Pics : Secret Underground WWII Factory

Oooh...a secret factory ! Where can this be....the Harz Mountains ? Bavarian Alps ? Or maybe the Scottish Highlands.....

No - Gants Hill.

In WWII, the Plessey Co ( always known as 'Plessey's' ) had their main factory at Ilford, in the Northeast suburbs of London. Plesseys were a vital manufactirer of electrical aircraft components, radar and aircraft starting systems. The factory was an easy target for the Luftwaffe. Very early in the war, someone put forward the idea of shifting much production underground - into the tunnels for the nearby Underground Central Line extension . Tunnelling had just been completed at the start of the war, but rails hadn't been laid nor stations constructed.

In November 1940 work commenced to transform a length of the tunnel - from Gants Hill to Wanstead stations today - into a full production line with 2,000 workers. The factory worked from early 1942 until the end of the war in conditions of strict secrecy which persisted long after the war ( details weren't made public until 1985 ).

I was born in Gants Hill and can remember asking my parents what was that strange brick edifice squashed between houses on the main A12 road......



And last week I finally went back there with a camera. This building was one of the entrances and housed lifting equipment to lower machinery down a 15ft dia shaft into the tunnel. Post-war, the lifting gantry was removed and today it houses machinery for the tube line...






Note how the chimney on the adjoining house had to be extended.

A short distance away near where one of the 'works canteens' was situated, a typical set of WWII -era gates can be seen..



Further down the road, Redbridge Underground Station now incorporates the tall building housing the wartime factory electricity substation...



Looking the other way, at the end of the car park is the surviving building which housed the huge air-conditioning equipment......



And here's how it looked 'then'...



Not much else to see....but the full, fascinating story can be found in After The Battle #139.

And Plesseys ? They vanished in the 1980s and so has their Ilford factory - so these relics are all that's left......

 

Nice, I notice the houses around it are still intact too

 

An Escalator in an Underground Factory. © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 4142)IWM Non Commercial Licence

 

Superb stuff.

 

I am happy to see someone making notice of these early manufacturing facilities for the war. I live near Fort Wingate in New Mexico a place where photographs to this day are restricted and all travel on the base is only allowed by remnant managers. I am told a large amount of ordinance was constructed, serviced, and stored in the many (800) bunkers that exist here. I worked there with demilling companies that only utilized a portion of the bunkers, but have never found good sources of information about the details of what buildings were used for what purposes for WWII. I do know that an active shipout of ordinance ran often 24 hours a day to supply Vietnam from this facility via two rail yard engines that operated there for shipment on the railroad. Today the facility is still used for launches of missiles(a White Sands controlled portion) and the testing of those systems but the majority of the lands will at some future date be given to the Zuni and Navajo tribes when the cleanups are completed. The site dates back to the days of western warring with the plains Indians and may have been used in the days of Kit Carson, but of course that will never be acknowledged locally to any degree as Carson is not well liked in our local population.