Digital steel archive goes live

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The archive occupies 700ft of shelving

Hundreds of photographs charting the industrial history of Teesside have been made available to the public via the internet.

Teesside University staff have spent months logging and restoring tens of thousands of photographs and documents gifted to the area by British Steel.

The first digital archive of 500 pictures has now gone live.

The archive captures just a fraction of the full collection, which occupies 700ft (152m) of shelving.

Project manager Dr Joan Heggie said: "I still am like a kid in a candy store, because there's so much that we still haven't appreciated, you know, the size of it.

The first stage of the digital archive project includes 500 photos

"Every day we open a box it's like Christmas Day because it's new to us and it's exciting because we're seeing it for the first time with new eyes, possibly the first time that people have had their hands on it."

Since steelmaking began on Teesside more than 150 years ago, the area has been responsible for some of the world's greatest bridges, crossing the Yangtze, the Nile, the Bosporus, and including the famous Victoria Falls Bridge.

Dr Heggie hopes that making the images public will help fill in some of the gaps in the archive.

"In most cases, we have an idea of where they are and what we are looking at, but in some cases there is nothing to tell us and this is where the public can help," she said.

"We do have a facility on the website where, if people know what they are looking at, they can click on the picture and it will come up with a comment box which ties that picture with their comment and they can send us that comment to say, 'I know what this is of,' or, 'I was there in 1955. I worked on this bridge."

Another 500 photos will be added to the archive in the coming weeks.