In my last post, I talked about a photo taken from a ship leaving Southampton, and these are taken the following day as we approached the coast of Holland. The smoke from the chimneys of IJmuiden Steelworks was visible some miles out to see, and as we got closer the unmistakeable cluttered skyline of the works came into view. The coastal location and long sandy beach reminded me of Redcar (pre-demolition).

Running adjacent to the steelworks, and linking the coast to Amsterdam (and beyond) is the Noordzeekanaal (North Sea Canal). An engineering marvel, it is similar in principle to the Manchester Ship Canal – a man made waterway linking an inland city to the coast, thus allowing seagoing ships to travel nearer to where their cargoes are required. But in reality, the scale of the canal is far larger and the canal is a more important waterway than the English version that sees only a couple of ships a month in it’s upper reaches. Once at Amsterdam the North Sea Canal then links to the Amsterdam – Rhine Canal and allows traffic to travel to the Rhine and all the canals that link to the Rhine. The Rhine itself is navigable to the Swiss border, and other canals link to France.

The IJmuiden steelworks has a long history that is well documented on wikipedia so no point in me repeating it here. It’s recent history does have a link to Britain though, with the merger of Hoogovens Steel (who owned the works), merging with British Steel in 1999 to form Corus. Corus was bought by Tata in 2007 with Redcar subsequently being sold off to SSSI (and then closed), and Scunthorpe being sold to Greybull Capital who created a new iteration of British Steel which became insolvent in 2019 and was bought by the Chinese Jingye Group.

In light of the announcements that Port Talbot’s blast furnaces will close in 2024 to be replaced by electric arc furnaces (EAF’s)and Scunthorpe’s will follow suit in the next few years, I wonder how much longer this plant has left?