Take a look at my Who Built Britain blog

My exploration into British manufacturing kept bumping into wonderful buildings and structures. I needed to discover Who Built Britain  

  Building is in my blood; my mother's family ran a Midlands building company for ninety-nine years having previously been itinerant craftsmen. I remember with huge affection childhood visits to the 'yard'.

My last employment before I retired was as Chief Executive of Lincoln Cathedral where I learnt something of stone masons and the way medieval cathedrals were built. Most recently, I have been exploring the history of British manufacturing and the places where it took place. This brought me close to the building of mills, factories and urban housing, over a period spanning three centuries or so.

I needed to try to understand how it was all built and indeed who built it. 

This research is about Britain and so the story of early English Building is relevant background and a good place to start. It will be my next post.

My next point of call is Rome. Roman architecture stands out because of the variety of materials used and structures built, but most of all because modern building from the Renaissance onward looked to Rome for both theoretical and practical ideas.

I go on from there to look at traditional building materials: wood, stone and brick. Glass comes next, linking the old to the new.

This is very much a work in progress. I hope you will join me in my quest. I plan to post further blogs in the coming weeks. 

I explore classes of building; churches and military buildings starting with castles; church building over ten centuries consumed more labour, money and materials than any other form of building.

The sixteenth century, the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, marked a change in attitude as the English become confident and developed a tendency to show off. So, I move on to the great Country Houses and Urban Houses for the Wealthy and Merchant and, later, Middle Classes. The individual blog pieces take urban building in particular further forward.

As the eighteenth century draws to a close I come to Industrial Buildings which run hand in hand with Urban Dwellings for the poor who fled to the towns from deplorable Rural Dwellings.

I then explore the contractors who first emerged in the nineteenth century. They run hand-in-hand with new building materials: Steel and Concrete and the exploration of non-traditional building methods and materials. In addition to houses, they did of course build hospitals, schools, civic buildings, places of entertainment and infrastructure for transporting the nation.

The image is of the interior of one of the oldest buildings in Britain, the Broch of Mousa on Shetland dating from 2,500 BCE.

The Weston family and Associated British Food

 Garfield Weston set his family company on course to become the anchor-man of British food manufacturing. The company is now called Associated British Food.

Canadian Willard Garfield Weston was born in 1898, his father had emigrated to Canada and created a baking business there. In 1934, Weston moved to England and founded Allied Bakeries which introduced sliced white bread to the English. He also bought the prestigious Fortnum and Mason. The business prospered and he gave generously to the war effort including £100,000 to built 16 Hurricane and Spitfire Aircraft.

He bought Ryvita in 1947 and appointed his second son Gary to run it. Gary left Ryvita for Australia in 1952 and set up Weston Biscuit Company which he grew into a successful business. He invented the Wagon Wheel.

In 1960, Allied Bakeries changed its name to Associated British Foods with the objective of diversifying. In 1963, it acquired the Fine Fair Supermarket chain and in 1967 set up Primark in Dublin. At this point Gary returned to take over from his father. He looked to refocus on food and sold Fine Fare, whilst retaining Primark.

The 1980s saw investment in bakery ingredients. In 1991, the company had built a sufficiently large war chest to buy British Sugar Corporation (BSC) from the family owned Beresfords, which in turn opened the opportunity to move into animal feed using the by-products of sugar. BSC produced sugar from home grown beat; Tate & Lyle used imported sugar cane.

Forever seeking opportunity, ABF moved into ingredients before adding Ovaltine to Twinings. Further acquisitions saw moves into world foods with Patak and Elephant Atta flour, and into health foods with Jordans and Dorset Cereals joining Ryvita.

Gary gave much of his wealth to the Garfield Weston Foundation with funds of £1 billion which supports the built heritage and much more.

In 1994 he reorganised his group creating Wittington Investments. In 1999 he stepped down on the grounds of illhealth. He died in 2002.

He was succeeded by Peter Jackson and then in 2005 by George Weston. ABF now operates in fifty six countries.

Wittington Investments bought the Boots chemists chain in 2026.

Jaguar and Land Rover - a surprising pairing?

 William Lyons and the Wilks brothers created remarkable companies which made iconic vehicles. Was it just fate that brought the companies together?

William Lyons and Maurice Wilks were born three years apart; Lyons in 1901 in Blackpool.

Son of a piano maker, William attended Arnold House School and in 1922 set up in business making sidecars in partnership with William Walmsley. They progressed into body work for cars; the Austin Swallow was one result of this. Their first full car was the Swallow Sports 'SS' which caused a sensation at the 1931 motor show; SS Cars Ltd was born. Four years later the first Jaguar emerged as the first production car to exceed 100mph. The war intervened and SS Cars played their part. The company changed it name top Jaguar Cars Ltd in 1945.

The post image is of an ashtray that was my father's. He had owned one of the first Jaguars in the 1930s; I still have the leather covered wheel hammer.

Maurice Wilks was educated at Malvern and went to the USA in 1926 to work with General Motors. After two years he returned and joined Hillman as a planning engineer. In 1930 he joined Rover as chief engineer being promoted to technical director in 1946. In the aftermath of the war, Maurice and his brother Spencer created a vehicle originally made for farmers from aluminium left over from aircraft production – the Land Rover. Interestingly they always had greater pride in their luxury cars.

The route to the first ‘marriage’ was circuitous.

In the fifties, William Lyons and Jaguar were doing well, producing cars much in demand and they had virtually doubled in size by buying Daimler, but also Coventry Climax and Guy Motors. To be honest this was a pretty rich mix. It therefore still strikes me as strange that Lyons would enter into merger discussions with George Harriman at BMC. Yet, we have to remember the times  –  when BMC’s Mini was the 'must have' car for swinging sixties. BMC also owned MG and Austin-Healey whose sports cars were much in demand.  It seems that Lyons saw BMC as having the weight to finance the development of the Jaguar models which he had at least in his mind if not on the drawing board. Jaguar merged with BMC to become British Motor Holdings in 1966.

The Wilks brothers had retired from Rover in the early sixties and Donald Stokes of Leyland viewed the company as offering a slice of motoring quality to the bus and truck company which he ran. Rover would join Triumph which had become part of Leyland with the Standard-Triumph acquisition in 1960.

The mid sixties saw BMH running into trouble. The answer in the eyes of the new Labour government was size and this would be provided by the charismatic Donald Stokes and Leyland. The merger took place in 1968.

The new group had riches beyond price in terms of wonderful motor cars. The Jaguar E-type and XJ6, the Rover P6, the Triumph 2000, not to mention the MGB and Triumph TR5, and the Land Rover. Rather more ominously it had a large number of old factories, dominant shop stewards and mass market motor cars that the public didn’t really want.

I explore what became the British Leyland story in my book, Vehicles to Vaccines.

For this blog I note just three events that ensured that Jaguar and Land Rover would survive.

The rationalisation of BL could so easily have led to the loss of the Land Rover; instead the factory at Solihull was made over to 4x4 production. The Range Rover had been introduced at the end of the sixties just as BL was running out of money. The car was perfectly timed and demand soon far exceeded supply.

A little later, a brilliant manager, Geoffrey Robinson, was appointed Managing Director of Jaguar. He had no intention of the marque losing it kudos and initiated an ambitious plan to bring the company back on track. A lack of money caused this plan to run into the buffers. The appointment of Michael Edwards to lead to the eventual breakup of British Leyland had for Jaguar a streak of brilliance for he appointed John Egan to take up the reins at the then floundering motor company. Egan and his team brought Jaguar back so much so that, following privatisation, Ford paid handsomely for what was to lead their new speciality car group.

British Leyland became the Rover Group and this was bought by BMW. They in turn sold Land Rover to Ford where it worked closely with Jaguar.

The rest as they say is history, Jaguar and Land Rover both now prosper as JLR as part of the Tata Group.

It is ironic that the Wilks family didn’t see the Land Rover as their great success; it was the experimental vehicle powered by a gas turbine – Rover had after all been part of the development of the jet engine. Had this been the case, Jaguar and Rover would have been head to head. Had Land Rover stuck to the utility vehicle so loved by explorers, Ford may well not have looked at them. Yet with the Range Rover successors, Land Rover and Jaguar together look to the luxury car market where they both can prosper.