Construction milestone on mammoth Teesworks watercourse

Posted on 14 March 2025

[Aerial photographs of the South Bank Watercourse on the Teesworks site. Water has now broken through from the River Tees into the watercourse.]

Construction of a crucial £18m surface water drainage system at the giant Teesworks site has reached a vital milestone.

Water has now broken through from the River Tees into the South Bank Watercourse, which is designed to handle and manage the extensive quantities of surface water run-off from the Teesworks development.

The watercourse will initially manage the large volumes of water draining from the 90-acre SeAH Wind turbine monopile manufacturing facility which is nearing completion.

The vast scale of this facility means that rainwater run-off from the development will be significant, particularly under heavy storm conditions. As a result, all developments on the South Bank and Dorman Point areas of Teesworks need to have a means of efficiently discharging surface water so as not to hamper their operations, a role which the South Bank Watercourse performs.

Extending up to 8m in depth and 1.9km in length, the new watercourse has been constructed largely as an open channel, natural stream, which supports the mitigation of water pollution through its natural filtration. It incorporates a gravel bed and carefully landscaped banks, discharging to the River Tees. The system also incorporates over 350 linear metres of buried culvert – where the watercourse passes beneath development land.

The project incorporates a very large intertidal section where the watercourse meets the river. This will see an ecologically valuable salt marsh habitat created, which will be a natural haven for wildlife.

The watercourse features extensive gabion basket walls – cages filled with stones – providing structural support to the open channels in most areas. These have been created using recycled aggregates sourced from land remediation projects on Teesworks – a former steelworks site – in lieu of importing natural quarried stone, saving cost and significantly mitigating the environmental impact of the scheme.

In total, over 100,000 cubic metres of recycled aggregates were used on the project.

John McNicholas, engineering and programme director at Teesworks, said: “We’re delighted to see the South Bank Watercourse reaching this pivotal milestone.

“The sheer scale of the works has been something to behold, but equally, the logistical challenges that have had to be overcome in delivering the scheme through live construction sites where multiple remediation, infrastructure and building projects have been progressing simultaneously.

“We are particularly pleased to see the extent to which we have been able to make best use of the resources on our own doorstep, through the extensive recycling of earthworks materials for use in the project’s channel bed and banks.”

This important civil engineering project has been carried out by a number of different companies.

The main civils contractor for phase one of the project was Hall Construction Services; for the other phases, including the final phase, it has been Applebridge Construction.

The overall scope includes the diversion and upgrade of two existing watercourses - Holme Beck and Knitting Wife Beck - traversing the 60ha Dorman Point development zone on Teesworks, which will discharge into the South Bank section.

For the Dorman Point section, the main civils contractor for the Holmebeck diversion and upgrade was Seymour Civil Engineering Ltd and for the Knitting Wife Beck diversion and upgrade first phase, it was Hall Construction Services Limited.

The primary subcontractors used on the project were Phi Group on phase one, providing gabion basket retaining wall construction, and Enviromesh on subsequent phases, also providing gabion basket retaining wall construction.

Following the watercourse works completion, the next phase of similar works will see the construction of the £3m second and final phase of the Knitting Wife Beck diversion on Dorman Point , followed by the £10m reconstruction of an existing four-bay bridge underpass beneath the Saltburn to Darlington railway corridor, which will enable the Holmebeck and Knitting Wife Beck channels on Dorman Point to connect through to the South Bank Watercourse.