Post War Development
The Royal Ordnance Factory closed completely in 1957. However with a boom in the construction trade and many others in the immediate post war years, the site found many new industries requiring the space it could offer.
George Moore (founder of Moores Furniture Group) bought the site near Wetherby in 1960s, converting it into a trading estate.
A major development on the estate (and certainly the biggest employer) is the British Library lending division. This is the British Library's second site, the St Pancras site in Central London is the main site. The British Library Boston Spa, as it is known, is housed in a large eight storey concrete building (with windows set in narrow slits to avoid light damage to the books) and many smaller, with newer buildings set around it.
Moores Furniture Group furniture factory is situated on the estate, as is a Leeds City Council household recycling centre and a sewage works. There are many other small businesses situated on the estate.
Read more about this topic: Thorp Arch Trading Estate
Famous quotes containing the words post, war and/or development:
“I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)