Qualla: Ketton Cement Works

Ketton Cement Works: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hanson Marketing, CC BY-SA 4.0. About one in ten bags of cement sold in Britain comes from a single Rutland village. Ketton, an unhurried place of pale stone cottages on the Welland tributary, sits on top of a Jurassic oolitic limestone so good it has been quarried for building stone since the sixteenth century. Trinity, King's and Clare colleges in Cambridge are mostly Ketton stone. So is much of Burghley House up the road. The colour has a name in geology textbooks: the warm honey of buildings in this particular corner of England comes out of these quarries. Since 1928 the same beds have been mined for cement, and the village now lives alongside an eighty-metre kiln tower and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, which is what the older quarries became when the diggers moved on.

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Image: Hanson Marketing | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ketton Cement Works: From Sheffield to the Limestone

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Sangwell from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. The works owes its existence to a Sheffield builder named Frank Walker who, in 1921, bought up eleven hundred and seventy-four acres of Ketton parish, most of it abandoned quarries and clay pits. Walker wanted to make sectional concrete buildings. He set up a block factory in 192...

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Image: Phil Sangwell from United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Ketton Cement Works: The Tallest Thing for Fifty Miles

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hanson Marketing, CC BY-SA 4.0. A second kiln was added in 1933, a third in 1939 with a reinforced-concrete chimney 338 feet tall, then the tallest structure in the south of England and visible for fifty miles. By the start of the Second World War, production had grown from fifty thousand tonnes a year in 1930 ...

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Image: Hanson Marketing | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ketton Cement Works: Castle, Hanson, Heidelberg

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hanson Marketing, CC BY-SA 4.0. The shape of the modern plant comes from a single decision in the mid-1980s. Kiln 8, built for around seventy million pounds, is sixty-eight metres long with a preheater tower around eighty metres high, capable of replacing the output of six earlier kilns at lower energy cost. On...

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Image: Hanson Marketing | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ketton Cement Works: Tyres in the Kiln, Solar on the Slag Heap

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hanson Marketing, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1990s the plant began burning shredded paper and plastics under the trade name Profuel; from 1996, used car tyres. Both are commonly used as cement-kiln fuels because the kiln operates at temperatures hot enough to destroy organic pollutants and the steel in tyre wire is i...

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Image: Hanson Marketing | CC BY-SA 4.0