Forums Forums Wirral History : Chasing the Past History Information Request Bidston Steel Mill

I rememeber the Green Sheds it was MASSIVE long that is.
I'm sure it had yellow in it too.

Would be good to see any pictures about it

I remember it too,was along side the rail track on way to birkenhead north station and as far as I know the whole building was taken down, shipped to China (or somewhere like that), then rebuilt!

The only pictures and information on the internet I can find are the following:

In 1987, the 80-ton electric arc furnace, capable of producing 275,000 tons of reinforced steel bars a year, was up for sale.

In 1989 , the giant Bidston steel mill was dismantled piece-by-piece and rebuilt as the Zhang Jia Gang municipal steel mill in China's Jiangsu Province.

You were right.

Wasn't there a time when they went Blue too ?

anyone have anymore information on this?

Would be great to see some more pics of the steel mill, also some of valley road and the footy pitches!

I remember when i was a kid looking out of the bedroom window and being able to see all the sparks & sheets of molten flame as they poured & pressed the metals, the men reminded me of orcs from LoTR & work never stopped, but you got used to the noise and never really noticed it. Also you had to be careful crossing over the bottom of stanley Rd by the penny bridge as freight trains crossed into the steelworks complex day & night. Practically every man living in the north end avenues worked at the steelmill & you'd see them en masse going to work at shift change swearing & laughing

Valley road playing fields now belongs to tranmere rovers and is a practice field & the other half of it is valley road industrial estate. The building in the photo to the left of the green shedding is still there .. it has belonged to park hampers since the early eighties and overlooks the Gautby Rd yachting lake which is still in use & is today as i type full of canada geese .
The land the green shed stood on in the photo now belongs to the Wirral Tennis centre & is madeover to astroturf for five a side footie matches & behind that of course is the Bidston moss TEscos.

To the Right ... sorry... If anyone can remember where i can buy wellies with big letters R & L on them it might be a help to me.

Wasn't there a fibre glass works before they put the steel works there?

I refereed a lot at Valley road. Nice pitches.

Managed to find 2 pics of the Steel Mill

great pics thanks for sharing

Thanks for the pics

My husband went there for an interview. A few days later was offered the job.A another few days later was informed it was closing down!

Yes there was a fibreglass works there. There was a white powder that came out of the factory and killed off all the tress nearby. Before that you had a factory making 3 wheeler motor cars and a dunlop factory. in Valley road.

We are now at the thick end of the wedge RIP British Steel

I believe the three wheeler cars were called Gordons.

The factory that made Gordon cars was called Vernon industries, owned by Vernon Sangster who had Vernons pools.

The one and only model of car they produced for 4 years.



Prior to that they produced invalid cars (invacars) for at least two years.

If my memory serves me correctly, there was no reverse gear in a Gordon. To go backwards, you turned the ignition knob on the dash to off, then the "wrong way". The engine started up again - running backwards. A weirdo two-stroke! You could work your way through the gears at the same speed as going forward. A brown adrenaline moment as a passenger! My friend and fellow apprentice had one. I questioned his parentage !

I think they had the same flywheel starter/ generator as the Bond Threewheeler, it was a Siba Dynastart, with two sets of points, one for forward and one for reverse. When you turned the key one way it started forward,the other way for reverse once the engine was running it worked as a generator, quite efficient too, I'm not sure whether they used the same Villiers 9E engine as the bond, but probably did. When I had my first car (a Bond) in the early 60s I was on top of the world, I did some miles in that car, not that Id like to do it now. You'd never keep up with the traffic and you needed a bit of notice for the brakes.

Reminds me of the Scott Squirrel 2 stroke motorcycles which, if you didn't set the manual spark advance/retard lever correctly, would run backwards when started: of course, you didn't discover this until you let out the clutch.

That could have been "interesting" to say the least !!

The Gordon did have a Dynastart fitted but it also had a gearbox with reverse with just a metal bar fitted to stop the change mechanism moving into reverse.They were mostly bought by people with a motorcycle licence but for people with a full licence the bar was removed.There were two types of engine fitted. The Villiers and for a bit more power the British Anzani 250 cc. A problem that they had was, as the chain driving the axle was on the right hand side behind the engine and gearbox and were driven with a two stroke mix which was lean on oil it could seize the engine and cause a swerve to the right towards approaching traffic.

My book "Sixteen Decades in Wallasey" has a whole chapter dedicated to the time I spent working at Bidston Steel. The steel plant has now been replaced by a Tesco Superstore, it has all but disappeared off the face of the earth.
It supplied well over 300 people with high paid jobs, and security for their families. Until we were sold down the river by the government, but more of that in my book.
Some twenty years after the plant had closed May Whitenbury organised a Twentieth Anniversary Party.

Appendix 5 in my book has a full list of all the staff who worked at the Bidston Steel Mill.

https://www.roydutton.co.uk/my-books/sixteen-decades-in-wallasey/bidston-steel/