Deadly, dirty, indispensable: the nitrogen industry has changed the world

It used to be a marvel; it remains, in its way, a subject of awe. Between the River Tees and the town of Billingham in the northeast of England there is a sprawling chemical works just over 100 years old. In the 1920s, as part of the newly formed Imperial Chemical Industries (ici), it was feted as a miracle of modernity; to a visiting Aldous Huxley it was “one of those ordered universes that exist…as pure logic in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence”, a forerunner of the sort of future he would explore and deplore in “Brave New World”. In the 1940s its strategic importance made it a target for the German Luftwaffe; by the 1960s it employed 20,000 people, the largest plant of its sort in the world.