Civic to realise their vision for where people live and work.

For Simon Hawkins, Feethams is a person project and he and his company are hugely proud of their work and the long-reaching effect it will have on Darlington’s future success. n

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A blueprint for partnership The new Department for Education building in the middle of Darlington marks a new era in collaboration for the town Bishopsgate House is an £8m landmark building in more ways than one. The 3,000sqm office development housing 400 Department for Education staff is right in the centre of the town, next to the new Feethams and close enough to have a physical link to the Town Hall, providing a shared space and meeting facilities. This level of collaboration has been rare, but is pure Darlington in the speed with which the council reacted to the closure of the Department’s offices in Mowden. The facility has provided a unique opportunity for collaboration between local government and a central government department, not found anywhere else. The council funded and built the offices and leases the building to the DfE, but it is the shared collaboration space within Bishopsgate House that is already making it easier for partnership working between the two organisations, including facilities management, mentoring and buddying schemes and volunteering opportunities.

The DfE’s head of site in Darlington, Phil North, said the site was hugely beneficial.

“Being located in the town centre and close to public transport links was important to us and makes us more attractive to prospective employees from across the region. We have already benefited from closer links to DBC and are doing what you might expect from colocated organisations such as sharing facilities and services.

“The closer relationship is giving staff from both organisations the opportunity to work and learn together by sharing skills, experience and development, and has the added benefit of giving our people the chance to get more active in community projects.”

That support for the benefits of the project goes right to the top.

Department for Education Permanent Secretary Chris Wormald said: “This partnership is already allowing both organisations to work together in new, exciting ways, which will benefit both

“I hope that this will become a blueprint for how large organisations can work together in the future” Darlington and the Department. I believe this project will offer a model for how national and local government can work together.”

The decision to build the offices in Darlington came after a concerted campaign by councillors, MPs, the council’s economic regeneration team and others to keep the hundreds of key public sector jobs within the borough.

Work on the offices started in December 2013 and was completed on schedule and within budget in December 2014.

As well as the collaboration benefits, it provided a huge boost for local trades and employment.

Construction involved 350 tonnes of steel which was cast on Teesside before being cut and finished in Peterlee, and the building work provided work for more than 450 tradesmen from the region with an average of 75 on

site every day. Leader of Darlington Borough Council, Bill Dixon, said: “I am absolutely delighted this vision became a reality. The retention of more than 400 jobs for Darlington and bringing them closer to the town centre – particularly the new Feethams development right next door - is a huge boost to the town and local businesses. We have been working with local traders to see how we can further maximise this potential.“This is the beginning of an exciting journey of working together. We can learn a lot from each other and there are work schemes in place to achieve this. I hope that this will become a blueprint for how large organisations can work together in the future.

“It is not just our skyline that is changing – Darlington is well and truly on the regional economic map.” n

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“X7x6crx7trc txr ctrxcyx yctuuyxtc yuxt cyutx cyutxcyutx cxytuc yuxtc yuxt cyuxtc yuxtcyuxtc uxytcyuxt cuyxt cyutx cyutx cytxyctxuyct yctuxuxc’’

Caring, sharing and daring In every corner of the town, Darlington people are working to develop their home town and make sure it is a thriving place to work and live. For Tony Cooper, that means building his vision of a community fit for the future West Park is a unique development in Darlington and the North-East, forging a new community – housing, school, hospital and pub – around the first new park in the town for more than a century.

Officially opened in 2005, the site’s centrepiece was partly built on the site of the former Darchem chemical works, with more than 46,000 trees and shrubs planted to create 12 hectares of woodlands, meadows and wetlands.

The driving force behind it is Tony Cooper, who runs Bussey and Armstrong which has been building homes in Darlington since 1902, and is building all the West Park homes, at Bleath Ghyll, named after the Victorian railway engineer, and John Fowler Way, after the inventor of a ploughing machine.

Always planning ahead, Tony asks all the homeowners and businesses to pay an annual

levy to look after the area. The son of a fitter who grew up in a Darlington semi, Tony is a former pupil at Queen Elizabeth grammar school. He bought the 120-acre site in 2000, including 60 acres left behind by Darchem. He could have chosen a much easier site, and he could certainly have chosen an easier plan – why not just fill it with houses and get out?

“We could have been cheap and cheerful and more profitable but the quality wouldn’t have been there,” he says.

“We started with a pub and an arts strategy and it’s not often you get the chance to do something like that which will make a difference for a hundred years.

“We can’t not do something to help the town. It has certainly done us no harm so why shouldn’t we pay it back?

“Once you get people here and they realise

what it has to offer and how the people here are such hard grafters, they understand that the region is as good as anywhere else in the country – and better than most.”

Tony’s passion for helping build a strong future for his town recently took a different turn when he took on the former Registrar’s Office and converted it into the eight-bedroom Houndgate Townhouse hotel, bar and restaurant.

“It was just a chance to make a difference. You see all these sort of places in other parts of the region, so why not Darlington? It’s good for the town and improves what it has to offer for visitors and businesses who want somewhere to take their customers.

“We did our research just as we do with our housing. We don’t copy anyone else, we do what is right for that area, like Lingfield Point is doing on the other side of Darlington, which

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hopefully might inspire other people to do the same.”

What he saw as ‘right’ for West Park includes public art built into every corner. Texts and sculptures exploring the ecology and history are all around the park and buildings, including work by poet W.N. (Bill) Herbert, sculptor David Paton, and blacksmith Brian Russell.

There are haikus about rare animals which live in the park and a Jabberwocky sculpture.

It is no surprise that it has already won several prestigious awards, including the RICS Gold Award for Regeneration, last year the LCG Sustainable Community Award and this year the Green Flag Award, which recognises and rewards the best parks and green spaces across the country.

To keep it at that high standard, County Durham Foundation works with Bussey & Armstrong and Darlington Borough Council and the West Park Steering Group to distribute funds from the levy, to help provide a Countryside Rangers Service and support volunteer groups working in the park and any future development of the 6.43 hectares of wildflower meadows and wetland

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and woodland features. But it is also a big boost for arts in the town, with the Friends of West Park, in partnership with the council, staging a series of events aimed at increasing the use of the park, raising awareness of countryside issues and supporting community and arts projects.

The ‘West Park Wave’ will continue for some years to come. Plans have already been drawn up for the 200 acre Westpark Garden Village on land next to the earlier phases. Tony and the council want up to 1,200 homes there using the West park model. It is a 15-year project that will once again be a striking and bold statement of intent from them both.

Tony Cooper is building new communities with a very modern approach and an overriding sense of responsibility. The three definitions of a community, cut into steel in the park’s central amphitheatre, could have been written for him: caring, sharing and daring. n

“We don’t copy anyone else, we do what is right for that area, like Lingfield Point is doing on the other side of Darlington, which hopefully might inspire other people to do the same”

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Business Central provides the scaffolding to help start-ups build Centre manager Vanessa Wood gives Mike Hughes a look inside Business Central, Darlington’s new home for SMEs There is a surge of activity around Darlington as a business-facing town eager to grasp every opportunity to attract jobs and investment.

One of the many benefits of that drive from business leaders and council leaders alike is that many residents and neighbours are inspired to set up their own businesses. These are just as likely to start in a back bedroom ‘office’ as in a spinout from Teesside University or Darlington College, but they need commercial scaffolding in place as they build, to support their plans.

As you leave the town’s railway station at the Parkgate side, there in front of you is the answer – Business Central Darlington.

Run by the North East Business and Innovation Centre (BIC), Business Central is home to up to 60 small businesses who pay from just £50 or £60 a week for office space which can be adapted to hold from one to about ten staff.

Crucially for smaller firms or those on the move, there is also a single-day facility for meetings, month-by-month membership packages or simply room to get your laptop out at one of the desks in the Open Spaces.

And because that is the way business works, the centre has 24-hour swipecard access. So if you suddenly have that flash of inspiration, your room is there for you. This is equally valuable if you are working internationally and it is 8am in the morning in Beijing, but 1am in Central Park. The scaffolding includes business advice and unique collaboration opportunities between tenants – all to make sure new business ventures have the best possible start and are then supported through growth and towards being able to offer local jobs and boost the Darlington economy.

“BIC has been around for about 20 years and

was among the organisations who bid to run the centre for the council,” explaines centre manager Vanessa Wood, who previously worked down the road in Newton Aycliffe.

“We will work with anyone from any sector around Darlington - there are no exclusions as long as the company is an SME. We have onsite business advisers who will help them and we’re partners with Tedco, an Enterprise Agency already working across the region “Those short term occupancies and day rates are becoming very popular, because we know that a lot of Darlington start-ups are home-based and sometimes you need to have meetings, usually at coffee shops and service stations. So it becomes much more professional to come here and work for a few hours with a client.”

That flexibility perfectly mirrors how Darlington SMEs operate. They have those essential aspirations of course, but just need somewhere to meet clients and put up a good impression –

or be able to focus on a short-term project that enables them to clinch a key deal. Just a little help to get them on their way.

“It has all happening at just the right time for Darlington,” says Vanessa.

“The enterprise zone, the university, the housing has all come together and there has been great foresight from the council to see what they can do to help SMEs develop here.

“It is always had a history of small business, in manufacturing, retail and engineering and that is obviously continuing, as the take-up of the spaces is proving. People just want to be able to do better, and it is great that they have that spark and that we might be able to do something to help.

“I hope all the work going on in the town creates a complete lifecycle for the people who live here. They will be born in the town, might live in a new house at Central Park, then the children will go to college and university and get employment here.

“They don’t need to leave the region, but if they do then they can always come back and work here and get good quality support and a fantastic supply chain to work with. If people come and talk to us at Business Central, they will find we are ready for that next generation.”

Just as people in the town have always had the ideas, so the buildings have always existed where they can grow them into a business. But this is a new Darlington, and it needed new spaces that matched the aspirations of its young businessmen and businesswomen.

Saying you are from Darlington is an impressive business card in itself for any young SME, but then showing your client to your office at Business Central would really seal the deal. n

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“People just want to be able to do better, and it is great that they have that spark and that we might be able to do something to help�

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Doing it the Darlington way Alex Hirst tells Mike Hughes about the pivotal role of shops and businesses in the town centre, from the independent stalls to the major national retailers There are many words that go before Darlington – thriving, growing, groundbreaking and now.... distinct. The word means ‘something that is recognisably different in nature from something else of a similar type’, which fits Darlington perfectly as it continues to take on the big shopping and commercial centres.

As head of Distinct Darlington, the body that runs the town’s Business Improvement District, Alex Hirst has the challenging job of co-ordinating that ideal mix of retail and office space from High Row to Duke Street and Post House Wynd to Skinnergate.

The BID is a business-controlled initiative which gives local businesses the power to raise funds with the aim of increasing footfall in the area, leading to an increase in business performance and an improvement in the overall look and feel of the town centre.

That’s a challenging brief, but with the support of a wide-ranging board drawn from experienced local businesses and co-opted members, it is a pivotal role as the town unites to offer a linked and co-ordinated package of facilities for visitors and residents.

“Developing the town centre should never be considered a finished job, because we will always strive to improve where we live and work,” says Alex.

“We are private sector, but work very closely with the council and support each other on a lot of projects. The level of continuing commitment from the council is pivotal, and illustrates how much Darlington is looking towards the future all the time.

“We are proud of the high number of independents in the town, which gives us that mix that all shoppers want – the small local traders and the big names – and part of our job is to see that there are no gaps that might make people shop elsewhere.

“The independent shops are supportive of our projects because they have brought their

“Developing the town centre should never be considered a finished job, because we will always strive to improve where we live and work”

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“The entrepreneurial courage to ‘go out and do it’ goes back generations and will always have a place at the heart of Darlington” businesses up from scratch and the town’s success means so much to them. They have no restrictions and enjoy a freedom to make choices that can benefit their businesses.

“There is so much community spirit out there, and they work a lot together. That’s the Darlington way, whether it comes from the college students or business developers. They all have great ideas and because of the sort of town it is and the pioneering work of the council, we have the range of units they can move into and grow with.”

This ‘scaffolding’ supporting new businesses is certainly ‘distinctly’ Darlington. From the first kitchen table conversation to the first finance meeting, then to the first market stall or startup unit and then the first products going out

to paying customers, the town is renowned for looking after businesses that want to be a part of its story.

The entrepreneurial courage to ‘go out and do it’ goes back generations and will always have a place at the heart of Darlington.

“We make sure that whatever they need to grow a business is within their reach all the time,” says Alex.

“A lot of the new businesses will start in our markets, either the covered hall which has been operating since 1863 or the outdoor markets, and then progress to getting their own window somewhere in the town.

“It is so rewarding to see so many businesses that have done that and it means that customer service throughout the town is second to none

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because of that feeling that the shops are all pulling together and are genuinely proud of the retail side having such a long history and huge effect on the future of the town.

“Darlington is really neatly packaged as far as town centres go, and it is only a few minutes to move from one area to another. That means all the future developments have a great head-start because while the shopping area is growing, it is always clearly defined.

“It is so important that we keep the character as those developments continue. It will change physically, of course as some businesses move on and others come and grow here, but it is vital that we respect the principles that give Darlington its unique identity.

“That is at the forefront of any plans we have and it is paying off all the time as the town goes from strength to strength. There are always challenges for regional town centres, but everyone in the town shares the pride at how Darlington continues to overcome them.”

There are four main goals that every one of those towns needs to achieve to be a success, and Alex and her team at Distinct Darlington are continually developing them as the town grows along with its population.

It has to be clean, safe and welcoming , which is achieved with the help of town centre rangers, who are on hand to assist businesses and improve the experience of visitors.

There has to be marketing, promotions and events to ensure that the message of Darlington Town Centre is reaching the general public.

Business support is also a key element, with initiatives to achieve business savings, business excellence, business networking and a financial support for small businesses.

And, of course, people have to be able to get here safely and securely so there must be accessible and affordable car parking for visitors and regular parking promotions.

Darlington has led the way in hitting those targets for generations. The town centre has a warm and open personality because it is a mosaic of so many people and businesses, all sharing the same determination to succeed and the same pride in the national and international reputation the town is enjoying.

Hard-working people in so many sectors have always been the heart of the town and will always be the key to its future. n

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PROFILE Lingfield Point

Where good business feels at home Lingfield Point is certainly a jewel in Darlington’s crown - its uniquely creative office space and warehousing are perfectly located to highlight the town’s role as a national mixed-use hub The 60 businesses and 3,000 plus staff based there already know that Lingfield Point offers a fantastic base for businesses in an unrivalled setting.

Originally built as Patons and Baldwins, the largest wool factory in the world, Lingfield Point has been upcycled and undergone an astonishing change in recent years cementing its place as part of the economic backbone of Darlington, seamlessly fitting with Darlington’s new ‘Ingenious’ brand.

Lingfield Point is owned by a fund managed by Clearbell, and Dominic Moore, Asset Management Director, said: “Anyone visiting Lingfield Point for the first time will be amazed at the transformation.

“The factory buildings that once held looms and scores of workers producing yarn for a world market are now filled with people working in award-winning state-of-the-art offices.

“Those offices are now home to some of the biggest companies in the North East, such as recently arrived Capita, Student Loans Company and AMEC Foster Wheeler.”

Leasing agents Jackson & Partners and Connect Property NE said the investment made by a major national company like Capita reflected the popularity of Lingfield Point as a business base.

David Jackson of Jackson & Partners, said “Its blend of location, facilities, services and customer-focused approach is unlike any other business park, and it’s proving an irresistible combination,” he said.

Dominic believes that providing a great base for forward-thinking, growing businesses is fundamental to the economic success of Darlington, Tees Valley and the wider North East.

Doing just that in its own ingenious way, Lingfield Point is made up of a series of key buildings – each individually transformed and brought back into modern day use as office space – with a nod to the past and its place in Darlington’s history.

In the days of Patons and Baldwins, the Beehive building was the hub of the thriving on-site social scene, once again, it is home to a vibrant business community. Following a £100,000 refurbishment and access to 100Mb fibre optic broadband, Easy Web is one of the first companies to benefit from the updated, contemporary space.

“Anyone visiting Lingfield Point for the first time will be amazed at the transformation. The factory buildings that once held looms and scores of workers producing yarn for a world market are now filled with people working in award-winning state-of-the-art offices” Tim Moor, General Manager for Easy Web, said: “We were blown away by the quality of space available at Beehive and felt it was a natural home for us as Lingfield Point’s ethos of customer focus matches our own. With space available from 1800sqft through to 15,000sqft, other companies can join this creative hive of activity – already home to a wide range of businesses including FaulknerBrowns, the internationally-acclaimed architectural practice, NFU and NFU Mutual benefitting from their own front door, unique meeting and break out space and even a converted VW campervan.

For smaller companies or start-ups, flagship centrepiece Lingfield House is the ideal location.

There is a community of creative and service

businesses with great support networks available.

This impressive Art Deco building has a dramatic double-height reception area and full-time customer service concierge.

Lingfield House offers flexible and cost-effective leasing arrangements – providing an exciting, accessible and supportive environment for small businesses looking to make a big impression.

Offices in this unique neighbourhood are available from 250 sq ft to 2,000 sq ft and visitors enjoy a fabulous first impression thanks to the first class concierge service.

All customers at Lingfield Point benefit from excellent on-site amenities – not least ability to access the 100M+ broadband connectivity

PROFILE Lingfield Point

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– essential to doing good business in today’s digital age. Added to this is the recent £1M power infrastructure upgrade – start up and SME customers can feel at ease as they grow.

The business park also offers a whole host of other facilities including Little Lingfield Nursery, the on-site café bistro ‘canteen’ along with access to corporate catering services and the security and convenience assured by the 24-hour concierge service. On-site parking is excellent and Lingfield Point is equally well-served by an on-site bus service direct to the town centre.

Lingfield Point’s strategic location makes it a national transport hub with excellent links and easy access to road, rail, air and sea connections – making it an ideal base for logistics based businesses – with warehousing available up to 250,000 sq ft.

Dominic said: “There’s been a clear surge in the demand for logistics and warehousing in the North East which is an indication of growth and good news for Darlington’s economy.

“Our location, having so many methods of transporting goods quickly, efficiently and cost effectively on the doorstep, means we can offer customers a commercial advantage.

“But it’s not just about physical assets, the success of Lingfield Point is also down to its ethos, which focuses on customer service with a self styled concierge service.

Dominic added: “We are proud to be based in Darlington to be part of the fabric of business in Darlington – and to bring our own touch of ingenuity to the town.”

Dominic said: “Clearbell will continue the creativity around the 90-acre site and hopes that, with ongoing investment, Lingfield Point will become a regional flagship for successful regeneration in the North East – continuing to position Darlington as a great base for business.”

To find out more about Lingfield Point and how your business could be part of the neighbourhood, visit www.lingfieldpoint.co.uk.

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INTERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

Way to go Whessoe Whessoe’s recent journey shows a typical Darlington resilience, as CEO Len Taylor tells Mike Hughes Pressure is something Whessoe is used to, with an engineering and contracting pedigree going back more than 200 years in areas across the world, working in process plants, oil rigs, nuclear reactors, and hydro-electric power stations.

But its later history brought pressure of a different kind, with the company changing hands four times since 1995. But it has been a part of the mighty Samsung Group since 2013 and CEO Len Taylor says the future for this iconic Darlington firm looks bright.

“Samsung wanted to add to its capability in LNG – Liquefied Natural Gas – as one of its core businesses going forward. We gave it the ability to grow that globally and along with that we have just about doubled the size of our business.

“It is the first of our recent owners to have a real interest in the business, which is very rewarding for us as they are a very significant player in the gas sector. They recognised they needed to be

“We are back at the cutting edge of technology all over again as well as diversifying the business into other areas, knowing that the skills we have are transferable into other areas”

more internationally-focussed and we have the skills to help with that and the experience within Whessoe.

“Forty years ago we built the first LNG import terminal tank and Samsung knew they were

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buying into that 40 years of expertise. The collaboration works very well because they understand the value of what we are doing here and see us a major contributor to their business.

“The work we are doing at Whessoe is ticking all the right boxes. We have always had a global reputation, but there is a reawakening of that now which is marvellous for the town. The potential for this company has been growing and is really encouraging. It will position us perfectly and develop the Whessoe brand.”

Towns grow because they have strong roots.

Darlington is rightly proud of its historic railways heritage, but also of so many firms like Whessoe who have been a fixture for generations of workers. Trade can be tough, but the town’s hundreds of employers and thousands of employees are innovative and adaptable and have a Whessoe standard of self-belief in their skills and the market they sell into.

“Whessoe workers have a history of long service to the company,” said Len. “I am also keen to bring youth into the business to keep continuity and facilitate this transfer of knowledge from the experienced workers.

Young people are aware of what is going on, and want to get involved, and we are out there in the community with programmes like the ‘Foundation for Jobs’ project, which we’re proud to be part of, telling them more about the Whessoe name.

“We are back at the cutting edge of technology all over again as well as diversifying the business into other areas, knowing that the skills we have are transferable into other areas for Samsung. From my perspective that is good for Whessoe and good for the region because it allows us to bring even more people into the business to give us all a longer and more sustainable future.”

That Whessoe determination has proved to global markets that they not only had a skillset that was almost unique in its depth and history, but also a mindset that took those skills and found new outlets for them.

The fact that it is still sending the town’s workers around the world to solve problems only they can handle is an enduring tribute to its strength and agility – and to the vision of a giant like Samsung to find exactly what it needed in Alderman Best Way, Darlington. n

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Cummins has passion for power There is a town in Indiana, USA called Darlington. If you drove an hour or so from there, you would find the farm where 11-year-old Clessie Lyle Cummins built his first steam engine around a century ago. At that young age Clessie can be forgiven for not realising the effect he would have on the other Darlington, 3,700 miles away in County Durham. His passion for engines grew to become a global superpower in the sectors of engines, power generation, components and distribution and in 1963 a factory was commissioned in Darlington and the production line started moving two years later. Now the site employs 800, but has held tightly to the same work ethics that Clessie started with, incorporating integrity, innovation and a strong sense of community.

Plant manager Christopher Willoughby is the current custodian of the Cummins values and says the long relationship with the town is a huge part of the Cummins DNA. “We had an open day to mark the 50th anniversary and more than 4,000 people came along, which shows what Cummins means to the town and the impact it is having here. That relationship also means we have a lot of people who have worked here all their careers, well over four decades. Their knowledge and background and understanding of the product process is matched by their fondness for the company. They have worked with us as we have sold into so many different market segments for the engines, from automotive for trucks and buses to power generation, marine and off-highway machines like diggers and excavators.”

Like all Darlington firms, Cummins is always planning for its future in the town, and alongside those highly experienced workers it is in almost constant contact with the college and university to identify the next generation to come to Yarm Road, and is also part of the town’s ‘Foundation for Jobs’ scheme.

“We need apprentices for our succession planning and to secure future development,” said Christopher, who has only ever worked at the firm, starting as an under-graduate. We want to give people in the town and further afield the chance to come and work for the company, so there has been a lot of work going on to let potential staff members know what life is like within the walls of a Cummins manufacturing environment. Perception can be very different to reality, so we have been liaising with a number of organisations like Darlington College and The Forge to bring them on site and let them see what projects we are working on and let them see that as well as the pure engineering there are opportunities in purchasing, finance and supply chain work.” Christopher says there are “common themes and opportunities across the town” that help unite businesses and certainly his company’s place here has been firmly cemented over the years with ongoing work in the community through an active Corporate Social Responsibility programme that echoes the spirit of Cummins and Miller in the 1900s.

“We are big enough to play a big part in the town – and that is only right for a company like us. We will send around 70 per cent of our staff to work in the community each year and give them paid time to go out and work in projects where people ask us to help and also in projects that have come from Cummins. That includes our long-term partners like autism charity Daisy Chain and others like the Employability Trust who are looking for help with basic skills in areas like manufacturing and warehousing so that NEETS are given every opportunity.”

“I have been with the company for more than 15 years and I know that its success is down to continuous improvement – no firm can stand still and think its work is done. It has to work year after year to keep competitive and maintain those core values of the company through each new generation of workers over the years.

“Cummins is a global company with an infrastructure to match, which has kept it at the front of its market for almost a century and keeps giving us customers around the globe.”

The company supplies to 190 countries, which means that wherever you are in the world there is a good chance that a piece of engineering from this remarkable town will be close by.

Such global success turns a spotlight on to Cummins and Darlington, to show a history of excellence that keeps both of them growing and innovating.

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Securing subsea skills The innovation in the subsea sector in Darlington has been nothing less than trailblazing. As rising seas crashed around oil and gas workers, it was technology drawn up and developed in this town that was withstanding the most unforgiving conditions and helping protect highly-skilled teams battling to feed our energy needs.

The key words for any firm whose work touches the oil and gas sectors is flexibility and diversification. Darlington knows well the importance of not being afraid to reinvent.

It is too dangerous to stand still and think enough has been achieved. Subsea sector firms show the courage to make changes and the unparalleled skill to seek out new markets, keep innovating, and keep employing some of the country’s most skilled people.

The fact that Darlington has a subsea sector at

The subsea sector has had the experience and agility to cope with challenging markets and the resilience to plan for the future. Mike Hughes reports all can come as a surprise. It is probably down to one simple factor – the people with all the ideas lived in or around the town, and wanted to stay here.

Charles Tompkins and Gary Bland both lived in the area and were keen to stay among Darlington’s greenery and space – and they needed somewhere where they could fulfil their potential to grow and make the region an unlikely hotbed for subsea work.

In 1986, Tompkins set up Northern Offshore Services (NOS) to install subsea pipes and cables

and opened up the market for power and telecommunications cables buried under the seabed.

He formed his own consultancy (CTC) in Darlington, which became CTC Marine and helped transform the subsea cabling industry.

His son Jake now runs Modus Seabed Intervention, a specialist provider of project services and remote technologies based in Beaumont House in the middle of town.

Gary Bland is chairman of Subsea Innovation, and grew a considerable reputation through

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“Being in Darlington has great benefits, and if you go anywhere around the world you will bump into people from round here who are in the offshore game”

his work at Tekmar Group, which SI used to be part of. Subsea Innovation MD Martin Moon, a former naval architect at Swan Hunter, said: “Most companies set up for one of two reasons.

Either the infrastructure is such that it dictates where it goes - in which case you would put a subsea company on the coast – or it is where the people who come up with the initial plans and designs started the business.

“Being in Darlington has great benefits, and if you go anywhere around the world you will bump into people from round here who are in the offshore game.

“From my point of view I have had opportunities to go back down South, but my family and I wouldn’t move from this region. And there has been phenomenal help from the council who knew how important we were and wanted to keep the business here and help develop it.

Martin, whose company also designs and manufactures launch and recovery systems that deploy remotely-operated vehicles from ships’ decks, is one of those battling pioneers, steering his vessel through some stormy waters but always sure of his destination.

The company recently opened a 40,000sq ft base at the Faverdale Industrial Estate, which was double the size of its previous facility.

“As the market changes, we are determined to broaden the scope of what we can design and manufacture and use our considerable skillsets in new marketplaces. We are doing more bespoke design and build work, looking more heavily towards the windfarm market, which is obviously becoming more buoyant.”

Darlington’s unlikely reputation as a centre of subsea work was emphasised only last year when Modus helped open a unique training and education facility in the town.

Subsea UK, the industry body, which represents the £8.9bn subsea sector, revealed that British subsea companies need around 16,000 new recruits to help them grow to £11bn and increase the country’s 45% share of a £20

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bn global market. So the Centre for Subsea Technology Awareness, Training and Education (C-STATE) was developed by Modus in partnership with Darlington College, Teesside University, Tees Valley Unlimited and Darlington Borough Council, and is being run by Maritime Training and Competence Solutions.

The purpose built facility at the college offers a range of subsea courses from apprenticeships to further and higher education, and industryrecognised and accredited training, which includes hands-on access to a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

Modus MD Jake Tompkins said location was a key factor: “The Tees Valley is a significant and growing centre for the offshore supply chain.

Darlington’s local airports serve Aberdeen, London and the continent as well as many other international locations on a daily basis; it’s on the national mainline rail network and has first rate local facilities.

“We hope to be able to create significant opportunities for individuals and companies alike and ultimately bridge the skills gap in an important industrial sector.” n

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Mutual respect Darlington Building Society has been a part of the town for almost 160 years.

Mike Hughes met chief executive Colin Fyfe When Darlington Building Society recently changed its branding, literally bringing a smile to its face, Chief executive Colin Fyfe said: “Our members take great pride in the service we provide. We are different to big banks and their strong support of our independence will help us to grow even stronger in a world where what counts is as important as what is counted.”

This was one of the main reasons Colin moved to Darlington in 2014 to run the society. There was a uniqueness about its principles and the town it was based in. For a relative newcomer, he is already immersed in the community and keen to be a part of its growth and aspirations.

Colin had previously carried out a number of high profile roles during his 29 years at Clydesdale Bank including divisional director, head of people and management development, regional director and head of customer strategy and marketing.

“I could see that the organisation’s approach to helping people was deep in its DNA,” Colin tells me. I can say that very confidently, having arrived in Darlington after 29 years in a reasonably large bank, which I enjoyed. It was a bank that was striving to be fair to its customers.

“But the building society can do things because it is owned by its customers, so there is no incentive for us to do anything other than follow the path that has already been created and be differentiated because we listen to people and understand what they do and need.

“We can use a human approach to understanding Darlington and deciding on mortgages for its people, rather than just saying ‘the computer says no’.

“The values of the organisation and the town have been pretty constant for a long time in a tight area – North Yorkshire, County Durham and Teesside. If we make a pound in profit, we would put so much into capital resources to make sure the society stays strong, so much to reinvest in technology or whatever we need

to and we are striving to put a chunk into our community initiatives and also keep the rates that we offer. We are not ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’, we are just having sensible conversations out in the community while strengthening the society. It feels to me much more like a stewardship, as if I and my executive board have inherited something and have a duty to it.”These are challenges for any financial institution – to be a friend to your customers at the same time as being a serious and respected player in global markets. Balancing both sides means, as Colin Fyfe demonstrates, you can take each element and turn a spotlight on it individually and you won’t be disappointed.

The people and the environment really are that good and the business acumen really is second to none.

But package the two of them together and there are no limits to what the town can offer or how far it can progress.

“We are here for a purpose – and it is not ‘how much money can we make because there is a big bonus for us at the end of it and we have shareholders to satisfy,” says Colin.

“We will stay loyal to the people of Darlington and beyond who have stayed loyal to us.

“When I first came here I felt that this was an organisation that could actually live up to that claim of putting customers first and I liked that opportunity. I was particularly interested to show my wife the town and area because she would be with me here as the kids were at various stages of schooling. I remember taking her to a couple of functions and she felt the people were so welcoming and so pleased that we had come

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here to be part of the community and help it as much as we could.

“She had never been to Darlington and didn’t know all that much about it, but it didn’t take long to sell it to her – from the greenery to the friendliness of the people and all the developments. This town has such an impressive heritage combined with so much ambition.”

Colin is a member of the Darlington Partnership, which engages and works with many private sector companies in the town, which helps DBS have a positive influence on the town. Projects such as new housing developments or major events in the town will get DBS support - just as

the town’s football club has.

“We were a key sponsor for a number of years, and we knew what was going on with the club wanting to head back to the town and we told them that if it would help, we would put our hand up and say ‘we’re in’.

“We hope that if other businesses see us returning to the sponsorship, they might join us and put some substance back into the club. We have agreed that putting the focus on the grass roots and community is a good position for us, so we have sponsored the youth teams and the matchday programme with the new brand.

“The previous brand served the society well

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and had the phrase attached to it ‘looking after local interests’ which summed it up rather well.

But we have a strong desire to remain as an independent regional building society – only 29 in the country have a specific town name.

“We think that’s pretty special for the town, so we have to continue to be relevant to existing customers as well as the next generation and people who may not have used us before.

“People told us we were approachable, friendly, more community-orientated, and so we looked to soften the brand and produce a smiling icon.

“We worked on it for more than a year to get something that fitted us and the town, and was exactly in tune with what people thought of us. To put it all in a phrase, the people were encouraging us to share. That meant share our knowledge, skills and resources, our cash, contributions and space.

“We’ve done that with the Darlington Credit Union, offering them help on an insight into how we do things. The County Durham Community Foundation was looking at its own risk framework. Risk is something we spend a lot of time on, and so we sent a risk manager along for a couple of days to share how we do it. That and the football club sponsorship is the kind of thing we have set our stall out to do.”

Colin is also involved with Lingfield Point’s Festival of Thrift, which is the perfect boost for its focus on the next generation of young Darlington savers. Encouraging them to at least think about money and how to handle it is an investment in the town’s future.

It seems logical to think that, with the Feethams development ticking so many boxes for young Darlingtonians, there won’t be many gaps in what the town has to offer its younger residents. But as they grow, job security will be high on their new wishlist.

The wave of incoming investment from the likes of the National Biologics Centre and Teesside University will give them the opportunities they need, and guidance from their local building society will make them wiser investors themselves. “The momentum in the town doesn’t seem at all forced. It is very natural progress and there is a widespread enthusiasm in the town to keep it going. We want to play a part in that,” says Colin. “We are here to support the town of Darlington and the surrounding area and I believe that, with what we have to offer, it is a win-win situation.” n

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Football is coming home - to Darlington Darlington FC is planning one of the greatest football comebacks

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Darlington FC’s tactics seem very sound.

The club is working on plans to return to the heart of the town where it belongs, just as a surge of developments and confidence lift the whole area.

It was only back in May 2012 that a triple relegation imposed by the FA led to a hugely emotional time as fans battled to save their club which at one stage had no team, no manager, no ground and little hope of survival.

Promotion as Northern League champions the following year showed determination and passion from the players as well, but it was still lurching through a series of last-minute bailouts. But there is more of an air of progress now with Darlington 1883, as the team heads back down the road towards the town where the commercial benefits really lie and where the club can re-engage with community and fans.

Darlington needs all its assets operating at full capacity as it drives through the next decade. There are the bigger elements alongside the valuable smaller ones, but they all have influence. Jobs, investment, families, infrastructure, developments... and sport all matter.

The power of the Quakers fans in refusing to give in and then reaching into their own pockets to save the club is inspiring and shows the attachment a town has to its modern-day heroes, but there is pure business to be done as well, and the board is determined to dig deep to make it happen.

Martin Jesper, a former KPMG manager who became a turnaround specialist with his own company Rootcorz is the football fan who got to do his dream job.

He was asked by the solicitors acting for the fans’ group if he could investigate whether the club could afford to stay at the Northern Echo Arena under a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) used to pay creditors over a fixed period.

“Unfortunately that position just wasn’t possible, so I told them that and moved on,” said Martin, until recently the CEO of the club.

“A few months later they contacted me again to try to find a strategy to take the club forward because a lot of things were in a mess and things needed to be a lot clearer.

“I remember at one stage telling the board they had three months left before they ran out of money, only eight months after they had rescued the club, because a lot of the financial

disciplines were not in place.

“We needed to redress a cash shortfall, so went through a crowd-funding route, offering shares to the fans and went from 30 shareholders to about 230, raising about £85,000. Some only owned £1, but there was a sense of ownership from the people of Darlington who love their sport and love their club.

“I absolutely adore my football, and have supported my club Leeds for years. To get the chance to work with a professional set-up was fantastic and I had great professional pride in seeing this job through and getting the town’s club to the next stage of evolution.

“Football is a magnet for this town. It makes it very easy for people to network when you say you are with Darlington Football Club because people will come in their numbers to listen.

“Crucially, because of the nature of football, that attraction goes well outside the town as well. People in London are well aware of the club and what it has been through. It opens doors.”

When Chris Senior’s goal won Darlington the FA Trophy at Wembley in 2011 they took close to 10,000 fans with them. That is the size of the prize for the town to contemplate, an ambitious figure but one that you can’t ignore. They turned up before and they could turn up again.

Not directly through the gate perhaps, but supporting and spending in the town.

One obvious reason the crowd base came right

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down was because the club has been based in Bishop Auckland. They simply needed to be back in town sooner rather than later and increase the ability to sell sponsorship and advertising – that’s what the Darlington businesses have been telling the club. The emotional attachment of sport is a powerful asset. It may seem like the most irrational idea to ask someone to buy your product when some weeks it might be really poor and some weeks it might be great. But it’s the pure emotion in this town that has driven it.

The support has been led by Darlington Building Society, which is sponsoring the junior teams, and by fans paying an average of around £800 for five-year season tickets to help raise £250,000 towards returning the club to its home. That’s how much the club means to the town. It is respected because, literally and emotionally, part of it belongs to the people.

As well as the players hitting peak performance on a Saturday afternoon, for the supporters the club has taken on an identity of its own, battling almost impossible odds and hitting its own peaks just when they are needed.

That close bond with the town is there for any new business investing here. Bring your ideas, jobs and optimism here and thousands of people will stand up to welcome you. And if you face a challenge along the way, that spirit is there for the asking.

Darlington’s businesses and people will never let a good opportunity pass them by. n

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INSIGHT bqlive.co.uk

A ground conversion

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“On the pitch, we have had a really rewarding response, with bigger gates for some big games and around 900 to 1,400 for our regular home games. On a Sunday, we will get close to 400 kids here for the junior sessions. It’s awesome for us and for the families”

Try, try and try again would seem to be a good motto for Mowden Park Rugby Club – owners of one of Darlington’s most recognisable buildings

The view will be very familiar to any drivers on the A66 around the edge of Darlington. The triangular framework of metal beams and the white ‘spaceship’ below them. It can only be the home of Mowden Park Rugby Club.

The 25,000 capacity Northern Echo Arena the largest dedicated rugby union stadium in England after Twickenham - is proof of the club’s ambitions, as well as its business acumen.

It was only back in June 1950 that a letter was sent from the Rugby Football Union which read “I am pleased to inform you that my Committee has accepted the Darlington Grammar School Old Boys R.F.C. as a member of the Rugby Football Union from 1st September”.

This was the first milestone along the road which started in 1946 when the Old Boys of Darlington Queen Elizabeth Grammar School mostly ex-forces - played some scratch games at the end of the l945/46 season, and began the l946/47 season as a properly constituted club, playing their games on the school field.

Now, as club chairman Mike Keeligan says, they are based among top-flight facilities - the former home of the Darlington FC - on the edge of town, but very much at the heart of it.

“It was an instant hit with us after we moved from Yiewsley Drive in Mowden in December 2012 – we could play immediately without having to build a pitch and let it mature, and all the extras were in place like the bars and eating areas,” said Mike.

“It is an incredible place, we could never have afforded anything like this from scratch, so it has been a win for the town and the club.

“The team settled in right away – which was the important thing – and then we could concentrate on the costs and the overheads.

We wanted to stabilise those costs and, given that almost everything in the arena works on

electricity, we put almost 1,000 solar panels on the roof, which will have paid for themselves before long. We have a good range of longterm lets, with people understanding what we are trying to do and signing up for five years.

“On the pitch, we have had a really rewarding response, with bigger gates for some big games and around 900 to 1,400 for our regular home games. On a Sunday, we will get close to 400 kids here for the junior sessions. It’s awesome for us and for the families.

“All that support has led to a number of the boxes being permanently occupied through the season, and many being taken by our tenants which gives us a great revenue basis.

“We are looking to tap into the town’s imagination and host more events to bring them here. It is a great thing for us that we can attract good numbers to our events – the pubs down Neasham Road have been full and the taxi firms are busy.

“It is a very viable proposition and we are looking to build on all the advantages it gives us and the town, with fantastic support from the council. We are very proud of it and its place in the town.”

Embracing change is once again a recurring theme at the arena, just as it is across the town.

When something of the scale of this building becomes available, nobody shies away from the challenge - it would only pass to somebody else.

As Mike says “The banks tell me they see Darlington as the gateway to the North East and it’s as good a place as any I’ve found to do business, with great connections and a good quality of life. The whole town just gets on with its work.”

That’s a premier league recommendation for the teamwork that has helped put Darlington on the map. n

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INTERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

Only the very best will do Rockliffe Hall chairman Warwick Brindle shows Mike Hughes around the five-star hotel

INTERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

Darlington is a town with five-star ambitions – so it is only fitting it has one of the country’s most luxurious hotels in Rockliffe Hall at Hurworth Place. The stunning 18th Century redbrick mansion and former sanatorium has been transformed since it was bought in 1996

by Middlesbrough FC owner Steve Gibson. He had entrusted his dream of a luxury hotel to investor and former media group MD Warwick Brindle. The five red stars next to the door into reception and year-on-year growth since it was fully opened in January 2010 are proof of how successful he has been and what an asset this has become for Darlington, with the power to draw in the most influential business leaders from all over the country. For Darlington to live up to its own very high expectations, it knew that the biggest players in every sector had to look here to invest. And they would expect fine dining and luxury facilities to be just as much a part of any aspirational town’s economy as retail, transport and office space. Thanks to Warwick and his team, led by chief executive Eamonn Elliott, Rockliffe is now a Darlington brand known around the world.

“The key for Rockliffe is that we have the very best of everything - from a championship golf course and a spa nominated as the best in the UK to rooms that are second to none. When you add three restaurants and great wedding facilities, we mark all the bases.

“We are one of only eight or ten hotels outside London that have five AA red stars (its highest ‘inspectors’ choice’ award), which need ticks in 48 boxes to be approved. For a Darlington hotel, that ain’t bad!”

It could have been a different story. When Steve and Warwick did their first feasibility study in 2000, the signs, including disposable income and catchment area, pointed towards a four-star option. But by the time of a second study in 2005 the economy was brighter, Darlington was growing and maturing and the money people were willing to spend on luxuries had increased, so the decision was made to aim for the very top of the sector.

“Because the hotel was going to be top end, the golf and spa needed to be as well,” says Warwick.

“We knew what the deliverables were and were able to put our stamp on it. We knew the property was going to be OK, but the risk we took on, was what we could demand in rates

and pricing. We were unproven, so needed to convince people we were worthy of a big chunk of their disposable income.

“It’s important to us that the growth of the business has come from a 50-mile or 60-mile radius, and it hasn’t been a helter-skelter period, the growth has always been there. We do a lot of business locally as well as earning that important international reputation.

“We relate closely to Darlington and it means a lot to us. We employ 330 people here and 95% of them are from the town. The hall is nothing without great staff and we have found almost all of them locally, with an average age in the mid-twenties, so we are an important employer in the regional economy, which is massive for the resort.

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has 61 bedrooms, alongside Tiplady Lodge, Woodland Mews holiday homes and apartments at Armstrong House. Outside there are 375 acres of countryside, with walks and jogging routes that pass some of the rare and exotic trees collected by the Hall’s former owners, and keen botanists, the Backhouse family.

Like any Darlington business, Rockliffe will not stop driving forwards. One of its most recent additions, after five years of planning is the spa garden, complete with outdoor heated pools, hot tubs and views across the landscaped grounds.

Warwick works on a rolling five-year plan, which is renewed constantly to maintain its ambition to stay far ahead of its rivals.

“If we describe Rockcliffe as a 61-bedroom

“The list couldn’t be more impressive and each would have been courted by towns and cities around the country – but they chose Rockliffe and Darlington” “So much of the feedback we get is how good the staff are – and that is what we are about.

We can feed 250,000 people a year and we pride ourselves on their opinion of us and our place in the market. It all revolves around the experience and our Darlington staff deliver that and understand what the customer journey is all about.

“The hotel has also had a lot of media interest from all over the country, which brings a very welcome focus to the area. People still don’t realise Darlington is only a couple of hours from London, so bringing them out here is important.”

There is no doubt the Rockliffe magnet has attracted major interest to the town. When the likes of the GB Olympic football team and paralympic sportsmen and women and the US women who won the Olympic title come here, they provide an almost incalculable boost for the hotel’s catchment area. Rallies from such luxury brands as Jaguar and Bentley have been held here as well as car launches from Audi, Tesla and Renault.

The list couldn’t be more impressive and each would have been courted by towns and cities around the country – but they chose Rockliffe and Darlington. Inside, the hotel

country house hotel, people have a certain vision of what that means,” said Warwick.

“But when they come here they realise it is much more and it is always interesting to watch people’s reactions, particularly to the spa, which is a few years beyond what any of the other hotels are doing.

“Everything we do is about the guest experience. We can have 500 covers at the hotel, but there can still be privacy and personal attention. There can be 120 people on the golf course or a wedding taking place and other parts of the hotel wouldn’t know.

“Whatever we offer, people expect it to be the best they have ever had.”

Warwick’s role from day one was to create the hotel from the original ideas, sketches and plans. Now it is to keep developing it, look after the spending and strategy as Eamonn and his team run it.

“I am proud of what we have achieved here, but I always see it as a work in progress,” he says.

“I am most proud when I see someone on the first tee, and I know what the field looked like five years ago. Or when I see a bride coming out of the front door, or someone relaxing in the spa. I see people actually using it all and I say to myself ‘do you know what? It worked’.” n

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INTERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

A town that knows no limits Mike Hughes looks to the future of the town with Darlington Borough Council Leader Bill Dixon

Darlington is a town whose future is built on connections.

Just like the opening 190 years ago of the railway linking Stockton and Darlington put the town so firmly on the map for innovation, now commercial relationships, infrastructure and high-speed broadband have pushed it to the top of the list for investors and businesses.

The council has guided and overseen a root and branch transformation of strategy and outlook that has laid solid foundations for the future, and built the town’s reputation to attract the biggest companies with the most far-reaching plans. Bill Dixon is a born and bred Darlington leader, and a councillor since 1979. His pride in the town’s history is matched only by his vision for its future.

“Darlington has gone through a transition,” he says. “And a lot of that is a case of back to the future, with such a resurgence of skills at such landmark companies as Cummins and Whessoe that is symbolic of what the future holds for Darlington. Advanced manufacturing will always be a big part of Darlington, with managers who are really pushing their plants to provide the products we are famous for.

“We have so many firms that are embedded in the town and committed to it and their success draws others in across an endless range of sectors, with subsea being one of the newest, but already with a huge reputation worldwide.

“We will always have major businesses wanting to come to Darlington – they know the support is here because others have done it and succeeded. But it will always be important that we protect our community, because that is such an important factor. In reality it may not be the board of directors who have the final say on a company move, but the families who want to relocate here and be part of Darlington.

“We understand that someone with a corporate career will be told to go somewhere and they will go because that’s how you develop a career.

A skilled workforce can be sourced locally or trained up here, but the critical mass of these companies, the very highly skilled technicians, will only go where it is best for their families.

“But it has to be all knitted together, with residential as the final connection. We don’t want people having to live in Darlington, we need them wanting to live here, and work here, rather than work and commute from somewhere else. Commuting doesn’t make for a holistic community.

“If you just let the housing sector rip, then you will get a complete mess, but we are able to manipulate the housing market in a good way, by providing homes at all sorts of levels and in some of our key areas.

“Prime residential land around the town is an integral part of the economic future of the borough, and the size of that borough means

we are agile and more able to manage demand and supply. And the fact that our borders are shared with organisations like the health commission makes it all easier to plan and simplifies issues for businesses that might be looking at the area as a possible site for their workers.”

Protecting and developing facilities like the Civic Theatre and making sure the town and its surroundings stay as green as they are now are also vital components as Darlington builds a future for itself.

Restoring the theatre to its original glory is part of a £7.8m project which includes the creation of a new café-bar and gallery, better disabled access and improvements to backstage areas, which will allow the theatre to accommodate even larger shows and bigger names.

And it is the people who will be at the centre of this project, with a Darlington Civic Theatre Foundation fund being run by the County Durham Community Foundation to ensure it makes a real difference to supporters near and far. “The other essential elements of continued growth are our schools and shops. We have always had outstanding schools that have been among the very top performers and we will always make sure we have the right range of shops – and the ones we don’t have in the town centre will always be within commuting distance.

INTERVIEW bqlive.co.uk

“We don’t want people having to live in Darlington, we need them wanting to live here, and work here, rather than work and commute from somewhere else”

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“We’ve seen the value of a cluster effect with the range of food destinations we can offer.

When one comes they all come in and now people can go to the likes of Duke Street for a meal and just take their pick when they get there. There will always be something to like.

“And while they are there we have well above the national average for small independent shops surrounding them and we have the covered market as well as the big supermarket brands.

“These all add up to a huge pull for incoming industries. We want to continue to be a place where workers who may be passing through on a contract will want to stay because it offers a quality of life that is missing in so many towns.

“For us, economic development is about more than only building roads and factories.

It is about the whole package and we work hard to get that mix right because if that holistic package isn’t there then people will go elsewhere.”

That continuing influx of businesses is the lifeblood of regional towns and Darlington’s future lies in keeping that flow coming in as well as staying close to the home-grown SMEs. They need a base in the town but they also need to be able to swiftly build relationships to give them the chance to expand and pump money back into Darlington’s Economy.

“We won’t just look at the big guys,” says Bill. “The philosophy is to get alongside our businesses in the good times and then be in a position to get ahead of the curve with them if they are struggling. We will continually lean on anyone we can to leverage support for our firms and help steer them through a labyrinth of options.”

Bill and the council understand the needs of those smaller businesses. They know they need to be fast-tracked because their businesses are vulnerable in their early stages.

“There is no point in sending them glossy brochures about the sales potential at a Munich festival, they just can’t afford the time away from their business. Many SMEs around here have never sold a product outside the area and often aren’t trained in the techniques of selling or exporting, so we should just give them a box – pure and simple.

“Tell them to put their product in the box along with a 4,000-word description and we will take it to Munich for them. They can stay and

“We want to continue to be a place where workers who may be passing through on a contract will want to stay because it offers a quality of life that is missing in so many towns”

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make their widgets and we will help sell them.

“Helping SMEs can be easier than some people make it look – and Darlington is in a position to rethink how it’s done.”

The connection between all these factors is what gives Darlington its advantage and gives it the pulling power to bring in such game-changing national projects as the £38m National Biologics Manufacturing Centre. The connection goes right back to the men who built the railways, through the long established Darlington companies, to the new business start-ups all around the town and then to the national projects that want to come here.

Each of those needs the other in the matrix and together they will grow in Darlington and as they do they will add another strata to those foundations and others will build on that and the next generation of Darlington development is created, as Bill explains.

“The Biologics Centre proves how far Darlington manufacturing and engineering has come and where its future may well be, because the big change will come when they start to spin out

the SMEs from the new technology.

“There will be a lot of future benefit, because it will be about biologically-based tailored medications. Within a couple of years every child will be able to get his or her DNA mapped for just a few pounds and you will then have the possibility of medicine personal to each patient.

“The council has to be in a position to take advantage of these new industries and have the capacity to move fast and offer them a home and all the support they need.

“Our planning for the future of the town means we have to be able to bring onstream land around Darlington faster than we might have intended. We have always maintained a strategic landbank, which means there are sizeable chunks of land that could house the really high-end SMEs that will be coming out of that biologics sector.

“Often these new firms will set up anywhere from 5 miles to 25 miles away. But we don’t want them 25 miles away – we want them in the town so we will always be ready to move fast. We will find a way to help any new

businesses or new sectors - that’s what we do in Darlington. Any company that comes remotely near us, we will be there for them with a very focused council team who will go after the business and grab it. Very little gets away from us. Hitachi has already seen the benefits of the area. The name brings out great emotions in Darlington. Its huge effect on the regional economy is literally close enough to touch, with its boundary fence in Newton Aycliffe being on the same line as the town’s boundary. And what it is making couldn’t be more evocative of this town’s pride and history – trains are back and Darlington will play its part in restoring a legendary sector in this region.

“A significant part of their skilled workforce will come from within the valley and our own engineering companies see it as a huge advantage because it makes the area even more of an attraction for that kind of work,” says Bill.

“This is the great attraction of developments along the scale of Hitachi – they create a cluster that stretches from screwdrivers to advanced engineering and that drives the skills development in those sectors as well.

“We would expect our colleges to pull together, rather than compete against each other, to be recognised for our centres of excellence, guaranteeing a strong future by working in a collegiate way.

“I really believe the aspirations of the town are limitless. We won’t let it grow into something that is ‘neither nowt nor summat’. The last five years have been hectic, but transformational, with the private sector working with us to keep that Darlington spirit alive and thriving.”

That spirit is embodied in the Ingenious Darlington initiative, a cross-section of people and organisations who do not pull their punches in fighting alongside the council. They say “that same imaginative spirit, blind to reason, which allowed a small group of railway-men and women to kick-start modernity, is still alive and well.” With Bill and the council backing businesses every step of the way for the future prospects of a 100,000-plus population, those people who might ask about Darlington ‘is that near Newcastle or Manchester?’ will soon get the message like the rest of the country.

We don’t need to be ‘near’ anywhere else. This is Darlington, building on a peerless heritage and a thriving reputation to create an exciting and limitless future. n

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