John Anstee, NetPark mastermind

Feb 9 2010 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

The man behind the successful NetPark at Sedgefield imported the idea from a pioneering scheme started in Durham, North Carolina. John Anstee told Sue Scott about it.

IT took 25 years for the Thatcher government to admit they’d got it wrong.

But by the time former cabinet member Norman Tebbit acknowledged last year that the breathtaking speed at which Britain lost its coal mining industry had wreaked unnecessary and untold damage on countless communities, the industrial and social landscape of North-east England had changed forever.

Between March 1984 when Mrs T drew up the battle lines with miners leader Arthur Scargill and 2003, 156 pits fell silent. Eleven were in County Durham, once home to one of the most powerful branches of the National Union of Mineworkers.

Some 16 years earlier a young John Anstee, fresh up from Wales, remembers witnessing his first Durham Miners Gala.

The timescales are important because it taught John, who went on to lay the foundations for a new economic order, whose influence could be just as powerful as coal, an important lesson. It doesn’t take long to destroy a community, but it takes a long time to build one.

Late last year, as veterans of the miners strike marked the end of a sombre quarter century, John stepped down as scientific director of NetPark in Sedgefield - a brave new cluster of white coat technology companies which he helped establish within site of the old pit heads and on whom the future might now depend for large parts of County Durham and the Tees Valley.

The inspiration for the science park, now barely five years old, but whose reputation has already put Sedgefield on speed dial for some of the world‘s best known blue chips, came from the experience of townsfolk in Durham, USA, which 60 years ago faced problems as apparently intractable as those of the North-east.

There, a visionary development on 8,000 acres backed by the local university to encourage research-based businesses into the area saw a very different Durham emerge, creating 40,000 mostly well paid jobs in the process.