Selected projects
4.19.11 Salt and soda: the archaeology of chemicals
The Monuments Protection Programme coverage of industrial archaeology has had to develop its own methodology to cover a vitally important aspect of the evolution of modern British society that is still very much underrepresented in the Sites and Monuments Records and other sources from which the programme draws much of its baseline information.. Coverage of each industry proceeds through six steps, from a report setting out the general character of the industry and the policies that should guide protection (Step 1), through short-listing and site assessment (Steps 2 and 3) and internal policy decisions (Steps 4 and 5) to the final documentation of the sites selected for Scheduling (Step 6).
As Step 1 to 3, coverage of the various extractive industries moves towards completion, attention is moving towards the manufacturing industries, and Cranstone Consultants - who have taken a leading role in the development of industrial aspects of the Monuments Protection Programme - are working on Step 1 for the chemical industries, and Step 2 for the salt industry (following on from a Step 1 Report prepared by Essex County Council). Already, these projects are providing interesting information. For salt, the wide range of coastal saltern sites - dating from prehistory to the twentieth century, and showing evidence for a wide range of technologies that are still not fully understood - forms a major and little-known aspect of English field archaeology.
One of the earliest branches of the chemical industry was the manufacture of copperas (the confusing contemporary name for iron sulphate, used from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century for the production of inks, dyes, pigments, and sulphuric acid), and the remains of at least two copperas works are known to survive. Moving closer to the present, some of the best surviving site evidence for the late nineteenth-century coal-dominated organic chemicals industry appears to survive on Dartmoor, where the field remains of several unsuccessful attempts to base a chemical industry on peat have escaped the clearance and redevelopment of the main lowland centres of the industry. It is also important not to lose sight of the need at least to consider what, if anything, should be done to preserve the dramatic modern skylines of the chemical industry, such as those that dominate parts of Teesside.