Ford Dagenham

Ford Dagenham is a major automotive factory located in Dagenham, London, operated by the Ford of Britain subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. The plant opened in 1931 and has produced 10,980,368 cars and more than 39,000,000 engines in its history. It covers around 475 acres and has received over £800 million of capital investment since 2000.

Vehicle assembly ceased at the plant in 2002, but it continues as a major production site with capacity to assemble 1.4 million engines a year. In 2008, the plant produced around 1,050,000 engines and was the largest producer of Ford diesel engines globally. It was announced in October 2012 that the stamping plant at Dagenham would close in summer 2013 with the loss of 1,000 jobs. Employment at the plant peaked at around 40,000 workers in 1953.

Following the change to only building engines, it now employs around 2,000 people.

Planning of the Dagenham plant began in the early 1920s, a time when lorries were small and road networks little developed. In the UK, bulk supplies were still delivered by water transport, so the Dagenham plant, like the Ford Trafford Park plant which it would replace, needed good water access. Dagenham on the southern estuarial edge of Essex offered the prospect of a deepwater port which would allow for bulk deliveries of coal and steel on a far larger scale than the barges of the Manchester Ship Canal could manage at the old plant. In 1924, Ford Motor Company purchased land in the Dagenham marshes for £167,700.

The Dagenham plant began producing Fordson tractors in 1933. This was originally the task of the plant in Cork City, Ireland (the first purpose-built Ford manufacturing plant to be located outside of the United States), however, following the establishment of the Irish Free State (which broke away from the United Kingdom) in December 1922, the British government imposed a tariff on the import of Free State manufactured goods into Great Britain. This made the production cost of Ford machinery for the British tractor market largely un-economical. All tractors assembled in Cork City were instead shipped to the US for distribution, with production of tractors suspended in this plant from 1923 to 1928. While production of Fordson tractors resumed in Cork City in 1928, this function was moved permanently from the Cork City plant to the Dagenham plant in Greater London, England, in 1933.

On 17 May 1929, Edsel Ford marked the start of construction on the site by cutting the first turf in the marshes. Construction on the site continued for 28 months and required around 22,000 concrete piles to be driven down through the clay of the marshland site to adequately support a factory that from the start was planned to incorporate its own steel foundry and coal-fired power station.

At the time when the plant was planned, western governments were increasingly responding to economic depression with protectionist policies. This was the context in which Henry Ford’s policy of setting up relatively autonomous car-manufacturing businesses in principal overseas markets can be seen. The drive for self-reliance implicit in including within the Dagenham plant its own steel foundry and power station nevertheless went beyond anything attempted by other European mass-production automakers such as Morris in England, Opel in Germany, or Citroën in France. Inspiration for Ford's Dagenham plant came more directly from Ford's own Rouge River plant on the edge of Detroit.

The first vehicle out of the Dagenham plant was a Ford AA van, produced in October 1931. However, the British economy was in a depressed condition at this time, and the surviving local market for light trucks was dominated by Morris Commercial products. Production at Ford's Dagenham plant got off to a slow start, but picked up as the British economy recovered, so that by 1937, the plant produced 37,000 vehicles, an annual total that would not be exceeded until 1953. Most of the output of the Dagenham plant during the 1930s consisted of various editions of the Ford 8, a successful model first built at Dagenham in 1932, which probably inspired the even more successful Morris 8, first produced at Cowley in 1935 by the UK market leader of the late 1930s.