It made the age of cheap foreign holidays possible, and for years it was what made margarine spreadable. Nickel may not be the flashiest metal but modern life would be very different without it.

Deep in the bowels of University College London lies a machine workshop, where metals are cut, lathed and shaped into instruments and equipment for the various science departments.

Chemistry professor Andrea Sella stands before me holding a thick, two-metre-long pipe made of Monel, a nickel-copper alloy. Then he lets it fall to the ground with a deafening clang.

"That really speaks to the hardness and stiffness of this metal," he explains, picking up the undamaged pipe.

But another reason Monel is a "fantastic alloy", he says, is that it resists corrosion. Chemists need ways of handling highly reactive materials - powerful acids perhaps, or gases like fluorine and chlorine - so they need something that won't itself react with them.

Gold, silver or platinum might do, but imagine the price of two-meter-long pipe made of gold. Nickel by contrast is cheap and abundant, so it crops up everywhere where corrosion is a concern - from chemist's spatulas to the protective coating on bicycle sprockets.