Accrington manufacturing history

 The town’s brickworks were known for making the densest and hardest bricks in the world used for the 'construction of the Empire State Building and the foundations of the Blackpool Tower'.

Coal mining was carried on around the outskirts of the town which attracted foundries from which textile machinery manufacturing emerged. There was tinplating and calico printing machinery, dye and chemical works.

A cotton town with forty seven mills at one time and calico printing. It was home to machinery manufacturers for the textile and cotton industries. The largest machinery manufacturer, Howard & Bulloughs, were the largest employer in the town.

Courtaulds set up a plant for machine making after the Second World War but closed it in the fifties preferring to buy from third party manufacturers.

Entwisle & Kenyon founded in 1864 began with manual washing machine but later made the much loved Ewbank carpet sweeper.

In the Second World War a shadow factory produced Bristol aero engines; the factory was later sold to English Electric, later GEC, which manufactured steel fabrication and aircraft structures.

Lucas (Rists) manufactured their wiring systems.

Further reading:

• Michael Rothwell, A Guide to the Industrial Archeology of Accrington 1979
• Jack Nadia, Coal mines around Accrington and Blackburn

Oldham manufacturing history

 Oldham was one of the Lancashire cotton towns but the story of Oldham is perhaps a little different to that of Preston with the advantage the town took of the Joint Stock company following the passing of the Limited Liability Acts. These were intended to encourage third party investment in businesses, but in Oldham they were used to encourage the participation of the workforce in the company for which they worked. In his book Oldham Past and Present, James Middleton suggests that the idea ‘prevails more in books than in practice’, yet there were examples of mill companies being owned in this way, the Sun Mill of 1860 being just one.

For Oldham the ending of the American Civil War sparked what is termed the ‘floating mania’ as dozens of companies where formed with investment from all sections of their stakeholders. Writing in 1903, Middleton gives some figures: in the Oldham district 270 cotton mills containing twelve and a half million spindles and eighteen thousand looms. These mills absorbed about one quarter of all the cotton imported into the country. Oldham’s proficiency at spinning fine yarn was such that the cotton industry in Burnley focused on weaving, buying in yarn from Oldham.

Oldham had other skills. Iron founders, Platt Brothers moved their focus on to wool and cotton spinning and weaving machinery. They also produced machinery for the weaving of carpets.

In the 1920s, the cotton market contracted and with it the demand for textile machinery. There were six significant manufacturers, Platt Brothers and Asa Lees of Oldham, Brooks and Doxey and Hetherington of Manchester, Howard and Bullough of Accrington and Dobson Barlow of Bolton. These firms merged into Textile Machinery Makers which eventually became a division of the machinery company Stone-Platt. The company made shells during the Second World War also training some 8,000 people for employment elsewhere. This company was broken up in 1982.

Ferranti moved his electrical engineering works to Hollinwood in Oldham, and, in 1897, employed seven hundred people. The company produced all that was needed for the generation of electricity, facing competition from the two large American companies: Westinghouse which set up in Trafford Park in Manchester and British Thomson Houston which came to Rugby. In time, Ferranti found their focus on electricity meters which provided the backbone of the company's business for decades. The next focus was large transformers required by the national grid, but also switchgear where the company competed with Reyrolle of Newcastle. The spirit of Ferranti was the exploration of new areas of technology. Much of this was paid for by the profits from meters.

With the advent of radio, Ferranti needed more space and leased a factory at Stalybridge. Here the company researched the components of radio, Marconi having secured patents over most elements. Ferranti engaged engineers and scientists and importantly worked with academics, to begin with at Imperial College, London. In spite of losses, the company persevered, gaining all the time increased knowledge and skills. For Oldham this provided a remarkable cushion for the decline in its textile industry with ground breaking science taking its place. From radio, Ferranti moved to television and cathode ray tubes. They researched and produced complex valves and explored very short wave radio which led them to radar. They took a further factory at Moston.

By the time of the Second World War, the company employed 12,000 people making radio devices including a radio-marker buoy called a Jellyfish and importantly carrying on radar research in conjunction with Metro-Vock at Trafford Park. The Ministry of Supply had hitherto looked to manufacturers of valves close to London, so for example Mullard at Merton (but also at their Blackburn factory), EMI at Hayes and Cossor at Harlow. Ferranti took on a further factory at Chadderton increasing their visibility and place in Oldham's community.

Moston became home to the manufacture of guided missile systems including the Bloodhound. The Bloodhound research bore fruit in automation control systems for industry but also for BOAC’s seat reservation system.

Avro moved its production from Manchester to Woodford at the start of the Second World War. They built a new factory of one million square feet at Chadderton near Oldham. They also managed a new shadow factory at Yeadon in the outskirts of Leeds. They began with Ansons with Armstrong Siddeley Cheetah engines. Their first heavy bomber was the Manchester. Its successor was, of course, the Lancaster powered by Rolls-Royce Merlin engines; Merlins had been intended for fitment to the Supermarine Spitfire. In the event they powered both.

A total of 7,377 Lancasters were built during the war by the production group which comprised: Avro itself at Newton Heath (Manchester) and Yeadon; Armstrong Whitworth at Baginton (Coventry), Bitteswell (Lutterworth) and South Marston (Swindon); Austin Motors (Longbridge); Metropolitan-Vickers (Manchester); Vickers Armstrong (Chester and Castle Bromwich); and Victory Aircraft in Canada.

Oldham continues its engineering heritage in companies like Oldham Engineering which had offered precision engineering since 1861. There are also anumber of textile manufactures remaining in the town.

Further reading

Hartley Bateson, A Centenary History of Oldham (Oldham County Borough Council, 1949)

Belfast manufacturing history

 Ireland moved later than much of Britain away from a subsistence economy. The island as a whole was not rich in raw materials yet the climate was good for growing, spinning and weaving flax. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Belfast ranked alongside towns such as Lisburn, Lurgan, Portadown, and Dungannon. In size, the city was similar to Derry and Newry. Linen was a cottage industry with a great number of spinners and weavers in Ulster but also in Leinster and Munster (which would become part of the Republic).

Linen was also made in England, but it was over-shadowed by that imported from continental European countries. The focus of English textiles was very much on wool and cotton. Ireland's linen industry was cottage based with exports flowing via dyers through Dublin. At the end of the seventeenth century the needs of British government finance for war led to increased duties on imports and, since linen was one of the biggest imports, it was a prime target. The knock on from this was the need to increase home production and Ireland was drawn in and given preferential access to the English market, then the biggest and fastest growing in Europe. In Belfast flax spinning and weaving gathered round the rivers Forth, Farset and Blackstaff and the mills they powered taking the place of what previously had been a cottage industry in the province.

The late eighteenth century also saw in Belfast the birth of the mechanised cotton industry. Cotton was the stuff of Lancashire, but the Irish climate was similar and the island had both labour and skills. The industry developed in East Ulster and also in the south in Waterford and in Dublin. Belfast was known for its fine fabrics, whereas the south produced the courser calicos. In the later nineteenth century Belfast took advantage of growing mechanisation to produce cheap muslins. Cotton reached its peak in the 1820s and a number of Belfast men notably Thomas Mulholland and John Hind decided to venture into mechanised flax spinning. Others followed. Linen came into it own once more when the shipping of cotton was blockaded in the American Civil War. With a market starved of cotton, what better than linen. In Belfast, spinning mills were busy and more were built. Handloom weavers moved closer to the spinners and still held the market for fine linen with coarser fabric being produced on power looms. In time these looms were improved and power looms were adopted widely with yet more mills built.

With the end of the war, cotton shipments resumed and Lancashire, adopting further mechanisation, once more undercut linen. To make matters worse international customers began to produce their own linen. The result of all this was the closure of mills and the removal of the remainder closer together in Belfast. Linen and cotton began to be processed alongside each other. Linen Union became popular as the addition of cotton made the fabric softer. The First World War increased demand for linen and the industry revived only to fall into terminal decline after a brief respite following the war.

Along with Dublin and Cork, Belfast was one of Ireland's sea ports and as the linen and cotton trades expanded so too did Belfast. Belfast was becoming increasing prosperous with developments in the textile industry. William Durgan, known in Ireland as the King of the Railways, saw the potential for growth, not only in railways, but also shipping and he undertook the digging out of the harbour. This made the docks perfect for shipbuilding, something seen clearly by Edward Harland and Gustav Wolff. This transformed Belfast in to Ireland's primary port. With shipping came shipbuilding which was also transformed mid century by the coming together of Harland and Wolff. It is worth mentioning, because it is a name that keeps appearing, that contracts with the Bibby Line were the lifeblood of the new company.

Harland & Wolff is surely the iconic image of Belfast. Anthony Slaven in his British Shipbuilding 1500-2010, praises the shipyard for its ability in the late nineteenth century to 'produce any type of vessel', having previously noted the specialisms of the other British shipbuilding areas. He does concede that the Northern Ireland yard was particularly known for its cargo liners and passenger liners. Later it was of course known as the birthplace of the Titanic but also her sister ships Olympic and Britannic. Alongside Harlands was Workman and Clark's yard founded in 1879.

Scottish born John Boyd Dunlop who, whilst living in Belfast, developed the pneumatic tyre which both greatly improved the comfort of riding a bicycle but also its speed.

Belfast played its part in the war effort in both world wars with ships and munitions and in the Second World War. Shorts of Rochester joined with Harland & Wolff in 1936 in a company known as Short & Harland and produced the Sunderland flyboat, and, from this design, the massive Stirling bomber. Production at Rochester became too vulnerable to air attack and so move to Belfast, with Austin also producing a good number. Some 2,375 were produced in all. After the war, some yards took advantage of opportunities to re-equip. Harland & Wolff took over welding shops provided by the government. Part of Shorts was bought by the American Spirit Aerosystems which in turn became part of Boeing. Another part of Shorts, then owned by Bombardier, entered into a venture with Thompson-CSF to develop the Shorts Missile System. Thompson-CSF changed its name to Thales and bought out Bombardier. Thales now manufacture ammunition in the city.

The Festival of Britain in 1951 shed light on Belfast and Northern Ireland highlighting its agriculture and linen industries. At that time manufacturing was concentrated on Belfast with some 58% of those employed in manufacturing working in the capital. It was by far the largest centre of population, some eight times that of Derry which came second with 50,000. It was primarily a manufacturing city with half the working population so employed in engineering and shipbuilding, textiles and clothing, food and drink. The Belfast Ropework Company had the largest rope making factory in the world.

Soft drinks producer Cantrell and Cochrane was founded in a shop in Belfast in 1852.

Government sponsored industrial development is important with industries established in the decade after the Second World War including aircraft (Short Brothers), precision engineering, rayon weaving, toy making and food processing.

The city welcomed investment from overseas, particularly the USA with Dow Chemicals. The DeLorean motor company set up production in 1978 but lasted only four years.

Belfast and Northern Ireland suffered from the 'troubles' - sectarian violence - which lasted until the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998. Since then the province has prospered.

Further reading

• Anthony Slaven, British Shipbuilding 1500-2010 (Lancaster: Crucible, 2013)
• Emily Boyle and Robin Sweetnam in Belfast the Making of the City 1800-1914 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1983)

The British in India

 The Indian sub continent was home to some of the world's great civilisations and was part of the most powerful empires. We need think only of the Mughals, but long before that Ashoka and the ideas of peaceful kingship in Buddhism. The country was populous and land was well used in agriculture. It is large, and peoples from different parts are quite distinct in language and culture. It is a place of great art; Indian textiles were the envy of the world, but so too many other crafts. The Silk Road ran across the top of the sub continent and so it is hardly surprising that influences from east and west filtered through.

As I explain in this link British merchants saw their counterparts in other countries taking the lead in international trade and they persuaded ElizabethI that England should follow suit.

The East India Company, founded in 1599, competed with companies from other European nations for full control of the overall governance of India with the objective first of trade. In order to do this it recruited 'sound men' educated later at Haileybury. Alongside civilians, the company had a small army of Englishmen educated at Addiscombe. There were exceptions, the Bombay Burmah Trading Company had a tradition of taking graduates from Kings College, Cambridge. Nepotism was the order of the day, and David Gilmour in his highly readable The British in India traces many generations of families who went out to serve. The word Service is important for to many it was a vocation. To others it was an opportunity to amass a fortune, although probably as many lost fortunes. The British upper middle class featured widely, sending second or third sons. Many families made their homes in India although much of the subcontinent failed to offer anything like comfort to young wives. Unlike Africa, there was no push for settlers nor any strong missionary activity. Nevertheless those who did come believed that their culture was superior and should be adopted. In the nineteenth century much changed and the scope for making fortunes all but disappeared.

David Gilmour makes a number of fundamental points. It was all about trade. When the East India Company arrived they established factories (as opposed to manu-factories) in a number of coastal areas which were staffed by 'factors' who would buy and sell with the local princes. The British were not alone, traders from France, Denmark and Holland also set up factories; Bombay was established on land leased from the Portuguese. There was relative harmony, broken perhaps by the old rivalry between the British and the French when the latter took Madras in 1746 and occupied it albeit briefly. No country brought large numbers of people, even in the bigger centres of population Europeans would be counted in the hundreds; no country brought many soldiers; there may have been for example British officers but most of the other ranks would be Indian. This changed, but only to a degree after the Rebellion in 1857.

The Great Rebellion or First War of Independence, or Indian Mutiny as the British Press preferred, was viciously cruel on both sides. The East India Company had its own army paid from its trading profits and reinforcements were sent from the UK. Kanpur was the place of a massacre of hundreds of British men, women and children, and the retaliation which followed saw the British killing everyone who was suspected of being a rebel. The rebellion was eventually quashed, the East India Company abolished and India became part of the Empire with an Indian Civil Service ‘whose high-minded and disinterested ethos was very different from that which had prevailed before’. There was an Indian Army with a high proportion of British troops and a Viceroy answerable to the new post of Secretary of State for India. Thus began a new chapter in Anglo-Indian relations.

In terms of manufacture, Kanpur (Cawnpure) became, with the coming of the railway in 1859, the 'Manchester of the East'. I wrote of this in my book, MacRoberts Reply.

Gilmour suggests that rather more Scots came to India to carry on business than did the English and he wonders whether their more appropriate university curriculum helped. As I have noted elsewhere, the English universities, essentially Oxford and Cambridge, were wedded to the classics whereas business requires engineering and accounting skills amongst many others. Most of British business in India was under the control of managing agencies. The largest was Tata founded by a Parsi family; the next four were Scottish: Andrew Yule, Inchcape, James Finlay and Burn & Co. Those men involved in business were known as boxwallahs. Gilmour explains that the word Wallah means man and the prefix describes what he does. The 'box' would contain samples of what he had to sell, and the term was stretched to encompass a much bigger business world. British India was hounded by class distinctions based both on birth and occupation. Boxwallahs and manufacturers were looked down upon by the ruling elite as they were in England. In many ways this echoed the Hindu cast system.

In terms of businesses, there were minerals to extract and engineers in the Kolar Gold Field in southern India were Cornish, the tinplate company was run by Welshmen. Tata Iron and Steel at Jamshepur employed men from just about every European nation. Tea planting was a substantial business, coffee was also grown but proved a difficult crop. Jute was important and here the skills came from Dundee which town imported the Indian crop. In time British factories were established in India to process the jute. Edward Parry, a Welshman, founded Parry's brewery which was the most famous trading company in the south of India. Edward Dyer from Devon ran an even larger brewery company in Simla, Rawalpindi and Mandalay. Later, Hodgsons produced India pale ale and Parry’s, Naval Gin. The coming of ice factories in 1878 was welcomed with open arms.

Burmah Oil and the Assam Oil companies began production in the 1890s. In Burmah, teak was big business with MacGregors as the major company. George Orwell, whose parents were born in Bengal, wrote of this in Burmese Days. John Maxwell established his plantation of Indigo Blue near Kanpur and this was big business in Bengal until synthetic indigo was produced in Germany, along with aniline dyes. Other raw materials included rubber and cinchona for quinine, lac and shellac for gramophone records, and Opium.

Gilmour's book focuses on many aspects of the lives the British people who went out to India. There was much sport and of course the British brought cricket to the subcontinent. The current primacy of Indian cricket is perhaps an example of the colonised becoming the coloniser Indian cricket. Tata surely is another.

Homes for the British were often substantial bungalows, but furniture tended to be sparse given the ravages of insect infestation. Some would have English furniture copied by local craftsmen. For much domestic equipment there was mail order and the Army and Navy Stores in Calcutta and Bombay. Ceiling fans were introduced after the First World War manufactured by Crompton Parkinson and GEC. By the time of the Second World War they were being manufactured locally.

India had produced fine cotton since ancient times. The demand for cotton fabrics in East Africa grew such that a trade began in slaves from Africa to pick cotton for princes in India. Britain had long been a market for Indian cotton fabrics and I tell elsewhere of the rise of Lancashire using raw cotton from the New World. As the grip of the East India Company weakened with legislation passed in 1813 the import of finished cotton goods was restricted and the import of Indian raw cotton into Britain was encouraged; India was to be the customer for finished British goods and the provider of raw materials, principally cotton. Manchester merchants continued to import raw cotton from America, but the American civil war created a cotton famine and renewed attention turned to the cotton growers of India.

The next logical step was to bring the mechanised cotton mill to India and import firstly yarn and then finished cloth into England. The first such mill was set up in 1818 but it was not until the 1850s that mills set up in Bombay, Broach and Ahmedabad were to become successful. The very early mills were powered by water, but steam provided by British manufacturers took over. Some mills were British owned, but increasingly Parsi merchants took hold of the industry; they had previously been significant growers and exporters of raw cotton. Early on it was yarn that was produced but soon both spinning and weaving were undertaken by such companies as the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Mill and the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company. The Empress Mill at Nagpur set up by the Tata family in 1877 was the largest to date. Further mills followed in Calcutta. By 1890, India was exporting 170 million pounds of cotton twist and yarn a year.

Goods and people travelling from England to India first went by sailing ship down the coast of Africa round the cape and on to Madagascar before crossing the Indian ocean. The trip was long and hazardous. Ships could be blown off course and reach south America before re-setting course to the west. Sailing ships seldom survived serious storms and if they did there was the danger of pirates and then the enemies of the British state: Portugal, France or Holland. We look to shipyards on the Thames for these 'East Indiamen' as these ships were known. The coming of steam eliminated the wind enemy and speeded the journey; for passengers there came the alternative of passage by ship to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and then overland to another ship on the Red Sea for the onward journey. Later the Suez Canal would further shorten the journey. The problem now was refreshing supplies of coal for the engines. Welsh coal would be shipped to coaling ports. I offer my father's description of the process in Port Said on his way to trade in East Africa in my book Dunkirk to D Day. Of the ships, Maudslay Sons and Field on the Thames built steam powered iron hulled ships for the East India Company as did yards on the Clyde. I tell the story of a Dublin yard supplying a ship to the East India Company. India was getting everywhere.

Coal was to become essential to industry in India and the first coal mine was sunk in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, but produced coal of an inferior quality to that shipped from Britain. In 1808, the Court of Directors of the British India Company seeing the cost of coal imports suggested that Ordnance Works should be shifted to Britain. I explore below the extent of Ordnance work then in India. In relation to coal mining, the government employed a mining engineer, William Jones, to carry out a full survey. He found a rich seem of coal at Raniganj. He failed to make a success, but laid the foundation for Indian coal mining. The coal from the Raniganj mines had to be transported by river 150 miles to Calcutta; however the river Damodar was only navigable for 10 weeks of the years and so coal had to be stored on the river bank to await shipment. The constant sunshine evaporated tar and coal-oil so reducing its burning quality. Coal was later discovered closer to Calcutta and the coming of the railways addressed the problem of transport.

The coming of the railways brings into the story two branches of the army: engineers and sappers for it was military engineers who largely built the railways and also the canal and drainage schemes. They also put on the architect hat, designing a great many buildings borrowing British styles. In 1853, the first railway line was opened running from Bombay to Thana by the Great Peninsula Railway. Others followed and by 1859 the East India Railway had received from Britain 77 locomotives, 228 coaches and 848 freight wagons. In 1895 the first locomotive was wholly built in India at Ajmer Works. Of British manufacturers, the Metropolitan Railway Carriage and Wagon Company Ltd in particular falls to be mentioned.

Fundamental to railways was the production of iron and steel. I have already noted the Jamshedpur steel works which was founded by the Tata family in 1907. Before this the first blast furnace in India was set up at Kulti in 1870. Subsequently the Ordnance Factory Board established the Metal and Steel Factory in Calcutta in 1872. Before any of these, bulk steel was shipped largely from Britain, although India did have long tradition of making fine steel. I noted elsewhere that iron works in Stockton cast rails for the Indian rail system. Examples of such rail stamped 'Stockton 1891' were re-used in the single track railway in what was Persia.

The Army in India was part British and part Indian and its predecessors had long since set up their own supply arrangements. The manufacture of Ordnance, that is arms and other equipment, for the Indian army, goes back to the early days of the East India Company with the making of gunpowder from saltpetre which was in plentiful supply. In the eighteenth century, brass cannon were cast and later cannon cast from iron. Rifles were imported until the early twentieth century, given the precision demanded by modern rifle design. Saddlery was made in Cawnpore as was army clothing: John Stewart's harness and saddle factory was supplying all the leather equipment of the British armies in Asia. For a long time army vehicles were also imported. There were Ordnance factories in all the major centres and their successors have now become a major force in the Indian economy. I write on Ordnance supply in the Second World War in Dunkirk to D Day when my father was sent out to review arrangements for a possible land war against Japan.

As with Africa, a good number of British companies established a significant presence in India. Today, several much loved British brands have found new homes there: BSA and Royal Enfield to name but two.

Further reading

• David Gilmour, The British in India (Allen Lane, 2018)
• Ray, Indrajit, and Krishna Paul. “BEGINNINGS OF COAL INDUSTRY IN BENGAL.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 61, 2000, pp. 836–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44148157. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• Sahoo, Rajib Lochan. “INDIAN COTTON MILLS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMIC POLICY, 1854-1894".” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 76, 2015, pp. 356–67. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44156602. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.
• https://victorianweb.org/technology/railways/india/chronology
• Young, H. A. “THE INDIAN ORDNANCE FACTORIES AND INDIAN INDUSTRIES.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol. 72, no. 3715, 1924, pp. 175–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41356452. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.

Stockport manufacturing history

 Stockport was a cotton town which perhaps embraced progress more readily than some others. Traditional spinning and weaving would take place in people's home. With mechanisation, Mills would be built but then demolished when new processes came in which demanded more or different space. In 1851, the textile industry employed half the working population. In the second half of the century it was said that Stockport was building mills on a ‘monumental scale’ and many of these along the Ashton canal which provided fuel and raw materials and took away the finished product. Among many others two families come to be mentioned. The Gregs, whose father built Quarry Bank Mill in Styal, and the Houldsworths whose mill is a classic example of great industrial architecture; it was designed by architects AH Stott. It also offered a more efficient configuration and was in effect a double mill with a central section housing the steam power used by a factory on either side.

Stockport had become, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great centre for power loom weaving. Manufacturers often carried on both spinning and weaving until weaving became concentrated on East Lancashire. Stockport shifted its efforts to spinning and embraced the spinning of cotton waste and doubling (spinning two or more yarns together to produce greater strength). Spinners also adopted the ring frame which worked much faster than the mule.

In the mid nineteenth century the weaving of silk was taken on in a number of mills to supply the manufacturers of Macclesfield until, with a downturn in demand, Macclesfield took over all their weaving. The weaving of wool had been done for many years as a cottage industry. This too was explored in the mill context with two mills in production until 1939. A further innovation falls to be mentioned. As mills got bigger they did of course cost more and a number of companies adopted a joint stock status following the lead of Oldham.

What was successful was hat making. The mid nineteenth century saw a fashion move from silk hats to those made from felt. Here, Stockport companies such as Christys and Battersbsy stepped in and in the last thirty years of the century employment grew ten fold. Stockport manufacturers embraced the latest American machinery and prospered until fashions changed once more.

Engineering followed textiles with manufacturers of the ring frame and power looms. They also made machinery for hat making. Cravens manufactured cranes, Simon-Carves made mining equipment and Lancashire boilers were built at the Wellington boiler works.

With the coming of the First World War, National Aircraft Factory No 2 was built in the town and run by Crossley. The associated airstrip was also used by Avro from their Woodford factory. Later Fairey manufactured aircraft in the Second World War in nearby Heaton Chapel. The company moved to wheeled armoured vehicles and now operates as KNDS UK.

Further reading:

Peter Arrowsmith, Stockport - A History (Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, 1997)

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