Friday Photo: former IMI gatehouse, Perry Barr.
Today’s Friday photo is the newly grade II listed gatehouse to the former IMI factory on Wellhead Lane. The gatehouse was originally built in 1915 for Kynoch Company, who at that time was manufacturing munitions for the first world war. It is the only surviving buildings from the factory site. The Victorian society called for the buildings to be listed as they are an important part of Birmingham’s industrial heritage. The buildings are currently under threat from demolition, as the site is a new faith school. As the photo shows the buildings are now covered over, but I am not sure what is going to happen to them and if they will be incorporated into the new school or if they will be demolished.
I’m pretty confident that the Kynoch works were amongst the first okaces where early work happened on the Tube Alloys atomic bomb project. The Kynoch print works did some experiments with creating filters to separate out Uranium 235 – an essential first process to create a bomb small enough to be carried and dropped from the air. It’s an important place!