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
Sucrose is still made of blood
Boxing Day 08 and I have a little birro time to put a file on my blog from the summer of 2007. This story relates to the amazing fact that the “tiger in the engine of flex-fuel cars” in Brazil derives from “energy cane”, which produces “ethanol” more effectively than America can ever produce BIOFUEL from MAIZE. Tragically however it is produced in some “out of sight, out of mind parts of Brazil” under “slave like conditions of production”!
Posted by Ron Noon in on Friday, December 26th 2008
A bitter sweet Christmas Story from the last millennium
Once upon a time the former boys and girls from the whitestuff met up in the Britannia Adelphi Hotel, initially every year after closure in ‘81 and then every two years, to celebrate the company financed Christmas party. In 1999 the company “because of the need to continually review and reduce costs” ended the “biennial Xmas Party” and it was this seemingly TERMINAL decision that really motivated a new “campaigning chapter” in my sugar researches. This “story” was written on December 20th 1999
Posted by Ron Noon in On The Lane on Monday, December 22nd 2008
More pictures and interviews for 09 as well as a controversial conclusion about closure.
It’s the last shopping weekend before Christmas and before the trip into town I thought I’d emphasise what is still missing from our website. The film is here but there are so many other people that we want to interview whose “lived experiences” and views of working for Tates and what closure meant to them will be at variance to “conclusions” that I may have reached in my research. It takes time to build a new site up but the priority in 09 will be for more pictures and memorabilia as well as more recorded interviews on film.
Posted by Ron Noon in on Saturday, December 20th 2008
What is sugar?
I know WHAT IS SUGAR? is answered if you hit that left hand column, but posing this “simple question” again in the blog is a reminder of just how complicated the answer can be. It is also a reminder that the end product of “refining” whether from cane or beet sources, is compositionally identical. Unless you saw the packet the sugar was being decanted from you would not know whether the white stuff came from the exotic tropical anitlles or wet fenland England! 
Posted by Ron Noon in on Wednesday, December 17th 2008
Albert (Tod) Sloane: Sweet Fighter extraordinaire!
The two most important influences on the Love Lane Lives project were the two “sweetfighters” who originally asked me to write the refinery workers story up. Albert E Sloane and John Maclean were yoked together in that struggle to keep the Lane open and their efforts live on.
Posted by Ron Noon in On The Lane on Monday, December 15th 2008