A third visit, this time from a different direction. This is Africa House, it was the South African pavilion at the Glasgow Empire Exhibition, moved to Ardeer to be used for offices, but now a gutted wreck:
Industrial
Fountainbridge Brewery
Hearing that this place was still (mostly) standing, I went over to Edinburgh for a look – situated right next to the Union Canal in Edinburgh, the brewery brewed McEwan’s for Scottish & Newcastle.
ICI Nobel Explosives Part II
A second visit to see more of this huge site. First to the very overgrown Gunpowder Section, and in a concrete incorporating mill in the woods I found three edge mills:
ICI Nobel Explosives
The Ardeer peninsula in Ayrshire is basically a gigantic sand dune – it was chosen by Alfred Nobel in 1871 as the site for his British Dynamite Factory because of it’s remote location and lots of sand to make protective berms and blast walls. It soon grew into the world’s largest explosives factory, making explosives for mining and quarrying, and expanding into other explosives and propellants for both civilian and military uses.
Nobel Explosives became part of ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) in 1926, but production shifted away and the Ardeer plant diversified into other non-explosive products, and unfortunately these didn’t do very well – much of the site is now derelict.
I’ve visited the southern shore-facing part of Ardeer before, but this visit was to investigate the northern section. First up was an interesting building on the satellite views which I knew from other sites was probably a drum mill for milling explosive powders – after poking about in the dense woodland, I found it:
Heather Mills
Did you know that Paul McCartney bought Heather Mills a plane for her birthday … and a Ladyshave for the other leg. Thank you very much, I’m here ’till Friday. So, anyway, Heather Mills in Selkirk in the Scottish Borders was founded in 1892 and soon became one of the town’s largest employers with over 200 workers. It was owned by Edinburgh Woollen Mills until March 2008, when it was bought by the Border Weaving Company, but orders dried up, and the company closed at the beginning of this year. One of the senior people told me “that’s how it goes – we’ve been closing mills here for 100 years”
IBM Greenock
IBM built it’s first factory in Spango Valley, Greenock, in 1951; initially making typewriters, printers and other office equipment, the factory began making PCs in 1981. As production of these shfted overseas, IBM Greenock shifted to making servers and laptops.
IBM sold much of it’s hardware manufacturing to Lenovo and Sanmina, who ran the plant in Greenock until 2006 before pulling out and shifting production to Hungary. 2000 IBM employees still work at IBM Greenock, mostly in a call centre, but the huge manufacturing halls stand empty.
This site is absolutely huge – several football-pitch-sized halls, some on top of each other, linked by enormous corridors and 4.5km of conveyors. I walked over a kilometre end to end – much further with all the diversions. It felt strangely familiar – a long time ago, I was a mainframe systems programmer for IBM…
One production hall:
William Paton Ltd.
William Paton Limited was founded at Johnstone in Scotland in 1840 by the twenty-one year old entrepreneur William Paton at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Paton began by meeting the local demand for hemp rope and moved on to the manufacture of cotton rope and a range of tapes. Before laces became the standard shoe fastener, Patons made elastic webbing for boots. Gradually the firm began to concentrate on the manufacture of boot laces before patenting a plaited fabric lace that would ultimately displace the traditional leather product.
The above was taken from http://www.punch.ie – The Punch group bought Paton’s in 1990. Paton’s mill incorporates part of the very first mill built in Johnstone in 1782, thought to be the first machine factory in the world, predating the New Lanark cotton mill by four years.
This A-listed building now stands empty and rotting after closing in 2003. There are suggestions that it might become a museum or flats.
Nestle Purina
The problem with GPS is that you need to put the right data in – I put in the address I found for this place, drove over there, and found lots of new flats. But I’d spotted an empty factory nearby which looked worth a go – it was only once I got inside that I realised that this was the place I was looking for…
The Nestle Purina factory in Barrhead, near Glasgow, made pet food – with a brief break to make baby food. The 200 employees were laid off in 2004, when Nestle decided that the factory was uneconomic.
First into the big storage warehouse:
EDS Print Facility
In Livingston with nothing to do on a Sunday, this looked worth a go – I had a good look about, went off to Bangour for a potter while thinking about it, then came back and got in.
The EDS print centre in Livingston was a privatised facility for printing government giro cheques – there was a near-riot when it closed due to the huge disparity in the payments offered to EDS employees and former government employees.
Due to the nature of the work done here, security was tight – a high and strong steel fence, only one gate, lots of CCTV and RFID-based ID cards for access to different areas.
