Sugar Beet Factory, Kidderminster.

The British Sugar factory of Kidderminster can be found in the county of Worcestershire which was once owned by the ‘British sugar corporation’ a company which was created in 1936 as part of a British effort to nationalise their sugar beet processing.

In 1972 the commercial brand of ‘Silver Spoon’ was formed to cover household forms of sugar purchase including granulated, icing and cubed sugars.

British Sugar Corp now faces a ropey yet inevitable future as the dominance of Tate & Lyle sugar and the low costs of imported sugar (and no doubt cheaper human labour that comes with those prices) force the few remaining plants to shut down.

Walking beneath the pitch blackened silos of the factory the concrete floors have been coated inches deep with spilt sugar and oil to form a sticky caramel scented tar which was so thick that my boots became weighed down by this super sugar ‘glue’.

A sense of irony occurred to me whilst walking through these crystallised mountains of discarded sugar of what these ‘mountains’ could have represented in the face of war times when sugar was so precious it was rationed or perhaps even to the brutal torture and heavy labour carried out on the slaves on sugar cane plantations to provide our Western countries with enough sugar for seasoning.