Monday 25 July 2011

The Marconi Radio Factory, Chelmsford

This was a return visit after getting busted by plod in March after only 20 minutes.
Back then we only touched the out buildings but had seen enough for it to be put on the back burner.
With my new baby daughter expected within the week then I was under orders to stay near to home so I could hot foot it back if the "head appeared".
Little did I know that I would be spending ten hours in a police cell and wouldn't walk through the front door until the early hours of the next morning

Explored with the brilliant Skeleton Key and a non member called Ben

The History

Marconi's New Street factory was built in 1912 next to the Great Eastern Railway. A railway siding ran across New Street into the factory yard and brought materials in one end of the works and took finished radio equipment out of the other.

At the South end of the building two huge aerial masts once stood, the 450ft (137m) high "Marconi Poles" formed Chelmsfords most prominent landmark.

  
During the Second World War the Marconi Company employed more than 6,000 people in Chelmsford. Producing vital military communications equipment, the New St factory became a target for bombing and was hit in May 1941 with a loss of 17 lives.

In 1920, two years before the BBC was established, the New Street factory made history as the site of the first official British sound broadcasts including the famous concert by Dame Nellie Melba which was heard all over the world.





























5 comments:

  1. Jesus talk about going down hill!! Its not the mint factory i remember it as any more that's for sure. Have the PIRs disappeared now?

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  2. Ah, no mate, it's still PIR'd to the eyeballs, we were setting them off as soon as we got on site and not just in the buildings but outside too, so we just took the decision to get on with it top speed and see as much a we could before sec arrived ;)

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  3. I used to work here...it was my 30 year anniversary on 23rd Sept 2013.I still work for them! There were then Marconi Communications, now I work in Rochester Kent for them,they are now BAE Systems!

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  4. I was a technical apprentice here between 1977 and 1981. Apprentices spent their first year in 'The Pit' learning how to operate machine tools. It was located in one the buildings photographed here. After that, time was spent getting experience in various departments around the site. The factory was fully occupied, employing thousands of people, and a lot of work was done for the MoD.

    This was just Marconi Communications. There was Marconi Radar and other subsidiaries, and also many little satellite factories scattered all over the region. For a while I worked at another Marconi facility in Billericay.

    And now nothing. Just abandoned, overgrown buildings that are only of interest to Urban Explorers. The world has changed, of course, but it's very sad to see such a huge decline in such a relatively short space of time.

    Anyway, I really enjoyed your photos and if it wasn't for the fact that I now live in Thailand I might well be tempted to become an Urban Explorer for the day so that I could go back and take a closer look.

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  5. I also worked there as an apprentice, but from 1991 through to about 1995. I used to pick up a folder and head off exploring for ages - you could get away with it if you walked around looking purposeful.

    The apprenticeships were great because you spent three months in lots of different departments. I had three months in publicity, civil programs, military programs, military development (which was in the pit when I was there, and then upstairs in the main building because the pit became the canteen), and various other places - I remember spending three months on the shop floor repairing stuff.

    Building 720(?) was incredible. Massive, unsupported roof and, I was told, the first place in the world to have fluorescent lighting.

    The shambolic management by GEC, where share-price came before investment, meant that every year we saw more and more redundancies alongside completely mad mergers. I even remember the technical director telling me how proud he was that, when engineers put in a requisition for test equipment, he just didn't sign them. He showed me a big pile on his desk, and proudly told me how much he'd saved the company. I just thought he was a total **** as I'd just spent three days trying to steal one of the two company oscilloscopes from the fella who'd managed to bag it last!

    Some great geniuses worked there, whose knowledge and experience could never be re-gained. Yes, some were extremely strange, but what an incredible place to work.

    Other things I remember:
    I believe the end of the building was painted to look like terraced houses during the war.

    There was one particular fortnight where the temperature went nuts - middle of summer with full sun coming through the glass roof into the development lab. The engineers asked for some kind of air conditioning or fan or something, with no interest from management... so one afternoon, half the factory lined up outside occupational health complaining of dizziness. It was hilarious, but really put the wind up the big people... fans turned up the next day!

    Fond memories of smoking in the offices, of some very formidable ex-forces people who ended up your boss (bosses at Marconi tended to be quite intimidating), and I remember five blokes staring at a flashing fluorescent bulb writing down what it was communicating to them, in morse code!

    Legends? Peter Turrall, Colin Page, the training manager Shaun Newton (proper ex sergeant material), and our induction day presentation by the bonkers scouse security chief who started his talk by shouting at us, "Everybody... Is... A... Spy..." Friday afternoons down the pub, and the day that all us apprentices decided to just sod off to Southend cos it was lovely weather - the telling off we got from Shaun Newton was a beauty!

    The building was beautiful art deco, always desperately neglected. But for years of neglect and zero investment, the company could have continued to lead the world. As it is... well...

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