Later, when British company Imperial Chemical Industries (known as ICI) set up shop here it further diversified this region's role as Britain's engine room. If you'd stood on Corporation Road back then, it would have been packed with men in donkey jackets waiting at bus stops to make their way to the chemical plants and steelworks. The horizon quickly transformed into a giant's playground of pipes, chimneys, cranes and towering structures; bursting flames, smoke plumes and blinking lights. The director Ridley Scott grew up around here, and based the opening shot of Blade Runner on what he saw: an industrial dystopia of hellfire and power, as awe-inspiring as it was terrifying. Even now, the sandstone ashlar of Middlesbrough's gothic town hall is stained dark from the fumes of those expansive days."The iron of Eston has diffused itself all over the world. It furnishes the railways of the world; it runs by Neapolitan and papal dungeons; it startles the bandit in his haunt in Cicilia; it crosses over the plains of Africa; it stretches over the plains of India. It has crept out of the Cleveland Hills where it has slept since Roman days, and now like a strong and invincible serpent, coils itself around the world."
You don't need to walk for long down the streets of Dave's native Stockton to see it is a conflicted town; a candid portrait of inequality in parts of Britain that successive governments have left to fester. It was voted the fifth best place to live in the UK in 2015, the same year Channel Four broadcast the second series of Benefits Street from it. In Stockton South, large private housing estates like Hartburn or Ingleby Barwick (nicknamed "toy town" by locals) spread out into the countryside; closed off middle class utopias with multi-million pound leisure facilities under construction. The MP here is the Conservatives' James Wharton, once Minister for the mythical "Northern Powerhouse" and the only Tory MP on Teesside."The opinion is: My life is shit anyway, and it is going to be just as shit afterwards. It just doesn't cross their mind to go and vote."