Birtley

A factory built for an ally

In 1915, with Britain gripped by a shortage of artillery shells, engineering giant Armstrong Whitworth agreed to build a huge new munitions plant at Birtley — the National Projectile Factory — and to staff it not with local labour, but with Belgian refugees and wounded soldiers withdrawn from the front by Belgium's government-in-exile. It became, by some accounts, the most productive shell factory in Britain, turning out over two million shells.

Elisabethville

To house the workforce, a self-contained model village named Elisabethville, after the Belgian queen, was built next to the factory — complete with its own doctors, nurses, teachers, shops, church, cinema, newspaper (The Birtley Echo) and even its own police and prison, all run on strict military lines by the Belgian authorities. At its peak it housed around 6,000 people, a third of them children, separated from the rest of Birtley by a perimeter fence; locals were allowed in only once, for a torchlight procession on Armistice Day, 1918.

A vanished community

Within months of the war ending, the Belgians were repatriated and Elisabethville was cleared — its contents auctioned off in what one newspaper called the largest furniture sale on record. A handful of Belgian graves remain in Birtley today, along with a scattering of descendants of workers who chose to stay, the last quiet trace of a community that, for four remarkable years, ran almost entirely to its own rules in the middle of County Durham.