Warrington Unilever site to be demolished after 130 years

Warrington Borough Council gave permission for the site to be demolished on Friday, December 2.

A familiar sight to many, the Unilever factory has been in Warrington since the 1890s.

Initial plans to screen the site for demolition were sent to the council's planning committee in September.

The council screened the site, and found that it was appropriate for demolition work to take place - freeing the developers to apply for full demolition work on the old factory.

Permission was granted for the full demolition of 11 buildings on the site by the council.

The first plans for the demolition show that it would cause some disruption to the Bank Quay railway line - a line that has recently come under fire from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

It was also stated in the original planning documents that there are no current plans for any further developments to take place on the site once the demolition has been completed.

Included in the planning documents was the estimate that the full demolition would take place over a 10-month period, and would involve 50 wagons of waste collection each week, over the course of the works.

11 buildings on Factory Lane have been approved for demolition (Image: Maps)

Documents suggest that the proposed demolition of the site would create more than 35,000 tonnes of waste - plans suggest that 99.4 per cent of all waste will be recycled.

The original proposals suggested that developers were more than prepared to begin the demolition works in mid-November; however, since it took longer than that for the plans to be approved, it is anticipated that work will begin to tear the site down in the coming weeks.

It is expected that the factory will have been razed to the ground by November 2023.

Warrington's Unilever site came into work in the 1890s, and it fell into disuse in 2020, after over 130 in action - the final closure of the site led to the redundancy of over 120 workers.

The site on Factory Lane is approved for full demolition, with work to begin on the old factory within the coming weeks.