Sundown on Tarmac's extraordinary Stone Age

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Sundown on Tarmac's extraordinary Stone Age

Wednesday 07 November, 2012

News Brief

Tarmac announces closure of Ettingshall offices.

Full Story:

The announcement last week by the quarrying and building products Company “Tarmac” to close its Ettingshall offices near Wolverhampton, brings to end an association of over 100 years with a site that played a pivotal role in one of the UK’s greatest untold stories of recycling and commercial vision.

The observations of Roads Surveyor Purnell Hooley, his subsequent patent and establishment of the Tarmacadam Syndicate Company in the early years of the twentieth century are well documented. However, the commercial intervention by Sir Alfred Hickman to ultimately establish Tarmac Ltd in 1905 was a stroke of genius.

Hickman ran a iron works at Ettingshall. The basic chemistry of iron smelting relies on a firing a charge of iron ore, limestone and coke in a furnace, producing molten iron, and a silica rich “slag”, which once cooled looks and behaves like a natural volcanic rock. The other by-product of iron production is tar, produced when making the high temperature burning coke required for the smelting process.. When coal is roasted in absence of air, volatile gases are first given off (domestic “town gas” the forerunner of North Sea gas) then various oils and tar and finally the clinker-like coke remains.

Acquisition of the rights to the invention of mixing two by-products, blast furnace slag and tar to make “Tarmac” by an iron-master at a time when the market for road surfacing materials was increasing was just the first stroke of brilliance.

We are unable to establish the exact quantities of blast furnace slag that were generated as a by-product of iron smelting during the industrial revolution. It is, however, reasonable to assume that from the mid nineteenth century somewhere in the region of 20million tonnes per annum were being produced.

Apart from seizing on the opportunity, the commercial genius unfolded during the next 50 years as Hickman (and later relatives) secured supply deals for blast furnace slag across the country. Notable examples included Shelton in Stoke on Trent, Corby and Scunthorpe, Middlesborough, and in the late 50’s Round Oak in the Black Country now the site of the Merryhill shopping centre.

The crushing and screening of slag with the subsequent production of Tarmac was a arduous and dirty occupation. Further the laying of the “Black Stuff” often attracted a dubious following, to the extent that many would affectionately claim that Tarmac ltd was actually a bunch of didicoys with a (Ettingshall based) head office! In spite of its reputation, its innovative management developed the most successful and influential company in road building and maintenance in the UK, however, sadly from next year its iconic office will no longer exist.

The purchase from 1958 onwards of natural resources, which moved Tarmac from its reliance on slag production to become the UK’s foremost quarrying Company, is a story for another day.

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