Milestone – the Wilton Centre on Teesside celebrates its 50th anniversary.
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Wilton Centre is marking a key milestone in its history with eyes fixed firmly on the future.
The site near Redcar on the Teesside coast has secured planning permission for a major expansion and, under its operator Pioneer Group, is supporting companies who are spearheading moves towards a circular economy and a“ modern, green industrial revolution”.
As it looks ahead, Wilton Centre is also looking back 50 years when – between October 1974 and September 1975 – 1,300 staff started arriving in the building, the new headquarters of ICI’ s Petrochemicals Division. Among the staff were 135 accountants, 155 secretaries and 426 engineers.
A year later Dawn Campbell began work as a“ messenger girl”.
“ It was a pleasure to come to work, nothing was any bother,” she remembers.
“ The camaraderie, the humour, it was just amazing.”
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Wilton Centre celebrates as it looks to the future
PAST PROGRESS
In 1977, aged 16, John Dale came to work for ICI at Wilton Centre. Amazingly, 48 years later, he is still there, now employed by Intertek.
Looking back, John says:“ You were working with some of the best scientists in the world and were well looked after. It was like being part of an extended family, offering security and a job for life.”
They all enjoyed working conditions that were the envy of their families and friends.
ICI had its own bus service and on site there was a bank, travel agency, shop, restaurants, cafés and even a bar.
Unusually for the times, the company opened a day nursery in the early 1990s and colleagues spent time together outside work at the nearby Wilton Castle Club, with its swimming pool, gym, croquet lawn and wine cellar, and on organised day trips to Blackpool and London.
The company provided an executive car service for the directors, who had their own dining room, as well as access to an ICI plane kept at Teesside International Airport.
For Eileen Milward, who started work as a shorthand typist at Wilton Centre in 1975 and became a senior PA before finally
leaving in 2009, one of the over-riding memories is the quality of the bosses’ carpet.“ You knew you were in the directorate corridor because of the thickness of the pile,” she recalls.
No wonder the place was known as The Wilton Hilton.
The break-up of ICI is well-documented and culminated in a takeover by Akzo-Nobel in 2008.
By then, although the Wilton Centre building had been bought and sold by investors, much of the ICI expertise remained.
“ The difference now is that the researchers and chemists are discovering ways to reverse the processes that were originally developed here,” says site director Steve Duffield, who came to Wilton Centre in September 1996 for four weeks and has stayed ever since. From its offices in the centre, Mura Technology, for example, has developed Mura Wilton- its commercial-scale hydrothermal advanced plastic recycling facility in nearby Wilton International.
The company says the plant represents“ the start of a global shift in how plastic is treated, valued and recycled.”