German Car Zone

Kowalski · 03-02-2007, 07:10 PM

Very sad images...

Quote:

So long, Longbridge.

Source:http://www.topgear.com/content/featu...ries/01/3.html

On April 15, 2005, workers dropped tools, tea and all hope, and left the Rover factory for the last time

Bodies hang from the ceiling of the tunnel, their dusty hulks reflected in pools of oily water on the floor, as steam hisses from cracks in the pipes along one wall and dissolves into the dank, still air.

It feels like the set for a film based in a nightmarish near future, but it's not. This is actually what was once the longest car-production line in Europe. Welcome to Longbridge.

The near history of this place runs deep. The infamous Red Robbo-led strikes of the 1970s; an Eighties' renaissance as home to the Metro and Rover 200; subjugation as just another assembly plant in the BMW empire; background to the triumphant return of John Towers in May 2000 as his Phoenix 4 collective bought the place for £10 and spent the next five years trying to find a corporate bunk-up that would secure its future.

They almost did it too, until in April 2005 their new suitors at SAIC got cold feet and, with nowhere to turn, they shut the factory down for what seemed like the last time.

That is until, out of the blue, another Chinese company snapped up the moribund plant and started talking about restarting production there. No one knew much about the new owners but they were called Nanjing and, according to ugly rumours, they were stripping the place of anything of worth.

Over a year after it all went belly up, Longbridge was strangely quiet. What were they actually doing in there? Clearly not posting out the housewarming invitations it seemed, so Top Gear decided to take matters into its own hands.

The tools of the job are everywhere: worn tyres stacked in corridors and old computers.

Someone knew someone who might be able to sort us out. Emails pinged back and forth, finally bringing a request for a mobile number. Two hours later the phone rang: meet us next Tuesday in the car park of McDonald's near the factory. We were in.

If the Chinese have been pretty silent on their future plans for Longbridge, it's nothing to the eerie stillness that pervades the place on a cold November evening. Developers are nibbling at its fringes with their plans for technology parks and leisure shopping omniplexes, knocking down the old West Works on the other side of the main road - and with it years of car building history.

But here on the main site, the factory buildings still stand, whipped by the icy wind that scuttles across the empty car holding-pans. We duck inside the old paint shop, its huge tanks and Willy Wonka-ish mass of pipework exactly as they were when MG Rover went under.

In fact, it has been left ticking over ever since: pumps primed and pipes flowing so that nothing dries out. Even now the stillness is intermittently broken by a sharp clack and bassy rumble as machinery automatically stirs into action to prevent the whole facility coagulating to death.

But while the machines run their cycles, the human side of the operation is absent, leaving only notes on white boards and grubby mugs on tables; age indeterminate but certainly less fresh than the paint that circulates through the miles of snaking pipework overhead.

The pipes and machinery are still active. Spooky

After the empty dip tanks and dry spray chambers, there are rows of painted Rover 25 and 45 shells, stacked four-high to the ceiling in the racks that held them until they shuffled through to the assembly hall.

Now their glossy metallic bodies are gathering dust. The tracks and slings that carried newly sprayed shells to meet their guts and trimmings are empty, save for in the murky tunnel where Rover 75 shells hang from the ceiling, still bearing the build-sheets that would determine their final spec if they'd ever made it out the other side.

Without maintenance, lakes of filthy water are forming on the floors and many of the fluorescent tubes in the roof have blown. At one end, a large electronic sign still glows, its display stuck on 0000. Does Nanjing know this stuff is switched on? If not, they're in for one hell of an electricity bill.

After the line of lifeless 75 shells, the tunnel rises up and out into the main car assembly hall. The lighting is patchy and there are more dot matrix signs, still powered up and projecting red light into the gloom. As we walk by they flicker to read 'HI'. It's just another error message, but that doesn't stop it being very spooky.

The hall seems weirdly empty. A smattering of Nanjing logoed crates probably explains why. Alongside the old assembly line, there are rows and rows of parts: steering racks, wheels, brake discs, badges, a box of Bosch starter motors carrying a shipping note from just a week before MG Rover closed down.

Some areas have been cleared out by the Chinese

You could almost believe that everyone has simply gone home a bit early today, and tomorrow they'll be back to work as normal. There may be some signals that the Chinese have been removing equipment, but what's more bizarre is the evidence that many areas haven't been touched for over 18 months.

On the far side of Longbridge is an old hanger called the Flight Shed, once used to build bombers during the war. Latterly it was home to MG Rover's development operations, clustered under the elegant lattice of its vast vaulted roof in a warren of workshops and stores divided by thin metal partitions.

The tools of the job are everywhere: worn tyres stacked in corridors, old computers and calibration kit left lying on floors, unsettling headless dummies used to replicate the weight of passengers sitting shoulder to shoulder in racks. The large workshop at one end of the building is filled with vehicles, bonnets up, sensors and probes still taped to their engines.

There's the grey Rover 45 that's actually an MG ZS simulator built under the radar when BMW wouldn't let Rover do sporty. Further along, a green Rover 75 estate on chunky tyres, test car for a stillborn plan to make the 75 Countrywise - an Audi allroad-style faux off-roader.

A mangled gaggle of luridly coloured crash-test cars rests in the far corner. Most are mashed examples of that awful CityRover, displaying terrifying crumpling and visible weld failure. Only one is fully intact: a print-out on its screen shows it was in the process of being prepped for testing. It's dated March '05.

Everything seems frozen in time.

Again, it feels like we're intruding into people's work, that they've simply gone home for the evening, although the day they went home was almost two years ago. Above the benches along one wall are postcards and yellowed cuttings from the local paper, mostly uncomplimentary articles about the personal wealth of MG Rover senior management.

Everything seems frozen in time. Nothing has been smashed, there's no obvious evidence of theft. People just quietly got their things and vacated the building. Perhaps they thought that the company would pull back from the brink, that they would be back soon enough to clear away that mug, put away those files of test data.

In one office there's a white board detailing the whereabouts of the development fleet as it completed shakedown tests on EU4 compliant K-Series and Galileo, the code name for a secret new in-house diesel engine commissioned after a deal to buy JTD units from Fiat went sour. One lot of cars was in North America, the other pounding across the Australian outback. When the company went under many of them never made it back.
It's surprising to find that cash-strapped MG Rover was so busy engineering for the future. Not just engines, either, because hidden on a mezzanine above the Flight Shed floor is an unfamiliar shape squatting on tatty alloys. It's an early version of RDX60, the fabled hatchback that would have taken on the Focus and Golf.

The secret RDX60 - a Focus rival that never had a chance

This particular car, a crude fibreglass-bodied mutant on a cut-down 75 chassis, was built to test cooling and aerodynamics before being abandoned. It's not a pretty car, matt black paint and crude detailing notwithstanding.

Its designer says he accidentally left one shoddy concept sketch in a management presentation, little guessing that David Brent-alike boss, Kevin Howe, would pick it as the look for a make-or-break new model. But this festering prototype became obsolete long ago, as the company continued tweaking the design to suit the tastes of the Chinese firms it was trying to court.

No matter what it looked like, it's unlikely a new hatchback alone could have saved MG Rover. But at least the factory itself has some sliver of hope, because in CAB2 - the assembly building readied for the new Mini before BMW cut and ran to Cowley - Nanjing are being true to their word, kitting out a clean, modern space to make MG TFs again. It's better than nothing, but they'll use just a tiny portion of the site to make a tiny number of cars.

The rest of Longbridge is silent, trapped in the moment when it all went wrong for Britain's last home-grown car factory. The Post-It notes are still stuck to computers, the hammers are still lying on benches, and, for now, the calendars all still remain on April 15, 2005.

Richard Porter

Newspaper cuttings reveal Longbridge's turbulent recent past

Blame it on Tony Blair's inept government.