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Industrious Ealing by
Anthony Warwick-Ching
Queen of the suburbs or city of a thousand trades? Ealing’s crown may have slipped just a bit, but it has remained surprisingly industrious. Recent figures show that in 2019 almost nine per cent of its workforce was in manufacturing. True, the headcount of 12,000 is a fraction of the numbers once involved in industry, but as a share of total employment it’s nearly four times the average for London (2.3%) and even higher than the figure (8%) for the country as a whole. More remarkably, the past decade has actually seen growth. Between 2010 and 2015 manufacturing jobs rose by a third in Ealing at a time when they were falling or stagnating in the rest of London. And since then – at least till Coronavirus hit - it has held on to those gains. The Factory Mile Ealing is fortunate to have a strong industrial heritage. Though the roots go back to Edwardian times the mainspring was the growth of the
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London economy in the 1920s and 30s. Import protection fostered engineering, a new National Grid fuelled demand for electrical goods and convenience foods had caught on. West London flourished, with dozens of US firms setting up operations. Ealing and its neighbours got the Factory Mile on the Great West Road and new developments along the A40, with newcomers such as Firestone, Pyrene, Hoover, Gillette, Guinness and Heinz commissioning distinguished architects to design their factories. The picture remained buoyant through the war and well beyond. True, the trend faltered in the 1970s, when there were one or two notable closures. AEC, maker of the Routemaster for London Transport, closed in Southall in 1979, with the loss of several thousand jobs, and Park Royal Vehicles followed soon after. Yet at 3.5% Ealing’s unemployment rate stayed below the UK national average.
1980s Cutbacks All this changed in the 1980s. Hammered by record interest rates, an overvalued pound and crippling recession dozens of firms made sweeping cutbacks. From an average 10,000 a year in the late 1970s, redundancies in the GLC area jumped to five times that level in 1981 and higher still in succeeding years. West London bore the brunt. Unemployment shot up to 11.6% for Ealing as a whole and approached 20% in Southall. Economic recovery brought some relief, only for renewed recession to bring a surge in unemployment at the end of the decade. Where were those jobs lost? One of the biggest sources was Park Royal. Shared by Ealing and Brent and similar in area to the City of London, Park Royal opened as an agricultural showground in the 1900s but soon converted to manufacturing. Early activities included iron-making, munitions and rubber processing, but after the First World War more salubrious operations predominated and Park Royal became a legend as one of the largest industrial estates in the country. The 1920s saw Park Royal Vehicles, Heinz Foods, Rank, Landis & Gyr and British Can established, and they were followed in the 1930s by Guinness, Waterlow, Elizabeth Arden and dozens of smaller ventures. Automobile and aircraft engineering, electrical engineering and food processing predominated, and the picture remained much the same after the war. By 1952 Park Royal had five operations with more than 1,000 employees, with Heinz the largest at over 1,500. The sunny years of never had it so good brought further expansion and by the mid60s employment had reached an astonishing 45,000, including no fewer than 3,500 at Heinz. Even after the
Great West Road Putting the People of Ealing First
