Limited edition print of The Tate and Lyle Sugar Refinery, London
£120
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45cm x 22.5cm giclee print giclee print not including the white boarder around. See below for Additional Information.
A bit about The Tate and Lyle Sugar Refinery
The painting shows Thames Refinery in Silvertown established in 1878 by famous Victorian sugar merchant and philanthropist Sir Henry Tate. He’s most noted for bringing the sugar cube to the UK and establishing the Tate Gallery.
Thames Refinery was his original site and has been in continuous operation for over 140 years – producing sugars, syrups and sweeteners to satisfy Britain’s sweet tooth. Raw cane sugar is still brought by ships up the Thames to the refinery’s jetty from countries as far afield as Fiji, Belize and Mozambique. At peak operating capacity the refinery can turn this raw sugar into the equivalent of over 1 billion 1kg bags of white sugar a year and supply 50% of the UK’s sugar market.
In the 1921 Henry Tate’s grandchildren along with Abram Lyle’s grandchildren decided to merge their companies. Abram Lyle was another famous Silvertown sugar merchant, with a similar site a mile West where the iconic Lyle’s Golden Syrup was invented. The merger gave the company the name the famous Tate and Lyle name seen on the factory (and millions of packets of sugar) today
It is one of the last true industrial landscapes in London with many of the buildings dating from the 19th Century. The building dominates much of the skyline in Silvertown. The area was the centre of East London’s once thriving docks but is experiencing rapid redevelopment. At its peak in the 1950s and 60s the company employed over 5000 people, many of whom would have lived in terraced houses in the local area just like those in the painting. The community in Silvertown remains tight knit with many ex-employees living in houses near the factory and the workers fiercely proud of the history in Silvertown of the company.
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