“This place might look bad but it’s not, the people are good people,” said one woman before turning to her young daughter and asking: “Is this place bad?” The girl shakes her head vigorously.
It’s a difficult thing to say given the week’s events in Grangetown and South Bank on Teesside.
Around the corner is the burned-out shell of a house which was deliberately set on fire on Saturday , killing Natalie McDonald, 34, and her seven-year-old niece Valentina Foster. Metres away is the A66 where, less than a mile away on Saturday, a head-on crash killed seven people, including two police officers.
Cleveland police have linked the crash to organised crime and say they cannot rule out it also being connected to the house fire.
The neighbours and well-wishers who gather sombrely opposite the house in Birchington Avenue, Grangetown, are sick of being asked questions by reporters but they also insist that the events are not linked.
“There’s no connection … 100 %,” said one neighbour. “It’s smackheads, that’s the problem round here,” said another.
John Kirton, the brother of McDonald, told reporters: “My sister was not involved with anything to do with gangs, or the [crash on the] A66.
“That’s what makes this so senseless. People think they can do whatever they like. There’s some terrible people in the world and now my sister and Valentina have gone.”
People, all reluctant to give their names, say the community is a tight-knit one. “Everyone looks out for each other,” said one woman.
But they also agree that there is a big problem with gangs of boys and young men involved in drug dealing and other crimes.
People felt trapped in their own homes, afraid to go to the shops, said the Middlesbrough and Thornaby East MP, Andy McDonald. He called it a form of “terrorism”.
Jonathan Brash, the MP for Hartlepool, said communities felt organised crime was “embedded”.
There have been nine deaths and other possibly gang-related local crimes including a knife attack and the ramming of an empty house. On Thursday evening, video was shared on social media showing cars being torched at a vigil for one of the men who died in the A66 crash. It was in Haswell, County Durham, 20 miles north of the crash site.
The events of the last week have clearly left a community shellshocked and in need of help, fearful of what might happen next.
Alec Brown, the leader of Redcar and Cleveland council, said authorities were working “tirelessly” to ensure people feel safe. About 200 extra police from other forces have been drafted in and some could be seen arriving at Cleveland’s police headquarters on Friday morning.
The extra police are coming from the Northumbria, Durham, Humberside and North, South and West Yorkshire forces as well as the National Crime Agency. The hope is that a show of strength can dampen tensions and reassure the area.
Terry Chapman is not from Grangetown, but was “born and raised” on a different Middlesbrough council estate.
He didn’t quite know why he had come to the site of the house blaze, but felt he had to. “I know these areas, they are like where I’m from,” he said. “We have problems but when things happen like this … it’s just hard to believe. It’s really horrendous and scary.”
Chapman said criminal gangsters were the minority. “The vast majority of people, including in places like Grangetown, are absolutely fantastic people.
“They may not have a lot. Some do. Some are managing and some are barely managing. But fundamentally, the majority of people are decent and they’re law-abiding. The trouble is that the small minority seem to have a bigger influence in places like this and it’s gone unchecked for years.”
Grangetown and South Bank are clearly deprived, rundown areas. There are small terraces of shops, many shut, and no obvious centre.
It’s also striking how few pubs there are. One former pub, the Magnet – which hosted early gigs for the Grangetown-born comedian Roy Chubby Brown – is now a branch of Heron Foods.
Saturday’s collision took place on the A66 between Church Lane and Normanby Road. Police had been pursuing a VW Passat with five young men in it for seven minutes before it turned on to the dual carriageway, against the flow of traffic. The pursuit was aborted. Ten seconds later the Passat crashed into a police car. Everyone died at the scene, including the police officers Matthew Blades and Tom Clough.
On the corner of Church Lane and the A66 a retired steelworker is looking desperately at the bouquets left for the PCs.
He’s called Joe. “I better not give you my surname, because of the lunatics …”
The former steelworks, where most people in the area worked, was literally on the other side of the road, Joe said. “I could be out of work and back home in 10 minutes.”
He is close to tears at what has happened in his community this week. “The problem is the police don’t have the resources. There used to be a station in South Bank, there used to be a station in Eston. Now there’s no police here and they [the criminal gangs] are doing whatever they like with drugs passing from one to another. They’ve got away with it for years.”
It’s also true that the problems in this part of Teesside are not isolated. Countless other places everywhere, not just the UK, have major problems with gangs and organised crime. You can watch versions of the problem on TV whenever you want, whether it’s Naples, Baltimore or Liverpool.
It’s easy to see places like Grangetown and South Bank as postcards for forgotten England, places tabloids sometimes say are controlled by feral gangs. But scratch the surface and there is light.
In South Bank on Normanby Road, near the A66 junction, is a community gallery set up by the Iraqi artist and Teesside University graduate Azad Karim Mohammed.
The Saabat Gallery is a great place, currently showing and selling the work of the local artists Rita Readman and David Watson.
The gallery’s coordinator, Nathaniel McGovern, has been there five years. “Everyone is warm and welcoming round here,” he said. “People are happy to help and it’s a close community.
“It has been a mad week for everyone round here but you get nice people and bad people everywhere, don’t you? I’d say this area’s got more nice people than bad.”
It’s a difficult thing to say given the week’s events in Grangetown and South Bank on Teesside.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Mark Brown North of England correspondent. Published 28 Aug 2026, 11:53 am.
