Racal Electronics was finally demolished in June 2008, after lying empty for eight years. Attempts had been made to sell the factory to another industry, so as to keep the buildings and provide some work for the town, but alas wasn't to be.
Plans for the site included a hotel plus luxury riverside apartments and a path with picnic areas alongside the river. It hasn't quite turned out that way. There is a Premier Inn on the front part of the site now, but it's nothing like the lovely ArtDeco building envisaged on the plans and, to be honest, looks nothing more than three boxes stuck together! I don't know if anything else has been built yet as I haven't been able to get down there to have a look, which I will try and do before finishing the fourth part of this series.
History and information about the building can be seen on Part One, the first article for Racal.
I was alerted about the demolition by a friend on Derelict Places, the forum that we both belonged to. Most fortunately, he happened to see it whilst driving past and I managed to get down there just in time to take some photos.
Sad as it was, it was really nice to see this side of the long factory building, as you can't see the top properly from the narrow river path on the other side where I took my previous photos from.
The crew were in the process of erecting hoardings around the site and demolition was already well under way. Happily, I was able to see quite a bit before the hoardings blocked the view.
One of the many things I loved about this site was the amount of flowering shrubs, roses and other plants, in and surrounding the grounds. Sadly, they were all ripped out.
I continued down along the lane to the end of the buildings. To the left of the car park gate, below, was the path leading to the pigeon lofts (seen in the article before the Racal ones).
And lo and behold, the God of Urbex was surely with me that day, as part of the hoarding was open! I snuck in. ;)
One of the blokes spotted me and wouldn't let me go too far in of course, but he did kindly allow me to take a few photos from where I stood just inside the site.
Just as I was leaving, I had an opportunity to take a photo of the inside through a partially demolished window in the front building (below).
As I have a lot more photos of the remains afterwards - including some bits and pieces that were left and that I hadn't seen before - I decided to make a Part Four. On my now defunct website I only had two pages; the explores for one and the demolition plus remains for the second, with just a few photos on each page and the rest in the photo gallery. However, with no gallery on my blog I now include all the photos on the pages where possible, often also rewriting and adding much more information, which would make these too long and unwieldy.
So, four parts it is, with Part Four coming up next. :)
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