To be the first of something is significant, to be the first of something that led to probably the most seismic shift in human behaviour in the C20 is very significant. To be such and overlooked, ignored and under-promoted could be considered an outrage. Such is the Rodboro Buildings. Prominently sited on a corner of Guildford’s busy gyratory road system, it is not a building that can be easily missed.
However, missed it was and for some considerable time. That lexicon of historic buildings, Pevsner’s Buildings of England (Surrey 1971) fails to mention it at all. By the 1980’s it was boarded up and scheduled for demolition to allow road widening of the infamous Guildford gyratory. Then, in one of the those glorious episodes of people power that occasionally triumph against the odds, a local amenity society put the semi-derelict building forward for listing – neither Borough or County Council wanting to disrupt their road widening ambitions. And it was listed, grade II, and protected for ever more. The road widening scheme was abandoned and the building carefully restored and put back to beneficial use as a public house and the, now prestigious, Academy of Contemporary Music.
Handsome as the curving, modelled brick façade with its large steel framed windows is, it is what it was rather than what it is that finally earned its listed status. Built around 1900, the list description succinctly puts it as “one of the first, if not the first, purpose-built car factories in England and the world.” Surprise that leafy Guildford should boast such early industrial heritage belies the fact that early car makers were niche entrepreneurs, often woodworkers, craftsmen or carriage builders with the foresight to see the possibilities of motorized transport.
Two such innovators were the Dennis brothers who arrived in Guildford in 1895 to establish a business dedicated to the new craze of cycling. However, quickly seeing the potential of the internal combustion engine, they had built their first factory by 1901 and such was the success that, by 1905, it had been further extended on site, doubling output. The cars were manufactured on the top two floors in an early form of automated production, that Henry Ford would go on to perfect, and then lowered to the ground floor showroom by an internal lift. By the time of the outbreak of war in 1914, Dennis were specializing in lorries, buses and fire engines. A new factory had opened on the outskirts of Guildford and this was expanded massively to meet the war demands of the military.
Production at the Rodboro Buildings site was closed down and it went through a variety of uses, including the eponymous Rodboro Shoe Company, before being left vacant and vulnerable in the 1980’s. Statutory listing as a historic building in 1986 saved it from demolition and preserves one of the most unlikely and little known episodes in the development of the vehicle that was to transform society in the 20th Century.
