ROVER AND SOLIHULL
charts the story of the Solihull factory
When the last Land Rover Defender left the assembly line in Block 1 at Land Rover’s Solihull factory on January 29, 2016, it brought to an end some 70 years of vehicle assembly in the building.
Before June 1939, there had been farmland alongside Lode Lane to the north of Solihull. Then construction began on the Rover Number 2 Shadow Factory, financed by the Air Ministry. The Solihull factory was up and running by September 1940, and in October built and tested its first Bristol Hercules radial engine. Block 1 was in those days known as the Machine Shops, and it was behind Rover’s purpose-built administrative offices.
Rover’s main factory and office headquarters were then at Coventry, but when the Air Ministry gave Rover first refusal on the Solihull factory when peace returned they took it. So during 1945, Rover took this factory over as its new headquarters. After a refit, it was officially opened by Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, in February 1946.
The first cars built there were revived pre-war saloons, generally now known as P2 models. There were plans for a new full-size car by the end of 1945, but Rover had problems adapting to the latest styling idiom. So they settled for a modified P2 body design on a new chassis with new engines and called it the P3 when they introduced it in 1948.
They didn’t sell well overseas and as the Ministry of Supply was allocating steel on that basis Rover was at risk of getting such small quantities that it would be unable to continue in business.
The solution was to build a model deliberately aimed at overseas customers, and that model was called the Land Rover. Introduced in 1948, it was a little commercial vehicle that was quite unlike anything Rover had produced before, but it sold and sold. Rover got their allocation and by 1951 became a manufacturer of Land Rovers, with saloons as a profitable sideline.
Meanwhile, the proper post-war car arrived in 1949. This was the P4, which put further-developed P3 chassis’ and mechanical units under a modern-looking body. This was heavily inspired by the 1946 Studebakers, and Rover traditionalists hated it. It would always be built in Block 1 – by then called the Assembly Block – alongside Land Rovers.
Profits from Land Rovers encouraged Rover to think big, and by 1953 they were planning a new saloon car, which they intended to be smaller than P4 and to be built in larger volumes. But P5 as originally planned didn’t happen thanks to booming Land Rover sales. There was nowhere to build such a high-volume car without first putting up expensive new factory buildings because the Land Rover was occupying all the available assembly space. So P5 was re-thought as a smaller-volume, larger and more expensive car than P4, and in that guise it appeared in 1958 as the Rover 3-litre.
The 3-litre went on to become another British icon, although this time of the Sixties. It was a favourite of the Royal Family, and from 1967 was re-engined with the light-alloy Buick V8 that Rover had bought, to become the Rover 3.5-litre. It is probably best known in this guise, especially with the more rakish Coupé bodywork that joined the original saloon style in 1962. All the P5 cars, and the P5B (B for Buick) models that followed them, were built
‘The last eight P5BS were delivered in April 1973’
alongside P4s and Land Rovers in that same assembly hall, which would later be re-named the South Works,
Rover did build its big-volume smaller saloon eventually. This became the P6 (initially a Rover 2000) and was introduced in 1963. Rover got permission to build a dedicated new assembly hall for it on the Solihull site, and this became the North Works. The P6 and its later V8-engined P6B (3500, 3500S) companion model would be built there until 1977.
The early 1980s saw Solihull becoming a Land Rover-only plant, the SD1 model introduced in 1976 – moved out to Cowley in early 1982, and the work of several satellite factories was brought in to the Solihull site. Since then, Solihull has expanded and expanded, and today the site is barely recognisable as the place that started as an aero-engine factory in 1940.
But some things remain. Those strange smudges on the walls of the offices that front Block 1 are the remains of camouflage applied to protect the factory against bombing during World War II – and today’s custodians, Jaguar Land Rover, have every intention of preserving this as the old assembly halls behind are gutted and rebuilt as a logistics centre.