Take A Look Around Shrewsbury's Sentinel Works

Take A Look Inside Shrewsbury's Sentinel Works

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Edward Goddard, I'm Director of Passon Enterprises, in turn part of Morris

00:06Lubricants and we're here today at the Sentinel Works in Shrewsbury. We as a

00:11company purchased the site about six or seven years ago and since then we've

00:16been renting the site to Radius who have been on the site

00:21making parts for various engineering sort of background type of things but

00:27they've just decided that they're moving their operation to Sheffield so the

00:31site's been on a sort of shutdown over the last six months and we've got it

00:35handed back to us on the beginning of September so we're now looking

00:40towards its future and our plan is to move some of our business up here into a

00:46major part of the site and then split the rest of the other site up into

00:51future tenants hopefully. Sentinel Wagon Works or Ali McClellan

00:55moved, they originally were based in Palmerdee in Glasgow and they were

01:04looking to move south and looking for a new manufacturing base in the year just

01:09after the, well sort of just before the First World War really and they

01:13moved down here and started, decided on Shrewsbury and built a new works you

01:18know a purpose-built works here in opening in 1915 and they brought

01:23everything with them, the steel girders and literally the bricks and everything

01:27else and brought the workforce with them, built their houses, put the works, you

01:31know started the works and the houses to put their workforce in at the time to

01:34build their wagons. I'm biased but I think well undoubtedly Sentinel were the

01:40if not the number one, certainly very close to being the number one wagon

01:43manufacturer of the time so yeah they were quite technologically advanced

01:48with their Sentinel wagons and yeah they were looking to expand their

01:53business and I guess they wanted to bring their wagons nearer to where their

01:55marketplace were. I think we we looked upon this site when we purchased it

02:01really because it was the closest place to our existing works down in Castle

02:07Forgate in Shrewsbury. We looked at it as an investment at the time but also

02:12with the possibility that we could expand in the future if and when

02:16something happened and obviously that time has arrived now and the

02:19opportunities come which has been actually quite fortuitous from our point

02:23of view. It's given us being able to move our business forward by moving up

02:27here and creating some space at Castle Forgate so it's an exciting move for us

02:32you know it's moving up here is a major step but it's in the history of the

02:37business but but it's yeah I think it enables us to move forward again so it's

02:41an exciting step.