Report - National Machine Gun Factory aka The Branston Depot, Burton-on-Trent - December 2017

[Mobutu]

That fire extinguisher is quite a find. I wonder when they stopped making them so patriotic

 

[clebby]

That fire extinguisher is quite a find. I wonder when they stopped making them so patriotic

Because brexit

 

[HughieD]

Nice movement on that.

 

[Ojay]

Apologies for the thread jack guys, all cleaned up now and I've had a chat with matey about his verbal diarrhoea (awaits response)

Sorry about that

 

[Ciaran Otte]

Did you find the ammo boxes? There is at least 40 in one of the buildings they were last checked 20 years ago and some have explosive stickers on them

 

[DustySensorPhotography]

The National Machine Gun Factory aka The Branston Depot - Burton-on-Trent.

Visited a couple of weeks back with a non-member.

The office block in its heyday

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It's fair to say that calling it 'the National Machine Gun Factory' is perhaps being a bit generous, as by the time construction was completed WW1 was over and not a single machine gun was ever produced on site. However anything with machine gun in the name is automatically epic, and if shitty clickbait titles are good enough for the braindead inbred cretins masquerading as explorers on YouTube then they're good enough for me.

A brief history - for a more comprehensive breakdown click here.

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Shitty iPhone photato.. looks much older than 1918 though amirite??

~

I first heard of the Branston Depot when, like most of you I imagine, I spent my evening browsing Google Images for pictures of derelict canteens. Once again the superb geograph.org.uk has delivered the goods - there was only one picture of the office block posted there but that was all I needed. A quick message to Judas Speed later and plans begun to form. I urge people to regularly check geograph - I have found at least 4 new sites simply through cursory browses over the years, and that's just in my local area.

Today the site has been largely taken over by B&Q as a distribution centre, as well as by the MoJ for storage. However the simply stunning office block that sits rotting by the main entrance is more than enough to keep you occupied for a day, with a few other buildings (canteen, social club etc.) thrown in for good measure. I've no doubt there's some more odds and sods scattered around the site just waiting to be found, but unfortunately just as we were preparing to leave the canteen some fat bastard secca and his gommo mate appeared as if from nowhere and threatened to perform a citizens arrest. We of course skipped away through the open front gate, but be warned - the CCTV seems to work!

Some pictures, seemingly shot at ISO 7 billion

The above picture pretty much sums up the inside - largely stripped but extremely dated. The ground floor is a bit meh, but the top two floors are real time capsules - in fact I'd go as far as to say this is the best office block I've seen. It never fails to amaze me that stuff this dated is still out there.

The real highlights were the bathrooms, however; those on the top floor in particular felt like they hadn't been decorated since the war.

On the top floor, each wing had a large skylight - no doubt some sort of epic drawing office was originally envisaged

Love the original half-glazed partitioning

Loved the colour scheme in general tbh

Cont.​

Hey man, this place looks insane, And I’m probs going very soon, any chance you could shoot me a private message? If you know anything about security/access it would be much appreciated, but for obvious reasons don’t put it in This public thread - Cheers, Oli