‘This was always a workers’ town’: Life at the heart of Britain’s Net Zero plan

The ebb and flow of Bridgwater’s fortunes can be followed along Cornhill, the high street that winds down to the banks of the River Parrett. A town that grew around the brick and tile-making industry in the 17th-century has an abundance of fine Georgian architecture. 

Today though, its shop windows offer little to tempt, unless you are in need of a new phone or a haircut.

Once known as the “smelly town” on the way to Cornwall because of the British Cellophane factory, Bridgwater has been in decline since the factory closed in 2005 with the loss of 3,000 jobs, and inevitable social problems.

Two decades on, however, it finds itself central to Britain’s net zero ambitions. First, there’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, 11 miles away on the coast, due to open in 2027. Then earlier this year Tata, the Indian owner of Jaguar Land Rover, chose Bridgwater over Spain for its new gigafactory to make batteries for electric cars, likely to be supplied by lithium mines in Cornwall. 

And now, Britain’s lithium production has had another boost: the Health and Safety Executive has announced that it doesn’t plan to classify various lithium compounds as “toxic”, in a marked deviation from the European Union’s standpoint. This slashing of red tape has raised hopes that Britain can become an electric car production hub.

But if Bridgwater is to become the UK’s “Lithium Valley”, providing electric batteries to cope with the 2030 new petrol and diesel car ban while churning out clean energy on the coast, the green shoots of industrial revival are yet to show themselves. The town centre, like many across the country, is struggling.

“We have about 40 hairdressers and phone shops,” says Savannah Jones, 28, who is selling home-made beauty products from a stall in the Angel Place shopping centre, part of an initiative to revitalise the town centre. “If you want a nice clothes shop, there’s New Look – that’s it.”

This is her side-hustle. Her day job is at Hinkley Point in admin. “When Hinkley started [in 2017] they said it would be great for the community, but I’ve not really seen that yet. It’s not a well-off area. I do these markets all the time and people aren’t spending. People here can’t afford luxuries.”

Behind the columned facade of the Market House on Cornhill is the covered market where Adrian Fraser has his record store. He agrees: “It’s so up and down I can take a fiver one day and £150 the next.”

Footfall may be low, but the roads around the historic centre are congested. The retail park is where all the main shops are now to be found and the town’s suburban sprawl has only galvanised the view that ‘Bridgy’ is best avoided. The bad reputation frustrates Fraser: “I get a lot of people coming here from other places and people can see the potential.”

Diamond in the rough it may be, but Bridgwater is slowly being polished. The news of Tata basing its lithium battery business in town has boosted future prospects for a place long considered the poor relation of nearby Taunton.

The creation of 4,000 new jobs comes alongside Bridgwater’s steady growth in various sectors, including manufacturing, logistics, and services. The town’s strategic location, close to major transport links such as the M5 motorway, Bristol Port, and Bristol airport, has made it an attractive destination for businesses looking to establish a strong presence in England’s southwest.

Diogo Rodrigues, a former mayor of the town, calls the Tata announcement a “gamechanger” for the region. “The arrival of this gigafactory will undoubtedly accelerate the trend towards clean energy and green technologies, propelling our region into a new era of sustainable growth,” he says optimistically.

Rodrigues is also a manager of the Bridgwater Chamber of Commerce, as well as a Somerset Council Councillor representing Bridgwater. “Bridgwater has a history of being ‘the makers’, going back to the brick and tile days to the – not so long ago – cellophane days, and today with companies like Muller, Mulberry, Morrisons… choosing Bridgwater as the go-to place for ‘making’.”

It’s hoped that the promise of thousands of new jobs will bolster the town’s young people – yet, there is tension simmering about how Bridgwater will cope with even more residents. Nearby Hinkley Point C has swelled the town’s population to more than 50,000 and locals grumble about rising rents and relentless traffic.

“It’s obviously a good thing there are going to be more jobs,” says Fraser. “But the only thing that worries me is that it’s going to cause more congestion and traffic. I don’t think the infrastructure can cope with it.”

It’s a view shared by many who are worried about the house building that has taken place in the surrounding area, while the centre itself struggles.

Details of the imminent Tata arrival are still closely guarded. Agratas, the new company set up by Tata to build the gigafactory, confirmed that it will initially produce 40GWh of battery capacity, with plans to start production in 2026. The location is widely thought to be the Gravity industrial park just out of town, on the site of the former Royal Ordnance Factory, the munitions supplier that provided explosives for the RAF’s famous bouncing bombs.

Two years ago, artists’ impressions of what the 616-acre “smart campus” would look like featured young people cycling along green pathways towards flashy glass buildings. The park was marketed as the natural home to world leaders in advanced manufacturing, robotics, artificial intelligence and electric vehicles.

But, there’s nothing there yet. A 13-minute drive from the centre of Bridgwater there’s the new and deserted roundabout built by Gravity’s owners to link the site to junction 23 of the M5. It is the symbol of a community in a whirl of change. While Gravity’s roundabout entrance is unceremoniously blocked off, with only a large awning with the Gravity logo giving a hint of development, on one side sheep graze in the mizzle and on the other side is a billboard for Redrow homes, announcing a new development, Polden Orchards, “coming soon”. Turn left or right at the roundabout, though, and you soon come to the villages of Puriton and Woolavington that sandwich the site.

Five years ago Keir Ritchie, 47, bought the Puriton Post Office and Village Stores precisely because of plans to develop the old munitions site: “I knew it would triple the population of the catchment area for this shop, bringing 4,000 more people into the area doing their eBay deliveries,” says Ritchie.

Not everyone in Puriton is so happy, he says: “The original plan was for 200 small-to-medium enterprises. Very technical modern companies. Everyone was onboard with that.” Then Elon Musk became interested in the land  a potential site for him to build a gigafactory for Tesla. Before that, the UK had only one large gigafactory project with big financial backers, supplying Nissan in Sunderland. And now, after secret talks with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the promise of State assistance from the UK, including subsidies for the Somerset factory’s high-energy use and a one-off grant from the Government’s £1 billion automotive transformation fund, Tata looks set to move in.

“It absolutely wouldn’t have been agreed if someone had said they were going to build one giant factory to make lithium,” says Ritchie.

Still, he’s not complaining. House prices are going up. His home and shop have already doubled in value in five years. “I see it as an inevitability that there’s going to be more houses, and I think within ten years we’ll be a suburb of Bridgy.”

However, reliance upon one large employer can have its drawbacks, as other cities have found. On 30 July 2021, Honda’s factory in Swindon ceased production with the final car produced, a grey Civic hatchback, rolling off the line the previous day. The closure marked the end of Honda manufacturing in Europe and a loss of 3,400 workers in Swindon. A task force was established to reduce the economic shock on the town and ease people into other employment.

While in Port Talbot, the south Wales town home to Tata Steel UK, the UK’s largest steel plant, a question mark hangs over the industry’s future as it tries to decarbonise. As the main employer, there’s a fear that if Tata were to close it would create an economic earthquake throughout the town and local area.

Still, Bridgwater has seen large employers come and go before. In response to the closure of the Cellophane Works, the local Sedgemoor council set about embracing the town’s prime location on the M5 motorway and good rail connections to rebuild the town’s industrial base. It’s a strategy that now seems to have paid off. New generation T-pylons have been installed and there is talk of improved rail links to Bristol.

For longstanding Bridgwater residents, however, the question remains as to how long it will take for the economic benefits to trickle down to the town centre. And more pertinently, if it’s a change that will have any impact. “This has always been a workers’ town. There’s not a lot of people who would pay £4 for a coffee,” says Ritchie. “People around here look after their pennies.”