El Anglo did not begin under that name. The works had been built decades earlier by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, which boiled beef into a concentrated extract and sold tinned corned beef under the Fray Bentos label. In 1924 the British Vestey Group, a meat-trading dynasty with cattle and cold stores spread across several continents, bought the aging Liebig facilities and reopened them as the Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay. The products kept the Fray Bentos name in European shops, but the scale changed. Refrigeration let the plant export not just extract and tinned meat but frozen and chilled beef, and the Vesteys had the ships and the markets to move it. The factory became one of the great industrial engines of the River Plate.

A plant this large needed a workforce, and the workforce needed somewhere to live. Along the river's edge rose Barrio Anglo, a neighborhood of small brick houses with walls thick enough to hold off the summer heat. It was a self-contained world. There was a hospital and a school, a social club where people gathered after their shifts, and a football team that became a point of local pride. The people who filled these streets came from far away: English and Belgian managers and clerks, Russians, Spaniards, Italians, and Uruguayans who had traded rural poverty for the certainty of a factory wage. Tradition holds they came from around sixty countries in all. They were not statistics on a production sheet. They raised families in those brick houses, buried their dead in local ground, and built a community whose rhythms were set by the factory whistle.

Inside, the labor was relentless and exact. The slaughtering, cooling, cooking, and canning ran as a single continuous system, and the boast was that nothing went to waste: every part of the animal found a use, from meat to tallow to hides. It was demanding, often grueling work, performed in cold, in noise, in the constant pressure of the line. Yet for the families of Barrio Anglo it was also dignity and stability, a place in the modern industrial world. The factory gave them identity as much as income. To have worked at El Anglo meant something, and the descendants of those workers still speak of it that way.

Nothing about the boom was permanent. After the Second World War, Europe and the United States cut back their purchases of South American meat, and the orders that had sustained Fray Bentos thinned. The plant limped on, but the economics never recovered. In 1979 the Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay closed for good, and the company town lost the reason it existed. The brick houses remained, the social club remained, but the line fell silent. Today the works are preserved as part of the Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape, recognized by UNESCO in 2015, where visitors walk through the old halls that once fed millions and try to imagine the heat, the noise, and the five thousand lives that filled them.