In 1917, the village of Billingham in County Durham suffered the agonies of the First World War as the rest of the country where young men joined up never to return - from Bellingham some 137 died; the population was 4,599. For Billingham, the war would result in massive physical change - A Brave New World.
The world war in which the country was engaged placed huge demands on industry. In particular the young chemical industry would undergo a revolution in order to manufacture the vast quantities of explosive which the shell filling factories were demanding. Brunner Mond of Northwich in Cheshire were asked to increase their production and in 1916 a new purpose built factory at Stratton in Swindon was dedicated to the production of nitrates.
It was a year later that the Ministry of Munitions commissioned the building of a yet larger plant at Billingham transforming the landscape. The plant was not in production by the end of the war, but in 1920 Brunner Mond formed Synthetic Ammonia and Nitrates Ltd to make ammonia for use in explosives but also ammonium sulphate fertiliser. The plant has access to a substantial bed of anhydrite a form of calcium sulphate which made it a suitable place for the production of ammonium sulphate. More significantly for the Ministry of Munitions, the plant had access to electricity from a soon to be commissioned station by the Newcastle Electricity Supply Co. With the coming of peace, there were severe doubts as to the market for nitrogen based chemicals and there was lengthy debate and negotiation with potential partners. But Brunner Mond did go ahead and set in stone the location of the heart of the soon to be born ICI .
The plant attracted chemists from around Britain including a young Aldous Huxley to whom Billingham represented an 'ordered universe in the midst of a wider world of planless incoherence'. It was ground breaking technology which, by the time Huxley arrived, was focused on the production of fertiliser to feed a hungry world. The world, though, had changed and other countries were equally able to produce the fertiliser they needed. Billingham had to look further afield.
In 1926 Brunner Mond became part of ICI and spurred Billingham to further growth. By 1932 it employed 5,000 out of the then population of 18,000. The Second World War renewed the demand for explosives. Billingham produced a high octane fuel from creosote which had added 25 mph to the top speed of a Spitfire in pursuit of German flying bombs.
A key invention was that of Perspex which proved ideal for the windscreens of Spitfires. Later other plants produced Perspex including Darwen in Blackburn, Lancashire.
In 1945, the company bought the site on which it would build its other major plant in the north east at Wilton. This was not only bigger, but would be home to Britain’s major chemicals manufacture for decades. It had its own power plant, with 33MW Metropolitan Vickers/AEI turbine-generator sets powered by Babcock and Wilcox boilers. It was vast then, but in 2013 boasted sixty miles of road, four hundred miles of electric cable and one hundred and fifty miles of pipework on the two thousand acre site. In the late forties and fifties, its production included nylon, terylene and perspex.
The postwar world saw the explosion of petrochemicals whereby a 'cracker' splits crude oil into its constituent chemicals. ICI’s cracker at Wilton was itself linked to Billingham by a ten-mile pipeline, making it the largest chemical plant then in the world. ICI Acrylics division would go on to produce the feedstocks for plastic manufacture and much more.
Further reading:
W.J. Reader, Imperial Chemical Industries - A History Vol II The First Quarter Century 1926-1952 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975)
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