We speak to TV chef – and one half of the Hairy Bikers – Si King, about the region’s ever-growing taste for street food. Having helped organise a recent festival in Sunderland, Si talks about our increasing fascination with new cuisines, the lucrative market our tastebuds are helping create, and why, as an area, we need to drop our ‘steady as she goes, head below the parapet’ attitude and celebrate loudly the quality of North East produce.
This magazine – was given an exclusive tour of Redcar’s Teesworks site. Once a sprawling steel plant, latterly home to the collapsed SSI UK, the huge expanse is undergoing a seismic transformation, with totemic buildings, including the coastal base’s blast furnace, making way for the creation of a giant clean energy hub. Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen, the man masterminding Teesworks’ inception, tells this edition, for all the history and memories, there must be a future too.