The Dark Story Behind Britain's Family Car: The Hillman Imp

Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk ___________________________________________ Watch the full series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8E02OnKzzPbINmCn5CxTmXPryV9jev3R If you drove on British roads in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the Hillman Imp was part of the furniture. Small, rear-engined, a little characterful. The kind of car you either loved or quietly respected. At its peak, Linwood — the factory that built every single one — employed nine thousand people and was turning out a hundred and fifty thousand cars a year. Scotland's only car plant. One of the most ambitious industrial projects the British government had ever backed. Today, that factory is gone. On February the eleventh, nineteen eighty-one, nearly five thousand workers were told it was over. Car production in Scotland ended that morning and has never returned. This is the story of how a factory built to last was instead built to fail — and the town that paid the price when nobody would admit it.