Our Patch July 2015
LOOKING
BACK
Workers at Gwynnes
Engineering
Company in
Hammersmith in
the early 1900s
GWYNNES
T
he hole in the ground
where Riverside Studios is
currently being rebuilt in
Crisp Road once played a
key part in Hammersmith’s
industrial past.
The firm of Gwynnes was founded in
1849 for the manufacture of centrifugal
pumps. In 1867 two members of the
Gwynne family started the separate
business of Hammersmith Iron Works
at Chancellors Wharf in Queen’s Road
(later renamed Crisp Road).
A merger in 1903 saw the whole
operation centralised in Hammersmith.
H A M M ERS M IT H
By the beginning of the 20th
Century, Gwynnes had won national
and international recognition for
its ‘Invincible’ centrifugal pumping
machinery.
In 1914 Gwynnes was commissioned
by the Admiralty to manufacture rotary
aero engines for the Royal Naval Air
Service. The Crisp Road site was fully
occupied in making pumps so the
company opened another works at
Church Wharf, Chiswick, formerly the
site of Thorneycroft shipbuilders.
After the First World War the
Chiswick works concentrated on motor
car manufacture and during the 1920s
produced a series of touring and racing
cars as well as fire engines. This site,
which had been empty for a number of
years, was destroyed by bombs in the
Second World War.
Thanks to crippling labour strikes,
the company went into liquidation
in 1925. The site was taken over by
Hammersmith Borough Council, which
used the southern section as a depot.
The large factory building to the
north opened as a film studio in 1935.
This became the BBC television studi