When we went to Ironbridge we stayed at the Best Western Valley Hotel. It’s a very short walk from the bridge and I’m happy to recommend it. (No they haven’t paid me.) Significantly, as far as this week’s blog post goes, it was built in 1757 as Severn House, the home of George Goodwin.
Severn House (now the Best Western Valley Hotel)
Goodwin was a master collier and a partner in the company that owned the Bedlam furnaces, one of the furnaces that eventually formed part of the Coalbrookdale Company. The remains of the Bedlam furnaces are still around today on the road out of town on the other end from the bridge. They feature in this famous painting of Coalbrookdale in its prime.
‘Coalbrookdale at Night’ by Philip James de Loutherbourg (1801)
Sadly we don’t have any photos of the remains because it was dark when we explored them on our way back to the hotel, but the point is that we were walking home and we were back very quickly. The owner of the forge lived a short walk from his business.
By the 19th century, the house was owned by the Maw family. Arthur Maw set up the tile works in Jackfield. (The hotel displays some lovely decorative tiles on the walls of the public areas.) It’s a little further away than the Bedlam furnaces, but we covered it in the same walk. When Arthur Maw owned it, it employed 180 people. It was a significant business and, again, the owner lived within walking distance.
Abraham Darby (the one we mentioned last week, who was the first Englishman to smelt using coke) owned the Ironbridge Iron Works and could, we can reasonably assume, have built his home anywhere. Instead, he built it on the hill just above the works where the sound of the machinery would have been easily heard day and night. (Smelting is a 24 hour a day activity: once you are at the right heat, it is economic madness to let the plant cool and start again the next day.)
What is interesting about Ironbridge is that masters and workers lived cheek by jowl. The workers homes are not miserable shacks but well-made houses (although, in fairness, any miserable shacks will have collapsed long ago). Ironbridge represents an early stage of the Industrial Revolution when workers were often skilled artisans and the owners lived and worked alongside them.
Last week we looked at the bridge at Ironbridge, but why was the bridge built there? Obviously people wanted to be able to cross the river, but we saw last week that the bridge was much more than just a utilitarian structure: it was showing off a new technique for producing iron. The iron bridge would have been impossible using the old technology of wrought iron, where iron pigs (basically lumps of iron) were beaten into the shape needed by smiths. The bridge was made of much bigger sections of iron than a smith could work, using the new cast iron technology.
Before there was an iron bridge, the area that now goes by that name was just part of Coalbrookdale, a flourishing industrial community that had grown up alongside the Severn. People had been smelting iron there since at least the 16th century using primitive smelters called bloomeries.
A bloomery
By the 17th century iron was being produced using blast furnaces where air is forced (blasted) into the furnace to increase the temperature. The photo shows the remains of the old blast furnace in the original Coalbrookdale iron works, now a museum. (The date of 1638 is now believed to be wrong, as an old photograph shows it originally said 1658.)
The Severn Gorge carves its way through a region rich in minerals, including iron ore. The Gorge had done much of the initial mining for the people who lived there, exposing seams of minerals in the sides of the Gorge.
This photo gives some indication of the steepness of the gorge. (You can just make out the slopes on the left through the trees)
Originally the iron would have been smelted using charcoal, which needed a plentiful supply of wood, another natural resource that the Gorge was (and, as you can see in the photo, still is) well endowed with. Later blast furnaces would have used coke from coal which is also found in the area and which, thanks to the gorge, could be extracted without deep mines.
Two other things were needed for an efficient blast furnace. One was limestone which (have you already guessed?) was found in the gorge.
Lime kilns (operational 1760 – 1870) by the river at Ironbridge
The other was a supply of water to power the bellows that forced air into the furnace. This was provided not by the Severn itself but by the streams that ran down the steep sides of the Gorge.
The steepness of the Gorge walls even assisted in the building of the smelters. A blast furnace is built so that ores, fuel and limestone are put into the top of the furnace and iron is drawn from the bottom. This can call for a substantial building but, in Coalbrookdale, foundries were built on the side of the Gorge so that material was simply tipped in higher up the hill and the metal conveniently arrived at the bottom.
The coal that occurs in the area is low in sulphur and thus particularly well suited for making coke. In 1709 Abraham Darby made a blast furnace that ran on coke. The higher temperatures obtained meant that the furnace produced quantities of liquid iron.
Darby had also imported into England a system of casting iron into dry sand moulds, rather than loam or clay moulds. (And, yet again, it turned out that the kind of sand needed was readily available locally.) This enabled him to produce cast iron items more efficiently (and hence cheaply) than traditional moulding. It was Abraham Darby’s new technology that produced the iron segments that his grandson was to use to build the iron bridge.
Not only was the topology and geology of the area ideal for the production of iron but, at a time when most heavy goods were transported by water rather than by road, the Severn, which runs through the middle of Coalbrookdale, provided a ready route for taking the finished iron to market.
The blast furnaces ran for over a century but were closed down around the 1820s, though the foundries remained in use. By the 20th century, though, iron production in Coalbrookdale was in decline as it failed to compete with new technologies and production methods. By 1946 the Coalbrookdale site was making Aga stoves in the last remaining foundry at Ironbridge. In 2015 Aga was bought by an American company and in 2017 the factory was closed on the grounds that it was no longer “economically viable”.
The whole area is now a museum, recognised as a cultural site by UNESCO. When we visited in February all the museums were closed on Mondays and Tuesdays (the days we were there) and soon after we returned to London, the centre of the town was under water. The area has a melancholy beauty in February and is well worth a visit. The melancholic air is fitting though: Ironbridge was a centre of industry when the natural advantages Britain enjoyed meant it led the world. Now it floods regularly and all it has to offer the world is tourism, and that only five days a week.
