In 1989 a young Janet Godsell, one of the authors of this article, spent a week on night shifts in the powerhouse at ICI’s Huddersfield works in west Yorkshire. She was starting her career at the biggest chemicals company in the UK, but it would be broken up and sold off a few years later as part of Britain’s drive to focus on only making the most lucrative products. This is the story of what happened to ICI and why its break-up looks less inspired now than it did at the time.
The name “powerhouse” was literal. The building produced the steam and electricity needed across the site, while the works also had its own water and effluent treatment facilities.
The end products were everything from fine to dyes to synthetic polymers used in making nylon. Engineers, laboratory staff, maintenance teams and apprentices were all based inside the gates. As Janet remembers it, about the only routine job done by an outside company was painting the miles of pipework.
Janet was 18, on a pre-university year before starting an engineering degree that was being sponsored by ICI – or Imperial Chemical Industries as it was originally known. At that age, she wasn’t trying to analyse the company or think about its place in British industrial policy. She simply saw it as enormous, self-contained and slightly otherworldly. On later placements at ICI’s Castner-Kellner works in Runcorn, near Liverpool, the lights, towers and steam seemed to stretch for miles. At night, it looked like a moon base.
The memory that has lasted longest, though, is less dramatic. On her first day at Huddersfield, Janet was with a group of recruits. Some were also bound for university while others were local 16-year-olds starting apprenticeships.
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