In 1899 the Wilkinson Sword factory moved from the City to Chelsea where it was known as the Oakley works and in 1903-4 it moved to Acton, retaining that name.
Chelsea
Despite the name, the Chelsea location of the factory was not Oakley Street, though it was nearby. London Transport Museum has this photo dated 'circa 1895', captioned 'The King's Road, Chelsea, the north side, east of Sydney Street. Street scene featuring a three-quarter view of the Wilkinson Sword Company Limited and Oakley Works premises.' This shows a terrace of four 3-storey houses boasting various signs including 'Wilkinson Sword' and 'Oakley Works'. Behind this terrace can be seen some 1-storey sheds and a tall chimney. The 1893 OS map (here and here) confirms the address. As does the Goad Insurance Plan of London Western District Vol. A: sheet 41-1, which shows an extensive site behind the terrace. We can't give the link to this map because of a technical glitch, but we've used it as the image on our Wilkinson Sword page. In 2023 a Metro Bank was on the corner.
It’s interesting to see the history of this site before Wilkinsons arrived: the 1865 map shows a 'Saw pit' at the north of the King's Road/Sydney Road site and we found evidence that in 1873 there was a business ‘Samuel Worssam & Co: Saw Mill Engineers : Oakley Works, King's Road, Chelsea’ (but see '2024' below).
History of the Wilkinson Sword Company gives ‘Oakley Street’ as the Chelsea address (an understandable mistake) and has a photo of a different, 2-storey, building captioned "The Chelsea Factory, 1889". We spent some time trying to identify the building and were pleased to find another photo of it at the magnificent Library Time Machine. This has a copy of our LT Museum photo and immediately below that is a photo of the rest of the block, to the right of the scene shown here. This shows the building incorrectly labelled ‘Oakley Street’ on the History of the Company site. It can be seen on the Goad map, set back from the road and labelled as ‘Machine Shop’.
Acton
One of the attractions of the Acton site was the rail connection. Britain from Above's aerial photo and this 1935 map both show the Acton works and the railway very clearly. Both also show a large amount of undeveloped land to the south of the factory. This was used to trial the tractors, made elsewhere. The company did not manufacture vehicles for very long and in 1908 a large part of this land was sold to the local Acton Council. Playing fields, etc. already existed to the east of the factory site so this extra land was added to that public open space.
During WW1 over two million bayonets were made on the Acton site. Since 2000 most of the company's manufacturing has been moved abroad. The production of swords came to an end when the company's sword factory at Acton closed in September 2005.
Information from Wikipedia and Acton History and History of the Wilkinson Sword Company.
2024: John Scott kindly wrote to correct an error: "Samuel Worssam & Co were an engineering company, making saw-mill machinery and similar. They operated from a building in the southern half of Manor Street, the address being No. 93 Manor Street. This was called Oakley Works, but is different from the Oakley Works run by Wilkinson’s. You can see this on the 1865 OS large scale map, recently reprinted by Alan Godfrey." So, another Oakley Works close to, but not actually in Oakley Street. It looks as if "Oakley' or 'Oakley Street' may have been a term used to describe the general area around the street.
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