Another letter in the paper

Dear Editor,
I supported the boundary changes made in 1974 as the communities in this region have far more in common together than they have with Durham or York. With a brand new name and our 400 years of industrial heritage we should have put our region on the world map.Thirty-six years later it has taken a crisis for the world to learn a little about our history. There has been some confusion over whether we live in County Durham or Yorkshire, now we have all been told we live in the Tees Valley. There are hundreds of Internet bloggers in this region and I don't know how many tell the world they live in Yorkshire or County Durham, but 550 of us - many from Redcar, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool, and Darlington - say we live in Cleveland, 200 live on Teesside and just 28 admit to living in the Tees Valley. We can all talk up our towns, but talking up our region and its industrial history is much more difficult. For 350 years people from my town have been supplying Britain with important minerals - I want to see Loftus in Cleveland on the world map. John Lawson