In case there is anyone out there who hasn’t heard Jacksons Law Firm has been practising in the Tees Valley for 140 years this year. This week, following on from a number of conversations with various local organisations I asked my colleagues in our Tees Valley office what it is that they like about working and living here.
Now I send many emails around the office in the course of a working week and to some of these I confess I get little response or at best a very muted response but this one inspired a number of people to speak out. I had very clearly stumbled upon a subject about which there was some passion. This is interesting because if you go outside of the north east when talking about this area, it is not uncommon for there to be little knowledge about the region and Tees Valley in particular and the way this area is perceived in the media is often negative.
There were though common themes amongst the Jacksons family as to what they liked and these included:
- The People
- The surrounding countryside and coast and the opportunities these present for leisure
- The reasonable price of housing
- The industrial heritage and the many businesses here that we are rightly proud of
- The high quality of our schools and our university
We are genuinely proud that we have hosted the Tour of Yorkshire, that our football team is in the premiership and most particularly, that despite difficult times the local people here get on and make the best of things. People cite the recent successes of companies in the region, the good news this week about the £145million superfund for North East businesses and the news just out that whilst still too high the unemployment rate is falling.
So with all these positives around why is that this area gets such a bad press? Is it because the bad news drowns out the good news, because we have gained a reputation of being a struggling northern region with a closing steel works, high unemployment and immigrants hiding behind red doors or because bad news gets more publicity than good?
I am not sure it matters why. The emails I received this week demonstrate loud and clear that we are proud of our area. We might be modest but I think however, the time is long overdue for us to let the secret out of the bag and tell the world about our fantastic region and its good news stories. This region has so much to offer and to give and we need to sell it. I do not believe the press only wants bad news stories but I do believe they need us all to tell them the good news so they can publish it. So whilst the self –deprecating humour of this region is in many ways refreshing compared with the snobbery and self –promotion we see elsewhere we are not doing ourselves any favours.
The Tees Valley or Teesside it doesn’t matter what we call it is a great place to live and work and has much to be very proud of. Together we can promote our region and encourage new businesses to consider the area and all its benefits so that the fall in the unemployment figures is even steeper and our region prospers further. We are very lucky to live in such a beautiful, interesting and friendly part of the world but we need to share it!
