A London-headquartered engineering company with roots going back to 1704 that makes the ceramic and flow-control products steelmakers and foundries use to handle molten metal.
Vesuvius is a British company, with its head office at 165 Fleet Street in London, that describes itself as a global leader in molten metal flow engineering. Its customers are steelmakers and foundries, which pour metal at temperatures of well over a thousand degrees. Vesuvius makes the ceramic and refractory products, which are materials that stand up to extreme heat, that control and protect that flow, along with the systems and services around them. Wikipedia lists four activities: Steel Flow Control, Foundry Technologies, Advanced Refractories and Precious Metals Processing. Its products also serve the glass and solar energy industries.
The group has a long and varied history. Its roots go back to 1704, when Isaac Cookson founded metal and glass businesses on Tyneside, and the later Cookson Group was a metals, lead and chemicals business. The Vesuvius name comes from the Vesuvius Crucible Company, a ceramics supplier that Cookson bought in 1987. A trade article says the original Vesuvius opened in 1916 in Pittsburgh, founded by the Arensburg brothers and Arthur Jackman, to make 'the most effective clay graphite crucibles'. Its foundry division, Foseco, was founded in Birmingham in 1932 as Foundry Services Ltd by Eric Weiss and Dr Kossy Strauss. The Cookson Group was renamed Vesuvius in 2012. In 2025 Vesuvius also bought a large part of the molten metal systems business of Morgan Advanced Materials, according to Wikipedia.
The company says it has built its business model on proximity to its customers, with a worldwide network of experts who deliver timely solutions. A trade article describes its aim as leading innovation in the steel and foundry industries, using data captured on customers' sites to give customers insight. We did not find a formal mission or values statement on the pages we could read, so those are the closest company statements.
Vesuvius's UK headquarters is in Fleet Street, London, and Foseco, its foundry business, began in Birmingham. The company's site map lists about 79 sites in 39 countries, with the most, about 28, in Europe, but it did not break down UK plants and we could not confirm them. It runs 17 research and development centres worldwide (as at 2016). We could not find a current employee count.
In a company like this you would find materials scientists and chemists developing ceramics, process and application engineers who help steelworks use the products, research and development staff, manufacturing and quality teams, digital and data specialists, and sales, finance, legal and supply chain teams. If you like chemistry, physics, maths or design and technology, ceramics for molten metal is a vivid example of materials science. The company's own website is the best place to see where its UK roles sit.
Website: www.vesuvius.com
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