It is just over a year since workers at the Princes Drive plant clocked out for the last time after six decades of production on the site.

Work to decommission the foundry started immediately and the process of selling off machinery, removing dangerous waste such as oil and silicon and checking for possible contamination is now over.

But work to keep the buildings safe continues and a former outhouse was recently demolished.

A Ford spokesman said: "All the plants have a summer shutdown for three weeks, but the shutdown at Leamington was permanent.

"It was a year-long project to decommission it after production ceased in July 2007.

"The final sale deal hasn't gone through yet, so the buildings won't be demolished - if they are going to be - until then."

Many of the foundry's 400 workers went to jobs at the car company's Daventry distribution centre and others received redundancy packages.

But the like-for-like factory replacement that Warwick District Council had promised in the wake of the closure appears unlikely.

In a draft planning brief to transform the 'station area', the Ford site has been earmarked for offices, a hotel and flats as the council and planning consultants GVA Grimley believe "a single use is not likely to be attractive to a single investor."

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Last week, members of both the Leamington Society and the Central Leamington Residents' Association submitted their view of the planning guidance to the district council.

Society chairman Archie Pitts said the groups felt the site would be better used for high-technology industries, such as computer games manufacturers.

Such companies already exist in the town and the society thinks more of these would be of greater value to Leamington then the proposed uses.

The draft plans suggest that a 'technology park' should be built on land along Old Warwick Road, but the society believes builders merchants already based there would be unlikely to relocate.

Ford aims to sell the site, which it bought in 1940 for £80,000, this year.