Spooky photographs showing the mighty Longbridge plant more than 10 years after the collapse of the Rover Group.

Longbridge Photos

Location: North Wiltshire

Tim,
Yes, very sad but sadder still is that all car production has finally stopped at the plant. The Chinese have had some assembly there since their take over but now, after 111 years of vehicle production, it looks like the end.
There is a very active design centre on site employing around 300 people but one can only wonder what the owners will now do with the redundant factory.

Location: Melton Mowbray

those pics are very odd, as that is not a 75, but a 45, which went out of production a lot earlier...

I guess some parts of the factory (e.g. the 45 line) were abandoned earlier, the MG Rover collapse probably wasn't instant.

I guess the site will be demolished and redeveloped as a housing/light industry/commercial mix, given the location.

Very sad week with the final finish of car assembly at the plant.

Location: North Wiltshire

The saddest part of all is that as a country we are making cars very successfully at various plants , the only difference is that the management personnel had to be kicked into touch and foreign owners have had the guts to actually earn their salaries and give the workers good guidance and training .

Merv

Location: New Forest

The way I see it, the "foreign management" asset stripped Rover and sold off the remainder as a non- viable company. What BMW wanted from the deal was the mini. They took it and ditched the rest. It's not surprising it couldn't survive, and it's nothing to do with mismanagement, just economics.

For those that found the pictures interesting these pages from 2007, from a forum where people photograph abandoned buildings and sites show a lot more.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/rover-mg-longbridge-18-02-07.t9321
http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/rover-mg-longbridge-day-2-roof-tunnel.t9749

There are more threads on longbridge if you check the similar threads.

The website is generally fascinating, but deeply sad to see places once so full of life, completely abandoned.

Location: New Forest

I went round Longbridge in the early '70s when I was an art student at Wolverhampton. The guys on the lines looked at us as if we were aliens!

We may well have been...

A previous post about the tunnels that still exist....

http://pub25.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=2099944454&frmid=5&msgid=837340&cmd=show

A very detailed paper was written in 2007 on The Austin-Longbridge Underground and its Culture. Ten of these subterranean areas were built over the years, the first before WW11 in the expectation of hostilities. They were built by miners from South Wales and as well as being areas of manufacture they were used as air-raid shelters and ARP control centres. Post war, two tunnels were constructed under CAB 1 and 2 for manufacturing, offices and maintenance. In 2007 some had been demolished, others blocked with no access and a few accessible but in poor state. I have no idea what their current status is.

Location: Melton Mowbray