Pont-à-Vendin Cement Works

June 2025 | France | Extant

The Pont-à-Vendin cement works is an interesting and really quite rare example of a 1920s cement works, few of which survive to this day. The building stands near the town of Vendin-le-Vieil which is near Lens in the North of France.

History:

The cement works, known locally as the Cimenterie Vicat, dates back to the mid 1920s when it was built by industrialist Ernest Cambier. Over its operation, it changed hands various times.

In the 1920s, the group ‘Société des Anciens Établissements Ernest Cambier’ was established with the goal of quarrying the surrounding area to make Portland cement. The cement making process is fairly simple on paper: limestone and raw materials were quarried from a neighbouring pit, and combined with clay and other materials, finely pulverised in mixing plants and blended with water to form a slurry. The slurry was then pumped into rotary kilns and then baked to form a glassy rubble called clinker. The clinker emerged from the kilns red hot and had to be cooled before it could be further processed into a fine powder in grinding mills. This process caused a lot of dust to be produced and given the nature of Portland cement, the older locals still remember the fine coating of white dust that settled on the surrounding area. The Cambier company changed hands in 1967, and was bought by the Portland Cement Company. This change of hands didn’t last long.

In 1972, the French cement making company Vicat took ownership of the cement works. In the years following the acquisition of the Pont-à-Vendin site, Vicat began modernising and increasing the production capacity of its newer cement works due to rising demand for raw construction materials. Thanks to its advancing age, the Pont-à-Vendin works was seen as inefficient and costly to run and could not compete in production output with more modern cement works. Therefore in 1985, Vicat closed the Pont-à-Vendin site, causing the loss of two hundred jobs at the works.

The Explore:

Whilst not the largest or most glorious of explores, I was still quite excited to explore this place. I arrived in the evening and began my explore, after having read about a rather aggressive guard who would randomly turn up. French guards tend to be quite lairy, as I found out at a failed hospital explore a few days beforehand… I got grabbed and threatened with a car wrench!

However despite that, the explore was chilled out and very relaxed. I hugely enjoyed the Art Deco style buildings with their ancient, antiquated machinery. Seeing the smaller, older style rotary kilns was really quite interesting. This was my second cement works explore after Shoreham Cement Works, which itself was a first of a kind given that it has the first two large scale Vickers-Armstrong rotary kilns ever used in cement production. The Vendin site was a pretty little gem and ended up being a nice three hour relaxed, chilled explore. Enjoy the photos.

Exterior:

Kilns:

Control Arrays:

Storage Silos and Shed:

Showers and Laboratory: