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From industrial powerhouse to uncertain future…

Business · November 4, 2026 · The Conversation · 20 min

Three decades after ICI was broken up in the clamour for a knowledge economy, UK chemicals output is down 60% in five years.

<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/janet-godsell-2415233">Janet Godsell</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/loughborough-university-1336">Loughborough University</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/anna-mate-2766501">Anna Mate</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/loughborough-university-1336">Loughborough University</a>

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 <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/chemicals-5749">chemicals</a> 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.

One of the ICI people leading the session brought out a large piece of cardboard with a career path drawn across it – this being the days before PowerPoint. The lines took different routes through practical training, technical college and degrees, then met again when the recruits reached their mid-20s. The message was simple: people might enter the company by different doors, but they could reach the same professional level.

That hand-drawn chart said a great deal about ICI. It not only made chemicals. It connected raw materials, energy, research, factories, skills and communities. It could invest in a teenager and wait years for the return. It could also develop a molecule in a laboratory, work out how to manufacture it safely at scale, and sell it around the world.

Thirty years after ICI was broken up, Britain still has outstanding chemical businesses. The value of its chemical exports kept increasing after inflation until only a few years ago.

Now, however, that has started to change.

The usual account is that the nation lost an old, dirty industry and moved towards a more attractive future based on science and high-value products. It moved away from high-volume, low-margin products like fertilisers, PVC, soda ash and chlorine to focus on areas like pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and advanced polymers.

Sure enough, modern plants are cleaner, safer and more tightly regulated than the works Janet entered in 1989. But the supporting infrastructure is much thinner. A large company like ICI was vertically integrated, meaning all stages involved in making a product were controlled in-house. Now these activities have been sold to different owners, contracted out, moved overseas or closed.

In other words, Britain did not just shed the less sophisticated parts of chemicals. It also weakened some of the foundations on which the sophisticated parts depended. In an era of protectionism, resource wars and tighter credit, that has become a barrier to growth.

<h2>A company, a network and a community</h2>

ICI was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Imperial-Chemical-Industries-PLC">formed in 1926</a> from four British chemical businesses that made things like dyes, explosives and bulk chemicals such as acids and halogen gases. Over the following decades the company grew into many other products including fertilisers, plastics, fibres, paints, pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. Its sites ran through Britain’s chemical heartlands: Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Teesside and the Scottish central belt.

The company’s great chemical works were designed as systems rather than collections of stand-alone factories. At Wilton on Teesside, north-east England, large plants made the basic chemicals used by smaller operations on the same site to make products ranging from polythene to perspex (these large and small plants are known respectively as upstream and downstream operations).

The different plants on the site shared everything from steam and power to laboratories, pipelines and treatment facilities. A process that would have been uneconomic on its own might make sense because it supplied several other parts of the site.

This created an early form of what would now be called a circular economy: an output that appeared to be waste on one plant’s financial accounts might be transferred to be used as an input at another site, meaning there was no need to buy it from a third party. Single ownership reduced the contractual and financial barriers to making those loops work.

ICI was unusually serious about developing people, and expected its young engineers to look well beyond Britain. It paid sponsored students to work for their first summer placement at a non-ICI company in a non-English-speaking country. Janet chose to work for Sumitomo Heavy Industries in the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan.

A couple of years later, she returned to Japan for a year as part of her degree to study Japanese. During the final three months, she worked at ICI-Teijin Fluorochemicals, a joint venture between ICI and Japanese chemicals group Teijin that had been established to manufacture a new generation of refrigerants for Japanese carmakers. Few of her colleagues had met a female engineer before.

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It’s an example of how ICI’s influence did not stop at the factory fence. It also supported technical colleges, apprenticeships, contractors, sports clubs and social clubs. In some places it provided housing. A large works didn’t just give a town jobs; it helped to forge a sense of identity. When a site closed, much more could vanish than the number of posts on the payroll.

None of this makes ICI a golden age. Janet remembers steaming drains and pollution that would be unacceptable now. Some plants were inefficient or had become commercially unviable. Large companies can also be bureaucratic. But ICI’s big strength was being able to see connections across a whole industrial system. Those connections became easier to overlook when the system was broken into separate businesses.

<h2>The attraction of the ‘clever’ end</h2>

By the late 20th century, the economics of European bulk chemicals were becoming harder. The manufacturing plants for these products consumed huge amounts of energy and raw material. Newer facilities in the Middle East and Asia often had cheaper feedstocks, greater scale and growing markets close by. To a company like ICI, this was fierce price competition for products whose margins were already thin.

It looked more promising to focus on high-value chemicals. Their value came from patents, specialist science, regulation and close knowledge of customers. In an era where the knowledge economy had become the buzz response to the rise of eastern manufacturing, a small quantity of a successful medicine could be worth more than thousands of tonnes of a basic chemical.

<figure class="align-center zoomable"> <a aria-label="Zoomable image" href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Pharmaceuticals in vials" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/765046/original/file-20261008-60-vp1zrq.jpg?ixlib=rb-4.1.1&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a> <figcaption> High-value chemicals were seen as the answer. <a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/plastic-tubes-dna-amplification-pharmaceutical-virus-195521591?trackingId=091a9a33-824b-4cf4-b64b-b1fac9a0fd13&listId=searchResults">Boumen Japet</a> </figcaption> </figure>

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