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Report - - Greenings wires-28/07/07 | Industrial Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Greenings wires-28/07/07

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R

romanian1

Guest
Guest
A bit of history to start with i think, as usual shamelessly copy and pasted.

Of all the metal-working industries which developed in Warrington in the late 18th centuries, none was more important than wire-drawing. The industry came to dominate the town's employment in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The origins of wire manufacture were in small-scale production in backyard workshops and foundries.
The growth of the wire industry in Warrington was aided by the demand for wire products in many other industries and in agriculture. For example in the 1880s and 1890s barbed wire was adopted in agriculture across the globe, particualrly in big farming areas of North America, Australia and South Africa.

Wire-working was already established in Warrington in the 1770s. The well-known firms that came to dominate the trade appeared towards the end of the 18th century. William Houghton had a wireworks in Tanners Lane by 1775 and in 1799 Nathaniel Greening came to the town and set up a small factory. In 1805 Greening was joined by a new partner, John Rylands, and in 1817 the partners moved to a new site at the end of Church Street. By the late 1830s the Church Street works was one of the largest industrial concerns in Warrington.

Visited With Lawrence.
Already part demolished to make way for a persimmon homes development the Brittania works must have been absolutely mammoth in its pomp, despite as i say a large chunk of it having gone already its still a very good sized explore and a very worthy one at that, especially the records room which must have one of the most complete set of part untrashed records ive ever seen at any site and this despite cheshire county council removing a lot of it in an attempt to save the archives.
The strange thing was the only ways into the the records rooms were either up the ladder at the end of this room or from outside via a now demolished fire escape.
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Workers records.
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Customer records, i recognise a few of these as should our resident coal experts
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The records room, stacks of phones, typewriters, records of all sorts and all sorts of other miscellaneous equipment, i nearly had a fit when i saw this room, to say i was in heaven would be an understatement, although i had also earlier seen both a new budenberg and found some great porn (yes i know these two things in my book are probably disturbingly close to each other) so that did explain part of it at least.
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To be honest i took that many pics in the record rooms i could have put a report up on those two rooms alone:D
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Ian Sharpe

28DL Member
28DL Member
The records room was accessed via a covered bridge from the first-floor typing pool in the office block opposite. Hence it was known as "over the bridge". I recognise the phones - they were the internal phones which replaced older ones while I was there in the late seventies. They were notable for their new-fangled push buttons instead of dials, which made dialling internal numbers an order of magnitude quicker. I occasionally spent time in that very aisle of dusty files. It was a little tidier then but still quite disorganised. This room was not much visited, since it was the archive for older files removed from office filing cabinets to make room for newer ones. My memory must be playing up becuase I think I remember another entrance that would have lead down steps to the factory floor, but I see no sign of it in the pictures. Or maybe it was removed and boarded up.
 
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