Locational Change of the Steel Industry in Britain.
Steel production is a weight losing industry (i. the raw material weighs more than the finished product). Thus according to Weber steel works should be located near to the raw material sources. However due technological advances and various other factors the optimum location for a steel works has changed over the years.
Before the Industrial Revolution (before 1700) the raw materials required for the manufacture of iron were, iron ore, charcoal and water. Therefore works in this era were located where iron ore could be found close to the surface, which was then smelted in a furnace by burning charcoal, thus works located in woodland areas e.g. Forest of Dean and the Weald of Sussex & Kent. .
However the process used was very inefficient thus the iron yield very low, additionally the energy source (charcoal/wood) was running out.
This problem was solved by Abraham Darby (in 1709 at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire) who perfected the method of using coke to smelt iron ore. This method increased the efficiency and speed of iron production, leading to a huge uptake of iron as a material and thus the amount produced (form 17,000 tonnes in 1720 to 8,500,000 tonnes by the end of the 19th century). As this process used coal rather than charcoal as the energy source there was a locational change and factories moved to coalfield sites to keep transport costs down and profits up, as 12 tonnes of raw material were required to produce 1 tonne of iron (8 tonnes of which was coal). Coal fields where iron ore was found within the coal seams ("black-band iron ore") were particularly favourable and by 1800 many iron works had been built in South Wales, South Staffordshire, Shropshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire as a result.
By around 1855 this black-band iron ore was running out. However the amount of coal required had been reduced due to technological advances, this in-conjunction with the development of the railway meant that the coalfields lost their locational dominance.
