THOUSANDS of jobs are expected to be created with a multi-million pound flagship redevelopment.

About £500m is to be spent on re-inventing Middlesbrough; burying 250 acres of derelict former dockland and a twilight neighbourhood, marked for demolition, under thousands of new homes, leisure developments, shops and offices.

A Middlesbrough Council report on the Middlehaven master plan forecasts that the facelift will "regenerate and reposition Middlesbrough" and sound a wake-up call to the rest of the region.

But it has been a difficult birth and labour, a history of false starts and disappointments running back 20 years. The defunct Teesside Development Corporation came up with a grandiose plan to build a world-class tall ships centre at the hub of the redevelopment, the plan anchored on a food hypermarket.

The idea was that the money from the deal with the supermarket chain would pay for the infrastructure needed to open up the Middlehaven site.

But local councils objected to the idea of a huge superstore and that part of the scheme went to public inquiry. The idea of a tall ships centre sank without trace and the entire redevelopment plan temporarily floundered.

The development corporation had been invented by Margaret Thatcher. She had also pioneered the British Urban Development, (Bud) the building and property consortium as an inner city action squad.

Bud pulled out of the Middlehaven project because of a lack of public sector grants.

Joe Docherty, chief executive of Tees Valley Regeneration, the urban regeneration company leading the project, said: "I know that Middlehaven has had more launches than Cape Canaveral - but this isn't just talk.

"Tees Valley Regeneration has no intention of making yet another grand announcement about Middlehaven without the ability to deliver."

There will be three major development phases to Middlehaven stretching up to the year 2020.

Mr Docherty said last night: "A significant amount of the proposals for phase one are at an advanced stage of negotiation, with a number of announcements expected later this year - in fact construction work on the first offices has now started."

Award-winning architects Alsop have drawn up a master plan for the Middlehaven scheme.

Tees Valley Regeneration will lead discussions with One NorthEast, English Partnerships and the Government's Treasury to secure the public sector costs of finally turning the Middlehaven dream into reality.