History: Longbridge
With the news that the current owners of Longbridge seem set to demolish almost all the remaining traces of the site’s history as a major car-building centre, we take an in-depth look at that history
A timeline of vehicle production at this once important car plant.
At the end of the 19th century Longbridge was scarcely a place at all. The area was gently rolling farmland between the outer fringes of Birmingham to the north and the Lickey Hills to the south. What would become the factory site was bounded by dusty lanes – Lowhill Lane to the south, Groveley Lane to the east and Lickey Road, which spurred off the main road between Birmingham and Bristol, to the west. The eastern edge of the site was mostly formed by the Midland Railway’s main line from Birmingham to Gloucester, which a branch of the Great Western Railway joined from Halesowen just north of the site. The River Rea flowed across the area.
This bucolic scene was changed by the arrival of Messrs White & Pike, a printing firm established in Birmingham in 1860 and which had grown to own several printing works across the city. White & Pike were looking to consolidate their business on one site. The land purchase by White & Pike consisted of 20 fields. Construction of the building cost over £105,000, began in 1893 and the works, facing onto Lickey Road, opened in 1895. Unfortunately White & Pike struggled to win business for their new factory and the Longbridge works closed in 1901, being put up for sale for a mere £11,000.
The factory lay empty for several years but in 1905 it came to the attention of Herbert Austin, the motor engineer who had fallen out with his employers at the Vickers armaments firm and decided to set up on his own. The Austin Motor Company was registered in June that year but had no home. After Austin came across the empty printing works he was able to negotiate the sale for just £7500 and within the week Austin and his staff of three had moved into the premises. Within a year the Longbridge factory covered 2.5 acres and employed 270 people – by 1910 it covered four acres boasting 47,000 square feet of machine shop space and provided work for 1000 men which included a night shift to meet demand. Already it was known to workers and locals simply as ‘The Austin’ – a name it would retain for the rest of its active life even long after the Austin marque ceased to exist.
DOING ITS BIT
Just seven years after it opened Longbridge was significant enough to be called on to play a major part in the industrial effort during the First World War. With government funding a rather motley array of machine shops and sheds were built from the back of the original White & Pike works to the Midland railway line. This also included the construction of a railway station that led directly into the Austin site, allowing special trains to run direct from Birmingham New Street station to bring workers from all over Birmingham, as at this time there was still very little housing around ‘The Austin’ itself.
As the war ground on the demands made on Longbridge grew, and the factory expanded in turn. By 1917 the factory was three times the size it had been in 1914 and it employed 22,000 people. Originally Longbridge had been turned over mostly to making shells (over eight million of them in total!) but soon Longbridge was making aeroengines and, by 1917, entire aircraft. These were produced in new hangars and sheds in the southern part of the site bounded by Lowhill Lane and Groveley Lane and included a large circular airfield.
The demand for munitions increased almost exponentially during the war and Longbridge was soon running out of capacity again. With government funding Austin purchased Longbridge Farm which lay to the north of the existing site up to the boundary with Longbridge Lane. This was then developed into a new foundry and machine shop. A second development project ran in parallel to develop a plot of land on the other side of the Bristol road to the west. This consisted of a single 600ft by 330ft building containing over 1000 machine tools designed to produce 18-pounder shells at the rate of over 100,000 per week.
NEW BABIES, NEW BUILDINGS
When the Armistice was signed in November 1918 Longbridge was ten times the size it had been in peacetime. The original (and much-expanded) factory was now known as the South Works. The buildings fronting onto Longbridge Lane were the North Works and the machine shop across the Bristol Road was the West Works. Unfortunately for Herbert Austin the end of the war also brought an end of all the government orders that had been sustaining this huge factory and he lost control of his company
when it went into receivership in 1921 but he remained chairman following a financial restructuring. Of course the saviour of Austin, and Longbridge, would be the famous Austin Seven.
The ‘baby Austin’ may have been a success but it was still not enough to keep a factory the size of Longbridge busy. However it provided a firm financial footing for the Austin business and allowed the production of other models which let the firm to claw its way back onto sound ground. By 1930 most of the site was back in heavy use. The West Works was converted into the main body shop, the North Works became the main foundry and casting plant and car assembly and administration was concentrated at the South Works – this was to be the basic arrangement of Longbridge for the rest of its existence. But this arrangement was something of a drawback, being a hotchpotch of sheds, shops and offices (many of which had been built ‘temporarily’ during the war) separated by roads and railways. Once praised as one of the most modern factories in Britain, Longbridge was now increasingly old-fashioned.
This was the main reason why Herbert Austin hired Leonard Lord as his works manager in 1938. Lord was a former managing director of Morris Motors and in this position he oversaw a massive reorganisation of Morris’ business and production systems which led to large profit increases and much more efficient production. But the relationship between Lord and William Morris became increasingly strained and in 1936 Lord resigned. His job at Longbridge was to work a similar brand of magic in streamlining Austin’s production and then overseeing the long-term reconstruction of the plant.
ON THE FRONT LINE
Lord’s first project was to have been the complete rebuilding of the North Works, which had been built in an especially haphazard fashion, but the scheme had to be put on hold due to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The conflict was to see Longbridge return to its place on the front line of the industrial war effort but this was a process that had begun years before as in 1936 Longbridge had received a ‘Shadow Factory’ under a government scheme to massively increase aircraft production capacity. This was built to the same plan as its counterparts at Solihull and Ryton on a new 15-acre site just east of Groveley Lane, there being insufficient space on the original Longbridge plot. The new ‘East Works’ would assemble Fairey Battle light bombers, Hawker Hurricane fighters and later Short Stirling and Avro Lancaster heavy bombers. The smaller singleengined aircraft could fly off from the Longbridge airfield while the heavy bombers were dispatched without their wings and tailplanes fitted and transported by road to RAF Elmdon (now the site of Birmingham International Airport) for final assembly.
Artillery shells once again made up the majority of the plant’s wartime output but naval mines, depth charges, infantry helmets, Bren guns and light mortars were also built there. Longbridge produced
over 3000 aircraft during the war but the main addition brought by the war years was a network of tunnels linking the various sections of the site. This not only allowed workers to move around the factory without crossing roads and railways but also provided a large ad-hoc air raid shelter which could hold 10,000 people at a time.
THE NEW ERA
Longbridge entered the post-war era without its founder and leading figure, as Sir Herbert Austin had died in 1941. His place as chairman of Austin had been taken by Leonard Lord, who was well aware that Longbridge needed comprehensive rebuilding – what had been an outdated factory in 1938 was an outdated and worn-out factory in 1948 and Lord produced plans to radically rebuild Longbridge.
His achievement in rebuilding the factory without affecting production was remarkable – in 1950 Austin built 157,000 cars while the factory was gutted and reorganised from scratch. The heart of the new factory was Car Assembly Building 1 which was nearly 1000 feet long. Body shells from the West Works and drivetrains from the North Works reached CAB1 via the tunnels and fully assembled cars would leave at the rate of up to 2500 per week. On the other side of the site was a brand new administration and design block which quickly became known as ‘The Kremlin’ because of its rather austere brick and glass architecture (shared with CAB1, which the press more flatteringly called ‘Austin’s Crystal Palace’). This new block included a showroom and public entrance with the now-famous curved frontage facing onto Lowhill Lane via the factory’s ‘Q Gate’. While previously Longbridge had always been thought of as facing onto Lickey Road to the west, this southern side of the plant now became very much the public face of Longbridge.
CAB1 officially opened in July 1951 and just over a year later came the formation of the British Motor Corporation when Austin merged with the Nuffield Organisation. The Kremlin at Longbridge became the group’s headquarters, with Leonard Lord as chairman, and all design work was concentrated at the new Amalgamated Design Office in a wing adjacent to CAB1. ‘Longbridge No.1 Shop’ – the original print works which also contained Herbert Austin’s office – was demolished in the mid1950s and replaced by more brick and glass offices and workshops running along Lickey Road. These were the famous ‘design cells’ where Alec Issigonis would produce his trio of innovative front-wheel drive cars, starting with the Mini in 1959.
The Mini, and the revamped conventional models given a facelift by Pinin Farina, continued to push Longbridge’s production capacity to the limit and in 1961 construction on CAB2 began. The new building lay alongside its predecessor and was almost identical in design. The land occupied by CAB2 had previously been used to store cars prior to despatch and so the project also included the construction of a nine-level multi-storey car park next to Lowhill Lane to retain the storage space – the car park was to become one of Longbridge’s most distinctive landmarks. The first car to be built in CAB2 was the MkII Austin A40 Farina, allowing CAB1 to be given over entirely to Mini production. The second line in CAB2 was used to meet demand for the Morris 1100 – the first time a non-Austin car had been built at Longbridge – but before long both lines in CAB2 were building the Austin version of this popular model. The factory employed 26,000 people and virtually everyone living in Longbridge, Cofton Hackett and Rubery either worked directly at Longbridge or relied on the activity and employment of the factory in some way.
GATHERING STORM
Despite the transformation of Longbridge into one of the most modern car factories in the world, and with both ‘The Austin’ and BMC as a whole setting production records year on year throughout the 1960s, profitability eluded the firm. The much-touted milestone of a making a million cars per year was never reached. Yet the low profit margins also meant that BMC depended on high production and sales volumes to stay afloat. There was a continual drive at Longbridge to build cars faster and faster: By 1965 the CAB2 production lines were building Austin 1100s at the rate of one every 40 seconds. Despite the high degree of mechanisation in the CAB buildings this still asked a lot from the line workers. Shop stewards and management both knew that BMC often lost more money from strike action than it did from pay increases, leading to settlements very much in the workers’ favour.
These underlying issues were no worse at Longbridge than anywhere else in the BMC empire but in this case it completely undermined the massive investments made in rebuilding the site. BMC spent millions of pounds adding production capacity to Longbridge and saw almost no return. Profits at BMC declined and by 1967 had turned to losses. Under government encouragement this precipitated first the creation of British Motor Holdings when BMC merged with
Jaguar in July 1966 and then British Leyland when BMH was merged with Leyland Motors in January 1968. The Jaguar merger had come at a time of stoppages and lay-offs at BMC – the dismissal of 10,000 workers from BMC’s components factories in the Birmingham area was considered particularly brutal and destroyed much of what remained of the goodwill between management and unions at Longbridge.
These events brought few physical changes at Longbridge, although large gatherings of workers in Cofton Park either staging walk-outs or voting on strike action were increasingly common, as were demonstrations and picket lines outside the main ‘Q Gate’ entrance. By now the East Works had been completely rebuilt, at a cost of £14 million, to produce the new E Series engine for the upcoming Austin Maxi (which, despite carrying the Austin badge, would be built at Cowley). The expense of the East Works plant and the relative failure of the Maxi then became one of the reasons why the E Series was fitted to Longbridge’s big hope for the 1970s, the ill-fated Austin Allegro, which can only be described as a commercial flop in a large part was due to its patchy build quality and unpredictable availability at dealers due to seemingly continuous stoppages at Longbridge.
EVERYBODY OUT!
When it came to strikes, the figure most closely associated with the plant at this time was Derek Robinson – named ‘Red Robbo’ by the tabloid press.
He was the plant’s convener for the Amalgamated Engineering Union (one of over 20 unions active at the factory) which represented the majority of Longbridge’s machine tool and production line equipment operators. Robinson was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and stood as a parliamentary candidate for the party in four general elections. Although cast into the role of a ‘bogeyman’ by the press, Robinson was actually something of a moderate by the standards of many of his comrades in the union movement: he was broadly in sympathy with Industry Secretary Tony Benn’s plans for worker participation, where the unions had a direct role in management – a system used to great success in German industry at the time. Even at its worst Longbridge lost few fewer days to strike action than Cowley, where the more militant union leaders spoke of keeping the factory in a state of ‘permanent revolution’. Robinson also supported management in the replacement of the archaic piecework pay system a fixed daily pay rate. This put him at odds with many of his members and fellow shop stewards, which at a time when wildcat strikes were legal led to almost as many unofficial strikes against Robinson than those that he called himself. And Robinson certainly called a lot of strikes, be they in protest against worker dismissals, executive pay, proposed changes to working practises or almost any other matter that he felt as threatening the interests of his members.
Unfortunately the combination of recurrent official and unofficial strike action fatally undermined the very company that provided all the Longbridge workers very livelihoods. All of British industry was troubled by strikes in the 1970s but the car industry lost ten times the average number of days to industrial action, with strikes at Longbridge alone costing upwards of £150 million per year in this decade. Just six years after it was formed British Leyland collapsed into bankruptcy and became effectively nationalised, with government-appointed managers and a government-produced recovery plan.
GOOD THINGS IN SMALL PACKAGES
The long-term key to this plan was the introduction of a modern supermini to replace the Mini and compete effectively with foreign rivals. Such a car had been in the planning stages since the late 1960s but had been subject to continual postponement and redesigns as the process dragged on. This car became the Austin Metro and was decided that it would be built at Longbridge. The plan was revised and the Mini was reprieved after being updated to use many of the new parts designed for the Metro, including that car’s front disc brakes and updated A+ Series engine which was built on a brand new production line in the North Works, which had been totally redeveloped from its ramshackle First World Warvintage appearance in 1975.
The Metro’s bodyshell was built in a brand new plant at an expanded West Works, requiring the purchasing of an extra 15 acres of land. The new works was equipped with robot welding equipment and a computerised paintshop. Rather than passing into CAB2 via the tunnels the completed Metro and Mini shells were transported by an enclosed overhead conveyor system over the Bristol Road, and a similar system fed drivetrains to the assembly lines.
As part of the plan to introduce the Metro and secure BL’s future, the Labour government under James Callaghan had appointed a new chairman to the company in 1977, the South African-born Michael Edwardes. His brief was to transform BL into a smaller, leaner and more sustainable business and that also meant reforming
labour relations. With the Metro being the key to BL’s future, and with Longbridge building the Metro, that put him in direct conflict with Derek Robinson. Edwardes had already shown his cards with the sudden closure of the Triumph factory at Speke in the face of seemingly unsolvable industrial unrest but insisted that factories that agreed to new practises would receive new investment – the workforce was offered the simple choice of ‘adapt or die’. This meant tearing up the agreements that Robinson and his predecessors had spent decades getting into place but, in Edwardes’ own words, as far as Longbridge was concerned “we could have the Metro or we could have Robinson. We couldn’t have both.”
The crunch came in November 1979 when Robinson put his name to a pamphlet directly criticising the new management practises. This made his stance of seeking a working relationship between unions and management untenable and he was sacked. A ballot was called for strike action in support of Robinson but only 600 Longbridge workers voted in favour while 14,000 were against.
The workforce had been convinced that Edwardes could close Longbridge entirely and that their future lay in accepting what the chairman called ‘management’s right to manage.’
The Metro was launched in 1980 to widespread acclaim and for a few years was Britain’s most popular car. While production was still held up by strikes, the amount of production lost was much less, the situation was gradually improving and there was, for the first time in over a decade, a sense of an actual relationship between workers and management. The start of full-scale Metro production saw the end of Allegro production as planned, leaving Longbridge home to the two small cars in BL’s range – the classic Mini and the modern Metro. In 1986 Longbridge built 215,000 cars and employed 13,000 people; half the workforce of the 1960s but almost the same number of cars.
THE END OF AUSTIN
Sweeping changes in the car industry followed over the next few years. In 1986 British Leyland was reorganised as the Rover Group. This saw the end of the Austin marque, which was deemed to be irretrievably damaged by the bad times of the 1970s. The last Austin left Longbridge in September 1987, 82 years after Herbert Austin had built his first car in the old printing works. However the cars continued – the Mini under its own, more sale-able brand and the Metro in a curious badge-less hinterland until it reappeared in a much-modernised form as the Rover Metro in 1989.
The Rover Group had scarcely come into existence when it was privatised and sold to British Aerospace, which quickly began reaping the fruits of the deal signed in 1979 between BL and Honda to co-develop models and share technology.
As far as Longbridge was concerned this led to the arrival of the first Rover on the production lines. This was the R8 series, sold as the 200 (hatchback) and 400 (saloon) and co-developed with Honda which built the car in Japan as the Concerto. The Rover version also used a new engine built in a redeveloped section of the South Works which saw one of the few remaining sections of the original pre-war Longbridge factory demolished and redeveloped. This was the advanced K Series which was to prove so troublesome for its maker in the years to come. In the meantime the main engine plant in the North Works was still building the A Series in small numbers for the Mini and the M and T Series engines for larger cars.
GERMAN INTERLUDE
The R8 and the Rover Metro both proved popular, leading to a definite air of optimism in Longbridge in the early 1990s. The Mini had been skilfully transitioned from an oldfashioned small car to a desirable slice of retro fashion and around 500 per week were still being built on line in CAB1. Successful models from Land Rover up the road in Solihull and the Cowley-built Rover 800 seemingly finding its feet meant the Rover Group was in a strong position. But British Aerospace became dissatisfied with the long investment cycles and low profits involved in the car industry and looked to sell the group wholesale.
The buyer it found was BMW, which controversially placed the last volume British car maker in foreign hands, even if there were some historical connections: BMW’s first car had been a license-built copy of the Austin Seven and CEO, Bernd Pischetsrieder, was a first cousin once removed of Alec Issigonis.
BMW completed its acquisition of the Rover Group in January 1994 and there was cautious optimism: BMW talked of matching its engineering skill with Rover’s design talent and of the more high-volume Rover models complementing the relatively exclusive BMW range. The early BMW years saw Longbridge grow busy with new models that had been developed under British Aerospace. The first was the R3 200 range, a family hatchback intended to replace both the R8 and the Metro. Unlike the previous 200 this was an entirely British project with no Honda involvement and it has the distinction of being the last truly British designed, built and badged mass-market car. The new 400 which joined it on the lines in CAB2 was, by contrast, little more than a reskinned and re-engined Honda Civic. The real hit of this period was a new MG sports car, the MGF, which was built in CAB1 on space vacated by dwindling Mini production. Whatever the historical problems of a Longbridge-built MG, the car was a critical and sales success.
BIG PLANS, BIG PROMISES
But BMW was tardy in producing actual new models at Longbridge. Partly this was because the focus was initially at Land Rover but also because BMW was very much looking to the long term. What was planned for Longbridge was probably the most important British car in over 30 years: a genuine replacement for the Mini. BMW’s other big project was an all-new large Rover saloon but that would be built at Cowley. The new Mini, codenamed R50, would
be an entirely new car built in much higher numbers than any Longbridge product for many years, which would require a major redevelopment of the site not seen since the construction of CAB2.
In fact the old CAB2 building would be demolished to make way for a new assembly hall. The North Works would be redeveloped as a body pressing plant while the West Works would continue to build up the bodyshells themselves. A new paintshop would be constructed in the South Works (roughly on the original printing works site) and the East Works would build the new Mini’s transmission and suspension as well as handling dispatch of the completed cars.
This work actually started, with buildings in the South Works (including a brick water tower which had stood on the site since 1908) being demolished in preparation for the new paint shop and the frame of a new body storage building going up in the North Works. Batches of pre-production R50 Minis were trial-built to various degrees of completion in parts of Longbridge to test the new production flows.
However it was never to be. In a shock announcement in March 2000 BMW declared it was selling the Rover Group. The German company had invested a fortune in Rover and seen only bad press and dwindling sales from the high of the early 1990s. BMW’s shareholders were growing wary and the pressure to ditch what most saw as a toxic asset had grown too great.
BMW retained the upcoming new Mini but decided to also keep the Cowley plant, which had just been radically and totally overhauled to build the Rover 75. The equipment that was already being installed at Longbridge (and even a couple of the new buildings) was dismantled and relocated down the M40 within a matter of weeks. Longbridge, its 5000 workers and the assets of the Rover and MG marques were sold for a token £10 to Phoenix Venture Holdings. This in turn meant that production of the Rover 75 had to switch from Cowley to Longbridge – the entire Rover 75 production line was squeezed into CAB1 by combining the Rover 200 and 400 lines, allowing the temporarily empty CAB2 to store surplus bodyshells.
LAST CHANCE
Longbridge may have lost the Mini (in both its new and old forms – production of the original Mini ended in October 2000 after over three million had left Longbridge) but it had gained the Rover 75 and was now the sole factory of the new MG-Rover firm. The Rover 200 and 400 were facelifted and became the 25 and 45 and soon sporting MG versions of the entire Rover range were also introduced – something that would never have been allowed under BMW ownership.
But with the exception of the Rover 75/MG ZT all of Longbridge’s products had their origins in the mid-1990s. The popular MGF was built around Metro subframes and the staple power unit for all the cars was the troublesome and mistrusted K Series. Individual critical and sales successes such as the MG ZR, the revised MGF and the evergreen Rover 25 couldn’t buck the trend of non-existent profits and declining sales. MG-Rover sold 170,000 cars during its first full year of trading – a poor show by Longbridge standards and this number was to decrease further.
There was no money to develop new models and no secure future for Longbridge or the company. What MG-Rover needed was a corporate parent to invest in it but attracting one willing to try and succeed where BMW had failed proved impossible.
Some fairly desperate measures were taken to keep MG-Rover afloat: for example in 2003 the freehold to the entire 230-acre Longbridge site was sold to property firm St. Modwen to release cash but while losses were reduced to ‘only’ £40 million profit remained elusive. In April 2005, almost exactly one century after Herbert Austin first set up shop in a disused printing works in the countryside outside Birmingham, MG-Rover ceased operations and the production lines, off which over 14 million cars had rolled, stopped never to fully restart again.