Description:When we were a fully integrated steelworks we stretched from Etruria right up to the Grand Hotel in Hanley – we’d got the plant spread out. The by-products from the iron-making furnaces – what’s known as the slag from these furnaces – they used for tarmacadam. A lot of people don’t appreciate this – they think that you’ve just the steelworks when you see the finished girders going off on the lorries and rail wagons. But in achieving that end there were a lot of other products and other activities. They brought iron ore in, the local collieries were supplying us with the coal, so we’d keep local industry going in that respect. There was a tarmacadam set-up for using the slag for making roads. The coke that we produced for the iron-making from our own coal supplies in our own coke ovens – the by-products from there were numerous. We’d got our own gasometer – we used so much of the gas on the plant. At one time we were supplying the Gas Board at Etruria, where it was converted and was three quarters or more of the pottery industry supply in Stoke-on-Trent when they converted to gas from the old bottle kilns. A lot of little hidden things going on that perhaps people didn’t appreciate.
This film also features in the documentary; “Stoke-on-Film, 1970s”, produced by Ray Johnson.