Features

Bodies hang from the ceiling of the tunnel, their dusty hulks reflected in pools of oily water on the floor, as steam hisses from cracks in the pipes along one wall and dissolves into the dank, still air.

It feels like the set for a film based in a nightmarish near future, but it's not. This is actually what was once the longest car-production line in Europe. Welcome to Longbridge.

The near history of this place runs deep. The infamous Red Robbo-led strikes of the 1970s; an Eighties' renaissance as home to the Metro and Rover 200; subjugation as just another assembly plant in the BMW empire; background to the triumphant return of John Towers in May 2000 as his Phoenix 4 collective bought the place for £10 and spent the next five years trying to find a corporate bunk-up that would secure its future.

They almost did it too, until in April 2005 their new suitors at SAIC got cold feet and, with nowhere to turn, they shut the factory down for what seemed like the last time.

That is until, out of the blue, another Chinese company snapped up the moribund plant and started talking about restarting production there. No one knew much about the new owners but they were called Nanjing and, according to ugly rumours, they were stripping the place of anything of worth.

Over a year after it all went belly up, Longbridge was strangely quiet. What were they actually doing in there? Clearly not posting out the housewarming invitations it seemed, so Top Gear decided to take matters into its own hands.

Someone knew someone who might be able to sort us out. Emails pinged back and forth, finally bringing a request for a mobile number. Two hours later the phone rang: meet us next Tuesday in the car park of McDonald's near the factory. We were in.

If the Chinese have been pretty silent on their future plans for Longbridge, it's nothing to the eerie stillness that pervades the place on a cold November evening. Developers are nibbling at its fringes with their plans for technology parks and leisure shopping omniplexes, knocking down the old West Works on the other side of the main road - and with it years of car building history.

But here on the main site, the factory buildings still stand, whipped by the icy wind that scuttles across the empty car holding-pans. We duck inside the old paint shop, its huge tanks and Willy Wonka-ish mass of pipework exactly as they were when MG Rover went under.

In fact, it has been left ticking over ever since: pumps primed and pipes flowing so that nothing dries out. Even now the stillness is intermittently broken by a sharp clack and bassy rumble as machinery automatically stirs into action to prevent the whole facility coagulating to death.

But while the machines run their cycles, the human side of the operation is absent, leaving only notes on white boards and grubby mugs on tables; age indeterminate but certainly less fresh than the paint that circulates through the miles of snaking pipework overhead.