Chittening is an industrial estate in Avonmouth, Bristol, England, bypassed by the A403 road, near the River Severn. It lies within the city boundary of Bristol, in Avonmouth ward, but used to be beyond it, in historic Gloucestershire, on former marshland at the southern end of the Vale of Berkeley. History Name and early history Chittening was once a farm, first recorded in 1658 and 1702 as Chitnend. The name is from chitten end(e), from Middle English or Early Modern English chitte 'young of an animal; brat, child' + end(e) 'end [of a parish or estate]'. Chittening was in the ancient parish of Henbury in Gloucestershire. It was added to Bristol in the early 20th century. There was a medieval Chapel on the site which stood until 1918. It had been in domestic use since 1845. No. 23 Filling Factory During World War I, the Ministry of Munitions built a filling factory for artillery shells on the site, which was farmland commandeered by the military for its closeness to Avonmouth docks and to the site of the National Spelter Company's chemical works (Spelter being zinc or a zinc alloy) in St Andrew's Road, Avonmouth, later the National Smelting Company. At Chittening, Nobel Explosives filled shells with chloropicrin, derived industrially from picric acid. In defiance of the Hague Convention on weapons, the German army used mustard gas (dichloroethyl sulphide) against Allied troops on the Eastern and Western Fronts in 1917, and the British minister of munitions, Winston Churchill, ordered supplies to be manufactured in Britain for use in retaliation. Having first used captured German gas in late 1917, and then gas produced at factories in Manchester and Runcorn, from June 1918 three filling factories, at Banbury, ROF Rotherwas at Hereford, and Chittening, were supplied with freshly manufactured mustard gas by the National Smelting Company. By November 1918, with unskilled female labour, Chittening had produced 85,424 mustard gas shells, but at a human cost of 1213 notified cases of associated illness, including at least two deaths which were later attributed to influenza. The story of the women who filled the shells at such great personal risk has been told in the stage play Gas Girls. Rather late in the day, a small hospital and surgery were opened on the site around the time of the Armistice. Surviving relics of the mustard gas operation One building survives from the World War I factory: