INDUSTRY

In 1844 Joseph Wright built his Saltley Carriage Works beside the new Derby (Midland) Line, north of Saltley High Street. It prospered with the great expansion of railways at home and abroad. By the 1860s another works was producing rolling stock on the restricted site between the London & North Western Line and Arden Road: by the century's end the Britannia Works had filled the site. A third works, the Midland, was built on Washwood Heath west of Common Lane. By 1862 Wright's works had become the Metropolitan Carriage & Wagon Co. with 1200 workers, most of them from Birmingham: it was making engine components as well as rolling stock, and had a flourishing export trade.

The next year Adderley Park Iron Works, engaged in steel rolling, was opened south of the new station. Extractive industry came to south Saltley with the Atlas (later the Britannia) Brick & Tile Co. about 1880: this and the Adderley Park and Globe Works were to delve deeply into the red clay, creating a hundred-acre area of pits north of Garrison Farm. The only other claypit in the manors was the City Brick Works east of Anthony Road, established about 1890. Between the Gloucester Extension line and Bordesley Green Road, factories - the Compressed Air Power Co., Whitworths, the Crown, and other metal-working concerns - appeared in the last Victorian years, as did the Universe Works on Garrison Street.

Saltley's prosperity was built on bricks, powered by gas, and moved on railway wheels. The Wolseley Motor Works, an offshoot of the Sheep-Shearing Co., came to Common Lane before World War One, and like most other factories expanded rapidly to carry out war work contracts. A National Shell Factory was built at Washwood Heath. Early this century five rolling-stock manufacturing companies, including the Metropolitan, had amalgamated: in 1927 the Midland Co. joined the group, which was thenceforth known as Metro-Cammell.

Between the wars Wolseley factories at Washwood Heath and Adderley Park (the former Britannia and Iron Works) were taken over by Morris, and the former became the Morris Tractor Works, the latter Morris Commercial Vehicles. Even before the Second World War the old dependence on railway stock was lessening: machine tools, cycles, electrical goods, lorries and vans, and components, were being produced in factories large and small. On Fordrough Lane the Post Office established its own works in the 1920s, and Southalls their Chardford Mills on Alum Rock Road.

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