Shelton Bar
Shelton Bar (Shelton Iron, Steel & Coal Company) was a 400-acre (1.6 km2) major steelworks in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England. In its heyday, Shelton Bar employed 10,000 in the steelworks, had five coal mines, a complete railway system, and a by-products processing factory.
The main site began around 1830, was rapidly developed in the 1840s by the 4th Earl Granville and his managing partner William Roden MP. In 1873 there were 93 puddling furnaces, 7 mills and 8 blast furnaces with extensive iron mines and collieries. Many coal mines were sunk on the site, and railways built into the site which stretched from the western reaches of Hanley into Etruria as far as Middleport. In 1920 the company was acquired by John Summers & Sons, who developed the site into an efficient modern steelworks. During World War II it was a frequent target for German bombers, it being impossible to fully blackout the light from the huge blast furnaces. Shelton Bar came under nationalised ownership in 1951, only to be denationalised by the Tory government in 1953. The works was re-nationalised again in 1967 by the Labour Party and the main works was closed in 1978, after which the eastern 200 acres (0.81 km2) of the site was reclaimed for the 1986 National Garden Festival site, the Stoke-on-Trent Garden Festival.
Shelton Works steel rolling mill was opened in 1964 as the world's first continuous cast production mill, and it remained fully operational during and after the Garden Festival, being on the western side of the Trent and Mersey Canal a few hundred yards from Middleport. It was closed by Corus in June 2000. The half-mile long building was torn down in early 2005, then used as a major supplies depot in the £8-billion upgrade of the West Coast Main Line railway that runs alongside the site. The rolling mill site is now being rectified ahead of a major £120m regeneration by St. Modwen. A pre-Roman British cemetery probably lies under the site, since funeral urns were found when the foundations were dug.
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