The earliest known picture of a bicycle and car factory?

It was just a hunch, but there was something very appealing about the late Victorian watercolour that I purchased at a provincial English auction room many years ago. It was certainly accomplished, large – 20”x36” (51x90cm), in its original frame and presumably carried out by the building’s architect. I felt it had to be cleaned and I duly found a professional restorer to carry out the task. Then it was hung in my house for pure enjoyment.

Recently I felt the need to do some research. The only clue was its inscription – NEW WORKS SALTLEY FOR THE WESTWOOD MANUFACTURING Co. Very little information exists about Westwood and just one thing emerged, from a book by Damien Kimberley – ‘Coventry’s Bicycle Heritage’. Westwood, I learned, was a bicycle manufacturer, established in Birmingham in the 1890s. Birmingham, and particularly nearby Coventry, were great centres for bicycle manufacturing at the time. Indeed Westwood found additional premises in Coventry in 1895. A year later, Starley Brothers, bicycle manufacturer of Coventry, established in 1878, merged with its neighbour Westwood. Soon after the merger, the new company announced additional works at Adderley Park, Birmingham. So this was it, a design for a bicycle factory alongside the railway at Adderley Park, adjacent to Saltley, just over a mile from the city centre.

But the Starley Brothers and Westwood had clearly overreached themselves, and by early 1899 the entire operation had collapsed. Quite how long it took to build the large factory complex with its offices, stables, stores, ancillary buildings and manager’s house, we may never know, but bicycle manufacturing at Adderley Park could not have lasted long.

Could this, I mused, be the earliest ever picture of a bicycle factory?! But the story doesn’t end there.

In 1901, Vickers, by then a very large manufacturing company, established the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company Limited based at the three and a half acre site at Adderley Park which it had purchased a couple of years earlier – the very factory that had been built in 1897 for Starley Brothers and Westwood. Vickers was clearly intent on establishing itself in the emerging motor car industry.

So successful was the venture, that before the outbreak of World War 1, the Adderley Park site was increased to six times its original size, with about 4.000 employees. By 1913 Wolseley was the largest British motor manufacturer.

Could this fine watercolour, I mused again, be the earliest ever picture of a motor car factory?!!

POSTSCRIPT. With the production of the final Morris Minor van at the end of 1971, the Adderley Park factory closed its doors for the very last time. Today, nothing exists of the late Victorian factory.