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Reid Story

The World is our Home Market, from Iceland near the Arctic to the Falkland Islands near the Antarctic; from the Peruvian Andes to the tropical jewels of the South Pacific, across the burning sands of Arabia to China and the tropical jungles of South East Asia you will find our work.

In Europe you will find our buildings in Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Poland, BosniaHerzegovina, Albania and Italy. France especially has hundreds of our industrial and agricultural buildings including 3 hangars and workshops erected in 1921 for Louis Bleriot the famous aviation pioneer. We have been making Aircraft Hangars to jumbo size ever since. In 1940 we supplied several dozen emergency hospitals to the British Expeditionary Forces, some of which we still keep discovering in use for all sorts of purposes. All over Germany we have erected many large, modern, factory buildings. In Russia, at Uralkali in the Ural Mountains, we provided a large brick factory and supervised the complete erection and cladding and recently shipped 5 cold store buildings Ro/Ro via Denmark on German and Russian trucks to St Petersburg. The same day a fully sound proofed generator building was trucked out on Polish vehicles to Zawierce in Poland. We recently sent 64 trucks to the Czech Republic with a complete factory building of 184,000 sq ft for making capacitors. This was closely followed by several industrial buildings to Latvia and Kazakhstan.

In North Africa our structures are in Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Even in the little Moroccan port of Larache, some 50 miles down the African coast from Tangier, there are 18 of our buildings used as hangars, godowns and customs houses.

In the Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Fujeira, Sharjah and Ras AI Khaimah, countless of our buildings are in use as warehouses, aircraft hangars, military or police workshops, and offices. We recently designed and made the new Emirates Airlines hangar and Air Cargo Terminal for Dubai International Airport. We also designed and made a 48m clear span and two 18m, 16 sided domes for a Majlis (Parliament) building in the Gulf, as well as the big Police Motor Workshop, VIP car park and many school buildings in Qatar. In Oman we supplied the Land Rover showroom and workshop, several Government training centres and warehouses.

In Saudi Arabia our buildings have even found their way into the Holy City of Medina where there is a bus terminal complete with cleaning plant and office block, all of which were erected by Egyptian contractors without our help. At Jeddah there are many of our portal structures and a large multistorey building which contains offices, flats and a shopping centre.

All the main airlines have offices there. At Riyadh there are many industrial buildings, in particular a large glass reinforced cement panel factory amounting to 323 shipping tonnes sent onwards by truck from Jeddah and successfully erected without problems by local contractors. On the East Coast at Damman there is an impressive shopping complex whose Arabic arches are a well known and much imitated landmark, with other subsidiary buildings, as well as a government training establishment

incorporating 12 of our buildings amongst the first to be imported into the Kingdom.

In Iraq our portal structures have reached Baghdad, Kirkuk and Basra as oil company workshops, wellhead stores, generator stations and offices. Northwards to the Caspian Sea Port of Baku in Azerbaijan we made the complete structure for a new BMW showroom. Cross the border to Iran and you will find another of our buildings in that ancient city of Tabriz. In Jordan we supplied and supervised the erection at WadielYabis of one of the biggest Horticultural distribution centres in the Middle East.

In Yemen we have supplied over 30 substantial buildings for use as factories, cold stores, workshops and port transit sheds mainly for Ministries and Public Corporations in the South and in the North we have provided many large factory buildings and workshops as well as agricultural buildings for chicken hatcheries, dairy product stores, a babyfeed factory, a gas bottling plant at Taiz and a pharmaceutical factory with warehouses in Sana'a.

In Eritrea, on the Red Sea, a number of our lattice portals were used to build a large agricultural school in 1934, while in Ethiopia, on the singletrack railway line from AddisAbaba to Djibouti, the steel framework and cladding for every one of the 22 railway stations was supplied by us in 1936. This line, in 1984, carried 1,000 tonnes of our steel buildings for 20 large grain stores to help with famine relief at Nazareth in Ethiopia.

We were back in Djibouti again 47 years later to erect a generating station, bottling plant and associated buildings in the Gulf of Tadjoarah. Our engineer lived in a mud dwelling with a French crocodile hunter, an Ethiopian and an Eritrean, no air conditioning but several scorpions and snakes. There was almost no water but they managed with beer.

In 1990 we shipped a large number of produce store buildings through Djibouti

destined for Sudan, 25 for Gezira, 11 for Rahad, 8 for new Halfa and 3 for Suki. For Kenana Sugar Company of Khartoum we supplied two large warehouses and associated buildings.

We have recently been to Somalia building warehouses, offices and workshops at Berbera and Mogadishu for the United Nations Relief Organisation. Berbera was the home of the Barbary pirates of 200 years ago and, amongst other things a base for RAF Spitfires during World War 2. In Kenya we made the workshop at Kifaru Camp for the army.

Almost every trip overseas has its interesting times, like being jailed for opening our own bolt crates, having fried cucumber for breakfast lunch and dinner every day and shaving with Coca Cola, as well as being held up by bandits and by the Police!

In SriLanka we supplied and supervised the erection of 6 rice stores for the Paddy Marketing Board, starting on sites at Maragahawewa (in the Wipatu National Park) and Huruluwewa near Anuradhapura, that fascinating ancient capital city and religious centre. The work was interrupted on the site at Adampan for a short period because of a thoughtless chap who waded across at low tide from India and brought cholera with him.

Further up the Indian subcontinent we shipped a new paint factory to Bangalore. For Bangladesh we recently supplied 18,000m² of warehousing for the Port of Chittagong in spite of the efforts of sundry typhoons to disrupt the work.

Our warehouses, factories and assembly halls have been erected as far away as Rarotonga, that tiny paradise isle in the South Pacific 1,633 miles N.E. of New Zealand and 12,434 miles from London Docks, while 1,400 miles to the West a warehouse and market building is to be found in Fiji and a further 900 miles west in New Caledonia there are trading stations and warehouses supplied by us so long ago we can't remember when.

During 1988 we designed and made steelwork for the two 180ft spans of the 360ft Ngalimbu bridge in the Solomon Islands financed by British Aid from the Overseas Development Administration and ordered by the Crown Agents. They also ordered a large workshop and crane for Santo in the Vanuatu group of islands (New Hebrides). Our first two buildings for Santo were for the French Oil Research station in 1965. They were erected within 14 weeks of leaving our works. In 1987/88 we shipped 2 big workshops complete with overhead cranes, for the P.W.D.

New Zealand has 395 of our buildings, including a small countrytown church and in Australia our structures can be found near Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

In the Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic our steelwork is to be found at San Carlos and four at Port Stanley. Even those tiny midAtlantic islands of Tristan de Cunha, St Helena and Ascension have sent us small orders to enrich our daily diet. At Las Palmas in the Canary Islands the cinema and nearby market buildings were made by us.

At the Brazilian port of Bahia there is a soap factory, at Santiago in Chile, just a few thousand miles off, a transport depot, recently joined by a large Naval aircraft hangar and the new Presidential Flight Hangar, and at Rio Verde a warehouse. At Georgetown, Guyana several large warehouses and sugar stores. Just over the border in Suriname we recently supplied a large workshop for the mining industry. In Central America, on the Pacific seaboard of Costa Rica near Punta Arenas, there are factories, while in Belize further north we supplied the Civic Centre and Auditorium in Belize City and many other industrial and agricultural buildings as well as the bridge over the Rio Bravo and another for the Southern Highway.

In the Caribbean hundreds of REID structures have gone ashore in the Dutch Isles of Aruba and Curacao, the Cayman Islands, Grenada, Antigua, Montserrat, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Dominica, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent, The Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Anguilla, and the French islands of Martinique and Gaudeloupe.

In spite of the efforts of several Caribbean hurricanes, one of which blew away most of the bananas in Jamaica in 1951 and deposited a large cargo freighter on the wharf in Kingston, our structures are still there and many have been shipped since.

For New Providence Island in the Bahamas we spent many happy hours in 1986 designing, making and finally supervising the erection of a huge 86,000 sq ft brewery for Heineken so that they could refresh the parts that other lagers don't reach. They must have been pleased because they asked us to provide another in the Cameroons to help refresh the inhabitants of those parts too.

For the Turks & Caicos Islands we designed and made the steel frame for a new bank.

Since then we have shipped many other breweries and distilleries to Africa, including 3 for CocaCola.

Further to the North, amongst the pink coral of Bermuda, 774 miles from New York and 3,445 from London there are numerous large Reid warehouses and garages. The Police Barracks includes no less than 5 of our buildings.

On Sao Tiago in the Cape Verde islands a few hundred miles west of Senegal, we supplied the structure for yet another brewery, complete with offices, to brew Carlsberg lager.

In West Africa our buildings are almost everywhere, from Mauritania, Senegal, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Dahomey and Cameroon right down to the Congos and Angola. For Zambia we made a hovercraft hangar. A multistorey hotel building at Banjul in The Gambia is helping the tourist trade whilst further up the river Kanifing are a variety of stores and warehouse buildings. We also supplied all the steelwork for the new fish and meat market. A lot of our work is to be found in Ghana, including the recent terminal building at Kotoka Airport. Eastwards, Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mauritus and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean account for at least 100 of our buildings between them. At the port of Beira in Mozambique there is a new warehouse of 10,000m² designed and made by us. We supervised the erection work too.

In Nigeria, school buildings at Kano, cinemas at Jos, a distillery in Lagos and a tyre factory at Warri etc., cover thousands of square metres. For the Nigerian Air Force we designed, made and erected at Kainji 400 miles north of Lagos, a large hangar of 4,500 square metres with a clear entry width of 90 metres for C 130 Hercules transport aircraft. Although there were many technical intricacies involved in erecting such a huge building way up country, the most hilarious and memorable matters which occupied our erectors was bargaining for local meat and taking care not to annoy the large families of baboons that came from the wildlife reserve to watch. They seemed keen to become engineers.

We even contributed to the road system nearby, between Wawa and Kaima, by supplying several large multispan beam bridges using no less than 17,000 welded 24mm shear connectors for the composite decks.

At Freetown in Sierra Leone we constructed the framework for the Centenary Building and a large clinic at Kenema as well as many warehouses and factories.

At Gao Airport in Mali there are no less than 26 of our smaller buildings and the old air route across the desert to Algeria was pyloned in 1935 with another 36, roofed in red and white glazed enamel sheets and spaced one every 14 miles.

In Lesotho, that land locked Republic (surrounded by South Africa) a ring road has been built right around the country for which we designed, made and supervised the erection of the multispan hot dip galvanised double lane steel bridge at the Maphutsapeng River Crossing.

In mainland China we provided the Sun Oil plant at Shekou in the province of Canton of which we also supervised the erection, followed by five large port warehouses in 1985 at Jiuzhour Harbour, Zhuhai in the province of Guangdong and more recently steelwork for a ceramic factory near Shanghai.

In 1992 we shipped 3 buildings for duck processing plants at Qing County in Hebei Province. At Huaibin County and Huangchuan County in Henan Province there are two more buildings for feed mills at Qing County and Huaibin County. We also supervised the erection at all the sites. In Hong Kong we supplied a dye processing building and in Macau an Aircraft Hangar for Air Luxor.

In Myanmar (Burma) we built a rice store amongst the temples of Rangoon. In

Vietnam, on the rubber plantations of AmNhonTay and PhoThanh near Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), are latex stores, and to the Philippines we shipped a large cable making factory.

Around the sparkling blue Mediterranean, in Cyprus, Turkey, Malta, Greece, Gibraltar, Sardinia and Corsica there are factories, cold stores, packing sheds, garages, cinemas, warehouses and multistorey apartment blocks of our manufacture.

In Iceland, that fascinating island of the midnight sun and hot water springs, we provided many dock warehouses and herring factories and cold stores at Reykjavik as well as several agricultural buildings.

In the United Kingdom much of our production has been used to build complete industrial estates, aircraft hangars, warehouses, football stadiums, supermarkets, garages, boatsheds, agricultural buildings, indoor tennis courts, riding schools, even covers for floating docks, North Sea oil terminal depots and work for the Ministry of Defence.

A few of our buildings are on the sea bed too. It is really surprising how many ships sink each year. Wherever there is any geography at all we try to get there. One of the most fascinating jobs we helped to make was a church for the owners of a vast 2,000 peon estate in the back blocks of Venezuelain 1937. That Church totalled 280 packages and bales (including a peal of bells and boxes of coloured glass) and every one of them went on muleback over the mountains through the Oveida Pass. Finished with a belfry and steeple like a proper Church, it was a proud job needing five month's drawing board and machineshop work.

There's poetry and romance enough in structural steel if you think of the travels of our work and any man who can handle a spanner can erect the buildings of his choice in whatever far away land it may have pleased him to pitch his tent.

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