Milton Keynes manufacturing history

 'Pooleyville', the nickname for the North Bucks New City was derived from the man who brainchild it was, the then Chief Architect and Planner for Buckinghamshire County Council, Frederick Pooley. Pooley was keenly aware of the developments in architectural thinking and also the experience of new towns in Britain: the shifts from the garden city movement to places to house those made homeless by the destruction of the Second World War. New towns were to have a balance of residential and employment accommodation as well as community facilities. By the sixties further challenges needed to be met. London and the South East were becoming over populated and so new towns had to be further away albeit accessible. The motor car, which was providing freedom and employment for many, was becoming a major headache in urban areas. Towns had to be designed to accommodate the motor car without being dominated by it.

Pooley's vision was for fifty neighbourhoods of five thousand people placed around four loops enclosing open space. The line of the loops would be marked by monorail track providing free public transport accessible by all residents. Industrial areas would be to the north and south.

Pooley's vision didn't survive the politics of London centric planners or the laissez faire of the Thatcher era during which later parts were built. Nevertheless the city did become a balanced community of manual and non-manual workers, living in neighbourhoods demarcated by a grid of dual carriage way roads sandwiched between linear park land with foot paths, bridle paths and cycle ways. Areas of employment were close to residential areas and all with abundant green space and literally millions of trees. There are lakes and woodland for recreation.

Milton Keynes embraces Newport Pagnell to the north and Bletchley to the south. The Grand Union Canal meanders through it, the MI runs down the eastern side and the A5 dissects it. The London to Birmingham railway perhaps gave it birth, as the village of Wolverton now within Milton Keynes was selected at the site for the railway workshops. In ways similar to Crewe and Swindon a community grew around Wolverton and is now evidenced by rows of victorian cottages amongst the twentieth century architecture of the city.

This is though a blog about manufacturing. The first large foreign companies to come were Alps Electric, Coca Cola, Mobil and Volkswagon. UK business brought Abbey National, Argos and the Open University. The days of large manufacturing units were coming to an end. In 2000, Milton Keynes was home to 4,500 companies most employing fewer than twenty people and there was a mix between manufacturing and the service sector.

Today the city's own website highlights Red Bull Racing; other websites pick out Lockhead Martin at nearby Ampthill and Unilever Research at Sharnbrook, both of which are closer to Bedford. Milton Keynes finds itself within what is known as Motorsport Valley stretching south of Birmingham through Oxfordshire. As well as Red Bull in Milton Keynes, there is Banbury with Haas, Brackley with Mercedes and Wantage with Williams. There is then a large cluster of specialist motor sport suppliers at Silverstone Industrial Park close to the racing circuit.

The overriding story about manufacturing in Milton Keynes is that it is about small and medium sized enterprises, with a strong bias towards technology in a community where knowledge is shared for mutual benefit.

Further reading:

• Mark Clapson, A Social history of Milton Keynes
• ORTOLANO, GUY. “PLANNING THE URBAN FUTURE IN 1960s BRITAIN.” The Historical Journal, vol. 54, no. 2, 2011, pp. 477–507. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23017981. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.

Slough manufacturing history

 A child of the War Office. Slough was one of many Buckinghamshire villages drawn to ever expanding London. London needed vegetables and Slough grew them. London needed houses and Slough had been making bricks for centuries; Eton College was built with Slough bricks. Slough wanted to be linked to the rest of the country by rail, but the Provost of Eton complained that the boys under his charge might use it to get away.

The Great Western Railway did come, but with no station for Slough; the nearest was in the neighbouring village of Langley. Trains did however stop in Slough, at a make-shift station, and then ran on through Langley without stopping on their way into London. The railway did slowly attract manufacturers, Slough was given its own station and trains began to stop at Langley.

James Elliman was already in the town as a linen draper and was producing his famous embrocation. He prospered and provided the town with a fire station and recreation ground. In contrast Lovegrove's chair manufactory closed. Halley's mineral water plant, the Gotha iron works and Fulbrook's engineering works all set up. Of more enduring benefit to the town, Horlicks, created in Canada but which nourished our forces in both world wars, chose to manufacture in the town. Naylor Bros. Paints came to Slough and formed the basis of ICI's paint division famously producing Dulux.

In 1917, the War Office commissioned the construction of a Mechanical Transport Repair Depot on a 600 acre site on which work began in July 1918. The depot was to collect, repair and repurpose the many thousands of vehicles used by the army in the war. In the months that followed the armistice, work continued until a parliamentary committee produced a report with the recommendation that the entire site, vehicles and all, be sold.

The site was bought by a consortium of businessmen and it became owned by the Slough Trading Company. Surplus vehicles were sold and buildings completed. The first factories were let to Gillette, Johnson and Johnson and the Hygenic Ice Company; Citroen Cars followed. The infrastructure of what had now become Slough Estates Ltd was added to, and further tenants arrived. St Helens Cable and Rubber brought its workforce from Warrington. Three Scots entrepreneurs set up Bitumen Industries but of greater significance Forrester Mars set up a confectionary factory and also a plant for producing food for the nation's increasing number of pets. Crane Packing followed with an Art Deco building echoing the design of the Mars towers. Workers came to Slough from the depressed areas of the country but the town struggled to build enough housing and community facilities.

In the Second World War nearby Langley was home to Hawker Aircraft's production of Hurricane fighter planes. After the war, Langley Park became the headquarters of Radio and Allied (later GEC Radio and Television) then run by Michael Sobbell, father in law of Arnold Weinstock. Both would become part of GEC which later also had in Slough Satchwell Controls. Langley also attracted the Ford Motor Company to build its commercial vehicle plant where the first Ford Transit was made. In order to house this further growth in the population, a good number of prefabs were erected.

Was John Betjeman right when he wrote: 'Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough'? The poem is a critique of places like Slough where fields were replaced by factories and to the benefit of 'the man with the double chin' who became rich as a result. The report on the parliamentary debate on the siting of the Mechanical Transport Repair Depot quotes members as lamenting the loss of 600 acres of fine wheat land.

Slough Trading Estate is the largest industrial estate in Europe under single ownership. It has some six hundred tenants from the UK and overseas countries including USA, Germany and South Korea. The estate receives electricity and heating from a dedicated power station fuel by refuse. Tenants now include Electrolux, GSK and Azko Nobel.

Further reading:

Judith Hunter, The Story of Slough (Newbury: Local Heritage Books, 1983)

Hitchin manufacturing history

Hitchin is a product of its soil which is a rich loam and so ideal for growing cereals but, even more so, herbs especially lavender. The undulating countryside also offers excellent pasture for sheep. A benign climate and adequate water supply completes the picture.

For centuries there had been water mills on the river Hiz with the business of grinding grain into flour. It was a good business with a regular market. The range of cereals grown attracted dealers looking not only for bread flour but for seeds yielding oil and cattle feed, and oats for malting for the London breweries. The arrival of the railways in the mid nineteenth century encouraged the building of a new corn exchange and dealers came from as far afield as Liverpool.

In the sixteenth century, lavender plants were brought from Italy, where they grow wild, and it was found that Hitchin's soil and climate were perfect for the plant. The flowers from the lavender plant are processed and distilled to produce fragrant lavender oil for use in toiletries. There were a number of firms in the town growing and processing lavender but the largest, Perks & Llewellen, caught my eye because Perks was my mother's family name. Perks & Llewellen were successful and supplied a growing market in the nineteenth century.

If lavender and a range of cereals could be grown, what else? The answer came from a young man who, attracted by the advances in science in the nineteenth century, became apprenticed to a pharmaceutical chemist. The young man with William Ransom and he was born and bred Hitchin; the pharmaceutical chemist was in Birmingham then thriving with busy factories. In 1846 William returned to Hitchin and set up his own business. He grew medicinal plants on the family farm: Henbane, Wild Lettuce and Belladonna. Other plants, he imported from as far away a Syria. He grew lavender but not in competition with Perks & Llewellen concentrating rather on its medicinal properties. William died in 1914 and the firm was continued by his son who also took over the growing of lavender for toiletries when Perks & Llewelyn closed down. Ransom Naturals became a public company in 1969 and now grows its plants near St Ives in Huntingdonshire. It has become renowned for its natural products.

In common with many towns in agricultural areas, Hitchin had its engineers. One, Ralph E. Sanders & Son, were carriage builders, cycle manufacturers and motor car engineers. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Harry Ricardo had praised Lanchester for producing a car that was not simply a motorised carriage. Sanders built motorised carriages in their workshop alongside carriages designed to be drawn by a horse. To me this goes a long way to explain the early car manufacturing process whereby the chassis and engine would be manufactured and a coach built body added to satisfy the particular requirements of the customer. As the motor car was made in increasing numbers and standardised forms, Sanders' business shrank although it continued as a garage until 1979.

John Whiting was a fellmonger, not unlike my own family who were fellmongers in Wheatley just to the south of Oxford and I wrote about this in my biography of my great great uncle William Smith Williams, Charlotte Bronte's Devotee. Alan Fleck and Helen Poole describe the business of fellmongers in their book Old Hitchin. It is about the hides of sheep and how they are cleaned and softened prior to tanning. They suggest that Hitchin hides may well have been used for parchment and I make that assumption for my family's business given their proximity to Oxford and its colleges. In the case of Hitchin it was fine hides used in book binding which began with the partnership of GW Russell and Henry Featherstone which took over the business from Whiting. In 1886 GW Russell & Son was formed and in 1949 it took over E&J Richardson of Newcastle and so secured the sole manufacturing rights for fine book-binding leather. The firm made the leather for the late Queen's Bible at her Coronation in 1953. The business, Russell Fine Leathers, continues in Hitchin and also in Suffolk.

Further reading:

Alan Fleck and Helen Poole, Old Hitchin (Chichester: Phillimore, 1999)