In early July, I learned that the demolition of the old HP Sauce factory in Birmingham had commenced. Upon hearing that the factory on Tower Road was to be torn down, people came to the factory to pay their last respects to the place which had employed the local community for over 100 years.

Today I have a followup to the “Demolition Commences on Historic Birmingham HP Sauce Factory” story which was published on July 7th. Since that time, Brown Sauce news coming out of Birmingham has been pretty quiet. Presumably there is not much more that can be said on the subject. The factory is gone, and with every passing day a little bit more of the old structure falls to the ground as workers continue their demolition work at the site.

There is one individual however who has taken it upon himself to document the demolition of the factory and to my knowledge he is the only person doing so. Francis (gas850 on youtube) was gracious enough to share both his videos with us as well as a few thoughts on why it was important for him to document this event.

I got my camera in June (and how i wished i had it when i went to see Girls Aloud in May) and just before then a friend of mine had joined You Tube. He got me to join and i put some videos on it and I found how easy it was to do. The HP sauce factory is near to where I work and all my life I have gone past it very often. When the Bullring shopping centre was pulled down to make way for the new one, afterwards I wished I wish I had some photos of my own. So when the HP Sauce factory was about to be pulled down I decided to take some photos and do a video of it so I done my first video. I put it on You Tube and then when the building started to come down I felt it would be a good idea to do a video every week so that is how it all started. It is very sad to see another land mark building in Birmingham been knocked down, so many of the places I knew as a child have changed so much in only a few years. - Francis

Francis is updating youtube with new videos every few days so I would encourage all those interested to follow up at his youtube profile page for updates. Please enable javascript in your browser for viewing the demolition videos directly from brownsauce.org.

Thank you Francis for documenting the demolition, your efforts are very much appreciated!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 10:25am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.