Firefighters answering a Saturday lunchtime blaze at Birch House, a Georgian three-storey former weaver’s cottage on Bridge Street in Macclesfield, walked into one of the largest cannabis factories ever found in Britain.[1] The building stood about 400 yards from the town’s police station, and two men in white face masks were seen running from it just before the fire took hold.[1]
The perfect factory
Inside, officers found a triple-tiered indoor farm packed wall to wall with cannabis bushes, arranged methodically from saplings to fully grown plants under a sprawling network of heat lamps.[1] The electricity meters had been bypassed to power the system, and that overloaded wiring is what started the fire that exposed the operation.[2][1] Macclesfield police Inspector Gareth Woods called it “the perfect cannabis factory”, and warned the building could have exploded, with catastrophic results for the densely populated street.[1] Police believed an organised gang had run the site for about 18 months.[1]
Officers first estimated about 8,000 plants worth roughly £500,000.[1] As clearing continued, the count roughly doubled: the local paper later described a £2 million factory, and Macclesfield’s MP told Parliament the house had contained 17,000 plants.[3][2]
