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Plant Oxford located in Cowley, southeast Oxford, England, is a BMW car assembly facility where Mini cars are built. The plant forms the Mini production triangle along with Plant Hams Hall where engines are manufactured and Plant Swindon where body pressings and sub-assemblies are built.
The original Morris Motors site at Cowley had three manufacturing plants, separated by the eastern Oxford Ring Road and B480 road. The present site of Plant Oxford was the car body manufacturing business of the Pressed Steel Company, later known as Pressed Steel Fisher, which was founded in 1926. The north and south car assembly plants were originally Morris Motors plants, later part of British Leyland and latterly the Rover Group. The whole site was reorganised in the 1990s and now only the original Pressed Steel portion of the site remains.
To facilitate more efficient production, the Great Western Railway opened Morris Cowley railway station to serve the thousands of workers commuting to the factory. In 1933, they built a railway goods yard beside the Wycombe Railway to bring supplies into the factory, and take completed vehicles away. This railway yard still exists today and serves the current vehicle-manufacturing plant, though the railway to High Wycombe has long been lifted.
As Cowley expanded into a huge industrial centre, it attracted workers during the Great Depression looking for work. This resulted in the need for new housing, including from the 1920s Florence Park, built mainly by private . Like many contemporary industrialists of the time, Morris wanted to provide for the whole life of its workers, and so developed the Morris Motors Athletic & Social Club on Crescent Road, which still exists today.
Despite successive company mergers and name changes, "Morris's" is still often used as the name of the car factory to this day. A brief timeline of the plant's history is as follows:
By the early 1970s, over 20,000 people worked in Cowley at the vast British Leyland and Pressed Steel Fisher plants. After re-organisation, PSF became part of the reorganised Austin Rover, while parts Unipart was floated off in a management buyout, but still has its global headquarters next to the Morris plant. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Cowley Assembly Plant (the former Morris Motors factory) faced a high level of industrial action, a problem which successive management teams struggled to resolve.
Much rationalisation took place at the plant in the early 1980s, as BL restructured its manufacturing operations in the light of the Ryder Report. Production of the Austin Maxi ended in 1981 to make way for the Honda-based Triumph Acclaim, whilst production of the Princess range was axed in 1981 to allow the arrival of production of the Rover SD1 following the closure of the car production lines at Solihull, which was retained solely for the production of Land Rover vehicles. Future large Rovers would therefore be built at Cowley until the BMW sell-off in 2000.
The Morris marque was abandoned in 1984, when production of the Longbridge-built Morris Ital finished; it had been transferred there from Cowley in September 1982, two years after its launch. The transfer of the Ital from Cowley was to make way for the Austin Maestro and Austin Montego, which were launched in March 1983 and April 1984 respectively, continued in production until December 1994, though production was gradually cut back after 1989 following the launch of the successful Longbridge-built Rover 200 and 400 series models.
In 1992, Rover Group sold the entire site to property group Arlington Securities, itself later sold to the property company Macquarie Goodman, now the Goodman Group and most of the old site was demolished.
Owner of Rover Group, British Aerospace, agreed a partnership with Honda, with Honda taking a 20% stake in the company, in return for joint-development of the new Rover 600 and 800, both produced at Cowley. The 800 Series had been launched in mid 1986 and facelifted at the start of 1992; a year before the launch of the 600 Series.
Despite 1989 seeing a then record of more than 2.3 million new cars being sold in the United Kingdom, falling demand for the 800 Series resulted in 1,800 job cuts at Cowley being announced in October of that year.
On 31 January 1994, BAe announced sale of its 80% majority share of Rover Group to BMW. On 21 February, Honda announced it was selling its 20% share of Rover Group, resulting in problems in Rover's supply chain which was highly reliant on Honda. BMW invested heavily in Rover, and particularly the Cowley plant, which became the production centre for the new Rover 75 in late 1998. However, when BMW broke up the Rover Group on its sale 18 months later, production of the Rover 75 was switched to Longbridge, while BMW retained the rights to build the new Mini and retained the Cowley plant to produce it at.
BMW agreed to redevelop the entire Cowley plant site with the Goodman Group, demolishing much of the factory, to create a new factory called Plant Oxford. The residual parts of the former Morris Motors site were placed into a redevelopment project called the Oxford Business Park, which now houses offices of numerous companies including: European headquarters of Harley-Davidson ; the global headquarters of international aid charity Oxfam; Wiley-Blackwell; Royal Mail; HM Revenue and Customs; and a large David Lloyd fitness centre.
Plant Oxford now produces the new Mini, built by BMW since May 2001. It is the largest industrial employer in Oxfordshire. In February 2009, 850 jobs cuts at the site were announced, resulting in union bosses being pelted with food by angry agency staff who felt that the union had failed to do enough to try and save their jobs. Shortly thereafter, the company was forced to hire more staff to meet production requirements due to an upswing in demand overseas.
Group tours of the plant are offered and should be booked in advance.
In October 2015, a two-episode series Building Cars Live was filmed there to show how a car is built. It was presented by James May, Kate Humble and Ant Anstead.
Production volumes of all Mini models produced at Plant Oxford.
| 4,930 |
These figures exclude production numbers of the Mini Countryman, which was manufactured in Austria. Since 2014 Mini "hatch" 3-door and "convertible" models have also been assembled, under contract, by VDL Nedcar in Netherlands, joined, at the end of 2016, by the Mini Countryman model, its production now transferred from Austria in anticipation of the launch of a "plug-in hybrid" version.
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