t’s not every day that you get invited to visit a bomb factory, but that’s exactly what happened to How it Works, so we jumped in the car and headed to Washington, in the north of England, to visit a plant operated by BAE Systems. Drive up to the building and you’d be hard-pressed to guess what gets made there. There’s a security gatehouse, but beyond that it just looks like any other factory. On the inside, though, it’s a very different story. Most of the armaments produced at Washington are sold to the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), but around 25 per cent of the factory’s output is sold to militaries around the world – on the day we visited, the munitions on show were heading to Germany. The BAE group produces loads of products – from vast tank shells to tiny bullets – and the plant at Washington concentrates
