SPS was (is?) a large steel stockholders owned by Corus – their 300,000 square foot warehouse in Bellshill held over 20,000 tonnes of specialist steels for shipbuilding, boilers, pressure vessels, structural sections and loads of different types of pipe. Big boys’ Meccano, basically.
The giant warehouse is now stripped, though – but it’s still a nice set of buildings if you’re into big girders and gantry cranes 😉
The sheds are so massive, the walls are labelled with their compass direction.
A nearby big warehouse – it looks derelict but it’s being used by the rail depot.
SPS (Steel Plate and Sections) is a seperate steel stockholding company not connected to Corus. The site in Bellshill only occupies a small part of the site attached to the one Corus used to occupy, hence the reason SPS are still operating out of the Bellshill works. I only know this as I used to do work for SPS and on my first visit to their site I took the wrong turning and ended up in the Corus end of the huge complex. It took ages trying to find anybody in the Corus end who even knew SPS existed, even though they are only at the other end of the site. On entering the site turn left and this brings you right round the back along a dirt track to SPS’s offices which are very much still in use. The photos you have taken are of the Corus Plate & Profiles site. Sorry if it sounds like I’m correcting you but thought it might help with some of the details.
Ah, thank you very much for the info – I was wondering why some signs had Corus on them 😉
Worked here until it closed. As above it was the corus plate profiling centre and also a stockholders for beams, angled lengths and box sections. In the photo of the office’s from the outside there was a road to the right hand side and everything the other side was the stockholders. It was also the British Steel training centre in the 70’s and early 80’s for apprentices. Also heard stories that the roadway was part of a firing range for testing as well.