Billingham and Wilton manufacturing history

 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)

Northwich manufacturing history

 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.

Accrington manufacturing history

 The town’s brickworks were known for making the densest and hardest bricks in the world used for the 'construction of the Empire State Building and the foundations of the Blackpool Tower'.

Coal mining was carried on around the outskirts of the town which attracted foundries from which textile machinery manufacturing emerged. There was tinplating and calico printing machinery, dye and chemical works.

A cotton town with forty seven mills at one time and calico printing. It was home to machinery manufacturers for the textile and cotton industries. The largest machinery manufacturer, Howard & Bulloughs, were the largest employer in the town.

Courtaulds set up a plant for machine making after the Second World War but closed it in the fifties preferring to buy from third party manufacturers.

Entwisle & Kenyon founded in 1864 began with manual washing machine but later made the much loved Ewbank carpet sweeper.

In the Second World War a shadow factory produced Bristol aero engines; the factory was later sold to English Electric, later GEC, which manufactured steel fabrication and aircraft structures.

Lucas (Rists) manufactured their wiring systems.

Further reading:

• Michael Rothwell, A Guide to the Industrial Archeology of Accrington 1979
• Jack Nadia, Coal mines around Accrington and Blackburn