 | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Building materials |
| Founded | 1945 |
| Defunct | 2000 |
| Fate | Renamed |
| Successor | Balfour Beatty |
| Headquarters | Helsby, UK |
| Products | Electrical cable |
British Insulated Callender's Cables (BICC) was a 20th-century British cable manufacturer and construction company, now renamed after its former subsidiary Balfour Beatty. It was formed from the merger of two long established cable firms, Callender's Cable & Construction Company and British Insulated Cables.
Callender's Cable & Construction Company was founded by William Ormiston Callender in 1870. [1] It was originally an importer and refiner of bitumen for road construction but began manufacturing insulated cables at their Erith site on the Thames in the 1880s. [1]
It played a significant role in construction of the British National Grid in the 1930s building the 132 kV crossing of the Thames at Dagenham with overhead lines spanning 3060 feet (932m) between two 487 ft (148m) towers, and allowing 250 ft (76m) clearance for shipping. [2] Callender's research and engineering laboratories were based at a former power station site in White City, London, close to Ormiston House, where the company's founder had lived. [3]
British Insulated Cables was founded as the British Insulated Wire Company at Prescot, near Liverpool in 1890. [1] It bought the rights to a paper-insulated power cable capable of transmitting electricity at 10,000 volts, for use at Deptford Power Station, from Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti. [1] It went on to acquire the Telegraph Manufacturing Company in 1902 and was renamed British Insulated Cables in 1925. [1]
Callender's Cable & Construction Company and British Insulated Cables merged to form British Insulated Callender's Cables in 1945. [4] The company was renamed BICC in 1975. [4]
BICC had a world presence which was initially in the Commonwealth but in the 1980s and 1990s extended into mainland Europe and beyond. Acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese companies gave entry in turn to South America and other parts of Africa. Disastrous investments in former East Germany and Russia helped bring the business to its knees at the same time as margins in every other part of the cable-making businesses came under attack. [1]
In the 1970s the firm had UK works at Erith, Prescot, Kirkby, Leyton, Helsby, Leigh, Melling, Wrexham, Blackley, Belfast and Huyton (now Hi-Wire Ltd) making electric power cables, telecommunications cables and metals. BICC's (originally Callender's) research and engineering laboratories at a former power station site in White City, London was close to Ormiston House, William Ormiston Callender's house of the 1870s. [5] In 1988 the research and engineering facilities moved to new premises at the company's Wrexham and Helsby sites. [6]
In January 1991 British Copper Refiners, a subsidiary of BICC, [7] announced the closure of the Prescot plant with the loss of 230 jobs. [8]
In 1999 the ailing BICC sold its optical cables business to Corning and power cables businesses to General Cable. [9]
BICC also owned construction company Balfour Beatty and, following sale of its cable operations, BICC renamed itself Balfour Beatty in 2000. [10]
In 2002, Pirelli, who acquired the Erith plant from General Cable announced the closure of part of the site and the transfer of the production of oil-filled cable to their Eastleigh works in Hampshire. [11]
In 2020 the BICC Cables name continued in use at the former BICC Egypt power cable plant in Giza. [12]
This was an amateur brass band, active between 1898 and 1961, of which all members were employees of Callender's at Erith. [13] They rehearsed and performed in their leisure time, while the company in its role of patron lent its name and supplied uniforms and instruments. The band broadcast prolifically on BBC Radio in the 1920s and 1930s. [14]
Erith is an area in south-east London, England, 13.3 miles (21.4 km) east of Charing Cross. Before the creation of Greater London in 1965, it was in the historical county of Kent. Since 1965 it has formed part of the London Borough of Bexley. It lies north-east of Bexleyheath and north-west of Dartford, on the south bank of the River Thames.
Prescot is a town and civil parish within the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley in Merseyside, United Kingdom. It lies about eight miles (13 km) to the east of Liverpool city centre. At the 2001 Census, the civil parish population was 11,184. The population of the larger Prescot East and West wards at the 2011 census totalled 14,139. Prescot marks the beginning of the A58 road which runs through to Wetherby, near Leeds in West Yorkshire. The town is served by Prescot railway station and Eccleston Park railway station in neighbouring Eccleston.
Archibald Milne Hamilton (1898–1972) was a New Zealand civil engineer, notable for building the Hamilton Road through Kurdistan and designing the Callender-Hamilton bridge system, and the Callendar-Hamilton aeroplane shed of the late 1930s.
Belvedere is a town in south east London, England, within the London Borough of Bexley. It lies close to the River Thames, with Erith to the east, Bexleyheath to the south, and Abbey Wood and Thamesmead to the west. Before the creation of Greater London in 1965, Belvedere was in the administrative county of Kent.
The Crystal Palace transmitting station, officially known as Arqiva Crystal Palace, is a broadcasting and telecommunications site in the Crystal Palace area of the London Borough of Bromley, England. It is located on the site of the former television station and transmitter operated by John Logie Baird from 1933.
The Isle of Man to England Interconnector is a submarine power cable connecting the transmission system of the Manx Utilities Authority to that of Great Britain. With an undersea section of approximately 104 km, it is the second longest AC undersea cable in the world.
Balfour Beatty plc is an international infrastructure group based in the United Kingdom with capabilities in construction services, support services and infrastructure investments. A constituent of the FTSE 250 Index, Balfour Beatty works across the UK, US and Hong Kong. In terms of turnover, Balfour Beatty was ranked in 2021 as the biggest construction contractor in the United Kingdom.
Prescot Cables Football Club is a supporter-owned football club based in Prescot, Merseyside. It was established in 1884 and has also been known as Prescot and Prescot Town. They compete in the Northern Premier League Division One West and play their home games at Valerie Park. They are a member of the Liverpool County Football Association.
WSP USA, formerly Parsons Brinckerhoff, is an American multinational engineering and design firm. The firm operates in the fields of strategic consulting, planning, engineering, construction management, energy, infrastructure and community planning. It is a subsidiary of WSP Global.
The Mendlesham transmitting station is a broadcasting and telecommunications facility, situated close to the village of Mendlesham, near the town of Stowmarket, in Suffolk, United Kingdom. It is owned and operated by Arqiva.
CBRE | Heery, formerly known as Heery International, Inc., was founded in 1952 by George T. Heery and his father C. Wilmer Heery Jr., and is a full-service architecture, interior design, engineering, construction management, program management, and commissioning firm with over 500 employees located in 19 offices across the United States.
BICC is an abbreviation or acronym with a number of meanings:
George Balfour was a British Conservative Party politician and engineer. He was of Scottish parentage where he also spent part of his upbringing but was born in Portsmouth, England. He served his long parliamentary career representing a constituency in the County of London and lived much of his life in England.
George T. Heery, FAIA RIBA FCMAA was an American architect and known for developing the concepts of Construction Program Management, Strategic Facilities Planning and the Bridging Method of project delivery.
The Callender-Hamilton bridge is a modular portable pre-fabricated truss bridge. It is primarily designed for use as permanent civil bridging as well as for emergency bridge replacement and for construction by military engineering units. Assembling a Callender-Hamilton bridge takes much longer than the more familiar Bailey bridge as it is made up of individual lengths of galvanised steel bolted together with galvanised high-strength steel bolts, all of which require torque settings. It is stronger and simpler in design concept than the Bailey bridge.
Enderby's Wharf is a wharf and industrial site on the south bank of the Thames in Greenwich, London, associated with Telcon and other companies. It has a history of more than 150 years of production of submarine communication cables and associated equipment, and is one of the most important sites in the history of submarine communications.
Painter Brothers is a major British fabricator of structural steelwork and one of the leading producers of bolted lattice steelwork in the world.
Callender's Cableworks Band was an amateur brass band made up of members employed by and under the patronage of Erith Works at the Callender Cable & Construction Co. Ltd, later British Insulated Callender's Cables, in Belvedere, Kent, and performing in London and south-east England. They were prolific broadcasters in the early years of BBC Radio, and won 25 brass band competitions.
Vero Precision Engineering Ltd (VPE) was a UK machine-tool manufacturing company which operated from premises at 7 South Mill Rd, Southampton SO15 4JW.
Sir Thomas Octavius Callender was an engineer and businessman, who promoted the electrical industry.
