History
Welwyn Garden City’s Shredded Wheat factory has the list of the past century’s best buildings and will appear in the London Landmarks in The 20th Century, Society’s 100 Buildings 100 Years Book. This is upsetting when you find out the building is set for demolition soon. Shredded Wheat was first produced in the USA in 1893 with Cereal Partners opening this first factory in the UK in 1926. With its tall bright white concrete silo’s forming part of a local landmark and the only ones of their type left in Britain. Its therefore surprising that these unusual Grade II Listed structures are not being spared demolition.
Tesco’s purchased the site a couple of years ago after its closure in 2008 with the intention of saving the building and redeveloping it into a shopping centre, with the wonderful silo’s being turned into a rooftop cafe. However once the plans were made public some of the other local supermarkets appealed to the council and Tesco’s plans were retracted. This left Tesco with a building that was simply useless to them. Then later the council deemed “too expensive for repair” and this affected it Listed status. Leading Tesco to decide to demolish the factory.
The visit
Upon arriving I started by capturing some drone flyovers as it was raining most of the the day but it let out just long enough for a quick fly round. I particularity like how the overcast sky compliments the white silos. Also the dull weather translated into the video giving it a dismal atmosphere.
Once I started exploring the location I was taken aback at the size of this now empty factory. It was so quite that I couldn’t help but imagine how nosy the place would have been at the peak of its output.
However I was unfortunately caught by the building security that polity asked us to leave. This was a real shame as I barley scratched the surface of this location. Yet I still managed to capture a few successful images.
One challenge with this shoot I encountered was most of the inside of the factory was extremely dark, forcing me to use my flash in several shots, This was a problem because I feel it washes out the images and restricts my ability to edit it in post.
Below are the images I selected for Editing in light room. These images just had basic things manipulated like contrast and lighting. I choice to only do simple edits as I wasn’t overly happy with the way these images turned out. This is because the location was to dark an my camera cannot handle low light very well due to the small crop sensor in a D3000.
However I really liked the effect the paint peeling had as it gives an odd texture to the images, It also highlights how long the building has remained un-maintained. My favourite images where the celling is reflected of small puddles of water on the floor (created by the rain that nearly prevented my drone fly over). These reflections give a strange perspective as the water shows you part of the building that would of normally been missed if the wasn’t a puddle. The image also has clear leading lines created by the reflections and the celling, drawing your eye to the rear wall
Time 