ROF Risley, (

Filling Factory A filling factory was a manufacturing plant that specialised in filling various munitions, such as bombs, shells, cartridges, pyrotechnics, and screening smokes. In the United Kingdom, during both world wars of the 20th century, the majority of ...

No.6) was a large World War II

Royal Ordnance Factory Royal Ordnance Factories (ROFs) was the collective name of the UK government's munitions factories during and after the Second World War. Until privatisation, in 1987, they were the responsibility of the Ministry of Supply, and later the Mini ...

filling

munitions Ammunition (informally ammo) is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. Ammunition is both expendable weapons (e.g., bombs, missiles, grenades, land mines) and the component parts of other weap ...

, including the

Grand Slam bomb The Bomb, Medium Capacity, (Grand Slam) was a earthquake bomb used by RAF Bomber Command against German targets towards the end of the Second World War. The bomb was originally called Tallboy Large until the term Tallboy got into the press an ...

, in the UK. It is located roughly halfway between

Liverpool Liverpool is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the List of English districts by population, 10th largest English district by population and its E ...

and

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The ...

World War II

With the advent of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, 927 acres (3.8 km²) of largely

heath A heath () is a shrubland habitat found mainly on free-draining infertile, acidic soils and characterised by open, low-growing woody vegetation. Moorland is generally related to high-ground heaths with—especially in Great Britain—a cooler a ...

and mossland which was part of Risley village, between

Leigh Leigh may refer to: Places In England Pronounced : * Leigh, Greater Manchester, Borough of Wigan ** Leigh (UK Parliament constituency) * Leigh-on-Sea, Essex Pronounced : * Leigh, Dorset * Leigh, Gloucestershire * Leigh, Kent * Leigh, Staff ...

(then Lancashire, now Greater Manchester) and

Warrington Warrington () is a town and unparished area in the borough of the same name in the ceremonial county of Cheshire, England, on the banks of the River Mersey. It is east of Liverpool, and west of Manchester. The population in 2019 was estimat ...

(then Lancashire, now Cheshire), was compulsorily purchased and within it was built a large

. The location was chosen because the low lying mist and cloud helped

camouflage Camouflage is the use of any combination of materials, coloration, or illumination for concealment, either by making animals or objects hard to see, or by disguising them as something else. Examples include the leopard's spotted coat, the b ...

the factory from the air; according to a local builder: "It was very lonely and misty at night, and that's why the factory was constructed there... it was usually covered with a mist or cloud. It was hard to see it in the day time, you know". A part of the site was drained and construction began in August 1939. It took 18 months to complete, but bombs were produced from September 1940. Risley Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) was a filling factory. It received the explosives in bulk, usually by rail, from other ROFs where they were manufactured. Risley specialised in filling them into the various casings to produce the finished munitions. There were 16 filling factories around the country and Risley was known as Filling Factory No. 6. Others in the north west included Chorley (No. 1) and Kirkby (No. 7). One of the features common to all of the filling factories was an area of storage bunkers where the finished munitions were stored awaiting dispatch. The areas within the filling factories were all numbered in the same way. Storage bunkers were designated Area 9. Risley had 20 such bunkers and Area 9 is roughly in the area of the main field in Birchwood Forest Park today. When the new town area of Birchwood was created, most of the bunkers were demolished, but 4 of them were left in place and can still be seen today. A number of bunkers were also built to house the munitions, to protect them from potential bombing, and also to segregate the site and reduce the consequences of any accidental explosions during manufacture or storage. Although these bunkers are on the surface, they are covered with soil and turf and so give the impression of being underground. It had a dedicated rail link to the Manchester-Wigan branch line, which was used both for bringing in workers and moving materials. Also there was a 'halt' on the Liverpool-Manchester line. In the post war years wooden coaches lay derelict there. The actual layout of the site was far from flat, the site having several pillboxes mounted high up on earthbanks surrounding the mounds covering the bunkers. Some of the rail sidings also had huge earthworks around them.

Post-war UKAEA era

However, after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

the factory was soon overshadowed when in January 1946UKAEATODAY May 2006 Issue 79 Page 10, Farewell to Risley, http://www.dounreay.com/UserFiles/File/archive/UKAEA%20Today/ukaeatodayMay06.pdf the Directorate for

Atomic Energy Atomic energy or energy of atoms is energy carried by atoms. The term originated in 1903 when Ernest Rutherford began to speak of the possibility of atomic energy. Isaac Asimov, ''Atom: Journey Across the Sub-Atomic Cosmos'', New York:1992 Plume, ...

Production, under the aegis of the

Ministry of Supply The Ministry of Supply (MoS) was a department of the UK government formed in 1939 to co-ordinate the supply of equipment to all three British armed forces, headed by the Minister of Supply. A separate ministry, however, was responsible for airc ...

, was set up to produce fissile material and chose Risley to build its headquarters, under the control of Sir

Christopher Hinton, Baron Hinton of Bankside Christopher Hinton, Baron Hinton of Bankside (12 May 190122 June 1983) was a British nuclear engineer, and supervisor of the construction of Calder Hall, the world's first large-scale commercial nuclear power station. Career Hinton was born o ...

. This project, to produce a

nuclear weapon A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions ( thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bom ...

or A-bomb was by far the UK's biggest industrial and scientific undertaking in peacetime, requiring most of the country's top scientists and a huge budget and scale that couldn't even be contemplated these days. The early atomic site used many of the old

buildings and also the dedicated raillink to the Manchester/Wigan branch line bringing in workers from

. In 1954UKAEA – THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS, Andy Munn, http://www.caithness.org/fpb/dounreay/history/index.htm the Risley

headquarters Headquarters (commonly referred to as HQ) denotes the location where most, if not all, of the important functions of an organization are coordinated. In the United States, the corporate headquarters represents the entity at the center or the to ...

site was greatly expanded again with the formal establishment of the UKAEA (

United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority is a UK government research organisation responsible for the development of fusion energy. It is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ...

) heralding the beginning of the civil nuclear power program which ran alongside the military one. By this time the organisation had more than 20,000 workers. Design and construction of all other UKAEA plants was overseen here, technical policy and long term planning, finance and administration as well as world leading scientific research in physics, chemistry and engineering. The biggest increase was between 1955 and 1958 when the need for producing much more plutonium and highly enriched uranium and development of new materials such as

tritium Tritium ( or , ) or hydrogen-3 (symbol T or H) is a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen with half-life about 12 years. The nucleus of tritium (t, sometimes called a ''triton'') contains one proton and two neutrons, whereas the nucleus o ...

required for the H-bomb, which the Government announced it would develop in February 1955. By 1961 more than 40,000 were employed, the biggest percentage at the Risley HQ.

Birchwood Forest Park

The disused area of the site was put on the market in 1963. No buyer was found for it until 1968, when the Warrington Development Corporation under government plans bought the site in preparation for building the new town of

Birchwood Birchwood is a town in the Borough of Warrington, Cheshire, England with a population of 11,395 (as at the 2001 census). Although physically and administratively part of Warrington, the civil parish council has named itself a town council. Hi ...

now part of Cheshire in the mid seventies. Birchwood Forest Park is in the centre, in which some of the old

bunker A bunker is a defensive military fortification designed to protect people and valued materials from falling bombs, artillery, or other attacks. Bunkers are almost always underground, in contrast to blockhouses which are mostly above ground. ...

s from the factory form part of the landscape.

Notes

External links

Royal Ordnance Factory, Risley
Note: As of 23 November 2008 this site appears to be non-functional. However, th
Internet Archive
has several cached snapshots.

Birchwood's Wartime Bunkers {{DEFAULTSORT:Risley Economy of Cheshire Filling factories History of Warrington Nuclear weapons infrastructure of the United Kingdom Royal Ordnance Factories in England