Albright’s Bastards

 

In his unusually long and rich lifetime of 89 years, Arthur Albright sired  8 children with his wife Rachael- possibly banging them out in between his many frequent business trips abroad.

Though his seed prospered to carry on running the company, along with the Wilson clan (John Wilson marrying Rachael Albright’s sister), the continuation of the legacy was one that would produce some sickly sites into the 20th Century, the remembered ownership of which begins to fade with the passing of the years. Rattlechain lagoon is not the only bastard of Albright’s toxic legacy.

There are other sites both former factories and waste disposal sites operated by Albright and Wilson and their subsidiaries in the UK which are of note- usually for their problems of pollution and nuisance that they caused to their communities. They also involved a toxic legacy of waste that in many cases will persist like that at Rattlechain lagoon.

The map below is taken from a potential workers guide published in the 1950’s showing the extent of the chemical factory empire as it then stood.

In  many cases these sites and their satellite waste dumps have now been decomissioned, and more frequently buried before any real scrutiny could validate what they actually contained. Today’s Environment Agency and the local authorities who inherited the problems have no real solutions to deal with them other than through building houses around them and like a cat covering up its business in the tray, backfilling hurriedly with soil to disguise the smell.

These sites are contaminated with toxic chemicals, and the land upon which they smeared is contaminated land- but in law this term has a poor translation into the reality of recognising this. The problem is the weakness of The Environmental Protection Act which was tailored and still is to suit the developer on industrial land and not the decontamination of buried toxic waste which is considered acceptable so long as it is not disturbed. Such graveyard memorials do not come with elaborate headstones, nor is there any ‘birth record’ of who created their deformed and twisted torsos. The mists of time and local authority shredders cover their existence still further.

We will look here at some of Albrights’ sickly bastards.