Massey Ferguson

It would appear that the demolition is due to take place sometime between 9:00am and 12noon on Sunday - residents have been requested to leave their properties by 9:00am

Due to go anytime between now and 1200!

ITS JUST GONE!!!!! Real moment in time for me - I went to Woodlands School in the early 80's so was so used to seeing it. Sad really - the battle up Broad Lane with hundreds of schoolboys and hundreds of Massey workers and trucks full of tractors was a sight to behold. Oh well, so-called progress.

That was a fine tower. No surprise they could not find any tenants for it as a business park. The whole business park idea for that area has been scrapped now. I like the way the lower floors were different, typical of skyscrapers.

Here's a view on YouTube. Does anyone know which was taller - Massey's tower or Mercia House, which I think is the tallest building in Coventry?

Gosh, that didn't take long! Where would that video have been taken from, they appeared pretty close! Thanks for the link Neil

Tony it looks to me like they were standing in front of the old Tile Hill Garage at the junction with Broad Lane.

It was a quick exit for the tower. I was by this video and it was on the new road that goes into this estate now. The estate owners had laid new turf in the week - bet they wished they hadn't with all the cars and people on it. We made a run for it after the explosion as the dust was everywhere. There are some great videos on youtube.

I wish my late father was around to see the demolition of the office block. The denizens of those offices were known around the factory as "The pen-pushers in the Ivory Tower", so I imagine that the general sadness for the decline of the city's industry, and most especially for the destruction of Banner Lane might have been tempered by the sight of the "Ivory Tower" crumbling to nothing. Surely not even those who worked in the tower will feel any sense of nostalgia for the building, maybe for the people, but not the offices!

Thanks for that, Pat - I enjoyed watching the videos! It must have been a strange feeling for you, seeing it go!

Odd attitude to have about people who work in offices. A large company needs 'pen pushers' to handle financial affairs, logistics, sales functions, purchasing functions, building maintenance & site maintenance. And then there's engineering & design, both of which tend to be office based, and perhaps the most important job in a business like Massey Ferguson. Oh, and who looks staff issues and recruitment? Without all this just exactly how would the shop floor actually get anything to build? Who you think designs things like tractors? Comes up with the requirements and drafts the drawings? Works out bills of materials? Purchases parts? Specifies parts? There is far more to bringing a product like a tractor or car to market than just putting it together in factory!

I'm very sorry, flapdoodle, I honestly had no intention of causing any offence. Obviously, the greatest tractor manufacturing site in Europe needed all of the departments to function as successfully as it indisputably did for a very long time. It certainly put bread on our table, and it is awfully sad to see it gone. I do not think there was any real malice in the nickname, just Coventry's legendary wry humour at work! Additional information - we visited the docks in King's Lynn sometime in the late 1970's, and a huge number of imported tractors were being unloaded from a ship. They were branded 'Metor' and 'Zetor' (if I have recalled correctly). In conversation with one of the dock workers, it came out that the country where they had been made exported them at a loss just in order to obtain pounds sterling. The quality of the machines was obvious in that among the dozens (hundreds?) of tractors lined up on the dockside, at least two had suffered failure of the front wheels upon being set down by the crane! One of our family traditions was that whenever we saw a lorry loaded with new MF's, we would cheer!

I worked at MF starting off in the Tower Block in 1970, then as a machine shop planner before ending up at Maudslay Rd. The Zetor tractors were, if my failing memory is working, from the Polish project, whereby MF sold their old drawings to Poland who then manufactured the "obsolete" tractors and resold them back to the UK. Us ordinary workers could see it was financial suicide but what did we know? Bosses knew best!

Taken at a village fete in Oxfordshire at the weekend, this "Coventry" beast !