Ford Dagenham assembly plant
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| Built | 1931 |
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| Location | Dagenham, London, United Kingdom |
| Coordinates | 51°30′54″N 0°9′11″E / 51.51500°N 0.15306°E |
| Industry | Automotive |
| Products | Engines |
| Employees | 4,000 (approx.) |
| Area | 475 acres (192 ha) |
Ford Dagenham is a major automotive factory located in Dagenham, London, United Kingdom operated by the Ford of Britain subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. The plant opened in 1931 and has produced 10,980,368 cars and over 37,000,000 engines in its history. It covers around 475 acres and has received over £800 million of capital investment since 2000.
Vehicle assembly ceased at the plant in 2002, but it continues as a major production site with capacity to assemble 1.4 million engines a year. In 2008, the plant produced around 1,050,000 engines and was the largest producer of Ford diesel engines globally. It was announced in October 2012 that the stamping plant at Dagenham would close in summer 2013 with the loss of 1,000 jobs. Employment at the plant peaked at around 40,000 workers in 1953, and following specialisation to engines only will be about 3,200.
Planning of the Dagenham plant began in the early 1920s, a time when lorries were small and road networks little developed. In the UK, bulk supplies were still delivered by water transport, so the Dagenham plant, like the Ford Trafford Park plant which it would replace, needed good water access. Dagenham on the southern estuarial edge of Essex offered the prospect of a deepwater port which would allow for bulk deliveries of coal and steel on a far larger scale than the barges of the Manchester Ship Canal could manage at the old plant. In 1924, Ford Motor Company purchased land in the Dagenham marshes for £167,700.
On 17 May 1929, Edsel Ford marked the start of construction on the site by cutting the first turf in the marshes. Construction on the site continued for 28 months and required around 22,000 concrete piles to be driven down through the clay of the marshland site to adequately support a factory that from the start was planned to incorporate its own steel foundry and coal-fired power station.
At the time when the plant was planned, western governments were increasingly responding to economic depression with protectionist policies. This was the context in which Henry Ford’s policy of setting up relatively autonomous car-manufacturing businesses in principal overseas markets can be seen. The drive for self-reliance implicit in including within the Dagenham plant its own steel foundry and power station nevertheless went beyond anything attempted by other European mass-production automakers such as Morris in England, Opel in Germany, or Citroën in France. Inspiration for Ford’s Dagenham plant came more directly from Ford’s own Rouge River plant on the edge of Detroit.
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