Episode 1: Teesside's summer of construction — £50m airport campus, Stockton's new waterfront and a housing building boom

Transcript

Welcome to the very first episode of the Teesside Trade Podcast — the weekly show covering construction, trades and property news across the Tees Valley. Whether you're on the tools, running a trade business, or a homeowner planning work, this is your ten-minute briefing on what's being built, who's building it, and what it means for you.

We're brought to you by the team behind Teesside Trade News, and every story we cover is linked in the show notes and transcript at teessidetradepodcast.co.uk.

Let's get into it — because this summer, Teesside is building.

Our first story is the big one. Alfor Aviation has signed a fifty-million-pound deal for a new aircraft conversion campus at Teesside International Airport — a fifty-year commitment to the site. The company will refit aircraft here and relocate its global headquarters to Teesside, with around two hundred and fifty permanent high-skilled jobs once the campus is operational, planned for the end of 2027.

For the construction trade, the headline is the build itself: hangars, warehouses and engineering offices, all needing groundworks, steel, cladding, roofing, electrics and fit-out over the next couple of years. Big-ticket industrial work, right on the doorstep.

Story two, and Stockton town centre has a new centrepiece. The twenty-three-million-pound Stockton Waterfront urban park, delivered by Esh Construction with Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council, has opened — transforming the former Castlegate shopping centre site into open green space that reconnects the High Street with the riverside.

And the work isn't finished. Installation of a large timber play area — designed by Timberplay with Ryder Architecture — began in mid-August, so there's still landscaping, joinery and finishing work flowing from this one. Regeneration schemes like this tend to ripple outward too: when a town centre gets a facelift, private landlords and shopfitters usually follow.

Story three takes us to Middlesbrough, where work has started on a nine-million-pound scheme of forty affordable-rent homes in Thorntree. Housing provider Thirteen is leading it, with RE:GEN North East and support from Homes England — thirty-nine two-bedroom bungalows, a housing type in seriously short supply locally.

And it's not alone. Over at Wynyard, approval is in for two hundred and forty-three new homes — and here's the detail trades should clock: they're being built with solar panels and EV charging as standard. That's renewables and electrical work baked into every single plot. Add the three hundred and twenty-three homes approved in East Cleveland, and you've got one of the strongest residential pipelines the Tees Valley has seen in years.

Every new home needs a roof, first and second fix electrics and plumbing, plastering, joinery and landscaping. That is steady, dependable work for local firms — and it's landing at exactly the moment the industry is short of hands.

Which brings us to our final story: the skills shortage. The CITB — the Construction Industry Training Board — is projecting that the UK needs tens of thousands of extra construction workers a year to meet demand, and the Tees Valley is feeling it. With Net Zero Teesside and the region's offshore wind supply chain ramping up alongside all this housing, competition for good tradespeople is only going one way.

Two takeaways there. If you're a trade business, the firms winning work right now are the ones investing in apprenticeships and holding on to their people. And if you're a homeowner, the flip side matters: good trades are busy, so plan ahead, get multiple quotes, and be very wary of anyone who can start a big job tomorrow.

That's it for episode one. Next week we'll have the latest planning decisions, contract wins and project starts from across Stockton, Middlesbrough, Redcar, Hartlepool and Darlington.

You'll find the full transcript and links to every source for today's stories at teessidetradepodcast.co.uk, and the written versions at teessidetradenews.co.uk. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.