Leaving behind the orderly world of parked cars, sandwich shops and old men with terriers at the Brus roundabout, you walk through a horseshoe tunnel and emerge into a wasteland of rubble, half-demolished masses of concrete, and crusts of white crystal. It looks as if the apocalypse has arrived, and its epicentre was Hartlepool beach.


1


2


3

In 1937, the Steetley Lime & Basic Company bought a strip of foreshore in the Brus area of Hartlepool, and began building a plant to extract magnesium from seawater, using a newly-developed process. Until that point, almost all Britain’s magnesium was imported. Raw dolomite rock was brought in by rail from a quarry extracting the high-purity dolomite deposits at Coxhoe, and was first crushed, then calcined in giant kilns; magnesia was produced by reacting it with seawater in giant settling tanks; then the resulting magnesia paste was calcined again in rotary furnaces, which turned it into magnesium oxide. Hartlepool was chosen thanks to the Coxhoe quarries, the undiluted seawater (go figure – undiluted by fresh water, I guess), and also the proximity of the Durham coalfield. The plant opened in 1938, and had an initial capacity of 10,000 tons a year. Almost as soon as it opened, the plant began expanding, in the run-up to WW2: magnesium was an essential constituent in aluminium alloys, and also a crucial metal in its own right, which was used to make flares and incendiary bombs. The Ministry of Supply took over at Hartlepool, and the Ministry of Aircraft Production set up sister plants in Cumbria and South Wales to increase production even further.


4


5


6

After the war, Steetley boomed once the government gave it back, because refractory-grade magnesite was used in bricks and tiles for lining kilns, blast furnaces and the like; and chemical grade magnesite was a constituent in rubber, plastic and paper-making. As these industries expanded in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the post-war boom/ reconstruction, so did the Hartlepool plant. There was a large reconstruction here in the 1961, when new furnaces were built, and the 250 foot high concrete chimney – and a year later, the world’s largest settling tank was constructed - No6 Settler was 340ft in diameter. After that, the site was capable of producing up to 5000 tons of magnesite each week, and it was loaded onto cars into the busy railway sidings. The site was originally run by British Periclase Ltd., a Steetley subsidiary, but by the 1990’s it had changed hands several times. Domestic demand for magnesite had shrunk, and the site closed after two failed attempts to keep it running: in 1997, Britmag took over from Redland Magnesia, who took Steetley over in 1992; but in 2002, Britmag went into administration, and were succeeded by CJC Chemicals, who failed in 2005. There’s more detailed history here - http://www.magworks.co.uk/Homepage/Magworks.htm.
Demolition of the main buildings began shortly afterwards, but clearing the site has become a long, drawn-out process and although the kilns, furnaces, silos and admin have largely gone, the chimney, pier and giant settling and mixing tanks largely remain. The site’s eventual destiny is 450 “executive” people boxes … but as it turns out there are only a couple of transit vans and a full-slew digger working there during the week, so the demo team is not exerting itself.


7


8


9

I picked a day that was more apocalyptic than the tropical blue of the tanks suggests, but I guess it suited Steetley’s character. It’s like some post-industrial setting from a JG Ballard novel, and while I was there, spaced-out folk were wandering around the ruins, and mongrels ran free amongst the devastation. To complete the “Mad Max” feel of the place, some neds ignited a big pile of tyres at the south end of the site, and black smoke roiled up into the sky – then a lad on a beaten-up scrambler came buzzing along towards the pier. The only sense of normality was provided by a couple of fishermen at the very end of the pier, where seawater was drawn up through a caisson into two big steel pipes and pumped ashore. The fishermen had seen all the antics before, and were pretty sanguine about what was happening around them … it happens every day. Further inland, the concrete chimney is less impressive close up than from the distance – and its ladder is cut low enough that you can catch the bottom rung with a loop and clip on etriers to it. But the lining is black with tyre smoke, so it’s an unappealing climb. In fact, the magnesite crystals on the walls of the tanks are more interesting – they’ve formed a crust like the surface of the salt lakes in Utah. Further north, some of the rotating agitators have gone from the tanks, and the curved concrete ribs of others have been knocked over. Those left look like the ribcage of a mammoth which has lain down to die on the shore …


10


11


12

These photos were shot on something unusual. ;-)