A page with some pictures I took while working on a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the steel crisis that is facing Port Talbot, and the UK more generally. You can listen to it here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0022zx2
Producer: Leala Padmanabhan.
Steel is all around us. It is in our homes, our cutlery, our cars. Tin cans are coated steel, and ‘copper’ pennies are coated steel too. The documentary starts in the hot rolling mill – it looks like this:
The glowing red steel slabs are rolled repeatedly. They start of 10m long, and end up around a 1km long.
A picture from my phone – here the slab has been rolled a few times and can now form a coil.
By the end of the process, you have a coil that is just a few mm thick, and is around 1km long. Here’s a coil coming off the line in summer 2024, before the final furnace was switched off.
The football pitch at Margam, one of the neighbourhoods that make up Port Talbot. The two blast furnaces can be seen in the background. Many of the Margam FC players are steelworkers.
The HQ of Margam Stags FC. If you have never been to South Wales, the weather is like this all the time.
