Imperial Tobacco is closing its last factory in Bristol, bringing an end to a remarkable slice of the city's business history.
Bristol was built on tobacco. The wealth of its tobacco barons, the Wills family, permeated the very fabric of the city.
The legacy of their generous endowments can still be clearly seen in landmark structures such as the University of Bristol's Wills Building, the Cabot Tower, the City Museum and Art Gallery, the Homeopathic Hospital and St Monica's home for the elderly.

Their trade put money into these and countless other projects, as well as into the pockets of thousands of workers engaged in the production of the cigarettes and tobacco products which were puffed by millions right around the globe.
Now, finally, all that is about to come to an end.
The axe is falling on Imperial Tobacco's cigar factory in Winterstoke Road. With its closure and transfer of work to Spain, the long history of tobacco production will be over.
All that will remain is an Imperial administrative headquarters in Southville, not far away from what was once the hub of a vast business empire.
Today, as tobacco use is subject to endless assault and constraint from a Government still, ironically, happy to benefit from its taxation, and those who smoke in public are bracketed as social outcasts, the decision to shut up shop in Winterstoke Road will come as no real surprise.
But where did it all begin? Just how did Bristol become inextricably linked with tobacco?
For that you have to go back to the 16th century when tobacco - dubbed "the noxious weed" - was imported from British colonies in Virginia, America.
Up the Avon river and into what became the city docks came boats laden with tobacco leaf. Waiting to process it were numerous tobacco companies. Among them was one of the great names of the industry, WD and HO Wills.
It was founded in 1786 by Henry Overton Wills and was originally known as Wills, Watkins and Co. It only became WD and HO Wills in 1830 and traded as such until 1982.
However, it was also part of Imperial Tobacco, a company formed in 1901 to fight off American competitors. It was an amalgamation of Wills and a dozen other tobacco factories. Wills, though, kept its name as a division of Imperial.
It took a war to hook a nation on cigarettes. The Crimean War.
Troops fighting there picked up the Turkish habit of rolling tobacco up into thin paper before lighting and inhaling. As a consequence, in 1881, the first cigarette appeared. Bristol's tobacco factories never looked back.
Wills opened a succession of factories. Its East Street, Bedminster, one arrived in 1886, others in Ashton and Raleigh Road, Southville, followed. Business was booming, with sales of brands such as the world-famous Wills Woodbines, Bristol and Embassy.
In the early 1970s Wills took the logical step of any thriving firm. It upped sticks and moved out of town - to Hartcliffe. Bedminster and Southville economies were devastated. Wills workers were essential to the businesses in this part of town. It took years for the area to recover.
Yet the Hartcliffe complex was truly spectacular, both in its concept and its operation. It was the largest of its kind anywhere in Europe and provided work for 4,500 people who manufactured 350 million cigarettes every week.
Its vast assembly hall was unique. there were no internal supports and it was the size of a number of football pitches. Adjacent was an office block as well as the sort of facilities Wills workers had become used to - their own supermarket, post office, medical centre, dentist, bank, six restaurants and lounges, even a bus station. It cost ?15m, covered 57 acres, and by 1975 most of the old Wills operation had moved out there from Bedminster.
Many must have viewed it as a job for life. It always had been - surely, it always would be. They could not have been more wide of the mark.
In 1982, Imperial had abolished the old Wills board. Four years later Imperial was taken over by the Hanson Trust. By 1991 it was shut.
Drive by the site today and this spectacular and innovative factory has been replaced by an out-of-town retail park. Nearby work proceeds apace on converting the old shell of what was once the landscaped office block into an apartments scheme.
Back in Bedminster, the East Street factory premises still exist, only in a new role as the frontage for yet another shopping complex, while architect George Ferguson's foresight has retained and transformed part of the old Southville site into a theatre, restaurant and bars.
Imperial HQ is close by in Upton Road and is expanding its workforce.
That, however, should not detract from the fact that the company's decision to shut up shop at its last remaining Bristol production facility in Winterstoke Road truly is the end of what has been an astonishing era.