Report - ROF Patricroft

[Milambar]

I was passing this place yesterday, when I spied a method of access that didn't entail climbing through a broken window. Its been abandoned for a long time now, and has probably been investigated previously, by others.

Inside its chav'd to hell, sadly.

Information scraped from [ROF Patricroft - Wikipedia].

The Royal Ordnance Factory, ROF Patricroft, was an Engineering factory and was classified as a Medium Machine Shop. It was located in Patricroft, near the town of Eccles, in the City of Salford, Greater Manchester, England; adjacent to both the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and the Bridgewater Canal.

The Ministry of Supply took over, an existing engineering works, The Bridgewater Foundry, founded by James Nasmyth and Holbrook Gaskell, owned by the locomotive manufacturer Nasmyth, Gaskell and Company. They had ceased manufacturing locomotives in 1938 but continued, on a smaller scale, making steam hammers and machine tools. The company ceased trading, in November 1940.

The Ministry of Supply took over the works, on 1 June 1940, to convert it into a Royal Ordnance Factory. Staff from the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, acted as Agents for the Ministry of Supply. It reopened as an ROF in February 1941.

The site consisted of a square mill like building, known as The Tower and various surrounding buildings including a machine shop, a foundry and a blacksmith's shop. It remained in use as an ROF until the late 1980s.

I only had my Sony DSC-P73 on me and even then, only a 64Mb memory card loaded, so pictures aren't brilliant, or plentiful.

The first thing I noticed, using the entrance I did, was that the room was filled with blueprints or plans all over the floor. None of them were significantly interesting though.

The first thing I noticed having gained entrance. This rather charming, "old style" lamp post.

And a yellow hardhat on the floor in the undergrowth.

A circular enclosure surrounded by a white fence, had this sign. An old mine ventshaft, perhaps? Patricroft DID have mines at one time, I am told. It was too overgrown to see properly.

A magnetic stirrer inside an old boiler house. I remember using these at college, many moons ago, but why was it in a boiler house?

This is actually a panorama of 2 images stitched via Hugin and Enblend, and resized to 600 pixels wide in photochop. Instead of the usual "chair" shot, its a "couch" shot.
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I will be returning, in normal shoes, and with my finepix and 2 1Gb cards for more pics soon.