IWA North East & South London Branches, Meridian Cuttings, June 2012

Enfield Rolling Mills was established at Millmarsh Lane in 1924 to process copper brought in barges and this continued until 1974. In 1970 this was the largest British manufacturer of brass, copper, phosphor bronze, zinc and aluminium. A new footbridge crosses the canal beside Mossop Creek. In 1922 Johnson Matthey, Gold Merchants, bought Mossop & Co. at Brimsdown to deal in auto-catalysts, heavy duty diesel catalysts and pollution control systems, components for fuel cells and technologies for chemical processes, fine chemicals, chemical catalysts, pharmaceutical ingredients, marketing, refining, and fabrication of precious metals.

Further along is a British Waterways transhipment depot which until recently transferred cargoes between the road and the canal. The faded notice reads “Warning – 9ft headroom” The extensive red brick buildings upstream of the mill stream was the Ediswan factory. In 1860 Sir Joseph Swan invented the carbon filament electric light bulb, later adopting tungsten filament which began production here, not realising that the American Thomas Edison had patented it. Instead of resorting to legal action they joined forces and in 1886 an old jute factory was taken over by Edison Swan United Electric Light Co. It began producing 5,000 ‘Ediswan’ lamps a day and although initially the company generated its own electricity from 1904 it was supplied by Brimsdown power station.

In 1904 a research team here, led by Dr Ambrose Fleming, invented the thermionic valve which revolutionised wireless and in 1916 Ediswan Co. set up Britain’s first radio valve factory in buildings alongside the Lee. The start of BBC radio broadcasting in 1922 caused a huge demand for wireless sets.

On 2 November 1936 Alexandra Palace started the world’s first high definition television transmissions and we are told that the control room alone used over 500 valves. In the same year the Ediswan engineers established the world’s first cathode-ray tube factory for television sets here and in 1964 started producing colour television tubes. The factory closed in 1984.

Wright’s Mill Stream In 1086 Domesday Book recorded some 40 water mills on the River Lea from Hertford to the Thames. One of them is Wrights Flour Mill which was powered with a branch from the River Lea. It is Enfield’s oldest industrial building, bought by the Wright family in 1867 who partly rebuilt and extended it in 1880. In 1909 the mill was converted to electric power. It now supplies flour to bakers in greater London and also packets of bread mix for supermarkets. The large red brick building was built as a Metropolitan Water Board pumping station and is now converted to a night club Ponders End Lock. The River Lee Navigation continues to be classified as a commercial waterway and eighteen locks between Hertford and Bow drop the water level ±112 ft. Several locks, including Ponders End, were converted to power operation to speed the traffic.

Leave the towing path and turn right to cross the tail of the lock. The River Lea and mill stream can be seen on the right where they flow under the road to join the Navigation by the site of the Visteon factory.

A White Lead Works opened here in 1893 and in 1915 Ponders End Shell Works, a huge munitions plant, opened here; it closed in 1919. In 1963 the site taken over by Ford for production of components for cars but in 1997 a new company Visteon Automotive Systems separated from Ford making car dashboards for Ford, Jaguar, Aston Martin, GM, Renault, Honda and Nissan cars. The UK subsidiary had never been profitable and the US parent company was unable to continue to support the British operation and insolvency led to the closure of all three Visteon UK factories and 565 workers were made redundant.

Workers occupied the plants in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Enfield and after several weeks of protest Ford and Visteon jointly agreed to improve the severance packages.

Continue along the road towards the footbridge. Just beyond the Visteon factory is Thomas Morson & Son Ltd, established at Ponders End since 1901, making a range of pharmaceutical products including Chloroform and Morphine. In 1914-18 war it was required to produce large quantities of poison gas – perhaps chlorine. Merck Sharp and Dohme subsequently acquired the pharmaceutical firm. On the right near the footbridge is the entrance to Wrights Flour Mill; they do not accept visitors as the mill is very busy producing flour for London bakeries.

Cross the footbridge over Mollinson Avenue and the railway to Ponders End railway station and the 191 bus stop in Alma Road.

Michael Essex-Lopresti - 17 -