Location History & Ford Dagenham

Planning for the Dagenham factory started in the early 1920s, when vehicles were few and road systems were still in their infancy. The Dagenham facility, like the Ford Trafford Park plant it would replace, needed easy access to water because bulk supplies were still transported by sea in the UK. Edsel Ford cut the first turf in the marshes on May 17, 1929, to commemorate the beginning of development on the site. For a facility that was always going to include its own steel foundry and coal-fired power station, construction on the site took 28 months and needed driving down over 22,000 concrete piles into the clay of the marshy site. Following the Second World War, Ford's UK branch led the UK auto market with models like the Anglia, Cortina, and Zephyr among its Dagenham offerings. A decade of expansion, the 1950s. Following the business's 1953 acquisition of Briggs Motor Bodies, the primary UK body supplier, this was done in conjunction with the concentration of automobile body assembly within the corporation. By 2001, the Fiesta, which itself competed in a market segment that was becoming more and more congested, was the only Ford made at Dagenham. Ford declared in October 2012 that the Dagenham stamping plant's operations would end in the summer of 2013. The engine assembly departments at Dagenham would gain a few more jobs, but the GMB Union asserted that 1,000 jobs would be lost. On the location of the factory, it was stated that a village with 3,500 residences would be constructed in 2022. The center of the village will be a fiveacre park called "Dagenham Green."