Bessemer converter
The rivalry today between Workington and Whitehaven rugby fans was echoed in the 1800s by a rivalry between powerful landowners. While Whitehaven and the Lowthers gambled and won big time in sinking coal mines and expanding the port, Henry Curwen, who inherited land all around Workington in 1745 first developed coal mines then oversaw the start of an iron industry that would eventually encircle the globe.
Many today can still remember how Workington had to suffer a fine cloud of red dust. Washing and newly polished cars were soon covered with the red dust as the steel furnaces belched out their smoke night and day. But the dust was tolerated because it meant full employment and that the iron and steel works were in full swing.
How Workington rose to be such a key steel-making town could be ascribed to two quirks of fate. One was a French revolution and the other was the fact that West Cumberland sat atop seams of the highest quality haematite iron ore.
To explain, the French Revolution of 1848 led to Henry Bessemer's father moving the family from Paris to England. Thus it was that the brilliant inventor, Henry Bessemer was in England when he worked out a way to manufacture cheap steel by blasting air through the molten iron. And because the newly invented process only seemed to work with the pure iron from Cumbrian haematite one of the earliest Bessemer converters was in Workington. The clever inventor sold his technology around the world becoming a millionaire in the process.
So it was that the world's first large-scale steel works was opened in Moss Bay, Workington. The Bessemer converter continued to work until 1977, the world's first and last commercially operating Bessemer converter.
 | The very last 30-foot-high steel-making Bessemer vessel now stands outside a Sheffield museum of industrial history. All steel-making has ceased at Moss Bay and the town waits expectantly to see if new plans can brush aside the recent property market slide and see the vast seashore steelworks land face a completely different future. |
Eatonfield Developments say they will transform the steelworks site into a £100m seaside community. The developers say 650 houses and apartments should be built on the 87-acre site. The area will also have hotel, restaurant, pub and district shops.
The bold plans are intended to start in May 2010. And where slag banks used to steam with the molten slag cascading into the sea, it is planned to build a seashore promenade with views over the Solway.
| The last blow, No. 2 Bessemer converter at Workington. The end of a century of steelmaking in Workington. Picture courtesy of Phil Baggley's excellent website on the history of the ironmaking, www.banklands.com
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