The wich-es in Cheshire, Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich have provided salt for centuries along paths known as salt ways, like the one by which I live in Leicestershire.
For two young chemists in the late nineteenth century they held rather more: the promise of soda ash for which the cotton manufacturers were screaming.
John Brunner and Ludwig Mond had met whilst working for Hutchinson’s alkali works in Widnes. They gained backing from wealthy engineer Charles Holland and bought Winnington Hall in the grounds of which in 1874 they built a plant producing soda ash by the then new ammonia soda process, The Solvay Process. Three further plants followed. The Solvay process gained acceptance over the former Leblanc process because it reduced the pollution of the latter and was altogether more efficient.
In 1926 Brunner Mond joined United Alkali, Nobel Industries and British Dyestuffs to become ICI and the enlarged company committed itself to research. They founded a laboratory on the site and it was there in 1933 that polythene was first produced. The Winnington works continued with polythene until production was transferred to ICI Hertfordshire.
Winnington was a significant part of the ICI Mond division and is now part of Tata Chemicals Europe and continues with soda ash manufacture. In 2022 Tata set up the first industrial scale carbon capture site in Europe.
Winnington Hall was previously a girls boarding school to which Victorian writer John Ruskin visited to lecture on one of his books on political economy.
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