Brunner Mond, Winnington - lime kilns
Introduction
The photograph on this page of Brunner Mond, Winnington - lime kilns by Alan Murray-Rust as part of the Geograph project.
The Geograph project started in 2005 with the aim of publishing, organising and preserving representative images for every square kilometre of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man.
There are currently over 7.5m images from over 14,400 individuals and you can help contribute to the project by visiting https://www.geograph.org.uk
Brunner Mond, Winnington - lime kilns
Image: © Alan Murray-Rust Taken: 15 May 2008
Salt and limestone are the basic building blocks of the chemical industry in the area. Lime is burnt to create quicklime which is then slaked to become calcium hydroxide. This can be combined with sodium carbonate (washing soda)- itself a result of combining salt and limestone - to produce caustic soda; the growth of the salt industry was driven by the use of these two chemicals in the burgeoning soap and cleansing agents industry at the end of the 19th century. Finding uses for the excess Chlorine was one of the driving forces behind the original Brunner Mond company, later ICI, developing uses in the pharmaceutical and plastics fields. This site is where polythene was first developed.
Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
Image Location
Latitude
53.268298
Longitude
-2.528483