page_title: Hayes, Hillingdon
section_title: Industry
hierarchical_section_title: Hayes, Hillingdon / History / Industry
caption_attribution_description: English: Nestlé Factory and driveway Photo from the formal gates in Nestle's Avenue which were the original entrance to the factory, which was built in 1914 as a chocolate factory and fully taken over by Nestlé's in 1929. The factory was extended alongside the canal in 1920. Manufacture of instant coffee started in 1939.
context_page_description: Hayes is a town in west London, situated 13 miles west of Charing Cross and part of the London Borough of Hillingdon. The town's population, including its localities Hayes End, Harlington and Yeading, was recorded as 83,564 in the 2011 census.
  Hayes has a long history. The area appears in the Domesday Book. Landmarks in the area include the Grade II* listed Parish Church, St Mary's – the central portion of the church survives from the twelfth century and it remains in use – and Barra Hall, a Grade II listed manor house. The town's oldest public house – the Adam and Eve, on the Uxbridge Road – though not the original seventeenth-century structure, has remained on the same site since 1665.
  Hayes is best known as the erstwhile home of EMI. The words "Hayes, Middlesex" appear on the reverse of The Beatles' albums, which were manufactured at the town's Old Vinyl Factory. The town centre's "gold disc" installation marks the fiftieth anniversary on 1 June 2017 of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, manufactured in Hayes in 1967. The town is the location of the U.K. headquarters of companies including: Heinz, United Biscuits, Fujitsu, and Rackspace U.K.
context_section_description: Hayes has, over the years, been heavily involved with industry, both local and international, having been the home of EMI, Nestlé and H. J. Heinz Company. Past companies include Fairey Aviation (later merged with Westland), and HMV.
  The first large factory established was that of the British Electric Transformer Company (affectionately known as the B.E.T.), which moved to Hayes in 1901. The B.E.T.'s main product was the Berry transformer, invented by A. F. Berry (the company's technical adviser and a member of the board of directors); Berry also invented the Tricity cooker.
  The most significant early occupier was the Gramophone Company, later His Master's Voice and latterly EMI. The Hayes factory's foundation stone was laid by Dame Nellie Melba. The EMI archives and some early reinforced concrete factory buildings (notably Grade II listed Enterprise House [1912] on Blyth Road, the first known work of Evan Owen Williams - described by English Heritage as "the most significant engineer turned architect in twentieth-century British architecture") remain as The Old Vinyl Factory.
  It was here, in the Central Research Laboratories (generally known as  "CRL"), that Isaac Shoenberg developed (1934) the all-electronic 405-line television system (called the Marconi-EMI system, used by the BBC from 1936 until closedown of the Crystal Palace 405-line transmissions in 1985).
  Alan Blumlein carried out his research into binaural sound and stereophonic gramophone recording here. "Trains at Hayes Station" (1935) and "Walking & Talking" are two notable films Blumlein shot to demonstrate stereo sound on film. These films are held at the Hayes EMI archive.
  In 1939, working alongside the electrical firms A.C. Cossor and Pye, a 60 MHz radar was developed, and from 1941 to 1943 the H2S radar system.
  During the 1990s, CRL spawned another technology: Sensaura 3D positional audio. In an echo of Blumlein's early stereo recordings, the Sensaura engineers made some of their first 3D audio recordings at Hayes Station.
  During the First World War the EMI factories produced aircraft. Charles Richard Fairey was seconded there for a short time, before setting up his own company, Fairey Aviation, which relocated in 1918 to a large new factory across the railway in North Hyde Road. Over 4,500 aircraft were subsequently produced here, but Fairey needed an airfield to test these aircraft and in 1928 secured a site in nearby Heathrow. This became the Great West Aerodrome, which was requisitioned by the Air Ministry in 1944. It was initially developed as a heavy-bomber base intended for Boeing B-29 Superfortresses, but when the Second World War ended in 1945, it was taken over by the Ministry of Aviation and became Heathrow Airport.
  In 1913, German bodybuilder and music hall performer Eugen Sandow – famous in his time as "Sandow the Great", a contender for the title of world's strongest man – opened a cocoa factory in Hayes. Sandow's fortunes plummeted in World War I. The Sandow Cocoa Company went into liquidation, and the building and assets passed to the Hayes Cocoa Company in 1916. Hayes Cocoa was owned by Swiss chocolate company Peter, Cailler, Kohler.
  In 1929 the Nestlé company bought out Peter, Cailler, Kohler and located its major chocolate and instant coffee works on the canal, adjacent to the railway east of the station; it was for many years the company's UK headquarters. The factory's elegant Art Deco façade was long a local landmark. The road that led to the factory was renamed Nestlé's Avenue (from Sandow Avenue, so-named after the German strongman); Sandow Crescent, a cul-de-sac off Nestlé's Avenue, remains. The Hayes Nestlé factory closed in 2014 at a cost of 230 jobs. Developers Segro bought the 30-acre Nestlé site in early 2015.
  Opposite Nestlé, on the other side of the canal, the Aeolian Company and its associates manufactured player pianos and rolls from just before World War I until the Great Depression. That, and the increasing sophistication of the gramophone record market, led to its demise. Its facilities were subsequently used by, among
caption: The former Nestlé Factory
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