When you think of headquarters or flagship stores, many people think of huge fancy buildings in the middle of London. That wasn’t the case for one household name, though – as they built their huge UK head office in a suburb of a town in Essex.
The UK head office of Ford Motor Group was built in the early 1960s in Warley, just outside of central Brentwood, and was intended to be a sort of replica of the head office in Dearborn, Michigan, according to Blurred Boundaries.
It sits on the site of the old Warley regimental depot and barracks, with only the officers’ mess and gym remaining to this day. Employees would then move in in 1964, many of them relocating from the former UK office on Ford’s Dagenham estate.
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The Warley site would be the base of all the top dogs in the Ford UK operation, including chairman Andy Barratt. Over 50 years later in 2018, Ford announced that it would be closing its site in Warley and moving the operation to Duntan Technical Centre and the Dagenham Diesel Centre by the end of September 2019.
Following the closure, the offices at Warley were flattened to make way for some 400 new houses. The flats have now been built, by developer LandCharter, and are named Warley HQ with a steering wheel as its logo – most likely giving a subtle nod to its past.
The flats are absolutely gorgeous, and have amenities many of us only dream of! Complete with a gym, cinema room, games room, cafe and so much more, the new flats are definitely not a waste of the site.
There is even underground parking, bike store and electric chargers ensure flexible commuting within the site. Brentwood station is a mere 20 minutes walk away offering an easy and direct route to London – making these flats an absolute dream for commuters!
The best flats in the block don’t come cheap, though – take the three-bedroom, three-bathroom penthouse for £1.25million for example, that has now been sold. One and two-bedroom apartments at the development were also available with prices starting at £275,000 and £400,000 respectively.