This book provides a history of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), a large Britain-based chemical firm which was a major industrial player in the twentieth century. Once a model for Britain’s industrial reach and dominance, ICI collapsed in the mid-2000s, with some still profitable elements sold off to other chemical firms. The book focuses on the firm's origin site in the Northeast of England, around Middlesbrough, engaging the remnants of the company magazine, oral histories and Reddit posts, and material artifacts in the world, to relate a history of the social, environmental, cultural and imaginative and bodily impact of the presence (and then absence) of Imperial Chemical Industries. This unique work is open to coincidence and speculation, drawing on science fictional and urban myth narratives, which emanate from the area—while also exploring themes that have not been covered—and specifically not brought into a wider global narrative of industrial and philosophical change, such as the manufacture of Quorn, the place of photographic mediation of the factory, and industrial disease. Setting out from a context of heavy industry and material processing, the book seeks to stimulate poetic and creative thinking around the ways in which people's lives were enmeshed with synthetic chemicals and the dreams that seemed to ooze and seep from them as by-products..weiterlesen