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 weaves together strands of personal experience, nature writing, botany, geology and history with an account of the impact of human industry and agriculture on the Tees and its valley. 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 activity.