Good evening everyone! So I visited this location over the course of 3 weekends at the beginning of April, and have recently released the breaks with sharing some shots from this absolutely breath-taking pharmaceutical production facility. Due to the sheer size of the site, and the amount of pictures I have taken, I am planning on dropping these posts in a couple of parts, hope you don't mind, mods!
Since I haven't been back in just under a month, I have no idea about it's current condition - however, with that being said, I had noticed that demolition had been progressing very quickly between the weeks, and all the industrial hardware that was up for auction had their listings end back at the end of April... I was incredibly thrilled (and lucky) to get to see a location like this in it's pre demolished, pre stripped condition... It's absolutely mind-blowing stuff.
HISTORY & OVERVIEW
There isn't a particularly exciting history around the development on this site (in my opinion), so I decided to focus a little bit more on AZ's general history, and a few other parts that I found to be interesting...
AstraZeneca was formed in 1999 following the merger of two existing European international pharmaceutical companies: Astra AB, a Swedish company founded in 1913, and Zeneca Group PLC, a British company founded in 1993 (as a subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries, a British company founded in 1926). Side note here - The antiseptic Savlon actually derived it's name from where it was originally developed, the Avlon Site which I'm covering here.
So Avlon Works was operational for 50 odd years from 1969 to 2019. In 2016, AstraZeneca sold the site to Avara Pharmaceutical in the hope of securing the operation’s future, but they fell into administration and the entire site was put up for sale. Apparently, Avara is a CDMO (Contract Manufacturing Organisation) that serves other companies in the pharmaceutical industry on a contract basis to provide comprehensive services from drug development through to drug manufacturing. They apparently have a bit of a rep for "snapping up Big Pharma’s discarded manufacturing plants", and they done exactly that with AZ, and continued to serve them, with AZ being it's sole customer.
AZ is among the biggest international pharmaceutical companies in the world. In 2018, they ranked 11th on the global list of highest earning pharmaceutical companies. The company made many corporate acquisitions since its inception, with recent examples including Cambridge Antibody Technology (in 2006 for $567M), Ardea Biosciences (in 2012 for $781M), Pearl Therapeutics (in 2013 for $1.2B), ZS Pharma (in 2015 for $2.7B), Acerta Pharma (in 2015 for $5.7B) and Takeda’s respiratory business (in 2016 for $575M). As you can see... they definitely aren't a small player in the big pharma game.
At the beginning of this year, a Canadian real estate company announced it had purchased the site, and was planning to demolish the old pharmaceutical plant and develop a huge new logistics and warehousing park. Vancouver’s Epta Development Corporation bought the 100-acre site in Avonmouth in December - and is now in the process of selling off all its remaining assets...
Maynards, an industrial auctions and liquidations, had been appointed to manage the asset recovery and demolition of the site. The project is so vast, according to Maynards, the asset list runs to 144 pages and the company expects to put together a sales catalogue of more than 5,000 lots, to include “everything above ground”. Maynards’ UK managing director Daniel Gray said the spares inventory alone was valued at £2.5million.
The two main API's (active pharmaceutical ingredients) that had been manufactured here in its latter years were rosuvastatin (Crestor) and quetiapine (Seroquel)...
EXPLORE
Okay, so now things start to get interesting.... I had caught wind of this place back at the beginning of the year, when I found out it had been sold, and demolition was due to start. I was desperately waiting for local travel restrictions to end, and after they did in March, I jumped at the first opportunity I could to try and get inside this place! The first early morning I arrived, the day couldn't have been better, both in terms of weather, and a certain holiday that may have made my first visit a little uneventful when compared to the next two trips!
So, with some assistance of another 28DL member and fellow explorer (thanks again mate!), I was ready to try my luck at this place. I arrived at sunrise, and without too much difficulty, I managed to find the route inside, after a couple small battles with a load of damn brambles! My first stop on this morning's trip was to the biological wastewater treatment facility.
These pipes were used to transport "weak effluent" AKA untreated waste water from the various manufacturing plants. The waste would be piped to a treatment centre where it would be separated, and the reusable products would be returned to the various plants to be used in production again.
It would seem that this part of the site was the first to get hit by the demolition, so there really wasn't much to explore here - just a load of pipes, some treatment tanks, and lots of rubble ready to be cleared.
AstraZeneca originally installed the effluent treatment plant to handle wastewater from the two (at the time) manufacturing plants at the site. The design contract was awarded to PURAC, a specialist process engineering contractor in this field.
And here below, we have our first proper look at the demolition:
Concerns had been raised over the likely future consent levels of waste products in effluents imposed by the Environment Agency and also the volumes of effluent which could be treated if the plant were to undergo further expansion (which it did).
At the time, the plant treated 3,000m³ of wastewater a day from the manufacturing processes. The design was flexible, so had allowed for an increase in future treatment load. It had incorporated flow balancing and a twin stream biological treatment process, the latter of which consists of successive fungal and bacterial stages.
The biological treatments use Natrix suspended carriers in a mixed bed bio-film reactor process. Bio-solids from this process are flocculated (forming into small clumps/masses) and removed by dissolved air flotation. The installation of this treatment plant is part of a plan formulated by the Environment Agency to improve water quality in the nearby estuary.
In the distance in the picture below, you can see smoke rising from the nearby Gas Powered Electricity Plant:
After a short climb to the top of this tank, I was able to get a decent vantage point of the site. We can see one of the largest API plants, and if you look carefully you can see the absolutely beautiful boilers that were still in the CHP plant (combined heat and power), which was the next step on this mornings journey.
Okay... and here we have it... I was so excited to have found some hardware like this, still waiting to be removed... (with hindsight, I had absolutely no idea what else was in store for me!) You can actually see the auction listing numbers and "SOLD" stickers on these beasts.
What you are looking at are "dual fuelled, horizontal multi tubular steam boilers", manufactured by Beel Industrial Boilers & Minster. They are not too dissimilar to the same boilers you would find in steam locomotives. Hot gases pass from a fire through one or more tubes running through a sealed container of water. The heat of the gases is transferred through the walls of the tubes by thermal conduction, heating the water and ultimately creating steam.
These were manufactured in 2001, and have a maximum heat output of 5018kw. There were perhaps 2 more of these boilers behind me, too. A quick inspection of the front plates indicated that these had already been sold on to another company - this hardware tends to get purchased 2nd hand by developing nations, instead of purchasing them brand new.
Hidden in the back corner of this building, was some noticeably older plumbing:
I had kindly been provided with a little bit of insight into this older pipework by another friend/explorer: "These look to be gate valves, definitely an older setup. Most modern builds would be using globe style valves, which are less prone to leaks but have a higher pressure drop across the valve. These gate style valves are suited to an un-interrupted flow application, more suited to a condensate return circuit, which if this is in a boiler room/heat recovery setup, could quite likely be the case "
Right - so that is where I am going to be leaving part 1 on this post for now... I need to edit more pictures and do a little more research into rosuvastatin and quetiapine is, and its manufacturing process, ready for the next part....
I hope you lot enjoy these pictures... this post has covered about 50% of the first visit here. We still have 2 & a half more days to go here and I hope I can get the next posts up soon enough
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