The United Kingdom Health and Safety Executive's Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL) is currently undertaking a number of research programmes to investigate the effects of dynamic loading on engineering materials and components. This paper describes the Laboratory's 1MJ impact facility and outlines some of the current work programmes. These include: investigating the effects of dynamic loading on locked ,coil wire rope, effects of impact loading on lifting components and techniques for investigating the strain rate effect on large tensile test specimens.