Rugby manufacturing history

 Home to Rugby Portland Cement, a famous school and a wonderful game.

The London Birmingham railway arrived in 1838 and set up goods yards and workshops around which grew small engineering works.

Willans & Robinson (later part of English Electric and then GEC) an engineering company which moved from Thames Ditton was attracted by the skills of Rugby’s railway engineers. The company used their steam turbine engines for electricity generation at the Coventry Ordnance Works.

More importantly it was the place British Thomson-Houston (BTH) chose for their first UK factory. Thomson Houston was one of the major American electrical engineers which had merged with the pioneering Thomas Edison in 1892 and became General Electric (GE). I write of them in my blog on the American Electricity Industry. They viewed the British market as attractive and set up in 1900 to compete with their major rival Westinghouse which had set up in Trafford Park in Manchester in 1897. The Rugby site began with the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs but to this was added heavy electrical engineering as more and more areas of the UK sought electrical generation.

BTH was later part of AEI and then GEC which had a major presence in the town. GEC Turbine Generators, GEC Machines and parts of GEC-Elliott instruments were all in Rugby.

The Rugby railway story continued in 1937 when Sir Nigel Gresley proposed a Railway Locomotive Testing Station funded jointly by LNER and LMS. The war delayed its opening until 1948 and then it supported the development of the railways until the final test in 1965. The building was then used for railway research until demolition in 1984. Rail research continued in Derby.

One of Britvic main manufacturing plants is here.

Continuing the engineering legacy, Technoset precision engineering is but one example of what Britain is doing so well.

In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. The Rugby Portland company was founded in 1862 and continues to produce in Rugby. It is now owned by the Mexican Cemex. It is one of the British companies to have been sold to foreign owners.

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World