Local History

Spanish company, SAICA™, bought a lease on a disused wharfside site by the Manchester Ship Canal in 2009 to recycle paper into packaging. The plant is the most “advanced, fully integrated facility in the UK”. It uses water recycled from the ship canal and its heat and power plant supplies surplus power to the National Grid. The plant cost £300 million and production started in January 2012.

The completion of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894 transformed Partington into a major coal-exporting port and attracted a range of other industries. Until 2007, Shell Chemicals UK™ operated a major petrochemicals manufacturing complex in Carrington, Partington’s closest neighbour, to the east. The gas storage facility in the north-eastern corner of the town was once a gasworks and another significant employer.

Shortly after the Second World War, local authorities made an effort to rehouse people away from Victorian slums in inner-city Manchester. An area of Partington extended as an overspill estate and is now one of the most deprived parts of the Greater Manchester conurbation. The Cheshire Lines Committee opened a railway line through the town in 1873, but it closed in 1964.