Dorman Long & Co was a UKsteel producer, later diversifying into bridge building. The company was once listed on the London Stock Exchange.
History
The company was founded by Arthur Dorman and Albert de Lande Long when they acquired West Marsh Iron Works in 1875.[1] In the 1920s Dorman Long took over the concerns of Bell Brothers and Bolckow and Vaughan and diversified into the construction of bridges.[2] In 1938 Ellis Hunter took over as Managing Director and he continued to lead the business until 1961.[3]
1850: 8 June – The Discovery of the Cleveland Main Seam of Ironstone at Eston by Ironmaster John Vaughan and mining engineer John Marley both of Bolckow & Vaughan. The Cleveland iron rush begins.[8]
1865: 30 blast furnaces operate within six miles (10 km) of Middlesbrough and one million tonnes per annum (TPA) of iron are produced to make the area one of the world's major centres of iron production.[9]
2015: Former Dorman Long Steel plant on Teesside ceased production after SSI mothballed the Redcar works following a global downturn in the price of steel and later announced its UK arm had gone into liquidation.[20]
2021: Cleveland Bridge goes into administration.[21]
2021: The Dorman Long tower is demolished,[22] despite its Grade II listed status.[15][23]
Bridge building
The most famous bridge ever constructed by a Teesside company was Dorman Long's Sydney Harbour Bridge of 1932,[24] of similar construction to but, contrary to popular belief, not modelled on the 1928 Tyne Bridge, a construction regarded as the symbol of Tyneside's Geordie pride, but also a product of Dorman Long's Teesside workmanship. The greatest example of Dorman Long's work in Teesside itself is the single-span Newport Lifting Bridge (a Grade II Listed Building). Opened by the Duke of York in February 1934 it was England's first vertical lift bridge.[25]
List of bridges constructed
The following is a list of some of the bridges built by the Dorman Long: it is not fully comprehensive.
In 1904 Sir Arthur Dorman of Dorman Long gave the Dorman Museum to Middlesbrough in honour of his youngest son, George Lockwood Dorman, an avid collector who died in the Boer War. Amongst the museum's exhibits is a collection of ceramics from the local Linthorpe Pottery, which was known for its iridescent glazes which, at the time, were not produced anywhere else in Europe.[40]
Dorman Long Tower
The Dorman Long tower was built from 1955 to 1956 as a coking plant for steel production.[15] The tower was an early example of brutalist architecture.[41] It was scheduled to be demolished in 2021 due its poor state of repair[23] and granted Grade II listed status, in an emergency listing by Historic England on 10 September 2021.[15] The emergency listing cited its significance as a "recognised and celebrated example of early Brutalist architecture", a "nationally unique surviving structure from the twentieth-century coal, iron and steel industries" as well as "for its association with, and an advert for, Dorman Long which dominated the steel and heavy engineering industry of Teesside".[15]
In one of her first acts as Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries revoked the listing – amidst accusations of "cultural vandalism" – enabling demolition of the building to be scheduled.[42] The tower was demolished between 00:00 and 00:20 on 19 September 2021 in a series of controlled explosions.[43]
^"The Sydney Morning Herald". British Steel Merger: Dorman, Long and South Durham. 9 May 1933. p. 11. Retrieved 1 December 2012.
^"Lackenby". The Civil Engineer. 1954. p. 399. In 1946, the whole of the land between the Cleveland and Redcar Works, an area of 680 acres, known as the Lackenby site, was purchased by Dorman Long.
^Scott, Peter Adamson; Roberts, Gilbert (1958). "The Volta Bridge". Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. 9 (4). Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, E-ISSN 1753-7789, Volume 9, Issue 4, April 1958, pp. 395–432: 395–432. doi:10.1680/iicep.1958.2304. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
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