Ford Trafford Park Factory

The Ford Trafford Park Assembly Plant was a car assembly plant established by the UK subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company. The plant was located at a recently established industrial park called Trafford Park, beside the Manchester Ship Canal, a short distance to the west of Manchester. It was the first manufacturing plant established by Ford outside the United States, though originally it was established merely to assemble vehicles using parts imported from Dearborn.

The first Ford model to be sold in the UK was the Model A, which was first launched in the American market in 1903. Two of the cars were imported to Britain in the same year, and since then the Ford company's British sales had grown thanks to an enthusiastic and talented entrepreneur named Percival Perry. Cars at this time were extremely expensive, and since Henry Ford insisted on payment in full before he would release cars for export from the New York City dockside, Perry's commercial energy was under constant pressure from shortage of credit. Nevertheless, by 1911 Perry was selling over 400 US built Fords per year from premises in London's prestigious Shaftesbury Avenue. It was determined that any further expansion would require more space than was available in central London, and Perry looked for a larger site, while retaining the Shaftesbury Avenue property as a showroom/office complex.

A disused carriage works at the Trafford Park industrial zone near Manchester was acquired. The original plan was to assemble Ford cars using parts shipped in from United States: the need to invest massively in high cost tooling in order to become a volume car producer had not yet come about, and the former carriage works was assembling Fords by October 1911. By now, Ford's principal model was the Model T, and this is the car assembled at the new plant.

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