One of the features common to all of the filling factories was an area of storage bunkers where the finished munitions were stored awaiting dispatch.
[2] A number of bunkers were also built to house the munitions, to protect them from potential bombing, and also to segregate the site and reduce the consequences of any accidental explosions during manufacture or storage.
[3] However, after World War II the factory was soon overshadowed when in January 1946[4][5][6] the Directorate for Atomic Energy Production,[4] under the aegis of the Ministry of Supply, was set up to produce fissile material and chose Risley to build its headquarters, under the control of Sir Christopher Hinton, Baron Hinton of Bankside.
The early atomic site used many of the old Royal Ordnance Factory buildings[9] and also the dedicated raillink to the Manchester/Wigan branch line bringing in workers from Manchester.
In 1954[10] the Risley headquarters site was greatly expanded again with the formal establishment of the UKAEA (United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority) heralding the beginning of the civil nuclear power program which ran alongside the military one.
[10] Design and construction of all other UKAEA plants was overseen here, technical policy and long term planning, finance and administration as well as world leading scientific research in physics, chemistry and engineering.
No buyer was found for it until 1968, when the Warrington Development Corporation under government plans bought the site in preparation for building the new town of Birchwood now part of Cheshire in the mid seventies.