Steve Nicholls makes an epic journey along the River Tees in north-east England, from the industrial complexes near its estuary to its source high in the Pennine Hills.

The Tees estuary was where Steve’s life-long passion for nature was born, launching a long career as a documentary maker. As he travels the length of the eighty-mile river, he uses his years of travelling the world and his work on nature films to place the fauna and flora he encounters along the Tees in a wider context.

He skilfully weaves together strands of personal experience, nature writing, botany, geology and local – and wider – history with an account of the depredations wrought by human industry and agriculture on the valley and waters of the Tees. Steel River is thus a natural and social history of a remarkable river, but also presents the Tees as a universal exemplar of environmental degradation, allowing the author to reflect on – and offer prescriptions for – the broken state of the natural world after 10,000 years of human impact.