British Steel: reforging Redcar’s industrial heritage through poetic and creative technologies

This practice-based thesis examines how remote sensing and volumetric capture can support community-led heritage meaning-making when industrial heritage becomes contested, inaccessible, and disappears in real time. It takes the demolition of the Redcar steelworks in Teesside, United Kingdom, as its case study, working with the Save Our Steel Heritage (SOSH) community group to explore how this industrial memory can be encountered, reconstructed, and governed through creative technological practice.

Guided by three research questions organised around technology, community, and heritage, the study develops two core methods. Co-building constructs a memory-led 3D model of the blast-furnace core prior to demolition, embedding participant agency through iterative sketch-to-model cycles, discussion, and review. Retrospective Capture reconstructs demolition through witness media, remote sources, and Structure-from Motion traces, assembling them into a navigable scene that holds multiple situated viewpoints.

Grounded in philosophical accounts of techné and poiesis, and in critiques of instrumental capture, this thesis argues that glitches, gaps, and distortions should remain legible as meaning-bearing traces of loss, mediation, and partiality rather than as errors to be erased. Its findings reposition volumetric tools as civic and ethical mediators, formalise co building as a participatory method for redistributing representational agency, and establish a legacy practice: a transferable, licensed, revision-ready infrastructure of co-owned outputs that keeps contested industrial memory encounterable, governable, and open to future stewardship after material erasure.

Archive of creative artefacts: https://britishsteel.cargo.site/