Hi there! I was always fascinated by the building known as the 'Flight Shed' at the lower end of Lowhill Lane. It seemed an unusual place to have what seemed to be a WW2 aircraft hangar, until I gradually began to uncover and understand the fascinating history of the factory and the part it played during the war years. I used to drive past it every day on my way to work and often used to go for walks and would purposely go and have a closer look at it through the railings. If one was to stand on the grass bank on the other side of the road in Cofton Park, you could get a good view of the inside of the geodexic roof structure through the windows that ran around the upper edge of the building. It looked a bit like the fuselage of a Wellington bomber but on a massive scale.
I was lucky enough to meet a chap at one of the Longbridge car rallies in Cofton Park who told me of a great web site called 'Austin Memories', which has been formed by a dedicated group of local historians keen to preserve and promote the rich history of the factory and the social history surrounding it. On the website. if you go onto the list at the side of the screen and click on 'Aircraft Production', then scroll down to the very end there is the most amazing piece of film showing the production of Hawker Hurricanes in the Flight Shed during WW2. Full airframe assembly is shown being carried out as well as the installation of Rolls Royce Merlin engines (by people who look as though they may have once lived in my street) and in the upper background the roof structure can clearly be seen. It then shows the completed aircraft being carried up onto the airfield via a lift type platform which ran on rails up the hillside at the rear of the building. The film ends with a Hurricane being flown out from the airfield with a clear view of a hill in the near distance with a clump of trees on the top (Frankley Beeches).
These were not the only aircraft built at the Longbridge factory. Across the road (Groveley Lane) from the flight shed was another less obvious aircraft hangar where Avro Lancaster fuselages were built and shipped out by road for final assembly elsewhere. Other aircraft built there was the Fairey Battle, and sub-assemblies for the De Haviland Mosquito. This building was later to be used for engine developement and gearbox production in the post war years, and I believe right up to the end of the factory's involvement with BMW, whereupon it was demolished to make way for housing.
One day as I drove past the flight shed, I noticed a sign attached to the railings saying that a demolition company was on sight with work having already begun. As I work in the motor vehicle heritage sector, I informed my work colleague who looked quite shocked. Being fully aware of it's historical significance he quickly got in touch with the demolition company and arranged for us to go and salvage a piece of the roof structure, as only two examples of this type of hangar roof survived in Britain at that time; Longbridge, and the old Supermarine factory at Southampton which was then occupied by Ford and where Transit vans were being produced.
We went with a Land-Rover and car trailer, and in very wet weather managed to come away with an entire 'diamond' section with adjoining sections and cross bracing spars which had already been chomped out by the demolition machine which resembled a huge mechanical dinosaur. Seeing this section close up, it became obvious how much bigger it was than when it was up in the roof and that it was going to overhang the entire trailer by quite a bit! The whole roof structure was held together by thousands of huge stubby looking nuts and bolts, the threads of which were very fine. These bolts had a diameter of approx. 2 1/4" inches and approx 3" inches long. There were about three dozen of these bolts in the bit we had salvaged, and we were just wondering how on earth we were going to transport this huge steel thing as we had no tools with us of this size to dis assemble it, when I discovered that all these bolts were in fact loose and the nuts could just be unscrewed by hand! Such was the quality of these fixings that none of them were seized up or even rusted, the only obstacle being to break the creamy coloured paint coating on some of them to undo them. It turns out through our research that luckily for us the fixings were never tightened when the roof was built in the 1930's, but purposely left loose to allow for a precise amount of expansion and contraction. So fortunately we were able to stack all the individual pressed sections neatly (which were about nine feet long and heavy) and which still filled the whole trailer. Incidentally, as we studied each individual section we began to appreciate the complexity of the design and the result of some very clever and precise design calculations. These must have been worked out by someone with a slide-rule and incredible engineering abilities, to allow for the gentle curvature of the roof span which was governed entirely by the subtle variation in the bolt hole positions and the angles of the pressed sections.
While we were there, amongst the rubble we stumbled upon the remains of where the hillside lift had been installed, in a large rectangular concrete hole in the ground which had been covered over with a steel girder structure and plating. This had been cut out for scrap revealing some of the original mechanism which had probably not seen the light of day in seventy years.
The roof section was re-assembled when we got it back to work where it was displayed in an exhibition about 'Shadow Factories' and what the car factories did towards the war effort in ww2. As far as I can recall, the roof section went out on loan to the British Motor Museum at Gaydon where I believe it may currently be in storage.
The site of the Flight Shed at Longbridge is now occupied by a housing estate with road names which only offer a clue as to it's aviation history. and I have since learned that the Supermarine factory building has also now gone, demolished in the name of progress. There were also some entrances to the factory's vast network of underground tunnels uncovered and which were all sealed off prior to the houses being built.
I have since learnt that the Supermarine factory building has also been demolished in the name of progress.
If anyone out there has any other interesting information on any of these buildings I would love to know.
Kind regards, Chris.
