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Happy Birthday to Heinz!
Happy Birthday, Heinz! One of Wigan's best-known landmarks is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
The huge Kitt Green factory – an icon of the north for those travelling on the M6 motorway – is a part of the fabric of the town and its people.
Wigan IS the baked bean capital of Europe – and it's all down to those folk who have worked at the giant plant for the last five decades.
But plans for the factory began as early as late autumn 1955, when, standing in a field rutted by tyre tracks a group of men look intently at detailed plans.
At the centre of the group was JF Quin, site architect for the proposed Heinz factory.
The development, set to be the largest construction site in Britain since the Second World War, would take four years to be transformed from a mixture of agricultural and National Coal Board land into the
most advanced food manufacturing plant in Europe.
The specific location of the site was determined by a number of
favourable factors.
See this week's Wigan Observer for our special anniversary souvenir supplement plus coverage of the Queen's visit to Wigan ... on sale now
Close to the proposed plant was an existing Heinz factory from which fully trained staff could be seconded to get the new site running smoothly until the local workforce was recruited.
Following years of austerity, the 1950s saw Britain beginning to reinvent itself as a forward-thinking economic power.
A unified network of motorways was under construction, with the M1 forming the backbone of Britain and linking to the first motorway to be opened, the M6.
The site was also surrounded by farmland, from where the raw material for many of the products that would be made in the new factory would come.
The sheer size of the site was a clear attempt to provide for expansion – the UK Heinz business had doubled its size three times in the 10 years since the end of the war.
The buildings on the site would cover 750,000ft sq. The steel needed to provide the structure of the buildings alone could have built nearly a quarter of the HMS Ark Royal aircraft carrier, completed in 1955.
Being former farmland (George Formby Snr was a former resident of Walthew House Farm), the terrain was not what would immediately suit a factory site.
However, imaginative architecture made the most of the layout to assist the factory.
Inclines in the ground offered the opportunity to have a split-level plant where the slopes, 15 to 20ft lower on one side of the factory to the other, provided the gravity flow necessary for some of the process.
Indeed, before the detailed architectural plans were drawn up, the whole of the factory's processing, from goods in to goods out was summarised in a drawing of four boxes and three arrows.
The construction of the site took four years to complete due to the scale and complexity of the factory; around half of the land acquired could not have building on it due to having formerly been mined for minerals.
Over the duration of the build and in addition to the architects, 11 consultancy firm s were engaged for specific expertise in specialised areas and in excess of 110 sub-contracting companies carried out the work.
The site was opened in 1959 by Viscount Kilmuir.
Fast forward 25 years and production needs require the installation of new machinery.
The problem facing the team in charge of the upgrades is where the machinery will be placed – at the heart of the factory.
The innovative solution is to fly the equipment into place by helicopter, the Westland Sea King having the payload slung beneath it.
This is not the only time in the 1980s that Kitt Green has a helicopter descend upon it. In 1989, TV's Treasure Hunt gameshow appears at Kitt Green on the hunt for clues, with former British Ladies tennis number one Annabel Croft scouring the grounds.
Other distinguished guests to have visited the factory include: Her Majesty The Queen Mother, Princess Anne, Bill Johnson, Dame Edna Everage and a former Miss World – and of course, last week, the Queen herself.
A year later and the demands of the growing markets and increasingly sophisticated tastes of consumers brought the construction of additional buildings.
The construction of a whole R&D block began in 1990 to house the personnel and facilities to keep Heinz products at the forefront of changing tastes and healthy eating. Its official opening was in July 1991.
And so to the present, where Kitt Green, the largest manufacturer of canned food in Europe, is having a year-long celebration of 50 years of delivering the nation its favourite foods.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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