East Anglia manufacturing history

 A predominantly agricultural region with historically a heritage of farm equipment manufacture. The presence of one of the world's top universities is of course significant. In much earlier history East Anglia was impacted by invasions from Rome and then Anglo-Saxons, Danes and William the Conqueror. Later it benefitted from successive influxes of Flemish weavers and Huguenots. Each of these invasions left their beneficial mark not least at Sutton Hoo near Ipswich.

Cambridge

The University is a major collaborator with British industry. It was from where ARM came. Read more in this link.

King’s Lynn

A fishing port for many centuries. British Sugar has a large factory at nearby Wissington

Great Yarmouth

Where the American Birds Eye began freezing fish in Britain. It became part of Unilever.

Lowestoft

Home to one of the Pye Radio factories. At nearby Bungay, Clays print books. Birds Eye frozen vegetables factory now owned by Nomad Foods.

Norwich

One of the great early wool towns. Home to Norvic Shoes and a centre of shoe making. The Boulton Aircraft company developed from a woodworking firm. The company was re-established in Wolverhampton in 1936 as Boulton Paul and in 1961 joined Dowty Group. Mackintosh of Halifax bought AJ Caley of Norwich and there developed Quality Street and Rolo. You can find more by following this link.

Thetford

Charles Burrell Ltd were the largest employer in Thetford and at one time were the largest manufacturer of traction engines in the world. In 1919 they joined Agricultural and General Engineers and when that company failed in 1932, Burrells closed with the loss of many jobs. Fisons first set up here.

Ipswich

Ransomes were the biggest employers and Fisons main factory was here having originated in nearby Thetford. I tell more by following this link.

Harwich and Felixstowe

Together with Ipswich, these are known as the three Haven ports on the North Sea thanks to their deep harbours.

Colchester

Thought to be the first English town a century before the Romans. A wool town in the middle ages and in the nineteenth century a centre of mechanical engineering with Paxman engines and Crompton's dynamos. You can read much more by following this link.

Southend on Sea

Ekco built a factory here in 1930 to manufacture radio and plastics. As I observed in the design review of the Festival of Britain, EK Cole was especially good at diversifying. In the Second World War, Ekco’s factory at Southend was considered too vulnerable to air attack and so they relocated in part to Aylesbury, and, in part, to a 19th century mansion near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. They made radio for bombers and airborne radars and walkie-talkies for infantry.

Basildon

The neighbouring village of Fobbing was where the Peasant's Revolt began in 1381 with Wat Tyler leading a march on London. Basildon is a town with a distinctly agricultural heritage and which moved into the twentieth century with brick works producing seven million bricks a year. The works were used by the military during the First World War and thereafter were dismantled. It was designated a new town after the Second World War. New Holland tractors set up in 1964 and Marconi manufactured here. Read more by following this link.

Brentwood

Ilford Ltd opened a factory producing dry photographic plates in Great Worley.

Billericay

Home to one of three Marconi components factories (the others at Wembley and Hackbridge, Surrey)

Braintree

Samuel Courtauld began with a silk mill making mourning clothing. Read more about silk and Braintree but following this link.

Chelmsford

In nearby Great Baddow there is the BAE Systems AI laboratories, formerly the Marconi Research Centre. GEC Marconi had a big manufacturing presence in the town with Radar and Communications. You can read much more by following this link.

Ilford

Plessey manufactured radio components and a large range of electronics. You can read more by following this link

Langford

Home to CML Microsystems set up in 1968 and now with a worldwide market.

Sudbury

Lucas diesel components were made here. It has the last British silk weavers. I tell more in my blog piece on Braintree.

Brantham

The early British plastics manufacturer moved production of Halex from Hackney.

East Midlands manufacturing history

 Textiles and footwear. Engineering built on an agricultural heritage and steel based on ore in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. The image is of Lincoln Cathedral.

Nottinghamshire

Nottingham

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. Hosiery was centred on the East Midlands and so Nottingham along with Derby and Leicester. This led to framework knitting and then to Nottingham lace. I write about framework knitting in the page on Leicester (below). Nottingham suffered from dreadful overcrowding and this combined with a decline in the hosiery trade after the Napoleonic wars led to the action of the Luddites.

The city was home to Jesse Boot and pharmaceuticals, Raleigh Bicycles (later part of TI plc) and Stanton and Staveley steel and spun pipes (formerly part of British Steel and before that Stewarts & Lloyds). It was also home to John Player cigarettes and a good deal of Courtaulds and other textile manufacturers. Follow this link to read more about Nottingham.

Long Eaton

Long Eaton was home to lace making and furniture. In the late 19th century three large tenement lace mills were built one financed by the notorious financier Ernest Terah Hooley who was born in the town. You can read more about long Eaton manufacturing in this link.

Beeston

Just outside Nottingham, Beeston was home to Plessey Telecommunication following their purchase of Ericcson. Long before then it was home to the Humber Company before their move to Coventry. It was the vacant Humber factory that in 1901 was occupied by the National Telephone Company (later taken over by British Ericcson) to manufacture telephone equipment under licence from the American Bell and Edison. Nearby Chilwell had been home to a massive shell filling factory in the First World War and I wrote of this in Ordnance. In the Second World War it became home to the Army Centre for Mechanisation of which I wrote in War on Wheels.

Sutton in Ashfield

A coal mining town which became home to hosiery manufacturer, Pretty Polly. Parker-Knoll upholstery moved here

Mansfield

William Hollins set up its mill in Pleasley that same year, attracted by the availability of water and a climate kept damp by the number of trees. Labour was provided by a workhouse; many of the workers were children
At the Great Exhibition of 1851 I noted that William Hollins of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire exhibited both cotton and wool which when combined was patented as Viyella.

Worksop

One of the major producers of liquorice. Home also to hat making and furniture. Also Sharwoods, owned by RHM and then Premier Foods, make their famous curry sauces.

Newark

Home to British Sugar, later part of Associated British Food. Home to Worthington Simpson Pumps, later part of a joint venture between Ingersol-Rand and Dresser Pumps. Ransome and Marles Bearing Co became part of Ransome Hoffman Pollard bearings formed at the initiative of the IRC in the sixties. It became a subsidiary of Ingersol-Rand. After a management buy out, the bearings business eventually became part of the Japanese NSK.

Leicestershire

Leicester

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. Leicester embraced hosiery and foot wear from which came engineering to mechanise those industries, and then much more. Follow this link to read more of Leicester's manufacturing history and framework knitters.

Ashby de la Zouch

United Biscuits produce McVitie, Crawford and McCoy's biscuits and snacks

Hinckley

The first stocking making machine was used in the town in the mid seventeenth century. Much more recently Hinckley is home to a new factory manufacturing Triumph Motor Cycles.

Ibstock

The company began in 1825 as a colliery, but refocused on bricks with annual production of 3 million in 1914, 10 million in 1939 and 18 million in 1946. Ibstock Brick became a punlic company in 1963. By 1990 it had 5,000 employees expanded through acquisition including Redland and Tarmac brick businesses. The business weas bought by CHR but then sold to management in 2015. It was then re-floated. Its Eclipse factory near Leicester was opened in 2018.

Loughborough

Home to Brush Electric Machines . I write of the American Brush Company in my blog on American electricity. The British Brush company operated first in London but grew out of its premises and looked for a suitable place for expansion. The site selected was in Loughborough next to the Midland Railway where the Falcon Engineering Works had been built by Henry Hughes who had begun by building carriages, railways carriage and eventually steam locomotives. Brush Electrical Engineering became a major manufacturer of electric powered locomotives whilst continuing with steam locomotive particularly for export markets. Ladybird produce their children's books in the town. Nearby Mountsorrel became home in 1941 to the Alvis workforce relocated from Coventry after the bombing of 14 November 1940. After the war the factory was bought by Rolls-Royce and only closed in 1994. British Gypsum producing plasterboard is at East Leake, now owned by St Gobain.

Market Harborough

Summingtons made Liberty corsets and the famous Liberty bodice.

Melton Mowbray

Promoted as the food capital of England, this market town is home to Samworth Brothers makers of sandwiches and porkpies and Clawson Dairy makers of Stilton and other cheeses. Until 2000, the neighbouring village of Old Dalby was home to the army depot maintaining our missiles. Mars chose the town for its Pedigree Petfood factory. Stanton & Stavely had an iron works manufacturing fitments and manhole covers at Holwell just outside Melton.

Derbyshire

Derby

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. Home to Rolls-Royce, railway and engineering history. I tell more about the city's manufacturing story with the help of a visit to the Derby museum of making.

Spondon

In 1923 British Cellulose had changed its name to British Celanese and by the 1930s was producing Celanese filament yarn well suited to the fashions of the twenties and thirties. Its acetate drape was being used in competition with silk. British Celanese was later bought by Courtaulds. In the Second World War, British Celanese manufactured parachutes and underclothing. By the end of the war, they employed 20,000 people. In conjunction with Courtaulds, ICI formed British Nylon Spinners to exploit the Du Pont patent of Nylon for the manufacture of parachutes.

Belper

Was home to Glowworm and Parkray boilers, part of TI plc and then Hepworth Ceramic plc.

Langley Mill

The Valley works became a shadow factory producing a variety of armaments. It was then repurposed by Vic Hallam to manufacture prefabricated buildings. Aristoc manufactured silk hosiery and GR Turner manufactured wagons.

Chesterfield

John Robinson set up a business here in 1839 making pill boxes. In the fifties the company patented the first disposable nappies and now as Robinson plc make a whole range of packaging material.

Burton on Trent

At one time it was home to thirty breweries. The Branston pickle factory was repurposed as a Central Ordnance Depot for Army clothing in the Second World War. Read more in this link.

Burnaston

Toyota built a plant here in the early 1990s to manufacture motor cars for the UK and European market

Cromford

Richard Arkwright’s water frame massively increased the speed of spinning cotton. Cromford is the site of his first factory and also John Smedley wool knitters.

Alfreton

Home to Thornton's Chocolates founded in Sheffield in 1911. Butterley was an engineering company at nearby Ripley and produced cast iron (for St Pancras Station and the Falkirk Wheel) and bricks, the latter became part of Hanson and then Heidelberg Cement. The engineering business was bought by Slater Walker and merged with Crittall. Read more in this link. Also nearby is the Denby Pottery.

High Peak

Home to Swizzles Matlow.

Northamptonshire

Northampton

New Town designated in 1968. Home to boot-making, becoming busy during the First World War with huge demand from the army. From this came shoe making which now is at the quality end of the market with Churches. The town was home to Express Lifts, Britain's largest manufacturer of lifts, and their test tower built in 1982 is now a listed building. I tell more in this blog.

Corby

A new town designated after the Second World War in 1950. Stewarts and Lloyds in effect relocated their steel making in the interwar years but steel production ceased in the eighties. Tata Steel has a presence in the town manufacturing thin walled tube. I tell more in this blog.

Kettering

This was a home to footwear manufacturing along with Northampton. Weetabix is made at nearby Burton Latimer

Wellingborough

Another footwear town also home to flour mills. Read more by following this link.

Irthlingborough

Home to Whitworth's dried fruit and to the Lantern Tower on St Peter's Church which was built as a beacon to guide travellers through the 'treacherous' Nene Valley

Daventry

Cummins Inc power systems factory was set up here and combines with their UK logistics centre. Home to DIRFT, the International Rail Freight Terminal. At nearby Long Buckby is McLaren automotive.

Peterborough

New Town designated in 1967. A deeply agricultural town which embraced engineering as I tell more in this blog.

Lincolnshire

Lincoln

The Romans installed garrisons at strategic towns across England and Lincoln was one. One of the five towns of the Danelaw. William the Conqueror built a castle and cathedral and the town was one of the largest in medieval England, wealthy from wool. More recently famous for its cathedral and relationship with the RAF and Bomber Command. Follow the link to Lincoln's manufacturing story

Grantham

An engineering town. You can read about it in this blog.

Scunthorpe

Home to United Steel Companies (Lincolnshire) now renamed British Steel and owned by the Chinese. I write more in this blog.

Stamford

One of the five towns of the Danelaw. A town famous for the Cecil family to whom we owe thanks for British patent law. The town, in its later years, attracted engineering. You can read more in this blog.

Boston

An ancient town with a busy port. In a county where chickens were grown in the hundreds of thousands Fogarty took advantage of byproduct of feathers for their pillows and duvets. Deep in farming country there is currently a plan to build a factory for a vegan food processor. Greencore produce prepared salads and vegetables.

Spalding

Home to vegetable processors including Greencore and FreshLinc.

Long Sutton

Home to Princes largest vegetable processing plant

Grimsby

Known for its fish as early as the thirteenth century. Fishing and fish processing dominated the town in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In nearby Caistor, Sealord (now Japanese owned) make high end fish fingers for Waitrose.

Humberside

The south bank of the Humber was and is home to much heavy chemical industry. British Titan Products built a factory on the Pyewipe industrial estate on the outskirts of Grimsby. They were followed by Laporte also with titanium dioxide, Dunlop with industrial hoses, Ciba Chemicals and Courtaulds with man made fibre. Fisons had a factory at Immingham.

Stafford manufacturing history

 A power house of British electrical engineering, Stafford was of course a shire town but one that was soon outgrown by other towns in its county. One reason was that the man road route following the course of the Trent by-passed it. When the canals came they too passed it by until a passage was created by dredging the river Sow and adding an canalised section.

The tradespeople of Stafford carried on the common trades, but slowly a larger group emerged whose business was making shoes. The wearing of shoes had become more common in London, the growing industrial towns and the colonies and so a strengthening demand developed for Stafford's shoe makers. In his book Stafford Past, Roy Lewis suggests that one name drew ahead of the field, that of William Horton. In many ways like Manchester cotton merchants, he had a network of outworkers for whom his workshop would cut the leather for soles and uppers and the outworkers would stitch them and return them to him for payment and the next batch of leather. At one time he is said to have had one thousand outworkers. Finished shoes would be despatched by canal to the growing urban areas. The Napoleonic wars boosted demand but then competition from the lower paid Northampton shoe makers attracted trade away.

Railways did not pass Stafford by, rather the town became something of a hub for Staffordshire's part in the growing rail network. Workshops were set up and successive stations built. More significantly the town embraced massive marshalling yards where wagons arrived and were despatched right around the country. Not surprisingly locomotive manufacture took hold and W.G. Bagnall emerged as a leader.

As with the other shoe towns, the advent of American sewing machines for shoes led first to strikes as men refused to work on machine stitched leather. In time, as elsewhere, machines became a fixture along with factory production. Stafford's factories found themselves specialising in women's shoes and the firm Lotus became the best known of Stafford's factories. As elsewhere, foreign competition shrank the workforce to one or two specialised factories.

Supporting the shoe making trade, there emerged a cohort of manufacturers of the equipment needed to make shoes but also the packaging, laces and polish the wearer would need. The British United Shoe Machinery Company was set up by its American counterpart and took over the shoe related business of W.H. Dorman. This company would move into motor vehicles with the Redbridge Motor Works and aero engines with Adams. In the First World War they developed the interrupter gear that enabled machines guns to fire between the blades of a spinning propeller. After the war, the company built its first diesel engines. In 1959 it acquired W.G Bagnall and two years later became part of the English Electric. Later still it would join with Perkins diesels of Peterborough.

At the start of the twentieth century, Stafford attracted the British Siemens Brithers whose premises at Woolwich were becoming too small to house both its cable manufacture and its business of dynamos and electric motors. It was these latter two which Siemens moved to Stafford. Siemens Dynamo works later joined the group of companies which in 1919 formed English Electric. I write of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

Roy Lewis writes of the arrival in 1930 of George Nelson as managing director of English Electric and how he encouraged its growth in a very hands on way, his home being through a garden gate in the factory fencing. The Second World War saw the factory produce tanks, bombs and a range of electrical equipment. In 1960 the company opened a new transformer factory and in 1968 merged with GEC. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. In 2015 the Stafford Grid and Power businesses became part of the American General Electric, now GE Vernova, which is working on high voltage transmission for the transition to net zero.

Stafford was also home to British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Company and in the Stafford Salt and Alkali Company.

Further reading

• Roy Lewis, Stafford Past (Chichester: Phillimore, 1997)
• J.D. Scott, Siemens Brothers 1858-1958 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1958) [printed by Jarrold in Norwich]

Norwich manufacturing history

The second largest city in Britain at the start of the eighteen century made wealthy by wool, Norwich, with a population of 30,000, was a city of spinners, wool-combers and weavers.

The principal product was worsted cloth. To this were added worsted made of wool and silk to make it softer and so offer competition to Indian cashmere, and later wool and cotton worsted. Norwich won business from Exeter through its lower wages, but then Yorkshire won over Norwich for the same reason. By the end of the century Norwich was dependent upon export sales via the East India company and, when these ceased in the early nineteenth century, Norwich's wool workers were destitute. They had long resisted mechanisation but eventually relented. The trade did revive but never to its former level. In 1961, there were 10,000 employed in the clothing trade around about the same number as in shoe making.

In 1800, there had been cordwainers making shoes and boots in the city for decades, but wool had always been the dominant trade. With wool's decline and increased demand for shoes from London, the colonies and the growing industrial towns, Norwich began its journey to become a centre of shoemaking, particularly for women. The earliest recorded shoe manufacturer was James Southall & Co in 1792. In terms of other activity, Gurney's Bank (later part of Barclays) was founded 1775 and Hills and Underwood vinegar maker in 1762.

In 1846 Norwich became the last major city to be connected to the growing railway net work. This facilitated further growth in shoe making, with Norwich becoming, so Frank Meeres suggests in his A History of Norwich, the fourth largest shoe city in Britain. Norvic shoes was a celebrated brand for women's footwear and one of the first to embrace advertising. This company, formed by the older Howlett and White, made many thousand of boots and shoes for the armed forces in both world wars. One Norvic speciality was sports shoes including running spikes.

The commercial strength of Norwich was in the diversity of its industry. Boulton and Paul manufactured all manner of product from wood including aircraft, at one time employing 1,300. Jewson Timber Merchants were founded in Norwich. Barnard, Bishop and Barnard invented a machine for making wire netting which sold all over the world. The company later became part of Tinsley Wire of Sheffield. Laurence, Scott and Electromotors embraced electricity and made dynamos and electric motors with a workforce at one time of 3,500. The company still manufactures in the city but was bought by the Austrian ATB in 2007 and now is financed by the Chinese Wolong. Coleman's mustard business was founded in 1804 and by 1900 had 2,000 employees. Coleman merged with the Recketts of Hull in 1938. As I told in my blog on Halifax, Mackintosh bought the Norwich chocolate maker, AJ Caley. Elsewhere the Norwich Union insurance company was founded in 1806. HMSO moved to Norwich in 1968 but closed in 1996. The publisher Jarrold moved to Norwich in 1823 and still publishes from the city.

Further reading

Frank Meers, A History of Norwich (Stroud: Phillimore, 1998)

Northampton manufacturing history

 In my perambulation around the manufacturing towns of Britain, I have normally found the presence of raw materials and water, ideally navigable. Northampton had no coal nearby and its river, the Nene, was only navigable some miles toward the sea. It was, though, on road routes from London to the north and so enjoyed the trade from passing coaches, much like Stamford. Unlike Stamford, it was the shire town and carried on all the administrative functions. It was in the middle of livestock farming country and so had a market, but also access to hides, of which more later.

Poor communications were hard to address. The Grand Junction Canal passed the town by as did the north-south railway. Anyone visiting Northampton by canal boat will know well the reason: the link from the Nene to the Grand Junction Canal demands some seventeen locks to descend one hundred and twenty feet. This link to the canal system completed in 1815 did open the town to more trade and that is where hides come in.

It was of course the shoe making industry that provided the economic growth that Northampton needed. It was a cottage industry, but quite substantial. Boots and shoes were made for the local market, but also further afield including the plantations of the West Indies. The Peninsula war created a strong demand for boots for Wellington's army. A strike by London boot makers added significantly to Northampton's business since wage rates were much lower. It wasn't only boots, it was said the Northampton lace was superior to that made in Nottingham.

The railways were a bone of contention. Land owners hated them; townsfolk knew they would be good for business. They were also not very good on steep inclines like that up from Northampton. For this reason Robert Stephenson chose to route the London Birmingham railway around the town. Nevertheless, the town did get a railway in 1845, linking it both to Peterborough and to the London Birmingham line. This enabled the cheaper import of coal and export of agricultural produce and footwear.

The footwear industry did take off, but still in small cottage units except for a very few factory employers such as William Parker and John Groom each producing 80,000 pairs of footwear a year with 800 employees. Moses Philip Manfield was not far behind. Their employees were said to be better off than their home working counterparts, given the opportunities the factories had for better ventilation of noxious fumes. Child labour was more prevalent in smaller businesses, indeed schools tried to include work based learning in their timetables.

The mid-point of the century brought to Northampton, as elsewhere, the issue of mechanisation. With footwear production it was the American invention of a sewing machine for shoes. The fear, as elsewhere, was the loss of jobs, particularly for men since the view was that women could manage sewing machines. A little later, machines for riveting soles were on offer, but not enthusiastically welcomed by masters for in the beginning they proved slower and less reliable than hand work. Finally machines to stitch soles to uppers came along and the battle was lost; the industry had become mechanised. Interestingly it seems that home working continued, but with machines in the home. It seems also that this was the case in Wellingborough and Kettering as well as Northampton and its surrounding villages.

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a great change. Home working was nearly a thing of the past. Manfield, run by Moses's sons, employed 1,000 men and women in a single story building. Crocket & Jones and Truform (part of Sears & So) employed about the same number. Charles and Edward Lewis employed nearer 1,500, whilst Barratts were still comparatively new but distinctly ambitious. Church & Co boasted 'every conceivable style and material'. William Wren made shoe polish and Horton and Arlidge, cardboard boxes. Some seven manufacturers had come together to form Northampton Shoe Machinery Co first supplying American machines but then manufacturing them under licence. Machinery also came from the International Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company.

Other businesses made cycles and motor cars. Mulliner made the bespoke car bodies for manufacturers to add to their engine and chassis. Bassett-Loake made beautiful model trains and yachts. Importantly for the future, Smith, Major and Stevens made lifts.

The First World War saw Mulliner's factory producing munitions and military vehicles. Of far more significance, the Northampton shoe companies produced 23 million pairs of footwear for British, French and Belgian forces including infantry boots, flying boots, ski boots and canvas shoes. The other shoe manufacturers in the county topped this production at 24 million and together they made up two thirds of the British footwear output between 1914-1918.

The 1930s saw Express Lifts of Leicester buy Smith, Major and Stevens but to continue to manufacture in Northampton. Other arrivals included Rest Assured with beds and Mettoy which later manufactured Corgi toys. Mettoy was encouraged to come to Northampton by Bassett-Loake whose owners played a major role in the civic community which was keen to reduce the town's dependence on shoe making.

The Second World War saw shoe factories producing an ever increasing range of footwear, including shoes designed for deception, so flying boots which could have their uppers removed to reveal ordinary well worn shoes should their wearer be shot down in enemy territory. The Birmingham British Timken company set up a shadow factory near Northampton and this reverted to peacetime work after the war.

The post war years saw the growth of earth moving equipment supplier Blackwood Hodge (owned by house builder Bernard Sunley), but the steady decline of the mass production of shoes. Manfield was bought by the British Shoe Corporation of Leicester and I write in my blog on Leicester of the gathering of former brands into this company owned by the property developer, Charles Clore.

Avon Cosmetics was encouraged to the town in the sixties a little before its designation as a 'new town' under the third wave of such towns in the post-war era. A good number of businesses came to the 'new town'. Black & Decker, set up warehousing and distribution, as did MFI; Henry Telfer employed 2,000 in food manufacturing. The Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation helped to fund the Blackwood Hodge Management Centre at Nene College.

In 1960 Electronics Weekly reported that 'the extended factory of Plessey Nucleonics at Northampton, officially opened in 1959, has doubled facilities for R&D is this rapidly growing field. During the year, Plessey Nucleonics received an order from the UKAEA for the supply of all nuclear instrumentation for the advanced gas-cooled reactor at Windscale.' This business eventually became part of Ultra Energy. Plessey also manufactured Connectors in their subsidiary Plessey Interconnect.

At the time of writing there are shoe factories still manufacturing in Northampton and neighbouring towns. In the town itself there are Church & Co, Crocket & Jones, Trickers, Edward Green and Jeffery-West. Outside Northampton there are Dr Martens in Wollaston, Grenson in Rushden and Barker in Earls Barton all just outside Wellingborough; then Loake in Kettering and Joseph Cheaney in nearby Desborough.

Express Lifts still has a presence in the town through its lift testing tower built in the seventies and shown in the image.

Further reading:

Cynthia Brown, Northampton 1835-1985: Shoe Town, New Town (Chichester: Phillimore, 1990)

Leicester Manufacturing History

 My exploration of British manufacturing has been sector by sector and chronological. It is time now to begin to join up the dots and explore those towns where manufacturing takes place or in some case took place. I begin with the city where I now live and seek of offer a flavour of manufacturing in this great city.

The image is of those famous sons of Leicester, David and Richard Attenborough, pictured at the University of Leicester.

Leicester’s traditional industry was hosiery with its origin in hand knitters who would work from their own homes in the city and around the county engaging the whole family in their enterprise. In this they were similar to the spinners and weavers of wool in and cotton in Lancashire.

Knitted hose began to take the place of stockings made from cloth in the Elizabethan age; Shakespeare makes reference to stockings in Henry IV (pt2, act 2, scene 2). The principal place of the trade was London close to those members of the population best able to afford that more expensive knitted product. Slowly, the hand knitted stocking gave way to the stocking knitted on a frame. In what were known as the Home Counties, framework knitters were to be found in Buckinghamshire and Surrey. Further north, into the Midlands, framework knitters began to appear in Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

In Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, it is suggested that by the mid-eighteenth century, a move had taken place towards the midland towns with the number of frames in Leicester exceeding those in London. It is suggested that wage costs were the significant driver and further moves would have taken place but for the demands of fashion. For the elegant in London it was essential that stockings should be a perfect colour match, something achievable only with the cloth and hosiery trades side by side. Frames were used to knit hosiery from wool, cotton and silk, with the latter producing the finest garments. By the mid nineteenth century, Nottingham had outgrown Leicester and Derby was fast catching up.

Leicester suffered from stiff competition from America where a degree of mechanisation had been introduced. We can see mechanisation seeping into the Leicester industry a little later than its northern counterparts essentially because of the greater complexity of knitting a stocking. When it came, it was from over the Atlantic where Americans had found solutions. In terms of local industry, Siobham Begley, in her book The Story of Leicester, writes how the Loughborough firm of Paget introduced power-run frames, Leicester’s Matthew Townsend invented the latch needle and Loughborough man, William Cotton, built on these developments with his Cotton Patent machine. Slowly machines were introduced and frame workers began to work in groups in a workshop setting. Pay for frame workers was bad until Corah built their factory at St Margaret’s, where, it was said, rates were 25% higher. Further impetus to the factory system came with the Education Acts where child labour was restricted and so home working became less economically viable.

Following on from hosiery came shoe making, especially for children’s shoes. This trade had prospered in nearby Northampton where it concentrated on men’s boots. Employment in Leicester’s shoe industry gradually grew and eventually overtook that in Northampton. As with hosiery, mechanisation crept in. Begley singles out Thomas Crick in Leicester making a breakthrough by riveting soles to shoes instead of stitching them. He went on to produce a machine which was later steam powered. Factory based production followed, boosted by the move of Leeds based Stead and Simpson to Leicester using an American invention, the Blake sewer, which could produce three hundred pairs of shoes a day. Leicester held on to the tradition of outworking, long embraced in hosiery, until the push of mechanisation from American essentially forced the move to factory working by the end of the nineteenth century.

In the mid nineteenth century ancillary businesses began to appear producing gussets and elastic web. More significantly, engineering businesses emerged with a focus on machinery for hosiery and shoe manufacture. Richard Rodger, in Leicester A Modern History, writes of some 7,000 male engineering workers in 1900. He lists some of the companies. Pegg’s dyeworks equipment, Phoenix Foundry for heavy casting for railways, Gimson’s Vulcan foundry on Welford Road, Gent’s clocks, Taylor & Hobson lenses and optical equipment, Pearson & Bennion boot and shoes machinery which became part of the British United Boot and Shoe Company, Wolsey Hopkins, Bentley Engineering and Mellor Bromley machines. It is fair to assume that these engineering skills encouraged Imperial Typewriters to set up in Leicester. Machine tool manufacturers Jones & Shipman set up in Leicester as did Wadkin which specialised in wood working tools. Later additions to the Leicester manufacturing scene include Thorn Lighting.

The city is also famous for Walkers Crisps and Foxes Glacier Mints.

I tell in Vehicles to Vaccines how the British commitment to excellence in textiles is evidenced by the presence of colleges devoted to teaching skills to those employed in the industry. One such was the School of Textiles in Leicester which celebrated its centenary in 1983-84 with the publication of a short history. The focus was on knitting, and the founding of the college was initiated by yarn merchants witnessing the quality of continental competitors which benefitted from formal technical education. In the second half of the twentieth century the focus moved to artificial fibres, machinery capable of producing whole garments, and textile and knitwear design. Textile manufacturing continues in Leicester albeit in reduced volumes given to move to sourcing from low wage economies.

Further reading:

Gravenor Henson, Civil, Political and Mechanical History of the Framework Knitters in Europe and America (Nottingham: Richard Sutton, 1831, reprinted 1970)
Siobhan Begley, The Story of Leicester (Brimscombe: The History Press, 2013), p.122.
Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin Ed’s. Leicester a Modern History (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2016)