Serving the Teesside Business Community | 77
/ DARLINGTON NEWS
EXTRA £3M COMMITTED
TO STATION PLANS
Over the last decade, Teesside University
has invested more than £250m in its
campus heart, with a further £50m
scheduled for the next three years.
#TalkingUpTeesside
Tees mayor Ben Houchen
Transport for the North
chief executive Barry
White (second left) and
Darlington Council leader
Bill Dixon (second right).
T
he Tees Valley mayor and Combined
Authority Cabinet have agreed a further
£3m of funding to begin detailed
design work on the Darlington station
redevelopment project.
The £100m Darlington 2025 plan will
see a major overhaul of the station and
reconfiguration of rail track to ensure the
station is able to accommodate new high-
speed services on the East Coast Main Line,
while also unlocking capacity on the local rail
line.
This will lead to faster, more frequent and
better-quality services across the Tees Valley,
County Durham and North Yorkshire, and
better freight connections from Teesport.
This ambitious programme captures the
pioneering spirit shown nearly 200 years
ago, when the Stockton-Darlington Railway
first ushered in the age of rail passenger
transport.
In the last four years the town has seen
nearly £200m of investment within ten
minutes’ walk of the station including the
National Horizons Centre, Business Central
and the Feethams leisure development.
Mayor Houchen announced in May that
he will bring forward an investment of up to
£25m towards the capital cost of the station,
but insisted that central Government will
need to contribute the rest.
The mayor’s commitment will come from a
£ 59m local connectivity pot that was devolved
to the area from Government last year.
This new £3m is in addition to the £25m
commitment, and will be used to support the
next stage of development and design of the
proposal.
Experts to get St
Paul’s Cathedral bells
ringing again
Combined cash for
£20m sports village
Half a million pounds has been agreed
to progress through detailed feasibility
plans for a bold £20m sports village
at the Darlington Arena which could
create more than 200 jobs.
Darlington Council, working with
Darlington Mowden Park RFC, has
proposed a mixed-use development
that would facilitate an exciting array of
new leisure and sporting partners on
land adjacent to the arena.
The authority has agreed to back the
case with £449,950 and the council will
provide an additional £50,000.
The development is part of a wider
plan that will seek to attract high-profile
international sport and major music
artists to the region.
ENGINEERS’ WIND FARM DEAL
Darlington-based Mech-Tool Engineering has
successfully secured its second contract to
fabricate 20 internal support structures to
what will be the world’s largest wind farm.
The contract – to fabricate and supply
the structures for the Hornsea One
offshore wind farm – has been awarded by
Billingham-based OSB EEW and will see
MTE manufacture the suspended internal
support structures (SIPS) for OSB’s transition
project.
It’s the second contract win this year
for MTE on the prestigious wind farm
development and follows the company’s
announcement in February that it would be
providing general fabrication of transportation
cables.
Stone Technical Services (STS) has
secured a prestigious contract to assist
with the refurbishment of the bells at St
Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The Darlington-based high-level
restoration and maintenance company
was selected from dozens of nationwide
contractors thanks to its expertise in the
field of historic buildings and its previous
work at St Paul’s.
NEW TENANT AT
LINGFIELD POINT
A new warehousing deal has seen a
massive 132,000 sq ft of warehousing
space snapped up at Lingfield Point in
Darlington.
The three-year agreement is one of the
biggest lettings in the North East this year
and brings new tenant Premofab to the
business park, which will use the unit for
storage, and joins the 3,000-plus people
who already work at Lingfield Point.
/TeesBusiness
@Tees_Business