One day in 1978, Janine Wiedel found hell a few streets south of Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham. “The noise was deafening. The heat was intense. I’d never seen anything like it,” she says. In her native US, she’d photographed Black Panthers and student protests at Berkeley in California, but neither prepared her for this industrial inferno, on which one-time West Midlands resident JRR Tolkien reputedly based Mordor.
Inside Smiths’ Drop Forgings were nine 35-hundredweight (around 1,800kg) hammers worked by some of the filthiest men
