Industrial Revolution

Traditional Industry in Chester
Early evidence for "industry" in Chester points to leather, lead and linen as significant commodities traded here. Remains from Roman Chester include lead ingots, one being inscribed IMP•VESP•AVGV•T•IMP•III (the word DECEANGI appears on the side, pointing to a source in North Wales) which means it can be dated to AD74.

During the 13th and 14th century, Chester was the largest and busiest port in the north-west, trading with ports throughout the British Isles and Europe. Chester claimed that it "lived by trade".



In medieval Chester the main industry was leather. There were skinners, tanners, glovers, shoemakers and saddlers in profusion. Local landmarks include "Shoemakers Row" and the "Gloverstone". As well as leather from dairy farming pelts and skins were imported on a huge scale. Both tanned and raw hides were sent from Ireland to Chester, together with tallow used in waterproofing, but skins were considerably more numerous. In 1525-6, for example, Chester received some 2,200 hides, over 13,000 lambskins, 10,200 sheepskins, 2,300 badger pelts, 1,100 calfskins, 640 marten and otter skins, 300 fox skins, 90 goatskins, and 50 hart skins. Alum and oil, used by Glovers and Tawyers to prepare light leathers, also came from Ireland. Prices for skins in the luxury market rose fast between 1500 and 1550, marten tripling in price and otter quadrupling, and Irish skins were sold in London after preparation in Chester. In 1536 Chester was brought into the national customs system for leather and in 1537-8 customs duties were paid on 10,681 tanned hides in five Spanish and five Chester ships. Figures for later years ranged from 700 to 1,600 hides, with Spanish merchants exporting the larger share. The privileges of the various trades and their asssociated guilds were jealously guarded (see: "Charters") - in 1433, the Mayor and Sheriffs of Chester were ordered to find and punish all ‘foreigners’ who used the trade of skinner and shoemaker within the liberties of Chester.

As usual (see: Charters) Chester did everything to hang onto its monopolies even outside of the City. During the reign of Elizabeth central government treated Liverpool as part of a large customs district which included the ports of North Wales, and had its centre at Chester. Orders of various sorts were frequently transmitted to the Mayor of Liverpool through the Mayor of Chester. At times Liverpool and Chester were treated as a single port, or Liverpool was actually catalogued with Chester and 'Ilbrye' as one of the ports of Cheshire. This supported a claim on the part of Chester to superiority over Liverpool as the Mayor of Chester was viceadmiral of Lancashire and Cheshire and Chester claimed (in 1565) that Liverpool was only "a creek within its port" such that all ships entering the Mersey should pay dues through Chester.

In the 18th century, Chester traded in raw hide with the Americas and even sent slave ships to Africa. Grain and wine were also major imports. Until the start of the 14th Century, the ancient city walls provided adequate defence to the port (the navigable River used to extend as far as Watergate). Silting of the River Dee had become a serious problem, leading to a loss of maritime trade to rival ports such as Liverpool. In response, the River Dee Company was formed and the Old Port area was developed as a new port for the City. A cut was formed which allowed easier navigation and led to the construction of Crane Wharf. Improvements to the river Weaver after 1730 served to channel trade from central Cheshire away from Chester to the Mersey, and the Trent and Mersey Canal Act of 1766 threatened to strengthen still further the dominance of Liverpool over the Dee. By the late 18th Century the port further waned, and focus shifted to linking it with the canal network, resulting in the construction of the Dee basin and Tower Wharf. Chester Canal became known as "England's first unsuccessful canal", after its failure to bring heavy industry to Chester.

2009 saw the closure of "Shuttleworths" in Bridge Street.

Sources and Links

 * Shuttleworths, as it was.

Broader Context
The "Industrial Revolution" was the emergence of improved manufacturing processes during the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. Developments included, among others:
 * the canal network: (see: Canal and Boatyard);
 * hand production methods being replaced by the increased use of machines, including the development of machine tools. Mechanised cotton spinning powered by steam or water increased the output of a worker by a factor of about 1000. The power loom increased the output of a worker by a factor of over 40. The cotton gin increased productivity of removing seed from cotton by a factor of 50. Gains in productivity also occurred in spinning and weaving of the Chester "staples" wool and linen, but they were not as great as in cotton.
 * new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes;
 * improved efficiency of water power;
 * the increasing use of steam power: following it's introduction the efficiency of steam engines increased so that they used between one-fifth and one-tenth as much fuel. Steam allowed the development and expansion of railways (see: Chester Station), leading to a Railway "Mania" humourously recollected in the "Hunting of the Snark" (..They threatened its life with a railway share..);
 * the change from wood and other (mostly renewable) bio-fuels to coal: for a given amount of heat, coal required much less labour to mine than cutting wood, and coal was more abundant than wood.
 * Urbanisation, as workers moved from agriculture to better-paid factory work.

Cast Iron
Cast iron was a known form of iron at the time of the Industrial Revolution and had previously been used to make weaponry, such as cannon and cannon-balls as well as other heat-resistant articles. Cast iron was traditionally prepared using a mixture of charcoal, iron ore and limestone. The heat supplied by the charcoal reduces the ore to the metal and the impurities are removed by the limestone to form a "slag". With the growth of the Royal Navy from Henry VIII onwards, more cast iron was needed than could be supplied using traditional sources of charcoal (the Sussex Weald and Forest of Dean), and the problem was made worse by the consumption of suitable (slow-growing) hardwood in building and the construction of Naval vessels - the Industrial Revolution and the Royal Navy cost Britain much of its natural woodland. Today, with just under 12% of land under woodland cover, the UK is one of the least wooded countries in Europe.

Coke, made from coal, was the only available solution. Only some forms of coke were suitable: it must support the burden of the furnace charge without crumbling and at Coakbrookdale, Abraham Darby found a suitable source of coke (Shropshire 'clod coal' - as well as local iron-ore and limestone) and built his original furnace in 1707. Darby was granted a patent by Queen Anne for the novel process of casting iron using sand, as opposed to loam or clay (the actual inventor, a welshman named John Thomas, is largely unremembered but appears to have been well-rewarded by Darby). The introduction of the patent (380) reads as follows:


 * "Anne, by grace of God, to all to whom these presents shall come, greeting. WHEREAS our trusty and welbeloved ABRAHAM DARBY....hath by his petition humbly represented unto us that by his study and industry and expense he hath found out and brought to perfection A NEW WAY OF CASTING IRON BELLIED POTS, AND OTHER IRON BELLIED WARE IN SAND ONLY, WITHOUT LOAM OR CLAY, BY WHICH IRON POTS AND OTHER WARE MAY BE CAST FINE AND WITH MORE EASE AND EXPEDITION, AND MAY BE MORE AFFORDED THAN THEY CAN BE BY THE WAY COMMONLY USED, AND IN REGARD TO THIS MAY BE OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO THE POORE OF THIS OUR KINGDOME, WHO FOR THE MOST PART USE SUCH WARE, AND IN ALL PROBABILITY WILL PREVENT THE MERCHANTS OF ENGLAND GOING TO FORREIGN MARKETS FOR SUCH WARE, FROM WHENCE GREAT QUANTITIES ARE IMPORTED, AND LIKEWISE MAY IN TIME SUPPLY FOREIGN MARKETS WITH THAT MANUFACTURE OF OUR OWN DOMINIONS, and hath humbly prayed us to grant him our Letters Patents for the sole use and benefit of the said Invention for the terme of fourteen years."

Darby used his iron for the production of pots ("Dutch Ovens" - at the time supplied from the Netherlands), pans, firebacks and other hardware for hearths. The first commercial steam-engines became available around 1712, and by 1781 James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotative motion using a cast iron cylinder. The stationary steam engine was a key component of the Industrial Revolution, allowing factories to locate where water power was unavailable, while the level of power available from the self-propelled steam engine facillitated the development of the railways.

In Chester


By 1700 Chester was on the verge of losing its dominance as a regional economic hub, as nearby towns, especially the industrial and mill towns in south Lancashire and around Telford began to specialize in trade or manufacturing. The reopening of the River Dee in 1737 did not halt Chester's decline as a port. In 1701 Chester shipowners had 25 vessels, and in the early 1710s the total tonnage, no more than 3,400, was less than half that owned at Liverpool where the worlds first enclosed commercial dock was built 1709-1715. By the 1730s it had fallen to around 1,650 tons (a tenth of Liverpool's total) and in the late 1750s Chester's 1,000-1,400 tons was scarcely a twentieth of Liverpool's fleet. Efforts were made to improve the Dee by dredging a "new cut" in the estuary and cutting the canal, but the decline of traditional industry and trade continued.

In the late 18th and early 19th century Chester was not a propitious place in which to establish new industries. It was not on a coalfield, and water power was restricted to the weir on the Dee, which was affected by the tide. The hinterland was mainly rural and was poorly served by transport. There seems also to have been a lack of enterprise on the part of Cestrians, and the residual power of the city guilds may have restrained development. It was observed in 1814 that:


 * "corporate privileges are not often calculated to foster commerce, and in this city, although we mark the infancy of several manufactures, few arrive at maturity" (Wardle and Bentham's Commercial Guide, 1814).

The influence of the guilds did not ebb as quickly as in other towns, due mainly to their subvention by the Owen Jones charity. Their final decay came about in part because of restrictions on membership imposed in order to maximize existing members' benefits from the charity, but their authority was destroyed finally in 1825 when an unsuccessful case was brought against a tanner for trading when not a freeman.

A Leadworks was established by the canal in 1799; its shot tower, which was used for making lead shot for the Napoleonic Wars, is the oldest remaining shot tower in the UK. However, at the end of the 18th century, industrialisation of the Lancashire and Manchester mill towns saw Cheshire farms abandoned as workers sought a better living in the industrial towns. These lands were absorbed into bigger estates culminating in 98% of Cheshire land belonging to only 26% of the population. Other developments moved the center of industry away from Chester itself. The completion of the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1777 and innovations such as the Anderton Boat Lift, allowed Cheshire cheese and salt to become major county exports - but not through Chester. The silk industry was developing in Macclesfield, triggered by Charles Roe building a watermill in Macclesfield in 1744. The railways came through Cheshire in the 1830s. The Grand Junction Railway designed by George Stephenson and Joseph Locke, opened for business on 4 July 1837, running for 82 miles (132 km) from Birmingham through Wolverhampton, Stafford, Crewe, Hartford and Warrington, then via the pre-existing Warrington and Newton Railway to join the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. The GJR established its chief engineering works at Crewe, moving there from Edge Hill, in Liverpool. In 1874, industrialist John Brunner and chemist Ludwig Mond founded Brunner Mond in Winnington near Northwich and started manufacturing soda ash (to meet the burgeoning demand for alkali in the soap, textile, and glass industries) by the Solvay Process using Cheshire's salt deposits as a main raw material.

The plans for a Chester and Holyhead Railway were prepared and canvassed between 1838 and 1842, almost scuppered in 1843, and eventually given Royal Assent on 4 July 1844. The route chosen was George Stephenson's proposal through Chester, despite the complications this entailed through "gaps" which needed to be bridged at the Menai Straight and Conwy estuary. The resident engineer in Chester was William Moorsom. The project had significant political overtones. Ireland was then an integral part of Britain but suffering greatly from crop blight and the exactions of absentee landlords. Moreover, there was little coal to support industry. A glance at the 1872 OS Map shows that Chester has barely outgrown its City Walls by this time, but that the railways had definitely arrived.

In Chester the number of male manufacturing workers remained almost static between 1871 and 1911, but there was a great change in the work they did. The proportion employed in the traditional and handicraft sector dropped from 61% to 43% with the most dramatic fall in shoemaking. The footwear trade became more concentrated in specialist towns like Stafford, Northampton, and Leicester, and mechanized factory production progressively eliminated traditional hand-work.

Boots and Shoes
As the footwear trade became more concentrated in specialist towns like Stafford, Northampton, and Leicester, mechanized factory production progressively eliminated hand-work, so shoemaking as domestic outwork declined in Chester. Attempts were made to move to factory production there, notably by William Collinson and his various partners. He traded from premises in Watergate Street from the mid 1840s, and later opened a shop in Eastgate Street. Between 1864 and 1866 he also started a large new factory at the canal bridge on City Road, housing 'vast amounts of machinery' and employing 250 hands who turned out 2,000-3,000 pairs of boots a week. Collinson did not, however, stay in manufacturing. Around 1875 the factory was taken over by Alfred Bostock & Co., a Stafford shoe firm, but by 1892 Bostocks had left and the premises were occupied by a rope and twine manufacturer. Another member of the same Stafford family, Edwin Bostock, opened a small shoe factory in King Street in the 1860s, but it closed between 1902 and 1906. Factory production of footwear failed to establish itself in Chester, and by 1911 the number of shoemakers had dropped to a third of the 1871 level.

The Dee Mills
Some surviving Roman millstones suggest that water-power mills possibly existed in Roman Chester. Otherwise, there is no evidence for milling until the late 11th century, but probably, given its position at the centre of a relatively extensive arable area and the presence of water power on the River Dee, the city had its own corn mills from an early date. The corn mills were located at the Chester end of the weir or causeway just west of the Old Dee Bridge, just outside the Bridgegate on the site of the former hydroelectric generating station. From the earliest times the corn mills were exceptionally valuable. In 1237 they were leased for the enormous sum of £100, half the earl's revenue from the entire city and over twenty times that for most other mills of the period. The fulling mills were located in Handbridge at the eastern end of the causeway. There appear to have been mills on the site by the mid 12th century, since the tithes of a mill 'beyond the bridge' were bestowed on Chester abbey in a grant probably falsely attributed to Earl Richard of Avranches (1101–20) but more likely issuing from Ranulph De Gernon (1129–53).

In 1725, two mills were sold to George Scott, a paper maker. Scott, who had been based at the site since c. 1705, was also lessee of the third mill, which had been sold to the waterworks company. By 1745 he was operating two paper mills and a mill for grinding the dye logwood, tobacco, and snuff. By 1757 one of the mills had been acquired by Edward Wrench to grind snuff, while the two in Scott's ownership ground snuff and logwood.

The Scott family's interest was acquired c. 1805 by Robert Topham, a skinner, and Joseph Evans, a needlemaker, and in 1828 Topham also bought the Wrenches' mill, together with the Dee fishery. By then Topham's property comprised snuff and tobacco mills, leased to a tobacco manufacturer, skinners' workshops, and some dwellings. Evans's share of a mill, used to make needles until his bankruptcy in 1833, was sold in 1845 to Thomas Nicholls, a tobacco maker. The Nichollses continued to operate on the site throughout the later 19th century, and in 1895 bought the rest of the property from the Tophams. By 1911 the mills, which had passed to the duke of Westminster, were acquired by H. E. E. Peel and Sir Henry Robertson, owners of important fisheries on the Dee. The tobacco factory remained in operation until 1954, when it closed and the site was acquired by the city. The buildings were demolished in the mid 1960s and replaced by housing, but the mill leat survived and a waterwheel was restored by Chester Civic Trust in 1988–9.

The Steam Mill


The building prominently marked "Steam Mill" beside the Canal was built over the original mill, which was the first steam-driven commercial flour mill using Boulton and Watt’s rotative engine in 1786 and predates the often-quoted Albion Flour Mills in London by three months - while work at the Albion Mill had started earlier, the Chester engine was the first to be completed. The Albion Mill in London was later gutted by fire, but the shell of the building was the inspiration for William Blake‘s "dark satanic mills".

James Watt had started his work on steam engines in 1763 when he had repaired a model of a Newcomen Steam Engine at Glasgow University. By 1769 he had developed the separate condenser which made his engine far more efficient and cheaper than the Newcomen Engine. A Boulton and Watt engine had an efficiency 3-4 times that of a Newcomen Engine in terms of coal used, and a manufacturer who had one installed paid a licence fee based on the difference in coal consumed. Boulton was the son of Matthew Boulton senior a manufacturer of buckles and metal "toys" and Christiana Piers. One of four children of parents formerly of Chester (with its shoe-buckle industry).

This Steam Mill was built for Samuel Walker, George Walker and Hugh Ley, Chester Corn and Flour Merchants, on a site that was formerly meadowland. Samuel Walker and his partners were prominent business-men in Chester and saw the opportunity of using new technology on a greenfield site alongside this then ten year old canal. Unfortunately, they did not make a profit and sold out to J A & J Frost in 1819, who built the present building along-side the canal in the 1820s. The Frost family came to Chester in 1818 and took over the Dee Mills, which were destroyed by fire in 1819 prompting a move to the steam mill. They developed the site and replaced the original steam engine in 1827. The Frost family continued to expand the use of the site until 1938 when it passed to the seed merchant David Miln. There is an on-going debate as to whether the two Samuel Walkers (Steam-Mill and Leadworks) were one and the same person. The Walkers who operated the Iron and Lead works were certainly a powerful family who had working relations with the Boulton and Watt Company, but at this time there is no direct evidence linking the Steam Mill with the Iron Works.

Seeds and Plants
In the 19th century Chester became a centre for market gardening, plant nurseries, and seed merchants. As early as 1837 Chester market gardens were supplying Liverpool, and the coming of the railways allowed some Chester firms to expand greatly. The trade increased in importance right up to 1914 and maintained its position until the 1930s. The city's location at the geographical centre of the British Isles, together with its good rail connexions and mild climate, made it an ideal place to serve the national market. The Dickson family, established in Chester by 1820, was pre-eminent in the trade, F. & A. Dickson operating at Upton nurseries and James Dickson & Sons at Newton. The two enterprises merged in the 1880s, when the grounds under cultivation extended to over 400 acres. It was one of the largest businesses of its type in the country. By the late 19th century the firm supplied all types of bedding plants and trees, together with farm and garden seeds, garden tools, and agricultural implements, and undertook commissions to design gardens for country houses. Other large nurseries were operated by Samuel Dobie and John Kirk in the Vicars Cross area, F. W. Dutton at Queen's Park, McHattie & Co. at Overleigh, and Alexander McLean at Upton. In 1883 James Hunter established a farm seed business in Chester, attracted to the city solely by its location. Hunter was a leading advocate of the need for scientific testing of seeds and his firm was the first to offer a guarantee of purity, genuineness, and germination rate. Operating from premises in Foregate Street, by 1913 it had become one of the leading farm seed suppliers in the country. In 1911 at least 413 people living in the city, together with an unknown number from outside, worked in nurseries or related businesses, double the number in 1861.

Engineering


The Chester Courant, of 13 December 1803 reported:


 * IRON AND BRASS FOUNDRY. COLE, WHITTLE & CO. HAVING erected a building over Cow-lane Bridge, near Flookersbrook, where they have begun the business of Iron and Brass Founders, with Smiths' work in general, they will in future always have an assortment of Cast and Wrought Iron on the premises, ready finished, and will able to supply Ironmongers, &c, on the best terms. Castings in Iron and Brass for Machinery, with all sorts of Smiths' work, executed on the shortest notice. Every attention will be paid to the orders with which they may favoured, and executed a manner to merit continuance of them.

By 1805 The business was known as The Flookersbrook Foundry, and operated under the style of Cole, Whittle and Co until 1832, when Mr. John Johnson became sole partner. In 1844 the business passed to his sons Edward and Bryan Johnson. It was during the partnership of the two brothers that the engineering side of the business was developed, and largely took the place of the purely foundry work. In 1861 Mr. Edward Johnson retired, and the business was continued by Mr. Bryan Johnson alone. 1869 Mr. E. B. Ellington joined Mr. Bryan Johnson in partnership, and the business was continued under the style of Johnson and Ellington (see below).

The Egerton Iron and Brass Foundry, was operated by James Mowle & Co. in 1871 and Mowle and Meacock by 1892. It was located between Crewe Street and Albert Street, but had been demolished by 1910 when Egerton Street school was built on the site. They appear to have partly specialised in lead-manufacturing equipment (they were quite close to the Leadworks) as in 1880 they provided a horizontal single-cylinder steam engine driving a lead rolling mill at Sheldon, Bush and Patent Shot Co, Bristol.

Decline
The prosperity of Chester's shops and services depended to a large extent on custom from the City itself. Demand from outside enabled it to support a larger range than its own population would have justified, but perhaps 60-65% of Chester's trade came from residents of the city and its suburbs. Conflicting economic factors applied:
 * Chester's restricted manufacturing base weakened the local service economy, since the city was deficient in both an industrial middle class and a skilled working class, two groups with significant purchasing power in the late Victorian economy.
 * Improved railway connections allowed the wealthy from Liverpool, Manchester, and other towns to choose the city as an elegant place of residence: in 1899 it was asserted that only four of 75 occupiers in Hoole Road derived their living from Chester. Chester also attracted a class living off inherited wealth and investment income, who perhaps formed 5% of the population by the Edwardian period.

Browns' monopoly had been broken in the late 19thC. by the growth of three other stores which exploited the increased spending power of the middle classes (and to a lesser extent working people):
 * Richard Jones's drapery business was founded in Watergate Street in the 1850s, and expanded into larger premises in Bridge Street in the 1860s. It diversified into furnishings and grew rapidly from the 1890s, and in 1900 opened a new clothing shop in Eastgate Street, by which time it was second only to Browns in importance.
 * The Chester Co-operative Society opened a grocery in Black Diamond Street in 1884, moved into the city centre in the 1890s, and by 1905 the Foregate Street premises had developed into a large department store.
 * Burrells was also a newcomer: Thomas Gaze Burrell, a Norfolk man working in London, was advised in 1877 that Chester was growing in importance as a shopping centre and would be an ideal place to start a business. He bought an existing haberdashery shop at no. 32 Foregate Street and renamed it the 'Little Wonder'. By 1890 he had opened men's, women's, and children's clothing shops and in 1899 expanded into furnishings.

The grocery trade changed greatly between 1890 and 1914. New shops were dispersed in the suburbs and the number of city-centre grocers fell. The chain stores of Liptons, Home & Colonial, Maypole, and Pegrams established branches in Chester, and their branded, packaged goods started to supplant the shop-blended and shoppacked provisions typical of the older and often more exclusive retailers. By 1910 there were c. 20 chain stores in the city, including Boots, Marks & Spencer, and Hepworths, but Chester remained a shopping centre dominated by local businesses often biased towards a wealthy and socially select clientele.

An upswing in the service economy performance after the 1890's led to even more of the City Center being rebuilt in the "Mock Tudor" style. Eastgate Street remained the heart of commerce, but developments of the ends of Bridge Street, Northgate Street and to some extent Watergate Street radiating from the High Cross as desirable locations pushed out the smaller shops. The story was different in lower Bridge Street and much of Watergate Street where buildings became subdivided and in some cases ruinous.



Behind the "Mock Tudor" facades of The Rows living conditions in the "Courts" remained appalling. While this "core of rottenness" became a subject of debate and these "foul and filthy dens" were seen as "the resorts of thieves, prostitutes and drunkards" (Chester Chronicle, 29th Nov 1879). Commercial pressures were to lead to the clearance of many of these inner city slums.

Relative growth of the "Service Economy"
The general rise in the standard of living which occurred during the later C.19th century led to relative growth in Chester's shops and services. That is, the proportion of people working in the service sector grew, but there was little underlying growth. Employment in shops, services, and transport almost doubled from 26 per cent of the working population in 1861 to 42 per cent in 1911, when nationally only 35 per cent of the labour force worked in service employments. While Chester had a relatively large service sector by the early 1870s, it did not grow particularly quickly before 1914, and less rapidly than in the country as a whole, growing by 58% between 1871 and 1911 compared with a national growth rate of 68%. The generally depressed period between 1873 and the 1890s seems to have hit Chester's most prestigious shop, Brown, Holmes & Co., where sales in real terms stagnated after 1870, and there were some particularly bad years, notably 1871-2 and between 1879 and 1884.



The "Long Depression" led (in 1879) to a reduction of wages in the Chester engineering trade, and the cheese market of 1879 was described as 'the deadest for 30 years'. Chester's private banks were badly affected by the national banking crisis of 1878/9, itself a reflection of the depression. Dixon & Co. was forced into amalgamation with Parr's Bank, and although the "Chester Old Bank", Williams & Co., survived, it remained weak during the 1880s. In the run on the bank by depositors of the "North and South Wales Bank" (with an office in Eastgate Street) a then staggering one million (a fifth of the total deposits) was withdrawn in a few days following the spectacular collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878. Chester's banking sector would see nothing so bad until the global banking crisis of the early C.21st.

By 1914 Chester had three engineering firms, Hydraulic Engineering, Henry Wood, and Brookhirst, which were leaders in their fields and, together with the Leadworks, these gave the city a significant national role in manufacturing.




 * The Hydraulic Engineering Co. was formerly the Johnson and Ellington engineering business of Edward Bayzand Ellington and Bryan Johnson before being renamed upon incorporation in 1874. Demand expanded in the late 19th century: the firm opened offices in London, Paris, and Brussels, and developed a significant export trade. Hydraulic Engineering became a large employer, with 200 workers in Chester in 1879 and between 300 and 400 by 1892. The works was expanded and modernized and as early as 1879 a new erecting shop was lighted by electricity. In 1909 the business was described in the as follows: The company's leading specialities in design and manufacture are hydraulic power generating plant for public power supplies as well as for docks and railways, and the hydraulic appliances usually worked off these plants, including coal hoists, fixed and movable cranes, hydraulic engines, capstans, machinery for working swing and bascule bridges, dock gates and sluices, wagon hoists and other lifts, etc., hydraulic machine-tools, such as punching and shearing machines, straightening and bending machines, etc., presses for various special purposes, injector fire-hydrants and hydraulically- driven pumps for water-supply and sewage. Considerable quantities of the smaller gun-mountings and other similar material have been made at the works. The number of employees is about 400. (Institution of Mechanical Engineers )


 * Between 1873 and 1910 Saltney's pioneer firm, Henry Wood & Co., trebled in size, due partly to the closure of works elsewhere. By 1892 the works was said to be 'the largest and most complete in the kingdom [for producing] all descriptions of chains, cables and anchors and crane chains for collieries and lifting purposes'. The firm became a limited company in 1899.




 * Brookhirst manufactured electrical switchgear. Neither of the original partners, John A. Hirst and Percy Shelley Brook, was a Cestrian, and the firm's location in the city was due solely to Hirst's view that Chester was a better place to live than his native Manchester and would provide 'gentle and pleasing conditions' for his workers. The original premises in Northgate Street were soon outgrown and a new works was built in 1906 at Newry Park off Brook Lane. Such was the firm's success that the works had to be expanded within two years, and it was extended again in 1915 and 1917.

By the early 1950s Chester still had some oldestablished manufacturing concerns including the Leadworks and two tobacco companies. Newer, larger, and modern enterprises included Brookhirst Electrical Switchgear and two makers of metal window frames, Williams and Williams of the Reliance Works and Rustproof Metal Windows Ltd. of Saltney. The last three firms employed over 3,500 workers between them in 1951, the first three had only 500. In 1951 there were also based in Chester around 2,000 railwaymen and 1,000 employees at Crosville Motor Services, the regional bus company. Retail sales per head of population in the county borough were higher in 1950 than for any other town or city in the north-west. Retailers employed over 5,000 people, and retail-type services such as catering and garages another 2,000. Browns of Eastgate Street, had a staff of over 600. The proportion of the workforce engaged in local and central government administration (the latter including the Inland Revenue and the headquarters of the Army's Western Command) and banking was regarded as 'extraordinarily high': over 3,000 and 800 people respectively in 1951.

By 1971 Chester had almost 1 million square feet of shopping space, most of it in the city centre. The city was by far the most important shopping centre in the region, with three times as much retail space as Ellesmere Port (a town of similar size) and more than Birkenhead (which had twice Chester's population). Chester's retail space was on a par with much larger county towns such as Oxford and Cambridge, both of which had affluent student populations. Sales in 1971 were £640 per resident, far outstripping other towns in the region and similar towns elsewhere in England (though not by as much as in 1950).

Sources and Links

 * Industrial Archaeology of Chester Canal;
 * Cheshire Trade Directories - from 1789 t0 1910;