How the mighty crumble ....

An interesting read re the decline of this building

Building of the month
January 2012 - Heathhall car factory, Dumfries
Thomas Charles Willis Pullinger, by Miriam McDonald
The former Arrol-Johnston Car Co. Ltd factory, described as ‘the only virtually complete British example of a concrete framed, multi-storey daylight car factory, built in emulation of American principles’, (Collins, P. and Stratton, M., British car factories from 1896: a complete historical, geographical, architectural and technological survey, 1993 (Godmanstone), 248) is located on the northern outskirts of Dumfries, in south-west Scotland. It opened in July 1913 and was built of reinforced concrete and brick on the Kahn reinforcement bar design. Heralded as an ‘epoch-making event’ which established Scotland ‘in the position of being a permanent [motor car] producer’ (‘Opening of the Arrol-Johnston Works’, The Motor, 5th August 1913, 18), it is a tangible reminder of Edwardian manufacturing confidence. Although more modest in scale, Heathhall bears a striking resemblance to Henry Ford’s Highland Park factory, Detroit (Albert Kahn, 1909).
But why a slice of pre- World War 1 Americana in what was, when constructed, a sylvan idyll on the outskirts of a Dumfriesshire market town? The answer is Thomas Charles Willis Pullinger. Pullinger, a native of London, had been the manager of Arrol-Johnston since 1908. After study visits to Henry Ford’s car factories in Illinois, and on being told by Ford of a firm in New York that built using a cheap, reinforced-concrete system, Pullinger duly returned to Scotland and designed Heathhall. It represented cutting-edge building design to house the manufacture of the motor car. The site was chosen as it had land available for expansion and there was also a ready rail link to markets in England, a local workforce in Dumfries, and the will to build housing nearby to attract families. The new factory building offered the elements of being fire-proof, with an adaptable floor plan and ease of structural addition. It provided greater spans than those of the traditional factory layout based on the multi-storey textile mill and (before the advent of the car assembly track) greater integration than that offered by the single-storey engineering workshop.