Hartcliffe Factory
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View from north-west showing head office building on the right and Western Division factory on the left
Richard Einzig and John Roaf Download Original
Europe’s largest cigarette manufacturing plant at Hartcliffe near Bristol for WD and HO Wills
Skidmore Owings & Merill designed the factory to an irregular plan which was suited to the complex manufacturing process of tobacco, of which there are seventeen phases.
The factory is a single-storey steel structure with an underground level. Tobacco is stored in the basement, with a car park above. The ground floor accommodates the production area with a tunnel linking it to the administative head offices.
Exposed trussses above roof level allow the 80m by 90m floor plates to be column free. A mezzanine on level two runs along the length of the building, accommodating offices and ancillary accommodation.
The head office is a five-storey tower on a two-storey L-shaped podium built over a newly formed lake.
The glazing is bronze-tinted glass within stove-painted aluminium frames. Inside, the walls are concrete block, painted black in the factory and white in the offices, and the floors are mostly vinyl asbestos tiles in the factory, and carpet in the offices.
Data
- Completed: 1974
- Floor area: 277,172m2
- Sector: Industrial
- Tender date: Jan 1969
- Address: Hartcliffe Factory, Bristol, BS13 7TJ, United Kingdom
Professional Team 
- Architect: SOM, YRM
- Client: Imperial Group Ltd, WD & HO Wills
- Structure: Felix J. Samuely
- Services engineer: Steensen Varming Milcahy
- Quantity surveyor: Gleeds
- Landscape architect: Kenneth Booth
- Sound Control: The Wolfson Unit
- Management Contractor: John Laing Construction
- Design Team: Wills Project Group
