The Lion Salt Works,Northwich: A Legacy of the Cheshire Salt Industry

The Lion Salt Works are the last standing buildings of the open-pan salt industry that dominated the mid-Cheshire valleys of the rivers Weaver and Wheelock in North-West England. The site had been in the hands of the Thompson family from 1856, when the first works the Alliance Salt Works began. The Lion Salt Works occupied an adjacent land plot and ran from 1894 until their closure in 1986. The site opened with a small museum, but despite the continued campaigning of the Lion Salt Works Trust over the next 25 years the majority of the buildings remained in a dilapidated state. The site was closed between 2009 and 2015 as the buildings were restored and reopened as a museum, conference facilities and café as part of a project funded by a combination of the Heritage Lottery Fund, Cheshire West and Chester Council, Manage+, WREN and Historic England. Archaeological and historical research was conducted as part of the project. This paper describes the results of this research, detailing how salt was made at the site, the development of salt-making in Cheshire, the archaeology uncovered on site and the Thompson family business. It finally concludes by examining the Lion Salt Works place in a wider landscape of the Cheshire salt industry and the chemical industry in North-West England.     

Voter Behaviour in Rural Areas: A Study of the Farrer Electoral Division in Southern New South Wales at the 1998 Federal Election

The National (Country) Party, traditional beneficiary of a countrymindedness ethos in rural and regional Australia, suffered a significant electoral setback at the 1998 federal election from a new conservative force in Australian politics, the One Nation Party. One Nation has been characterised as the party of the ‘old’ Australia, those least able to cope with the pace of recent social and economic changes, rationalisation and centralisation of services and the exodus of people from rural and regional areas. Such a characterisation is supported by findings from this study of the geography of voting and the social correlates of One Nation's support base in the Farrer electoral division in south‐western New South Wales.     

What Do Objects Want?

This paper develops an argument for the agency of objects, looking at the effects objects have on people. Groups of related objects, such as pots or metal ornaments, create stylistic universes which affect producers and users of new objects, bound by the canons of style. For an object to be socially powerful in a recognized manner, the form of the object lays down certain rules of use which influence the sensory and emotional impacts of the object. Formal properties of artifacts are influenced by the genealogy of the object class, including historical continuities and changes, and also its perceived source. The forms of objects, the historical trajectories of the class of objects and their perceived sources combine to have social effects on people, shaping people as socially effective entities. Britain’s incorporation into the Roman Empire between 150 BC and AD 200 provides an excellent case study through which to look at the changing corpora of objects, which had continuities and changes in form, a set of subtle attributions of sources and a complex range of social effects.