Grove shuts lid on its Crown Works coffin

hundreds of jobs are going "by the end of December" as Grove Europe closes its Sunderland Crown Works manufacturing operation.

The move, which will axe 670 jobs, comes just months after Grove's parent, Hanson Group, sold the Shady Grove, Pennsylvania-based multi-national manufacturer to American giant Keystone for £365 million.

Complete cranes have not been built at Sunderland for some time but it had an important role providing sub-assemblies for the Grove-Krupp All- Terrain (GMK) models built at Wilhelmshaven in Germany. Some models of Manlift access platforms were also being built as attempts to keep Sunderland viable were made.

It also has a foundry which produces castings and which, ironically, had around £2 million of investment just last year.

The factory covers almost 40 hectares of prime riverside land on the River Wear's south bank with the north-south A19 trunk road close by, but a new western access road would make it more attractive to developers.

The factory workforce has shrunk progressively as losses became the norm over the past six years, although there had been happier periods after Grove bought the company from the receivers in 1985.

Local rumours are already linking the possible rescue of the factory with the successful Liebherr operation which builds shipboard and offshore rig cranes just half-mile downstream of the Grove factory. But although Liebherr's operation is thriving and expanding, the likelihood of any kind of rescue is beyond the bounds of possibility.

A small glimmer of hope may be found in the foundry refurbishment. Some sort of mini mbo could find that a market for its products still exists within Grove's German operation. Being independent might mean a search could be mounted for new, outside markets. Running a foundry is still considered as much a black art as it is a science, and pockets of expertise have their price.

But for a once-proud factory which boasted more than 3,000 employees in the 1960s - when the likes of Richards and Wallington, Mobile Lifting Services, JD White and Sparrow's Crane Hire were buying Coles cranes by the score - it is the end of an era.

Grove says its sales, marketing and customer support operations for Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, which employ 200 administrative and sales staff, "will remain in Sunderland". But it doesn't say for how long.

By timing its announcement now, Keystone has bought itself five months of breathing space while the news sinks into the workforce's consciousness. This will allow Keystone to run the rule over its other Grove plants.

Wilhelmshaven is widely believed to be more efficient than the US factory at Shady Grove, but the German plant has only one product line - All-terrain cranes for worldwide supply. Truck mounts and rough-terrain models are built at Shady Grove. It's European plant, Delta, which produces mast-climbers at Tonneins, near Bordeaux, may escape any possible cuts because it is highly specialised and state-of-the-art.

The Grove closure comes at the end of a week when the north east is reeling from the loss of 1,000 jobs at Siemens' micro-chip plant on Tyneside, and 600 staff at the Fujitsu electronics plant at Newton Aycliffe have been "sent on indefinite holiday".

Also, there are strong rumours of "delays" to another far eastern electronics company's plans to develop a new plant on the Samsung site at Wynyard Park on Teesside.