Coalbrookdale

• 1. Introduction

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  Above the Old Furnace at Coalbrookdale, a cast-iron lintel carries a date that nobody can settle. Today it is painted as 1638. An archive photograph shows the same inscription as 1658.

  Coalbrookdale is a settlement in the Ironbridge Gorge, within the Telford and Wrekin borough of Shropshire, England. It lies in a civil parish called The Gorge, and people sometimes call it a town.

  Twenty years of uncertainty on one lintel hints at a bigger puzzle. Who was making iron in this valley, and when? What did one tenant change so completely that the name Abraham Darby still follows the place? And how did a small dale, with no village of Ironbridge yet beside it, end up supplying machines, bridges and garden fountains to far-off places?

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• 2. Before The Darbys

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  Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the manor of Madeley and the neighbouring parish of Little Wenlock belonged to Much Wenlock Priory. At the Dissolution, a bloomsmithy stood here under the name "Caldebroke Smithy".

  Around 1572 the manor passed to John Brooke, who developed coal mining on a substantial scale. His son Sir Basil Brooke became a significant industrialist and invested in ironworks elsewhere. He probably had ironworks at Coalbrookdale too, though evidence is lacking.

  In about 1615, Sir Basil acquired an interest in the patent for the cementation process of making steel. He had to surrender that patent in 1619. He kept making iron and steel until his estate was sequestrated during the Civil War, yet the works stayed in use.

  In 1651 the manor was leased to Francis Wolfe, the clerk of the ironworks. Wolfe and his son ran them either as tenants of Brooke's heirs or possibly as their managers. Records are thin, so what ironworks stood here and from precisely what dates remains obscure.

  By 1688 Lawrence Wellington was operating the ironworks. A few years later the furnace was occupied by Shadrach Fox, who renewed the lease in 1696 and let the Great Forge and Plate Forge to Wellington. Some evidence may suggest that Fox smelted iron with mineral coal, though this is controversial.

  Fox was clearly an iron founder. He supplied round shot and grenade shells to the Board of Ordnance during the Nine Years War. By April 1703 at the latest, his furnace had blown up. It stood derelict for years, although the forges kept working.

  A brass works rose here before 1712, and possibly as early as 1706. It closed in 1714.

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• 3. Coke And Cooking Pots

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  In 1709, the first Abraham Darby rebuilt Coalbrookdale Furnace and eventually fuelled it with coke. The coal came from drift mines cut into the sides of the valley. It held far fewer impurities than ordinary coal, so the iron it produced was of superior quality.

  Darby was an ironfounder, making cast-iron pots and other goods. He did especially well because of a patented foundry method that let him sell pots more cheaply than his rivals.

  Coalbrookdale has been called the home of the world's first coke-fired blast furnace. That is not strictly correct. It was, however, the first furnace in Europe to run successfully for more than a few years.

  In 1714 Darby renewed his lease and formed a partnership with John Chamberlain and Thomas Baylies. They built a second furnace around 1715. Plans followed for a furnace at Dolgûn near Dolgellau in Wales, and for taking over Vale Royal Furnace in Cheshire in 1718.

  Darby died prematurely at Madeley Court in 1717. That was the same year he began the house called Dale End, which later became home to succeeding generations of his family. His widow Mary followed him quickly.

  The partnership had been dissolved before Mary's death, with Baylies taking over Vale Royal. Afterwards he had difficulty extracting his capital. The works passed to a company led by Thomas Goldney II of Bristol, a fellow Quaker, and managed by Richard Ford, also a Quaker.

  Darby's son, Abraham Darby the Younger, was brought in as an assistant manager once he was old enough.

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• 4. Engines And Rails

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  From 1723, the new company supplied cylinders for Newcomen atmospheric engines. Its main business stayed cast-iron goods. The molten iron for that foundry work came from the blast furnaces and also from remelting pig iron in air furnaces, a variant of the reverberatory furnace.

  Upgraded boring facilities in 1734 allowed larger cylinders. By 1748 the company could bore cylinders 60 inches across, and later 70 inches. In 1743 it installed its own Newcomen engine as a water-returning engine. When the water supply ran low, it pumped water from below the waterwheel back up to the pond above.

  A forge operated at Coalbrookdale from 1720 but it was not profitable. Around 1754, renewed experiments applied coke pig iron to the production of bar iron in charcoal finery forges. They succeeded, and the partners built new furnaces at Horsehay and Ketley. This marked the start of a great expansion in coke ironmaking.

  In 1767 the company began to produce the first cast-iron rails for railways. In 1781 a beam engine named Resolution replaced the old Newcomen water-returning engine. It still worked on the Newcomen principle, but a separate condenser, as in James Watt's patent, made it more efficient.

  In 1802 the Coalbrookdale Company built a rail locomotive for Richard Trevithick. Little is known about it, including whether it ever ran. One account says a workman died in an accident involving the engine, and the company chose not to run it on its existing railway.

  The only surviving information is a drawing at the Science Museum in London and a letter from Trevithick to his friend Davies Giddy. The design had a single horizontal cylinder inside a return-flue boiler. A flywheel drove the wheels on one side through spur gears, and the axles were mounted directly on the boiler, with no frame.

  The drawing shows a plateway for the track. This was two years before Trevithick's first engine to tow a train ran at Penydarren in south Wales.

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• 5. The Iron Bridge

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  In 1778, Abraham Darby III undertook the building of the world's first cast-iron bridge. It opened on the 1st of January 1781, and it is the iconic Iron Bridge. Its fame leads many people to link ironmaking with the neighbouring village of Ironbridge.

  That link is misleading. No settlement existed at Ironbridge in the eighteenth century, and most of the work was done at Coalbrookdale. Expansion there continued, with a system of sophisticated ponds and culverts to supply water power.

  In 1795, William Reynolds and John Rose founded the first porcelain factory near Coalbrookdale at Coalport, east of the Iron Bridge. It produced Coalport porcelain.

  Buildwas Bridge, built in 1796 two miles up the river from the original Ironbridge, shows how quickly iron design improved. Coalbrookdale supplied its ironwork. Thanks to advances in technology, it used only half as much cast iron despite being 30 feet (9 m) wider.

  Thomas Telford began Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct in 1796. It carried the Shrewsbury Canal over the River Tern and rested on cast-iron columns.

  In Ditherington, Shrewsbury, Charles Bage designed and built the world's first multi-storey cast-iron-framed mill. He used only brick and iron, with no wood at all, to improve fire resistance.

  The nineteenth century would turn the foundry's skills toward ornament.

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• 6. Ornament And Decline

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  The gates of London's Hyde Park came out of Coalbrookdale. The foundry became known in the nineteenth century for decorative ironwork, and its pieces travelled widely.

  Other examples include the Coalbrookdale verandah at St John's in Monmouth, Wales. The Peacock Fountain in Christchurch, New Zealand, stands about as far from Shropshire as ironwork could go.

  The blast furnaces were shut down, perhaps as early as the 1820s, but the foundries kept working. The Coalbrookdale Company later joined an alliance of ironfounding companies called Light Castings Limited.

  In 1929, Allied Ironfounders Limited absorbed Light Castings. Glynwed then took over Allied Ironfounders, and Glynwed has since become Aga Foodservice.

  The Coalbrookdale foundry closed in November 2017. By then, the older ironworks of the valley had been rescued from burial.

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• 7. Furnace And Museum

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  For about a century after the Old Blast Furnace closed, it lay buried. Someone proposed clearing the site and dismantling the furnace. Instead, the decision was to excavate and preserve it.

  In 1959, the furnace and a small museum opened to celebrate 250 years of the company. This grew into the larger Ironbridge Gorge Museums. The Museum of Iron occupies the Great Warehouse, built in 1838, and the Ironbridge Institute sits in the Long Warehouse.

  Those two buildings form the sides of an open space. On a third side stands the Old Furnace, now sheltered by a building erected in 1981. The fourth side is a railway viaduct that carried coal to the now demolished Ironbridge Power Station.

  Telford Steam Railway is due to take over one of the viaduct's two tracks as part of its southern extension from Horsehay. The Ironbridge Institute is a partnership between the University of Birmingham and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust. It offers postgraduate and professional development courses in heritage.

  The museum's archaeology unit continues to dig into the earlier history of Coalbrookdale. It has recently excavated the remains of seventeenth-century cementation furnaces near the site of the Upper Forge, formerly called the Middle Forge.

  The Old Furnace began as a typical charcoal furnace, with a waterwheel working bellows to provide the blast. After the switch to coke in 1709, Abraham Darby I used it to cast pots, kettles and other goods. His grandson Abraham Darby III smelted the iron here for the first Ironbridge.

  The uppermost lintel reads "Abraham Darby 1777". It probably records an enlargement for casting the Iron Bridge. Inside, the furnace bulges at the middle and tapers below, so the charge sinks into a narrower, hotter hearth.

  When Darby III enlarged the furnace, he widened the boshes only at the front and on the left. Widening the right side would have meant moving the waterwheel. As a result, the mouth of the furnace is off-centre.

  A local trail links other heritage sites in the dale. They include Coalbrookdale railway station, the Quaker Burial Ground, the Darby Houses, Tea Kettle Row and the Great Western Railway Viaduct. The burial ground and the houses point to the families who lived here.

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• 8. People Of The Dale

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  Abraham Darby II lived from 1711 to 1763 and worked as an ironmaster. His wife, Abiah Darby, lived from 1716 to 1794 and served as a minister in the Quaker church.

  William Reynolds, who lived from 1758 to 1803, was an ironmaster and a partner in the local ironworks. He is the same William Reynolds who co-founded the Coalport porcelain factory.

  Thomas Parker, who lived from 1843 to 1915, was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He worked as an electrical engineer, inventor and industrialist.

  Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, who lived from 1871 to 1928, was brought up locally. He became a writer and an expert in heraldry.

  Rowsby Woof, born in 1883, became a violinist and music educator. He died in 1943, having taken a very different path from the ironmasters of his birthplace.

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