The presence of a chemical factory right next to houses used to be the norm for the people of North Lynn.

In the late 1980s, Dr Aaron Cahill was a young boy living near the former Estuary Road industrial estate.

While out on the playground of the now closed St Edmund’s Primary School, he remembers getting an occasional whiff of an odd chemical smell on a calm summer’s day.

Now grown up and working as an associate professor of applied geoscience and environmental risk in Edinburgh, Dr Cahill began to reflect on life in North Lynn at this time and how different it is compared to today.

He started to investigate reports about how air quality was monitored around the area at a time when factories such as Dow Chemical were in operation.

The plant closed down in 2019 after being in operation for 61 years. A total of 65 people were employed there at the time.

During Dr Cahill’s investigations, he unearthed concerns raised by his primary school head teacher over children suffering from asthma and headaches.

“On some summer days, when there was no wind, you could smell chemicals in the air around the school,” he said.

“That whole area was industrial when I was growing up. Now it’s shops like Home Bargains – but back then it was heavy industry.”

Dr Cahill reiterates that his discoveries are not about assigning blame or wrongdoing, but to highlight how times have changed when it comes to monitoring environmental risk, health and safety.

“I came across freedom of information documents showing concerns raised by St Edmund’s School in the mid-1990s about air quality,” he said.

“People were being exposed to industrial emissions – that much is clear. The conclusion at the time was that the levels were low enough not to cause harm.

“What struck me as an academic is that how it was handled then would not be allowed now. By today’s standards, it was relatively basic.

“Can you imagine now letting something run for 30 or 40 years before doing a full environmental risk assessment? That just wouldn’t happen today.

“If you tried to redevelop something like that now, you probably couldn’t – the rules are far stricter.

“There was little engagement with residents about what was being emitted or what it meant. I grew up there for nearly 20 years, and nobody ever explained what was being emitted or what it meant.”

Find Dr Cahill’s full article below…

I grew up in North Lynn in the late 1980s and early 1990s, living close to the industrial area around Estuary Road and attending St Edmund’s Primary School.

Like many families in the area, we were used to the presence of factories, tanks and chimneys just beyond the housing estate. Industry was part of the backdrop of everyday life: visible in the skyline, present in the traffic, and sometimes noticeable in the smells that drifted across on certain days.

At the time, few of us questioned it deeply. The industrial estate had been there for decades and provided employment locally. If concerns were raised, there was an underlying assumption that they were being looked into and that reassurance, when it was offered, rested on sound judgment.

Years later, I became an environmental scientist working on environmental risk. Recently, out of personal interest rather than professional obligation, I revisited the reports, correspondence and modelling studies produced when air quality concerns were raised in North Lynn in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

What struck me was not evidence of wrongdoing, but a clear picture of how environmental risk was understood and managed at the time.

The response followed what was then considered standard practice.

Emissions reported by nearby industrial sites were compiled into inventories, computer dispersion models were used to estimate concentrations at nearby homes and the school, and those estimates were compared against health-based guideline values.

In general, the modelling suggested that long-term average concentrations were below regulatory thresholds, and this was taken as reassurance that risks were low.

From a regulatory perspective, that conclusion made sense in its historical context.

What is less visible, however, are the limits of what those assessments could reasonably capture.

Monitoring focused largely on long-term averages rather than short-term peaks.

Odour, which can be detected at concentrations far below health-based limits, sat awkwardly between being treated as a nuisance and being considered a genuine environmental concern.

Chemicals were assessed individually rather than as mixtures, and there was little in the way of continuous monitoring close to homes or the school to show what people experienced on a day-to-day basis.

With hindsight, an important distinction becomes clearer: exposure and harm are not the same thing.

Being exposed to low levels of industrial emissions does not mean people were made ill, and the available evidence from that period does not support claims of widespread health impacts.

But it does show that exposure occurred, sometimes repeatedly, and that reassurance relied heavily on modelling assumptions and averaging over time.

Looking back with a modern lens, it also becomes clear that distance mattered. Emissions did not stop at the site boundary.

Airborne substances dispersed outward, declining with distance but not disappearing entirely.

Under certain weather conditions, short-term concentrations could increase, which helps explain why odours and irritation were occasionally reported even when overall assessments remained reassuring.

Revisiting the historical information with contemporary analytical tools makes that spatial pattern more visible than it was at the time.

None of this overturns the conclusions reached at the time, nor does it reveal a hidden problem.

What it does reveal is how much confidence rested on dilution, distance and time smoothing out variability, rather than on a detailed understanding of how exposure varied across the surrounding community.

Today, environmental regulation places greater emphasis on uncertainty, cumulative exposure and the lived experience of communities near industrial activity.

There is more focus on sensitive locations such as schools, and greater recognition that compliance with guideline values does not always answer all the questions residents have.

North Lynn was not unusual in this respect. Many towns across the UK grew up alongside industry and were assessed in much the same way.

What makes revisiting it worthwhile is not to reopen old disputes, but to recognise how ordinary this approach once was, and how much expectations have evolved since then.

Much of the industrial landscape around Estuary Road has now gone, and the area has moved into a new chapter.

But the questions raised at the time still resonate in planning and environmental debates today.

How much uncertainty is acceptable? How should it be communicated? And how do we balance economic activity with the everyday experience of nearby communities?

For me, revisiting North Lynn has been less about assigning blame and more about understanding how environmental risk can become normalised when it forms part of the everyday landscape.

Growing up downwind felt ordinary at the time. Only later did I realise how much was assumed, and how differently we would approach the same situation now.