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Along the Moors - Donnington
The Midland Iron Works
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When C&W Walker moved to Donnington, the company occupied a forge that belonged to the Duke of Sutherland. As a condition of the company’s lease, it was stipulated that all new buildings should be erected in corrugated iron, the reason being that, if the fortunes of the business should go awry, the premises would be easy to convert to private dwellings! Consequently, the firm’s premises had an extremely distinctive appearance that was made all the more striking by the presence of a cast-iron clock, which was erected on a timber sub-frame outside the company’s offices in 1879. This local landmark, which housed a bell (and, later, a siren) that informed the workers when their shifts were about to begin or end, now stands on the Donnington roundabout of the A518, which itself occupies the site of a former railway station, closed to passengers in 1964.
Alongside the railway, which originally ran from Wellington to Stafford, the Midland Iron Works developed rapidly and covered an area stretching to the former main road from Wellington to Newport. By 1949, the site comprised numerous workshops for the assembly of the company’s many products, together with a foundry, saw mill and timber yard. The premises were also served by an internal rail system connected to the main line, containing a large circular track known as ‘The Field’. Here, platework for the gasholders was brought out from the plant into the erecting yard, assembled for testing, taken apart again and then transported to its destination.