Report - GEC - Leicester - June '09

Mr Sam · Jun 14, 2009

seen this ages back but it was well secure and tbh just looked totally trashed (which it is) but after MD and LL did a recce earlier on in the week it looked well worth the effort

site is huuge and dates from war times at least, its been used for jet engine testing, nuclear power plant component making and apparently theres even a test submarine somewhere on the live part of the site

unfortunatly kids and pikeys have long been and gone

odd gem left untouched though!!! no doubt end up in a skip :banghead

slighlty worrying, lead lined box and sealed canister just lying around!

big loading bay

oh hello.....what be this

would of been rude not to risk life and limb getting to the bottom!

nearly there

to find bugger all!

ventilation fan spinning in the wind on the roof

some old skool advertising brosures for the site

and lots of random documents from various sites they did components for!

squirrel approves of the worn aggregate

rotory dialer with a keypad :confused

an although its been closed for about 8 years theres some modern junk right in the heart of it all

Goldie87 · Jun 15, 2009

It was good to finally see inside this place after so many years. From 2004 I used to pass the place regularly due to work. I didnt bother with taking photos that much, so I had the camera on auto and they are not brilliant. There was far to much stuff to look around and rummage through, we spent over four hours at the site. Some history...

It was at Whetstone that Frank Whittle set up what is believed to have been the first factory in the World built specifically for jet engine production. By 1944, up to 300 employees were producing 20 engines a month for the Gloster Meteor aircraft. Whittleâ€™s original Company was called Power Jets Ltd. This became part of the National Gas Turbine Establishment in 1946 and was later transferred to Pyestock. The Whetstone site was acquired by English Electric, which then became GEC and is now ALSTOM. There has been an almost continuous presence of staff working on gas turbine design, development, test and production for the last 50 years. Back in the 1940â€™s the Whetstone site also developed and tested new jet engine ideas. The related activity of gas turbine development is carried on to this day at Whetstone by the ALSTOM Power Technology Centre. It takes place now in a state-of-the-art test facility just yards from the original buildings and named after the pioneer, the Whittle Research Centre. The site also housed the Atomic Power Division and Mechanical Engineering Laboratories. A lot of early computer technology was developed here, as well as robotics, wind turbines, and nuclear power plant, among other things.