ABSTRACT
At No. 289 Vauxhall Road Mr Muspratt made the manufacture of soda ash from salt a matter of national importance.1
In the autumn of 1822, having made his farewells to Dublin, James Muspratt set out for Liverpool with the aim of establishing a successful business supplying soda produced by the Leblanc process to local soapboilers. By the early 1820s Liverpool was a major commercial centre with a sharply increasing population and an expanding port. Liverpool’s first dock had opened in 1715, and with completion of Prince’s Dock in 1821 there were now nine docks in total occupying some 45 acres. The tonnage of ships entering Liverpool had seen a sharp rise, from 450,100 tons in 1801 to 839,800 tons by 1821. The import and export trades through these docks were to have an important bearing on the local and national economies throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, as Francis Hyde has highlighted:
In general terms, however, Liverpool continued to control the export trade for coal, salt and manufactured goods, produced within a radius of a hundred miles, in return for food and raw materials. The magnitude of the expansion involved a vast outpouring of capital from the port into the financing of new trades, raw markets and new means of communications.2
