BMW Sold the Plant That Built the Mini for £10 and It Went Bust in 2005: Longbridge, Birmingham
The Vanished Isles
229 views
In May 2000 the German carmaker BMW let go of the Longbridge car plant in south Birmingham, the works that had been building the Mini for more than forty years, for a nominal ten pounds. It sent the new owners, the Phoenix consortium, on their way with about £500 million in loans: "the very generous dowry which came from BMW", as the chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee later put it. Nine thousand people still worked there. On 8 April 2005 MG Rover went into administration, and within a week most of its six thousand remaining workers had been made redundant. At its height, around twenty-five thousand people had worked on this one site. Car assembly ended for good in 2016, and today no cars are built at Longbridge at all.
This is the story of the works that the south of Birmingham still calls "the Austin", told from the record: the empty printing works Herbert Austin came to see on 4 November 1905 with his wife and his staff of three; the First World War, when more than twenty thousand people, most of them women, made shells, guns and aeroplanes here; the Austin Seven, the shadow factory and the Second World War; Leonard Lord, the Kremlin and the Mini of Alec Issigonis; British Leyland, Derek Robinson and the show of hands in Cofton Park; the Metro and its robots; British Aerospace, BMW and the ten-pound sale.
Then the ending, week by week and year by year: the collapse of the talks with SAIC; the administrators of 8 April; the £6.5 million that paid the wages for one more week; the 5,000 redundancies confirmed on 15 April; the government inspectors' 830-page report on the Phoenix directors; the sale of the assets to Nanjing Automobile, which SAIC itself soon took over; the MG6 and MG3 assembled from kits; and the last car, an MG3, in July 2016, before MG announced on 23 September 2016 that car production at Longbridge was over.
We follow the people the record names: Tony Osborne, the apprentice of 1972 who stayed thirty-three years; Gemma and Andy Cartwright; the core team who built the last Rover by hand in the summer of 2005 and signed it where no buyer would look; and Ken Bullas, the former MG Rover worker who helped open the first store in the new town centre in 2013.
Longbridge itself is very much alive: a new town centre, a college, a park along the reopened River Rea and hundreds of new homes stand on the old works, MG still keeps a small base on part of the site, and the cedar bungalows of Austin Village are a conservation area. What disappeared is the car factory.
What you'll learn
How Herbert Austin turned a failed tin-printing works into a car factory, and how the First World War made it ten times bigger.
Austin Village: two hundred red cedar house kits ordered from Bay City, Michigan, some of them lost to a German submarine, and put up in eleven months for the wartime workforce.
The Mini, British Leyland, the strikes and the robots that built the Metro in 1980.
The ending: BMW's ten-pound sale and the dowry, the week of 8 to 15 April 2005, the government inspectors' report on the Phoenix directors, the kit-built MGs, and what stands on the land now.
Educational and historical content.
Key sources
National Audit Office, The Closure of MG Rover, report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, March 2006 (nao.org.uk)
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, The closure of MG Rover, Fifty-seventh Report of Session 2005-06, with oral evidence (publications.parliament.uk)
Hansard, House of Commons, Westminster Hall debate on MG Rover, 3 November 2009 (hansard.parliament.uk)
Eurofound, End of the line for MG Rover (2005) and Immediate future of Longbridge secured after sale of Rover to Phoenix consortium (2000) (eurofound.europa.eu)
John Baker, Austin Memories: History of the Company and Longbridge Factory (austinmemories.com)
and other sources
#history #Birmingham #Longbridge #MGRover #Mini #TheVanishedIsles
ℹ️ About this video
Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember.
1 Comments
BMW Sold the Plant That Built the Mini for £10 and It Went Bust in 2005: Longbridge, Birmingham
The Vanished Isles
229 views
In May 2000 the German carmaker BMW let go of the Longbridge car plant in south Birmingham, the works that had been building the Mini for more than forty years, for a nominal ten pounds. It sent the new owners, the Phoenix consortium, on their way with about £500 million in loans: "the very generous dowry which came from BMW", as the chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee later put it. Nine thousand people still worked there. On 8 April 2005 MG Rover went into administration, and within a week most of its six thousand remaining workers had been made redundant. At its height, around twenty-five thousand people had worked on this one site. Car assembly ended for good in 2016, and today no cars are built at Longbridge at all.
This is the story of the works that the south of Birmingham still calls "the Austin", told from the record: the empty printing works Herbert Austin came to see on 4 November 1905 with his wife and his staff of three; the First World War, when more than twenty thousand people, most of them women, made shells, guns and aeroplanes here; the Austin Seven, the shadow factory and the Second World War; Leonard Lord, the Kremlin and the Mini of Alec Issigonis; British Leyland, Derek Robinson and the show of hands in Cofton Park; the Metro and its robots; British Aerospace, BMW and the ten-pound sale.
Then the ending, week by week and year by year: the collapse of the talks with SAIC; the administrators of 8 April; the £6.5 million that paid the wages for one more week; the 5,000 redundancies confirmed on 15 April; the government inspectors' 830-page report on the Phoenix directors; the sale of the assets to Nanjing Automobile, which SAIC itself soon took over; the MG6 and MG3 assembled from kits; and the last car, an MG3, in July 2016, before MG announced on 23 September 2016 that car production at Longbridge was over.
We follow the people the record names: Tony Osborne, the apprentice of 1972 who stayed thirty-three years; Gemma and Andy Cartwright; the core team who built the last Rover by hand in the summer of 2005 and signed it where no buyer would look; and Ken Bullas, the former MG Rover worker who helped open the first store in the new town centre in 2013.
Longbridge itself is very much alive: a new town centre, a college, a park along the reopened River Rea and hundreds of new homes stand on the old works, MG still keeps a small base on part of the site, and the cedar bungalows of Austin Village are a conservation area. What disappeared is the car factory.
What you'll learn
How Herbert Austin turned a failed tin-printing works into a car factory, and how the First World War made it ten times bigger.
Austin Village: two hundred red cedar house kits ordered from Bay City, Michigan, some of them lost to a German submarine, and put up in eleven months for the wartime workforce.
The Mini, British Leyland, the strikes and the robots that built the Metro in 1980.
The ending: BMW's ten-pound sale and the dowry, the week of 8 to 15 April 2005, the government inspectors' report on the Phoenix directors, the kit-built MGs, and what stands on the land now.
Educational and historical content.
Key sources
National Audit Office, The Closure of MG Rover, report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, March 2006 (nao.org.uk)
House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts, The closure of MG Rover, Fifty-seventh Report of Session 2005-06, with oral evidence (publications.parliament.uk)
Hansard, House of Commons, Westminster Hall debate on MG Rover, 3 November 2009 (hansard.parliament.uk)
Eurofound, End of the line for MG Rover (2005) and Immediate future of Longbridge secured after sale of Rover to Phoenix consortium (2000) (eurofound.europa.eu)
John Baker, Austin Memories: History of the Company and Longbridge Factory (austinmemories.com)
and other sources
#history #Birmingham #Longbridge #MGRover #Mini #TheVanishedIsles
ℹ️ About this video
Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember.