[3] Planning of the Dagenham plant began in the early 1920s, a time when lorries were small and road networks little developed.

Dagenham on the southern estuarial edge of Essex offered the prospect of a deepwater port which would allow for bulk deliveries of coal and steel on a far larger scale than the barges of the Manchester Ship Canal could manage at the old plant.

[2][5] At the time when the plant was planned, western governments were increasingly responding to economic depression with protectionist policies.

This was the context in which Henry Ford’s policy of setting up relatively autonomous car-manufacturing businesses in principal overseas markets can be seen.

The drive for self-reliance implicit in including within the Dagenham plant its own steel foundry and power station nevertheless went beyond anything attempted by other European mass-production automakers such as Morris in England, Opel in Germany, or Citroën in France.

[2][9] However, the British economy was in a depressed condition at this time, and the surviving local market for light trucks was dominated by Morris Commercial products.

Wartime production included large numbers of vans and trucks along with Bren gun carriers.

[2] The 1950s was a decade of expansion: a £75 million plant redevelopment completed in 1959 increased floor space by 50% and doubled production capacity.

Saarlouis was joined in 1976 by another new European plant in Valencia, Spain, to produce the then new Ford Fiesta concurrently with Dagenham.

The same European strategy was followed by Ford's US rival General Motors, which in the 1970s, also merged the operations of its previously independent Opel and Vauxhall subsidiaries, with similar results.

This decision to concurrently manufacture the same models in other European plants reduced the company's vulnerability to further industrial disruption at Dagenham, and gave Ford a crucial advantage over strike-torn domestic rival British Leyland, which was often unable to fulfill customer orders during the all too frequent times of industrial unrest in the 1970s, and eventually ceded its long-standing UK market leadership to Ford, something from which it would never recover, but the duplication of production also made cost comparisons between the company's various European plants increasingly stark.

Mindful of its image as a good corporate British citizen, the company stressed that the plant's engine-building capacity would be further developed to "help the UK to become the producer of one in every four Ford engines the world over".

Two areas were marked out to the same scale as the stadium so two sections could be rehearsed at the same time, with a big tent erected as abase of operations for the production team and the hundreds of volunteer performers.