tarboat's photos with the keyword: ovens

Pushing coke into the coke car at the South Bank coke ovens, Middlesbrough. This was the second coke oven plant at South Bank and consisted of 88 ovens split into two batteries of 44. The plant was the first in Britain to have chambers exceeding 5 metres in height and was built by Gibbons Wilputte in 1971-2. The whole site has recently been demolished.

A door scene at the now demolished Monckton coke works at Royston in Yorkshire.

The loading hoppers move into position for charging an oven at the Monckton Cokeworks.

The coke car at Monckton Cokeworks heads for the quenching tower.

Having been pushed from the oven into the coke car, the red-hot charge of coke is being winched to the tower for quenching. The Monckton Coke & Chemical Company is owned by Hargreaves Services plc and has been producing metallurgical coke for more than 130 years at its site near Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Monckton is the only independent coke works in the UK and takes its coal from Maltby Colliery to produce more than 200,000 tonnes per year of the highest-quality coke for UK and European markets.

I was driving along the M62 past Milnrow as I have done many times before, only this time I spotted something. On approaching a bridge carrying a farm lane over the motorway I looked up and spotted a bank of coke ovens on the hillside. How on earth had I managed to miss those for so many years? Moving on a couple of weeks I was back for a closer look at this row of beehive ovens built into the hillside. The stone facing has long been removed for re-use but the back half of the kilns remains. My first thought was that they were associated with Tunshill Colliery which was a short distance downhill from here, but after a bit of research I reckon they were built to use coal drawn from the Tunshill Hey Collieries operated on the north-east side of the hill in the later nineteenth century by Benjamin Chadwick and the Executors of Alfred Wild who also seem to have been involved with the colliery and coke ovens at Schofield Hall, of which more anon. The coal was brought through the hill from Tunshill Hey workings and emerged from a tramming level close to the ovens. By producing the coke here it was closer to the markets of Oldham and Rochdale and may even have been sent down the tramroad linking Tunshill Colliery with Butterworth Hall Pit in Milnrow itself.

Corus South Bank coking plant in action.

The huge South Bank cokeworks gasholder is almost entirely hidden by banks of slag when viewed from Lackenby.

Coke ovens in action on Teesside. A view only made possible by the demolition of the three blast furnaces that once stood in the foreground.