Catalyst is an interactive science centre and museum which aims to entertain, inform and educate. Our key aim is to make science exciting and accessible to everyone and to inform people of all ages about science based industries and their role in our lives – past, present and future. Our main theme is chemistry and how the processes and products of chemistry are, and have been, used in everyday life with particular reference to the locality.

The collection was started in 1982 with the setting up of the Halton Chemical Industry Museum Project as a Manpower Services Commission/Halton Borough Council funded project. Catalyst was originally located at Widnes Town Hall but moved to its present location, the Gossage Building, in 1987. In the first instance a collecting policy was not in place and collection of items was rather indiscriminate. This has resulted in a diverse early collection of items.

We hold nearly 10,000 individually numbered items and groups including objects, archive material and photographs. If the individual research files from the ICI General Chemicals Group are also included then the collection would exceed 35,000 items. The objects range from test tubes to a 20 ton cast iron caustic soda finishing vessel and the archives include company documents of all kinds, product brochures and general ephemera. The photographic collection documents products and processes, company history, social activity and local history. We also have collected some local social history objects which have helped to give a human context to the collection as a whole.

We have concentrated our collection, in terms of industry, on the salt based chemical industries of Merseyside, South Lancashire and North and Mid Cheshire, along with other chemical industries that have arisen in these areas. Our social history collection has been confined to Widnes and Runcorn and its environs.

The Collection is used as a source of research and display material for exhibitions and to a certain extent for educational purposes.