Billingham is a town and civil parish in County Durham, England. The town is on the north side of the River Tees and is governed as part of the Borough of Stockton-on-Tees unitary authority. It had a population of 35,165 in the 2011 Census.

The settlement has been around since Anglo-Saxon times as a village, a post-Second World War modern town centre was built north of the old village centre on the town's grange. It was a township with an urban district from 1923 until 1968, when it was absorbed into the County Borough of Teesside, and part of the county of Cleveland.

Billingham is home to the Billingham Manufacturing Plant which is a major producer of Chemicals for agriculture.

History
The town was settled by Angles and has a name either meaning Billa's people's home or bill-shaped hill people's home. The town was in one of the Northumbrian regiones. This regione is thought to cover much of the land of northern Teesdale and had late Viking rule. It was later broken up with Billingham in the Hartness district then into a small shire called Billinghamshire.


St Cuthbert's Church
St Cuthbert's Parish Church has elements dating back to the late-7th/early-8th-century in its nave and a tower dating c. AD 1000. There is also a 7th-century grave-marker from the church in the British Museum.

Chemical industry and ICI
Main article: Billingham Manufacturing Plant

Fertiliser chemical works
The town's chemical industry started in the early 1900s. In 1917, the town was chosen to be the site of a new chemical works supplying ammonia for the war. However, the plant wasn't completed until 1920, after the war had ended. The Brunner Mond Company took over the site and converted it to manufacture fertilisers. In December 1926, Brunner Mond merged with three other chemical companies to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), who took control of the plant. With the World Wars creating a high demand for explosives it led to a massive expansion of Billingham and post-Second World War a new town centre was built. ICI began to produce plastics at Billingham in 1966.

Aldous Huxley visited the newly opened and technologically advanced Brunner and Mond plant at ICI and gave a detailed account of the processes he saw. The introduction to the most recent print of Brave New World states that Huxley was inspired to write the novel by this Billingham visit. Henry Thorold in the Shell Guide to County Durham states:

This is one of the most extraordinary of experiences, a sight almost unique in England. On either side of the road are the works. Steaming, sizzling—tall steel towers, great cylinders, pipes everywhere... At night the whole industrial world along the banks of the Tees comes to life... brilliant with a thousand lights, the great girders of the Transporter Bridge dark in silhouette: a magic city.

From 1971 to 1988 ICI operated a small General Atomics TRIGA Mark I nuclear reactor at its Billingham factory to produce radio-isotopes for use in process instrumentation such as level measurement devices. In addition to its own on-site coal-fired power station, ICI also operated the coal-fired North Tees Power Station, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, on the banks of the Tees to provide electricity for its plants. The latter was eventually decommissioned and demolished (at a ceremony attended by Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley) in 1987. The site of the power station is now Billingham Reach Industrial Estate, an international wharf owned by Able UK Ltd. ICI no longer operates in Billingham, having sold many of its businesses during the restructuring of the company in the 1990s. Some of the company's former manufacturing plants are still in operation, run by other chemical companies. Several chemical plants close to the town were subject to explosions and leaks in 2006 and 2007.

Following the fragmentation and ultimate loss of the chemicals conglomerate ICI, the Billingham Chemical Industrial park became a multi-company facility. The chemical, biotechnology and engineering companies that continue to operate at Billingham are members of the Northeast of England Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC). They include GrowHow, Johnson Matthey, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies and Fruitarom. Other members of the NEPIC Cluster operate from the 62 acre (25 hectares) Belasis Business Park in Billingham such as Cambridge Research Biochemicals, ABB and Biochemica. Growhow not only manufacture fertilisers & industrial chemicals in Bilingham, but also capture the CO2 for use in the food and drink industry. Tomatoes are grown in Billingham by North Bank Growers using the recoverable energy from the Billingham complex, which further reduces the area's carbon footprint.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies have a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Billingham. Subject to regulatory approval, at least 60 million doses of the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine will be manufactured there for the UK government from 2021