Exploring has a habit of tugging on the heart strings somewhat. Ive lost count of the number of time ive been totally gutted at missing something epic or totally elated at stumbling on something truly amazing. Well here i feel like ive been through the full range of emotion and back again!
A lot of you will know that i grew up in Suffolk and cut my exploring teeth around the fast disappearing industry in the Ipswich area. For me the hay day was the late 2000s when there seemed to be so many amazing disused haunts around the town i was spoilt for choice where to look next.. However by the time i moved away in 2012 all these places had as good as gone and more than that, It seemed as if i had caught Ipswich's last days as an industrial town all together, not only had the derps gone but the industry that had fueled most of them had pretty much gone too! By the time i moved away not only were the derelict sites a shadow of their former selves it seemed as if the entirety of what i would call 'proper' industry had gone. Well that is apart from here. This was the last 'historic' factory in the entire town and even tho at the time it was very much alive and kicking it only seemed a matter of time before it joined the likes of Cranes or Xylonite as a retail park or housing estate!
Manganese Bronze is a rather large sprawling company that at one point had made everything from, well, bronze! to taxis and motorcycles.. Its a proper classic British industrial name and despite starting out down in Deptford in the 1880s the name is highly associated with Ipswich. In fact i have already explored a large chunk of their Ipswich based empire a few 100 years up the road at the old 'Oilite' bearing site. This was derelict back in the noughties hayday i mentioned and although it wasn't the best of industry in the area, by todays standards it was still pretty damn good! We certainly enjoyed it at the time i recall! The 'wrought products' factory you see here is actually older and while the Oilite section had dealt with sintered components this part of the site dealt with extruded and rolled products. I have heard reference to this factory being built in 1938 but that doesn't really make sense as i know for sure the company moved to Ipswich to escape Zeppelin bombing raids during the 1st world war. They bought land on Handford Hall Farm and by 1920 had built plants to both extrude shell casings for munitions and roll other wrought bronze products for aerospace and shipping. It think it may actually be the now demolished Oilite section that dated from the 1930s.. In latter years the company particularly concentrated their work on specialist aerospace contracts and the Oilite sintering division was sold off to become 'Delta' with the marine works (moved to Birkenhead during WW2) being bought out by Stone-Platt. This section of the company had numerous names in latter years, Bolton Aerospace and Lebronze Alloys being the latter two, but its always been known to locals as Manganese Bronze
A good while has passed since i moved away from the area and with Suffolk exploring having gone through a 10 year baron spell going home to explore wasn't something i did very often! You can imagine my excitement then when just about a year ago i heard that indeed Maggy Bronze was finally going to close.. Of course this was sad but ive become so accustomed to anything of vague merit in this country going to the wall i just concentrated on the exciting side of things.. i couldn't ignore the potential the place had so of course i wanted to get down there straight away but its not quite that simple when you're now 3 hours drive away and theres a pandemic on the go. The auction details went online around June and with the country opened back up enough to get away with travelling it all seemed to fall into place at first. I was fairly keen to get to see it pre-strip out but alas luck was not on our side. After a successful morning at Colemans we should have been on a roll but we arrive here to find it crawling with men and fork truck activity even on a Saturday afternoon. Really we should have gone away for a few hours and come back again later in the evening but with other items on the agenda i decided that i may as well just do what i do at quite a few these kind of factories now and just buy some of it! I returned back to Birmingham with only a few externals under my belt and got bidding! I won a few choice bits of bits of junk and arranged to go over to get it a week or so later. You can imagine my annoyance when i turned up and the guy basically had them on a pallet by the front gate and i didn't even really get much more then a look through the doors. So far project Maggy Bronze was a complete fail!
Without much more choice i had to head back home with my few items of junk metaphorically empty handed. Covid continued to run its course and with the optimum time to get in now passed anyway i thought i may as well just wait until i happened to be back in the area to try again. In the mean time @xplorer.x decide to put up his photos and rub salt into the wounds a bit. I had heard i wasn't the only one interested in the site so it wasn't surprising to see and in some ways quite relief someone had documented the place but at the same time pretty gutting it hadn't been me! None the less my chance soon came. With the lock downs coming to an end i found myself back in Ipswich again this spring and thought id have a casual look at what was happening. Well as it usually does the casual look soon turned into me hopping fences and running across the no mans land wit the proverbial fingers crossed.
Anyway, thats the end of the life story section of the report.. the explore went well enough, i spotted a security bod in the offices straight away but it didn't seem as if he ever left the office. A lot of the CCTV had gone which gave me a bit of confidence what was left had just been left as dummies. The power was now off across the site with a genny running the office and every door was wide open or at least unlocked so it all made for a pretty cool 'old skool' kind of a mooch. Not a free for all but easy enough. Main problem was after 2 or so hours of mooching the place was just a bit of a disappointment.. I mean the buildings are amazing and even having the privilege of walking round any factory of that sort of age nowadays is something to be glad of but i had also expected it to have a few hidden gems and well it didn't really seem like it was going to. I started off in the main mill buildings and progressed on through workshops, amenity blocks and through to labs and even the canteen hall but the epicness i was hoping for just hadn't shown up and i was just about to give up an head for home when i had a quick peak in what appeared to just be a little empty shed..
A lot of you will know that i grew up in Suffolk and cut my exploring teeth around the fast disappearing industry in the Ipswich area. For me the hay day was the late 2000s when there seemed to be so many amazing disused haunts around the town i was spoilt for choice where to look next.. However by the time i moved away in 2012 all these places had as good as gone and more than that, It seemed as if i had caught Ipswich's last days as an industrial town all together, not only had the derps gone but the industry that had fueled most of them had pretty much gone too! By the time i moved away not only were the derelict sites a shadow of their former selves it seemed as if the entirety of what i would call 'proper' industry had gone. Well that is apart from here. This was the last 'historic' factory in the entire town and even tho at the time it was very much alive and kicking it only seemed a matter of time before it joined the likes of Cranes or Xylonite as a retail park or housing estate!
Manganese Bronze is a rather large sprawling company that at one point had made everything from, well, bronze! to taxis and motorcycles.. Its a proper classic British industrial name and despite starting out down in Deptford in the 1880s the name is highly associated with Ipswich. In fact i have already explored a large chunk of their Ipswich based empire a few 100 years up the road at the old 'Oilite' bearing site. This was derelict back in the noughties hayday i mentioned and although it wasn't the best of industry in the area, by todays standards it was still pretty damn good! We certainly enjoyed it at the time i recall! The 'wrought products' factory you see here is actually older and while the Oilite section had dealt with sintered components this part of the site dealt with extruded and rolled products. I have heard reference to this factory being built in 1938 but that doesn't really make sense as i know for sure the company moved to Ipswich to escape Zeppelin bombing raids during the 1st world war. They bought land on Handford Hall Farm and by 1920 had built plants to both extrude shell casings for munitions and roll other wrought bronze products for aerospace and shipping. It think it may actually be the now demolished Oilite section that dated from the 1930s.. In latter years the company particularly concentrated their work on specialist aerospace contracts and the Oilite sintering division was sold off to become 'Delta' with the marine works (moved to Birkenhead during WW2) being bought out by Stone-Platt. This section of the company had numerous names in latter years, Bolton Aerospace and Lebronze Alloys being the latter two, but its always been known to locals as Manganese Bronze
A good while has passed since i moved away from the area and with Suffolk exploring having gone through a 10 year baron spell going home to explore wasn't something i did very often! You can imagine my excitement then when just about a year ago i heard that indeed Maggy Bronze was finally going to close.. Of course this was sad but ive become so accustomed to anything of vague merit in this country going to the wall i just concentrated on the exciting side of things.. i couldn't ignore the potential the place had so of course i wanted to get down there straight away but its not quite that simple when you're now 3 hours drive away and theres a pandemic on the go. The auction details went online around June and with the country opened back up enough to get away with travelling it all seemed to fall into place at first. I was fairly keen to get to see it pre-strip out but alas luck was not on our side. After a successful morning at Colemans we should have been on a roll but we arrive here to find it crawling with men and fork truck activity even on a Saturday afternoon. Really we should have gone away for a few hours and come back again later in the evening but with other items on the agenda i decided that i may as well just do what i do at quite a few these kind of factories now and just buy some of it! I returned back to Birmingham with only a few externals under my belt and got bidding! I won a few choice bits of bits of junk and arranged to go over to get it a week or so later. You can imagine my annoyance when i turned up and the guy basically had them on a pallet by the front gate and i didn't even really get much more then a look through the doors. So far project Maggy Bronze was a complete fail!
Without much more choice i had to head back home with my few items of junk metaphorically empty handed. Covid continued to run its course and with the optimum time to get in now passed anyway i thought i may as well just wait until i happened to be back in the area to try again. In the mean time @xplorer.x decide to put up his photos and rub salt into the wounds a bit. I had heard i wasn't the only one interested in the site so it wasn't surprising to see and in some ways quite relief someone had documented the place but at the same time pretty gutting it hadn't been me! None the less my chance soon came. With the lock downs coming to an end i found myself back in Ipswich again this spring and thought id have a casual look at what was happening. Well as it usually does the casual look soon turned into me hopping fences and running across the no mans land wit the proverbial fingers crossed.
Anyway, thats the end of the life story section of the report.. the explore went well enough, i spotted a security bod in the offices straight away but it didn't seem as if he ever left the office. A lot of the CCTV had gone which gave me a bit of confidence what was left had just been left as dummies. The power was now off across the site with a genny running the office and every door was wide open or at least unlocked so it all made for a pretty cool 'old skool' kind of a mooch. Not a free for all but easy enough. Main problem was after 2 or so hours of mooching the place was just a bit of a disappointment.. I mean the buildings are amazing and even having the privilege of walking round any factory of that sort of age nowadays is something to be glad of but i had also expected it to have a few hidden gems and well it didn't really seem like it was going to. I started off in the main mill buildings and progressed on through workshops, amenity blocks and through to labs and even the canteen hall but the epicness i was hoping for just hadn't shown up and i was just about to give up an head for home when i had a quick peak in what appeared to just be a little empty shed..
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