John Thompson Senior was born in 1799 and started his working life as a joiner, timber merchant, and brickyard owner in Northwich. He entered the salt trade in 1842 with a shipping and lighting business on the River Weaver, carrying salt to the ports at Liverpool and Birkenhead. In 1846 he formed a partnership with his son John Thompson Junior, called Thompson and Son, that would run for forty-three years. They sank salt mines at Platt's Hill in Wincham in 1843, opened the Dunkirk Works in Witton-cum-Twambrooks in 1846, and over the following decades added more works and mines in Witton, Marston, Wincham, and Winsford. In 1857 they took a fifty-year lease on the Outlet Field in Marston from John Buckley and built the Alliance Salt Works there. They bought the site outright in 1868. After John Thompson Senior died in 1867, the family business split between his sons. The bulk of it was eventually sold to the Salt Union in 1888 for substantial sums, including £17,000 for the Alliance Works alone.

John Thompson Junior retired to Eddisbury Hall in Macclesfield after the sale, but the family was not done with salt. In 1894 he and his son Henry Ingram Thompson bought the Red Lion Hotel in Marston and built a salt pan in its coal yard. Henry Ingram sank a brine shaft, raised a brine tank and engine house, and constructed the first pan and stove house around the surviving hotel building. By 1899 the Red Lion Hotel had been demolished and replaced by two cottages that became the Red Lion Inn, and two further pan and stove houses had gone up. A mineral railway extended south of the site by 1906, and the works settled into its long mature shape: pans, stoves, brine pumps, smithy, manager's house, and the wooden stove-house roofs that gave the buildings their distinctive look. Salt was exported to Canada, North America, and West Africa, and sold domestically to Manchester, Liverpool, and across Cheshire. Henry Ingram ran the works with his sons Jack and Alan Kinsey Thompson until his death in 1937.

After the Second World War, Henry Lloyd Thompson came home from the Royal Navy and joined the family business in 1947. He would run the salt works for the next four decades. In 1954 and 1965 he built two more pan and stove houses, numbers four and five. The trade focus shifted heavily west: by the 1950s, ninety per cent of the Lion's output went to West Africa, shipped through firms like Paterson Zochonis, John Holt, and ICI. The pans produced what the trade called Lagos Salt, a light flaky-grained salt that withstood high humidity better than the dense crystals from competing producers. Customers in Calabar, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Monrovia, Conakry, and Freetown preferred it even at a premium price. The cost of that dependence became clear when Nigeria slid into the Biafran War in 1967, followed by successive military governments. The West African market that had supported the Lion through the British post-war decline began to come apart. Brazilian solar-evaporated salt, available cheaply in exchange for oil, completed the squeeze. Henry Lloyd and his second cousin Jonathan modernised what they could, introduced an automated pan, switched the boilers to reclaimed oil, and even opened the works as a partial museum between 1980 and 1986. None of it was enough. The fires went out in 1986.

Vale Royal District Council bought the buildings to prevent demolition, and in 1993 the Lion Salt Works Trust was formed as a registered charity. A 2000 survey confirmed that the land around the works was stable enough to support restoration. Funds were raised gradually from DEFRA, English Heritage, Cheshire Rural Recovery, and the Northwest Development Agency, and in 2004 the Lion appeared on the BBC's Restoration programme. The breakthrough came in 2008 when the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded £5.29 million toward a £7 million restoration. In 2009 the site passed to Cheshire West and Chester Council, and on 5 June 2015 the Lion Salt Works reopened as a heritage visitor attraction after a £10.2 million project. The restoration won the AABC Conservation award at the 2016 Civic Trust Awards, and that August it was named Britain's best Heritage Project by the National Lottery. The site is now Grade II listed, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and an Anchor Point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. A rebuilt stove house with its pan in situ, the smithy, the engine house, the brine tank, and the rail tracks all stand again. The pans are cold, but the buildings remember the heat.