Nissan’s Sunderland factory celebrates 40 years of car building.

During two world wars, it was RAF Usworth. In the 1940s Hawker Hurricanes operated out of the newly paved aerodrome. In peacetime it became Sunderland Airport.

In 1984, construction of a new Nissan plant started and a mere two years later, a Nissan Bluebird - a white one - rolled off the production line. This first car is in the Sunderland Museum guarded by a stuffed lion called Wallace (not pictured). There were 470 people on the payroll at the time, and the car took more than a day to build - a far cry from today's two-minute cadence.

The plant, known internally as NMUK, was opened a few months later by Margaret Thatcher and Nissan president Yutaka Kume.

Timing in Tyne and Wear was crucial. Shipbuilding and coal were fading and the Japanese manufacturer arriving was propitious. Nissan arrived with a single union structure and a bet that British workers could build cars to Japanese standards.

Early Bluebirds weren’t really manufactured there. Kits came from Japan and were assembled and painted. The engine plant arrived along with the Primera in 1990 and the facility started manufacturing Micra in 1992. 40 years later, nearly 12 million cars have been built there. A third of those were Qashqais.

These days, production is about 270,000 units a year, well down from the half a million output of the mid twenty tens.

All is not well in car manufacturing and the plant is now down to a single line with China’s Chery exploring a lease of the second line. NMUK has always adapted. Through Covid, Brexit, EV transition, a handful of recessions and the spectre of China’s manufacturing behemoth on the horizon.

Maybe this is why Nissan are celebrating in a rather muted way. I know the people inside the plant are deeply proud of their four decade record and rightly so. It’s still Britain’s biggest car factory. The story is perhaps less about the bricks, mortar and corrugated steel as it is about the people of the region. Buildings are temporary, disposable. The work is not. Buildings don’t make cars. People do.

So, to whomever it may concern, Happy anniversary, NMUK!