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The World is
our Home Market ,
from
Iceland
near the Arctic to the Falkland Islands near the Antarctic; from
the Peruvian Andes to the tropical jewels of the South Pacific, across
the burning sands of Arabia to
China and the tropical jungles of
South East Asia you will find our work.
In
Europe you will find our buildings in
Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Spain, Holland, Belgium,
Germany, Poland, Bosnia‑Herzegovina, Albania and Italy. France
especially has hundreds
of our industrial and agricultural buildings including
3 hangars and
workshops erected in 1921 for Louis Bleriot the famous aviation pioneer.
We have been making Aircraft Hangars to jumbo size ever since. In 1940
we supplied several dozen emergency hospitals to the British
Expeditionary Forces, some of which we still keep discovering in use for
all sorts of purposes. All over Germany we have erected many
large, modern, factory buildings. In Russia, at Uralkali in the
Ural Mountains, we provided a large brick factory and supervised the
complete erection and cladding and recently shipped 5 cold store
buildings Ro/Ro via Denmark on German and Russian trucks to St
Petersburg. The same day a fully sound proofed generator building was
trucked out on Polish vehicles to Zawierce in Poland. We recently
sent 64 trucks to the Czech Republic with a complete
factory
building of 184,000 sq ft for making capacitors. This was closely
followed by several industrial buildings to Latvia and Kazakhstan.
In
North Africa our structures are in
Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Even in the little Moroccan port of Larache, some 50 miles down the
African coast from Tangier, there are 18 of our buildings used as
hangars, go‑downs and customs houses.
In the Gulf States of
Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Abu
Dhabi, Dubai, Fujeira, Sharjah and Ras AI Khaimah, countless
of our buildings
are in use as warehouses, aircraft hangars, military or police
workshops, and offices. We recently designed and made the new
Emirates
Airlines hangar and
Air Cargo Terminal for Dubai International
Airport. We also designed and made a 48m clear span and two 18m, 16
sided domes for a Majlis (Parliament) building in the Gulf, as well as
the big Police Motor Workshop, VIP car park and many school buildings in
Qatar. In Oman we supplied the Land Rover showroom and
workshop, several Government training centres and warehouses.
In
Saudi Arabia our buildings have even
found their way into the Holy City of Medina where there is a bus
terminal complete with cleaning plant and office block, all of which
were erected by Egyptian contractors without our help. At Jeddah there
are many of our portal structures and a large
multi‑storey building
which contains offices, flats and a shopping centre.
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All the main airlines have offices there. At Riyadh there are many
industrial buildings, in particular a large glass reinforced cement
panel factory amounting to 323 shipping tonnes sent onwards by truck
from Jeddah and successfully erected without problems by local
contractors. On the East Coast at Damman there is an impressive shopping
complex whose Arabic arches are a well known and much imitated landmark,
with other subsidiary buildings, as
well as a
government training establishment

incorporating
12 of our buildings amongst the first to be imported into the Kingdom.
In
Iraq our portal structures have reached
Baghdad, Kirkuk and Basra as oil company workshops, wellhead stores,
generator stations and offices. Northwards to the
Caspian Sea Port
of Baku in Azerbaijan we made the complete structure for a new
BMW showroom. Cross the border to Iran and you will find another
of our buildings in that ancient city of Tabriz. In
Jordan we
supplied and supervised the erection at Wadi‑el‑Yabis of one of the
biggest Horticultural distribution centres in the Middle East.
In
Yemen we have supplied over 30 substantial
buildings for use as factories, cold stores, workshops and port transit
sheds mainly for Ministries and Public Corporations in the South and in
the North we have provided many large
factory buildings and workshops as
well as agricultural buildings for chicken hatcheries, dairy product
stores, a baby‑feed factory, a gas bottling plant at Taiz and a
pharmaceutical factory with warehouses in Sana'a.
In
Eritrea, on the Red Sea, a number of our
lattice portals were used to build a large agricultural school in 1934,
while in Ethiopia, on the single‑track railway line from
AddisAbaba to Djibouti, the steel framework and cladding for every one
of the 22 railway stations was supplied by us in 1936. This line, in
1984, carried 1,000 tonnes of our steel buildings for 20 large grain
stores to help with
famine relief
at Nazareth in
Ethiopia.
We were back in
Djibouti again 47 years later
to erect a generating station, bottling plant and associated buildings
in the Gulf of Tadjoarah. Our engineer lived in a mud dwelling with a
French crocodile hunter, an Ethiopian and an Eritrean, no air
conditioning but several scorpions and snakes. There was almost no water
but they managed with beer.
In 1990 we
shipped a large number of produce store buildings through
Djibouti

destined for
Sudan, 25 for Gezira, 11 for Rahad, 8 for new Halfa and 3 for
Suki. For Kenana Sugar Company of Khartoum we supplied two large
warehouses and associated buildings.
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We have recently been to
Somalia building
warehouses, offices and workshops at Berbera and Mogadishu for the
United Nations Relief Organisation. Berbera was the home of the Barbary
pirates of 200 years ago and, amongst other things a base for RAF
Spitfires during World War 2. In Kenya we made the workshop at
Kifaru Camp for the army.
Almost every trip overseas has its interesting times,
like being jailed for opening our own bolt crates, having fried cucumber for breakfast lunch and
dinner every day and shaving with Coca Cola, as well as being held up by
bandits and by the Police!
In
Sri‑Lanka we supplied and supervised the
erection of 6 rice stores for the Paddy Marketing Board, starting on
sites at Maragahawewa (in the Wipatu National Park) and Huruluwewa near
Anuradhapura, that fascinating ancient capital city and religious
centre. The work was interrupted on the site at Adampan for a short
period because of a thoughtless chap who waded across at low tide from
India and brought cholera with him.
Further up the
Indian sub‑continent we shipped
a new paint factory to Bangalore. For Bangladesh we recently
supplied 18,000M˛ of warehousing for the Port of Chittagong in spite of
the efforts of sundry typhoons to disrupt the work.

Our warehouses, factories and assembly halls have
been erected as far away as Rarotonga, that tiny paradise isle in
the South Pacific 1,633 miles N.E. of New Zealand and 12,434
miles from London Docks, while 1,400 miles to the West a
warehouse and
market building is to be found in Fiji and a further 900 miles
west in New Caledonia there are trading stations and warehouses
supplied by us so long ago we can't remember when.
During 1988 we designed and made steelwork for the
two 180ft spans of the 360ft Ngalimbu
bridge in the
Solomon Islands
financed by British Aid from the Overseas Development Administration
and ordered by
the Crown Agents. They also ordered a large workshop and crane for Santo
in the Vanuatu group of islands (New Hebrides). Our first
two buildings for Santo were for the French Oil Research station in
1965. They were erected within 14 weeks of leaving our works. In 1987/88
we shipped 2 big workshops complete with overhead cranes, for the P.W.D.
New Zealand has 395 of our buildings, including a small
country‑town church and in Australia our structures can be found
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