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Bridge Road - R. Groom & Sons
The Shropshire Works
The motive force behind the Groom's rise to prominence was undoubtedly the success of the family business, which moved to a more convenient railside location at the Shropshire Works on Bridge Road before 1870. These premises were originally constructed as a railway carriage building shop and engineering plant by John Dickson, after the railway arrived in Wellington and he used the site as the headquarters for his own railway contracting business. Although Dickson enjoyed some success in this venture, he was eventually bankrupted after a scandal relating to the poor quality of his company's work on a railway in the north east of England. This enabled the Groom family to establish an industrial concern that was quite unrivalled in Wellington and perhaps even further a field. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the firm described itself as the 'biggest timber buyers in England', by which time it manufactured a vast array of goods at The Shropshire Works, from spade handles and clothes pegs to heavy civil engineering products for the War Office and The Admiralty. The Company's site contained an astonishing 79, 000 square feet of covered workshops, offices, saw mills and warehouses, while raw materials and goods were shipped into and exported out of their timber yard by rail from three sidings connected to the main line. Groom's timber yard remained at Bridge Road for around 100 years, before its closure in 1970. The site itself is now covered by car parks and housing and only the name of Groom's Alley survives as a reminder of this important part of Victorian Wellington's Industrial heritage.