Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
The Love Lane Lives Weblog
Maggie snub for Mr Cube team
Exactly thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher snubbed a delegation of civic and religious leaders from Liverpool. Why? The Lady was not for turning and certainly not interested in meeting delegations from Liverpool!
Posted by Ron Noon in On The Lane on Thursday, February 10th 2011
30 years ago TODAY, 90 day Redundancy Notices were served on Love Lane Refinery workers
“The loss of 2000 jobs near the city centre would be more than the end of a business enterprise - it would obliterate a community.” They were the words used by Michael Otterson in the Liverpool Daily Post Business section on July 8th 1976. Four and a half years later on January 22nd 1981 Tate & Lyle issued 90 day redundancy notices to the surviving 1500 workers. A Sugar Giant made on Merseyside by Henry Tate, Britain’s late 19th century Rockefeller, was to be junked on April 22nd
Posted by Ron Noon in on Saturday, January 22nd 2011
Time for a Blue Plaque for Tate Liverpool!
On Friday 26th November 2010 The Liverpool Echo contained this report: “TATE & LYLE is to end its 150-year presence in Liverpool after agreeing to sell its molasses operation. Northern Ireland-based grain trader W & R Barnett will pay £67m for the business, in a deal which will see the 50 employees based at Regent Road, Bootle, and Birkenhead’s North Alfred Dock transfer over.” I asked myself what will there be left to “commemorate” Tate’s Grieving of Liverpool and the answer was/is obvious! We may need the help of the Liverpool Pilot to achieve an ambitious but achievable goal for 2011
Posted by Ron Noon in on Monday, December 06th 2010
Love Lane’s Memory Lane
Mike Greenall started his sugar industry apprenticeship as a 16 year old in the month that the Beatles “stormed” Shea Stadium, the legendary home of the New York Mets. He wrote to me last week and kindly attached “a couple of souvenirs of the Yellows House” a timely reminder of the arts of the sugar boiler like our own Bobby Austin and of the vitally important experiences and memories of PROCESS apprentices like Mike.
OK that’s the Lane above, but what are the two instruments below used for?
Posted by Ron Noon in On The Lane on Friday, November 26th 2010
Our film was shown at the Tate three years ago LAST NIGHT, but BIG SUGAR loves TONIGHT best!
“Historian Ron Noon’s decade-long obsession with the Liverpool sugar industry led to the making of the film Love Lane Lives: The Boys and Girls from the White-stuff, which is to be screened tonight at the Tate.” That was Vicky Anderson’s take on my “sugarcentricity” in an essay she wrote in the Liverpool Daily Post on October 30th 2007. All the hard work and effort that Leon Seth, Maggie Skilling and I had invested in the project, culminated in a great night three years ago last night! TONIGHT as I write these words I am keenly aware of other more taken for granted anniversaries and the fact that HALLOWEEN in the twenty first century has become in North American a $4 billion sugar festival which in the words of another film maker, Brian McKenna, has made tonight “a marketing dream for the sugar industry”.
Posted by Ron Noon in on Sunday, October 31st 2010