[Closed] Inside The Factory on BBC2.

Barbour waxed clothing factory,

Isn't this just some people sat at sewing machines somewhere near Newcastle? Bit like Coronation Street but with different accents?

😛

Yes it is weirdly fascinating despite the fact they are normally making something incredibly mundane.

God I am old and boring 😂

Isn’t this just some people sat at sewing machines somewhere near Newcastle? Bit like Coronation Street but with different accents?

there was one in Hackney I'm sure. We'd get lost Japanese folk asking directions. I just assumed they'd gone the wrong way on the old No.6 (later 26) until I found out. Not really on my clothing radar though probably mandatory hipster wear now, for all I know.

From the preview the Barbour episode looks quite educational on waterproofing.

I love it. Its absolutely fascinating. Loved the Ribena factory one just to see the shear vast scale of it. They take about 90% of the UKs blackcurrant crop and produce about a hundred squillion bottles a day

I actually quite like Gregg Wallace because he's basically a huge overgrown kid who wanders round in a constant state of bafflement and wonder

I can identify with that 😀

Saw him once in a curry house as he lives locally. He made his young daughter cry by insisting she pronounced the pudding correctly or she couldn’t have any 😂 Seemed a bit mean. Guess it means the curry house is pretty good though 😀

Wait, what, there are still factorys in the UK then ?

I thought it was all call centers and shared office space's for histers with laptops.

Have worked in a couple of plastics factories for several years as a machine operator. Filthy noisy stinking places & treated like shit. Hated every second of it.

The BBC only shows the nice, clean, well-lit food-grade factories. I've certainly seen some poxy ones in Africa, I think the soap factories are the most unpleasant.

It's almost as if the employer and the producers vet the staff for the shows.

Barbour is based in South Shields I'm not sure how much the make their now but they still do their legendary repair service there.

You'll be able to find out if you watch next Tuesday's episode.

Almost unbelievably, Lusso cycle clothing is 100% made in the UK at an anonymous little factory about 100 yards from where I'm typing this, with about a dozen local women inside stitching the garments together.

"What, you put sugar in your bakewell tarts, what usually comes in bags in shops? That's bonkers!"

"How much of this magical stuff goes in?

"It's a very large number of tonnes Gregg. We supply all 3 corners of the UK"

"That's mental. All that yummy sweetness in a cake. You could have knocked me down with a feather!"

"Aaar many of them chocolate fingers laid end-to-end would it take to reach the moon? Five 'undred billion? You're 'avin' a larf!"

Anyway next Tuesday’s episode is about the Barbour waxed clothing factory, so should be worth a watch.

I hope it starts with a truck load of beehives being dumped onto Gregg Wallace's head.

Binners.

The Ribena factory isn’t as big as you’d think. It doesn’t mill the black currants on site, that used to be at a place in Ledbury. But it also makes nearly all of the Lucozade, which is an even bigger seller.

It’s very nearly a billion bottle per year factory.

Check out "Made in Britain" on ITV with voice over by Jimmy Nail.
We have had carbon fibre fishing rods and policeman's helmets!

My mate runs a few of the factories at Buxton spring, there's hardly any staff needed for the making of plastic bottles apparently. Daughter went there to work in the labs on work experience she enjoyed it but said there was a lot of people sitting around doing nothing. Mr Attenborough has had a huge impact on their sales apparently...

Wait, what, there are still factories in the UK then?

I thought it was all call centres and shared office spaces for hipsters with laptops.

Fixed those for you 😏

Whenever I see Greg Wallace on TV I just want to say to him: "no need to shout, the microphone will work just as well if you talk."

The frightening thing about the show is the realisation that the world’s entire supply of these cakes and biscuits and things come from one massive factory and that if the factory got burned down or armageddon happened, we could possibly be deprived of life essentials like cherry Bakewells or M&S cakes.

Do you not remember the 2016 floods taking out McVitie's factory in Carlisle and causing a nationwide shortage of custard creams?

Was surprised to learn that NB trainers are made in the uk. Never had any but will probably try some now next time I need some! I was even more surprised recently when I belatedly discovered that virtually all Raspberry Pis are made in Wales (pretty much since day 1). I would’ve assumed the Far East had a total stranglehold on the manufacturing of cheap electronics! (I know they are a charity though so they probably get a lot of advantages that helps make it viable)

and Carr's water biscuits

Almost unbelievably, Lusso cycle clothing is 100% made in the UK at an anonymous little factory about 100 yards from where I’m typing this, with about a dozen local women inside stitching the garments together.

Which is one of the reasons I buy their kit.

You'd be surprised by how much storage isn't in these factories also. So many manufacturers have sacrificed what was once their storage areas to increase production areas. I've just finished putting up a big shed which is filled with Christmas puddings of all varieties, all made by the same local company just packaged differently. It's also got shed loads of glenfiddich cardboard tubes in it, these are made and stores down here before being sent up there to be filled.

@wrightyson - don't you think they'd be better using bottles? 😏

I've watched a few of these shows (shouty man notwithstanding) and one thing always referred to in passing is "just in time". A lot of their "storage facilities" are actually articulated lorries moving around the country whether that's incoming materials or outgoing products.

I reckon they should visit Hope.

You’d be surprised by how much storage isn’t in these factories also.

Saw the NB one and thought ooh my trainer of choice is made in the UK,hurrah. I looked inside mine to see made in Vietnam.

I love inside the factory!

Find GW quite annoying though.

I've done some work for a few food factories and used to love getting a factory tour - usually totally devoid of people and exceedingly clean with a series of crazy looking machinery.

The fact that factories dont have storage now could be a big problem if the border crossing points get slowed down by red tape October onwards.

@wrightyson
In Heanor, by any chance?

bigblackshed

Subscriber

Binners.

The Ribena factory isn’t as big as you’d think. It doesn’t mill the black currants on site, that used to be at a place in Ledbury. But it also makes nearly all of the Lucozade, which is an even bigger seller.

It’s very nearly a billion bottle per year factory.

30 years ago I installed 3 big Atlas Copco compressors at the factory in Coleford, if I remember they were the 1st ones we did with energy recovery giving them a lot of pre heated water for their boiler houses saving shed loads of gas.

I now run the engineering department in one of those big food factories you see on "Inside the Factory" as in a flour mill.
Anyone who goes on a tour round always says "where is everyone?" the reply is "this is everyone" PLC control sadly does away with a lot of jobs.

The Barbour company was originally started by two brothers, but one of them flew off the rails drinking and partying.  He was the Barbour black sheep.

Can't understand why you're talking about the Barbour thing and I've already seen it the other day. It must have been on the Made in Britain programme too. It was cool anyway.

I can't help thinking about some of those poor factory workers when Greg gets all excited about a mundane little procedure that they probably perform a million times a week.

Load, stamp, turn, stamp, kill me....Load, stamp, turn, stamp, kill me....Load, stamp, turn, stamp, kill me..... 😉

I've been addicted to How it's Made for a long time so this is like a more drawn out version of that. I like.

@Trimix - indeed. A lot of the existing third party storage has been snapped up which means there's not exactly a lot of wiggle room for anything to get held up. Supply chains for many industries are international and are run to pretty tight schedules.

John Barbour founded the company on his own did he not?

Yeah, love these sort of programmes - this one to (even factoring in Greg's annoying fascination with any mixer and scales bigger than you'd find in your average kitchen). Some of the machinery and automated processes must have a load of thought and testing gone into them

There used to be a Barbour factory round the corner from me in Tweedbank, Scottish Borders. They used to do sales of stuff that had failed its quality control. I purchased my Beaufort jacket at one for about £50. 16 years later I still haven't been able to find the fault that meant it failed Quality!

It’ll be some stitching out of line or the lining not cut right.

MrOvershoot.

10 years ago there was a gas turbine installation that supplies half of the sites electricity. The other choice was laying a new cable across the Bristol Channel.

I now make the bottles on site and supply them through a hole in the wall, “just in time”. 2 to 4 minutes of made bottles per line at any one time. No stocks of made bottles on site. It was a lorry every 20 minutes, 24/7 to supply bottles, now it’s 4 tankers of plastic resin beads per day. We’ve reduced a lot of lorries on the road.

The Ribena factory isn’t as big as you’d think. It doesn’t mill the black currants on site, that used to be at a place in Ledbury.

Nooooo - they got rid of all the onsite blackcurrant processing?  I spent 2 summers working on the mill at that site many years ago - incredible job for paying off student debt if there was a lot of blackcurrants grown that year.  Used to take them up to 9 weeks of 24/7 working to process all the currants.

If there is no mill there, no wonder the place looke dso clean...

Can we have a little more sexist neanderthal male chit chat about Cherry Healey? She went to Cheltenham Ladies' College you know; she's not just any old presenter.

Edit: deleted, too slow

Working in South Africa for 8 years before coming to Spain, I visited hundreds of factories. Everything from meat processing and KFC packaging to huge 3 phase cables and shampoo. Some were nice, but all the metal/steel processing plants were cold and hard places - ready to remove a limb at a moments notice!

The dirtiest factory I visited in the UK was a sugar plant.

The dirtiest factory I visited in the UK was a sugar plant.

Anyone beet that? 😉

Don't think they cane.

I did a shift in a drop forge in Walsall back in the ‘90s when I was on holiday from uni.

A big shed with 8 drop hammers in it, furnace by each to heat the bar to the required temperature to forge gate hinges.

My job was to rake the excess left by the hammer forging into the stillages below the hammers and then tell the bloke with the fork lift when they were nearly full so he could swap them.

12 hour shift, break every couple of hours for a fag/drink.

With ear plugs and ear defenders on you couldn’t hear a thing so no conversation, absolutely baking and filthy.

I never went back after that first day, what got me was that some of the operators had been there for 10 years or more. It really opened my eyes to how crap some jobs could be, even in the late 20th century it was like something from Brunel’s day...

I used to be a food technologist working at the Mr Kipling factory ....

I believe the producer off the puddings is there. The shed I built is in denby just outside of Ripley.

Which is the reason the shed building boom continues...

A sugar factory in the UK that's actually clean? Demerara.

@wrightyson that makes sense, not much space near the actual factory. They were held up as an example of production on my business course, producing 11 months of the year for effectively one month actual sales.

@MoreCashThanDash Thorntons were similar back in the day going for Easter and Christmas, the original belper site is just about down.
Were you studying Mr walker or the 2sisters group?