To the South East of the site are the enormous rolling mills and the almost as big Basic Oxygen Steelmaking (BOS) plant. The rolling mills are nearly a mile long, and while the BOS plant isn’t as long, it is rather tall, and is said to be 4 metres higher than St. Paul’s Cathedral (which I have to admit is an unusual basis of comparison, but let’s go with it).
The actual steelmaking process is well described on British Steel’s own website, and a well photographed version can be found here, so there’s no point me repeating it verbatim, but in essence, molten iron is brought from the blast furnaces by rail in the torpedoes and unloaded into the BOS plant convertors. Here, scrap metal and lime are added and oxygen is blown through at high pressure to remove impurities. It takes 25 minutes to convert 330 tons into steel.
Adjacent to the BOS plant is the CONCAST (Continuous Casting) Plant, where the molten steel is transferred and cast into blooms and slabs that are then cut into appropriately sized sections for working into finished product elsewhere.
Mechanical Landscapes 