Philip Hamlyn Williams - my history of British Manufacturing

Thursday, December 4, 2025

South London manufacturing history 19th and 20th century

In his book, London: A History, Francis Sheppard observes that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, London had more steam engines than Lancashire’. London had also employed water power from the fast flowing river Wandle to mill flour and snuff and also to power the printing of calico.

Southwark, Lambeth and Vauxhall

Southwark and Lambeth were home to engineers Joseph Bramah, Henry Maudslay and Marc Isambard Brunel about each of whom I also wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. I explore further in a blog piece the huge influence of Henry Maudslay in particular on mechanical engineering and machine tools. Maudslay Sons and Field turned their hands to marine engines and ended the 19th century with 1,500 employees. Vauxhall began as marine engineers in Vauxhall but turned to motor cars and moved to Luton. Siebe Gorman moved to Lambeth from Denmark Street and made equipment for underwater exploration and later iron lungs for polio victims. Napier manufactured the 'perfect printing machine' (accordingly to the Great Exhibition catalogue).

Engineer, Bryan Donkin, manufactured tin cans from his premises in Bermondsey. J.C Field had candle factories in Bermondsey but also Battersea and Lambeth. Wright's coal tar soap was made in Southwark and Price's Patent Candle Company employed 2,000 people in Vauxhall and Battersea.

Peek Freans made biscuits in Bermondsey and Rowntree moved production of After Eights to the Bermondsey works of Shuttleworth in 1966.

In 1920, GEC had the Accessories Works in Southwark.

Battersea, Kennington and Wandsworth

in 1856 Morgan Brothers set up a factory in Battersea to make graphite crucibles for metals furnaces. In 1907 it progressed to make commutator brushes for electric motors and relocated to South Wales in the 1970s. In 2013 Morgan Crucible was renamed Morgan Advanced Materials with businesses across the world.

Burroughs, Wellcome & Co. set up the first office to be lit by electricity, and a factory in Wandsworth to manufacture compressed medicines. In the First World War, Burroughs Wellcome & Co supplied: ‘aspirin, chloroform (from alcohol), cholesterol, cocaine, emetine bismuthous iodide, flavine, hydroquinone, lanoline and phenacetin’.

Kennington remains home to the Beefeater Gin distillery. Airfix models were first made in Wandsworth.

Lewisham, Norwood and Deptford

Lewisham was an early home to Elliot Brothers instrument makers and George Harvey galvanisers. Catford had James Robertson preserves and Hither Green, King’s Biscuits.

Norwood was home to William Ford Robinson Stanley, a prolific inventor amongst whose devices was the Stanley Knife. He was a successful industrialist and benefactor giving the Borough the Stanley Halls and the Stanley Technical College.

The London Electric Supply Company was incorporated in 1887 with a capital of £1 million to build a power station at Deptford. Ferranti, at the age of twenty-three, was appointed chief engineer responsible for the whole project. He conceived a project of generators producing electricity which would be transmitted at 10,000 volts through cables and switchgear built to his own design. This was a massive project. Ferranti moved his works to Hollinwood, Oldham in Lancashire, and, in 1897, employed seven hundred people.

Merton, Morden and Mitcham

Of great significance was the arrival of a man of volcanic energy, William Morris. Morris had already run a decorative business at Red Lion Square and then Queen's Square but the demand for his products was such that more space was needed and the Abbey Works was founded in seven acres of 'lush meadows' interspersed with the remains of Huguenot buildings. Here Morris designed and his highly skilled employed made: painted glass windows, arras tapestry, carpets, embroidery, tiles, furniture, printed cottons, paper hangings and upholstery. Economic growth had put money in the hands of many more people who wanted to buy furnishings that were not mass produced. Morris did not eschew the factory system, he dye making was on a large scale as were bleaching and finishing. He had workshops of men and women weaving and painting, but all the designs were his or those of his best friend the artists Burns-Jones. The output was considerable. It was not surprising that Liberty & Co sourced their printed fabric from the same area.

The Lines Brothers factory at Merton was at one time the largest toy factory in the world. By the time it came to Merton it had been trading in one form or another for one hundred years, but it was rebranded Tri-ang. A workforce of 4,000 made Fairy Cycles, Frog model aircraft, Minic clockwork toys and much more. They went on to make model railways (as the image of the signal box bears witness) and I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Watliff was the largest manufacturer of commutators and slip rings for electric motors producing up to 20,000 a day. Customers included the coal and steel industries and power stations. In the industrial area on the Kingston Road was Pilchers which made ambulances and mobile radiographic units used worldwide.

Decca pressed records in New Malden and began work on radar in Brixton. The company was floated in 1929 by stockbroker Edward Lewis. It began with records but went on to radar. The radar business was bought by Racal in 1980 and the record business was sold to Polygram.

Mullard radio components were at Mitcham and Balham having set up in Hammersmith in 1920, founded by Captain Stanley Mullard who had previously made valves for the Admiralty. The move to Mitcham came in 1929 after the Dutch Phillips had taken control of the company. Phillips made radios in a neighbouring plant. Philips only just managed to ship over components and machinery for their vital EF50 valve just before the Germans invaded in May 1940 In 1960 Mullard held 75% of the transistor market in Britain.

Marconi made radio transmitters and receivers in Hackbridge.

Carshalton had an industrial alcohol plant of the Distillers Company.

Croydon

Home to Powers Samas accounting machines which was bought by Vickers in an attempt to diversify after the Second World War. Powers Samas later joined with the British Tabulating Machine Company of Letchworth to form the International Computers and Tabulators Company.

Southeast London

Beckenham had the Wellcome research laboratories. Caterham was home to motor sport engineers by the same name.

Saturday, November 29, 2025

East London manufacturing history 19th and 20th centuries

Docklands

The first decade of the nineteenth century saw an expansion in docks which would guarantee London's position as the world's trading city. The first was a West India Docks which had in addition to the docks themselves, warehouses all surrounded by a secure wall. The work was privately funded and financed by a 21 year monopoly of West Indies trade. They were located on the then marshy Isle of Dogs. Next came London Docks serving Europe and North America located in Wapping. Lastly the East India Company opened their walled and policed dock at Blackwall.

The East India docks speak of the vast international trade that poured through London and I am drawn to John Masefield’s poem Cargos which I quote at the start of How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. I also remember from childhood sailing from the docks on a banana boat bound for Tenerife.

We are still talking of ships made of wood and powered by sail for which London shipbuilders were rightly famous. Anthony Slaven in his book British Shipbuilding 1500-2010 suggests that eight major yards on the Thames were in the van in building iron hulled ships. These yards had the skills in shipbuilding but also engines. The 1860s were a boom time for London's yards with at one time as many as 27,000 people employed in shipbuilding. 1860 saw the first British ironclad, HMS Warrior, built by the Thames Ironworks, clad with armour by John Brown and armed with guns from Armstrongs. The boom came to a grinding halt as the Clyde, Tyne and Tees took over the lead largely because raw materials were close by and so vastly cheaper that those London shipbuilders had to buy in. I write in another blog piece of Henry Maudslay's influence on machine tools; his company Maudslay Son and Field were highly influential in steam power for ships. In Greenwich, John Penn owned the largest marine engine business in Britain.

In shipbuilding 1,700 worked in John Penn’s boiler works at Greenwich and many more at Wigham and Green’s yard at Blackwall.

Joseph Rank saw the vast quantity of grain imports coming through London docks and saw the opportunity for flour mills which he built by the river. These worked alongside huge warehouses and markets. London had cornered world trade, for example Australian wool was shipped to London for onward sale. The domination in trade was mirrored and amplified in banking and finance where London took an unassailable lead until 1914.

The docks needed expanding again, this time to fit the larger steam powered steel hulled ships and the Victoria and Albert docks were built.

The final expansion of the docks on the Thames can look to Tilbury docks in 1886 which provided a massive deep water dock east of the then docklands. Somewhat later Samuel Williams created a huge industrial development around Dagenham Dock. Tilbury would once again take the lead in 1967 in the move to containers which transformed the docks from a community ruled by dockers to an international business controlled by computers.

Woolwich

Woolwich was of course home to the Arsenal where some 75,000 worked in 1917 and I write of this and more in Ordnance and How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. At the start of the Crimean War an engineer, John Anderson, was appointed to undertake a major programme of modernisation and expansion. He introduced steam power into the Foundry and the Royal Carriage Factory. Similar building programmes and modernisation were undertaken at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, which had been set up after the Napoleonic Wars following bad experience with commercial suppliers, and the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey. Another key appointment was made in 1854, when Frederick Abel took the office of Ordnance Chemist which had fallen into disuse in 1826. Under Abel, the technology of ammunition took major strides with Woolwich as a centre of excellence.

William Siemens was another major employer in Woolwich. As I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World, William was the British end of the German family and took on the manufacture of cables for telegraph. In time cables crossed the globe with Siemens purpose built ship The Faraday laying them. Siemens worked in partnership with steel rope makers, Newall & Company of Newcastle. This latter company became part of British Ropes which later changed its name to Bridon. Siemens factory became part of GEC but was closed by Arnold Weinstock attracting acrimony from the community and unions. The factory had also produced telephone equipment. As well as hand-sets, they supplied their first public automatic telephone exchange in Grimsby in September 1918 handling 1,300 lines. This was followed by exchanges in Stockport, Southampton and Swansea; in all some forty-three out of one hundred exchanges brought into service by the Post Office up to 1927. They also set up exchanges in Canada and Australia. Such was the demand that they took new space in Hartlepool and Spennymoor.

In the Second World War in order to protect the Clyde, Siemens were commissioned to supply not only the five miles long loop cable through which high currents would be passed to explode such mines, but to commission and build all the necessary switch-gear and power plant. They also supplied cables equipment for radar and line communications. They were of course the perfect company to produce a submarine cable which could contain petrol at high pressure for the PLUTO project. For the HAIS pipeline (Hartley, Anglo-Iranian, Siemens) cable of seventy miles in length was required and a whole new building had to be constructed to contain it. Elsewhere, lamp production became even more specialised for the war effort, and the research laboratories were kept busy with demands by the British Aircraft Establishment for specialist bulbs for aircraft signalling.

Shoreditch and Bethnal Green

The furniture trade continued stongly into the nineteenth century. Timber would be provided from local saw mills such as Lathams which prospered and is now a leading UK timber supplier. One or two larger establishments emerged. In the lead was Lebus, but Hille and others would follow. Herrmann was said to have the largest furniture business in Europe; they were also in New York. The Lusty family made Lloyd Loom furniture.

It was a mixed economy with some warehouses making space for manufacturing. West End retailers, like Maples, began to source their products from East End makers. The large hire purchase companies like Times and Great Universal Stores dealt with the warehouses and the larger makers. Mechanisation came with electricity and, with the establishment of the National Grid, larger makers took advantage of cheap land in the Lea Valley, leaving little furniture making in the East End. When Lebus moved they had 1,000 employees. They now manufacture in Scunthorpe. Hille, which employed two of Britain's most talented designers in plastic injection moulding, moved to Watford and now manufacture in Ebbw Vale. Meredew moved to Letchworth.

Barking, Silvertown, Dagenham and Shadwell

Barking had an unhappy start to industrialisation. In How Britain Shaped The Manufacturing World I wrote in the context of communication of the great stink, the Thames doubling up as a massive open sewer. The river attracted all sorts of industry and processes often highly polluting especially outside the county boundary where by-laws restricting offensive trades did not apply. In Barking this meant chemical and related industries. Barking's other problem was that the sewerage from north London carried by Bazalgette's new sewer emptied to the west of Barking creek, creating, along with market gardens (where some of the sewerage was used raw as fertiliser) and polluting industries, a massive public health problem. In time local authorities were established which could enforce regulations and act together to improve the environment with sewers but also railways and means of communication. J.B.Lawes discovered a method of making fertiliser from treated sewerage, thus overcoming the health hazards.

The coming of the railways opened up east London and Essex for development. Barking attracted the largest gas works in Britain and much later a massive coal fired power station. Handley Page’s first aeroplane was made in Barking. After the First World War a number of new companies opened factories: P.C. Henderson doors (subsequently relocated to County Durham and now part of the Finish ASSA Alloy company), A.F. Bulgin radios and Dicky Birds crackers and ice-cream. Abbey Match works became part of the British Match Corporation.

In the Second World War, Barking creek was used for building Mulberry Harbours; companies in the borough also produced chemicals, life jackets, wood craft including Mosquito aircraft, and steel drums.

The local authority built the largest council house estate at Becontree which leads on to....

Dagenham which became home to Ford UK which moved manufacture from its plant in Manchester; many employees from Manchester moved into the Becontree estate. The Dagenham plant was vast with its own furnaces for casting engine blocks. One of their paint suppliers, Lewis Berger, was at nearby Shadwell Heath (I remember well working on their audit in the seventies). Dagenham also had an industrial alcohol distillery run by the Distillers Company, a May & Baker factory and pharmaceutical research facility drawing employees also from the Becontree estate.

Whilst most manufacturing still took place in the home or in small workshops, Jerry White highlights some of the other larger factories. Silvertown had a factory employing 3,000 making tyres and footballs, and insulation from rubber. The company The India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company was bought by the American Goodrich who then sold it to British shareholders and it became the British Tyre and Rubber (BTR). The insulation was probably used by Siemens Brothers at Woolwich which employed 1,700 making cables. Rope making took place in Shadwell with Frost’s works being the largest in the world.

At the start of the twentieth century the Great Eastern Railway employed 3,100 at their Stratford works. The workshop was originally intended for repair, but went on to build locomotives. Their famous engineer James Holden built an early electric powered locomotive capable of reaching 30mph in 30 seconds. It never went into service for the rail infrastructure at the time was not up to the challenge.

Bryant & May employed 1,400 in Bow making matches. Bow was also home to porcelain manufacturer Thomas Frye and Edward Lloyd's paper mill. The paper industry blossomed following the abolition of the newspaper stamp in 1855.

Plessey had their main factory was at Ilford and relocated during the war to Central Line Tube tunnels to escape enemy bombing. Ilford manufactured photographic film here. Britvic manufactured soft drinks in Beckton.

Thursday, November 27, 2025

South London manufacturing history

The south bank of the Thames and the rivers flowing into it, the Wandle and Neckinger, attracted industries needing ready transport for raw materials, water power and water itself.

Southwark, Lambeth and Bermondsey

Ceramics were made in Lambeth and also in Chelsea and Bow. Doulton & Co made rainwater goods and later fine pottery as Royal Doulton having moved to Stoke on Trent.

Glass was famously produced in Southwark and over the river at Whitefriars in the City of London. Around about one quarter of Britain's glass works were in London. I write of early British glass making in this link.

Tanning took place in Bermondsey. The river Neckinger provided the water for the tanning pits. Slaughter houses provided a constant supply of hides and there was ample oak bark for the tanning process. There were busy cobblers and cordwainers throughout; the Corwainers in particular were very protective of their craft. It was this trade that suffered as Northampton attracted London retailers by virtue of its lower pay rates.

Leading on from tanning were furriers and a trade in making fur hats which continued to thrive until machine made rabbit skin hats and felt hats from further north took over.

Londoners needed feeding and were thirsty people. The Albion Steam flour Mill was built in 1785 and had two of Watt's 50-horsepower steam engines driving eighty millstones and cranes, hoists, sifters and dressers. The largest of the London breweries was in Southwark. The great London breweries not only became very rich but were some of the pioneers of mass production. We can think of Samuel Whitbread, Richard Meux, Sir Benjamin Truman, Sampson Hanbury and John Perkins who brewed in Southwark. Four producers of vinegar added to everything else ensured a challenging smell for the uninitiated.

Merton and Morden

The presence of the river Wandle in Merton Abbey made the area attractive to Huguenots silk weavers. When they left, the attraction of the water for dyeing calicoes and linen with madder was recognised by Mr Leach who set up a dye works. William Morris and Liberties would follow.