Industry and Farmland

This photo shows the interesting juxtaposition of an industrial site and farmland. It depicts the Newcastle Innovation Centre of Procter and Gamble on Whitley Road, Longbenton - about a mile from where I live. They use it for research and development of laundry detergents and machine dishwashing products for all parts of the world. It was opened in 1957 as the Hedley Research Laboratories (Thomas Hedley Co. was a Newcastle firm which was bought by Procter and Gamble in 1930 at the start of P&G's expansion from its American operations.)

I worked there as a lab technician for 6 months in 1971 to earn a bit of cash between leaving school and going to medical school. I was involved in research into deposition of colloids onto charged surfaces. For me that mostly involved synthesising a latex of minute polystyrene beads then manually measuring several hundred of the beads on electron micrographs so as to work out the mean and standard deviation of their diameter. I recall the excitement of using a teleprinter to communicate with a mainframe computer in London to do the number crunching; nowadays you could do it on a pocket calculator, or no doubt on a smartphone!!

The fields around are still used for agriculture, although one nearby (not this one) is about to have 600 houses built on it. The traffic is already bad enough in the rush hour so it can only get worse after that. The local Council apparently refused planning permission but the developers won on appeal to central government. So much for local democracy!