Cordite manufacture required acetone, an organic solvent in short supply during the war years. Britain made acetone from the destructive distillation of wood, a slow process that could not keep pace with demand. In 1912 Chaim Weizmann, a chemist who would later become the first president of Israel, had developed a fermentation process using the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum to produce acetone from starch. The process had no obvious commercial value at the time. Then the war came. In 1915 Weizmann was introduced to David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. He was given laboratory facilities at the Lister Institute in London and industrial space at Nicholson's gin distillery in Bow, where he perfected the method. A full-scale acetone plant was built at Holton Heath, fermenting grain into the solvent the navy needed. By 1917 the grain shortage was acute, so the Ministry of Munitions turned to a different source. School children across Britain were asked to collect horse chestnuts. Conkers. Six enormous storage silos were built at Holton Heath to hold the harvest. The starch in the chestnuts was fermented into acetone, the acetone was used to make cordite, and the cordite drove the shells that drove the war.

The main factory was bounded by the A351, Station Road and the London and South Western Railway. Holton Heath railway station was opened specifically to bring staff to the works. A coal-fired water pumping house was built at Corfe Mullen to draw water from the River Stour, linked by a sixteen-inch main to a 3.5-million-gallon reservoir inside the factory. A jetty on Poole Harbour gave access for raw materials, connected to the factory's own standard-gauge railway system, which crossed the LSWR by means of a bridge that was still visible from the air as of 2023. During construction and through the First World War, the site was guarded by a detachment of armed Metropolitan Police. There were genuine spy scares and false alarms throughout, with builders and contractors accused of being German agents and each claim duly investigated. In 1935, during British rearmament, a new nitroglycerin plant was bought from Cologne and installed by German technicians, who themselves needed police protection because public feeling about Germany was already running high.

Holton Heath was a Luftwaffe target. The German military had a dedicated dossier on it, GB 76 11, and the factory appears in multiple Luftwaffe reconnaissance photographs taken in August and September 1942. The British knew this. The Ordnance Survey omitted the site from wartime maps; comparison of 1940s editions with later ones shows a deliberate blank where the factory should have been. The Admiralty also built a series of Starfish decoy sites at the village of Arne, three miles to the southeast, designed to be lit on bombing nights and look like a factory burning under attack. On the night of 3 to 4 June 1942, German bombers dropped hundreds of bombs on the Arne decoys. The village of Arne was practically destroyed. The Cordite Factory at Holton Heath was untouched.

Working with cordite and nitroglycerin is dangerous, and the Holton Heath records list the cost. On 10 September 1927, an explosion in an acetone recovery building killed three men, when acetone vapour ignited inside a pipe. On 7 November 1929, an explosion in the cordite press house seriously injured four workers, one of whom died in hospital two days later. The worst came on 23 June 1931. An explosion in a nitroglycerin preparation chamber killed ten men and injured nineteen. Three buildings were destroyed. A storage tank ruptured and spilled sulphuric acid across the area. The blast was heard twenty miles away. People working outdoors two miles from the factory were knocked over by the wave. Houses a mile away suffered extensive damage. On 23 June 2015, on the eighty-fourth anniversary, a memorial stone was dedicated by relatives of the dead. The stone was unveiled by Jill Charman, whose grandfather Robert Rubie Taylor had been one of the ten killed in 1931.

After 1945, propellant manufacture ceased at Holton Heath. Some buildings reopened as the Admiralty Materials Laboratory, which became the Admiralty Research Establishment, then part of the Defence Research Agency, then closed altogether in the late 1990s. The Ministry of Defence no longer owns any of the site. In 1981 a major portion of the old explosives area became a national nature reserve, the bracken and gorse and birch grown up over concrete bases and brick foundations. Other parts of the site became an industrial estate, and some may yet be turned to housing. The bridge that carried the cordite factory's railway over the LSWR is still there. The silos that held the schoolchildren's conkers had their basements turned into air-raid shelters in the Second World War, then were filled with earth to provide additional protection, and outlived the factory itself. Standing on the heath now, you would not know what once happened here. The plaques tell you. The blackbirds in the birch trees do not.