Be thankful for Cheshire salt: at least we don’t have to buy the stuff from Russia

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

The winter is arctic and the economy is a long way from spring, but commodities are hot again. Gold, the doomsters’ favourite, has a charmed life of its own, though its recent ascent has run out of oomph. Copper, the metal of choice for professionals betting on global recovery, perked up at the beginning of 2009 and has climbed steadily most of the way back to its 2008 peak. Nickel, zinc and aluminium bounced last spring in anticipation of a surge of industrial demand and continue to zigzag upwards, offering good returns for those who get their timing right. But the natural resource du jour is a basic commodity for which, until the snow started falling a month ago, no hair-gelled hedge-fund player would have shown any appetite at all, except on the rim of his margarita glass or his platter of foie gras: plain old salt.

It’s rather pleasing that the quiet little towns of north Cheshire — which have been mining salt since Roman times but have long been looked down upon by posh folk from Chester to the west and footballers’ wives from Wilmslow to the east — have suddenly become the Klondike camps of a midwinter gold rush. Two-mile convoys of trucks have been waiting to pick up precious supplies of grit treated with brine from the Salt Union depot at Winsford and rock salt from British Salt at Middlewich. For anyone interested in industrial history, it’s also pleasing to discover how these forgotten corporate veterans have survived.

Salt Union, as its name suggests, was an amalgamation (in 1888) of numerous Cheshire mining operations. Its product was distributed by barge, hence its headquarters at Runcorn where the Manchester Ship Canal met the Bridgewater and the Weaver Navigational, providing distribution throughout new industrial England.