Metroland manufacturing history

 John Betjemin used the term to describe those areas made accessible to London by the building of the extensions to the London Underground. For me it also describes those areas just outside and to the north of the Thames in what were in my childhood referred to as the Home Counties. The image is of a model of a tube station at Bekonscot in Beaconsfield. From the point of view of manufacturing history, it was where many business moved out of London. It was home to New Towns.

Luton

Where Vauxhall moved from south London; in the Second World War, they manufactured Churchill tanks here. Commer trucks were made here and later became part of the Rootes Group. Also Lucas Aerospace had a presence along with a former English Electric factory beside Luton Airport. The town's origin was in hat making. You can read more in this blog piece.

Dunstable

Home of Bedford, the commercial vehicle arm of Vauxhall with a main base at nearby Luton.

Hertford and Ware

Glaxo bought Allen & Hanbury which had its main manufacturing facility at nearby Ware having moved from Bethnal Green . Follow this link to find out more.

Letchworth

The first Garden City before the First World War. You can read more by following this link

Baldock

A town founded by the Knights Templar with the intention of making it the English Baghdad. Nonetheless it was a busy market town known for its malting and brewing.

Royston

The world’s first catalysts to control vehicle pollution were produced at Johnson Matthey’s Royston plant

Hitchin

A town, the product of its soil. Read more by following this link.

Stevenage

One of the new towns designated after the Second World War. Now home to GSK, Airbus and MBDA the missile joint venture between BAE Systems, Airbus and Leonardo. Stevenage has been given the nickname Space City recognising its role in satellite manufacture. You can read more by following this link.

Radlett

EMI set up a factory to manufacture its CAT scanner. Handley Page aircraft moved to nearby Radlett Aerodrome from Cricklewood and manufactured many great aircraft before falling into voluntary liquidation in 1969.

Welwyn Garden City and Hatfield

One of the first designated new towns which became home to Shredded Wheat, Murphy television and a Unilever research laboratory for food stuffs. Nearby Hatfield was home to de Havilland aircraft which later became part of Hawker Siddeley and then BAE Systems; production ceased in 1992. Read more by following this link.

Harlow

One of the new towns designated after the Second World War, former home to the Edison Swan Laboratory as a legacy of their joint venture in incandescent bulbs. In the sixties Gilbey's Gin built a striking new factory moving its production from London. Follow this link to find out more.

Hemel Hempstead

This was one of the new towns designated after the Second World War building on the substantial and long standing John Dickinson paper mill at nearby Aspley Mill You can find more by following this link.

Watford

The home of printing. You can read more by following this link.

St Albans

Before the Roman invasion, Verulamium (St Albans) was capital of Catuvellauni under king Cunobelinus (brought to life for us by Shakespeare in his play Cymbeline). It was occupied by the Romans and destroyed by Bodeca.

Waltham Abbey

The Royal Gunpowder Factory was here.

Borehamwood

During the Second World War the Admiralty enabled Elliott Brothers to take a redundant fuse factory in order to increase their production of fire control systems. Elliott Automation, as it became following a merger, was in 1957 the largest automation and instrumentation company in Europe, with some 35,000 employees. They are one of the few companies still active in the fifties who exhibited at the Great Exhibition; then they offered drawing instruments, theodolites, transit instruments, slide-rule, azimuth and altitude instruments. During the war, Elliott had worked with the navy on fire control and had developed electro-mechanical devices. In 1947, Elliott created their Borehamwood Research Laboratory and there pursued an advanced digital system building on their earlier naval work. They became part of GEC Avionics. Ugo Foods, manufacturers of pasta, moved from Holloway in 1998 where the company moved in 1952 having set up in Soho in 1929.

Slough

Home to light industry and much inward investment. Read more by following this link.

High Wycombe

Home of furniture making including Gomme with their famous G Plan, and William Hands. You can read more by following this link.

Princess Risborough

Ercol furniture moved their offices, design and factory here from High Wycombe in 2002.

Denham

Home to Martin-Baker ejector seats for aircraft and Bosch UK.

Beaconsfield

Rotax (part of Lucas) moved magneto production here after its Willesden factory was bombed in the Second World War. Wiggins Teape research centre was founded at Butlers Court. Perkin Elmer made instruments in the town.

Amersham

Home to the nuclear diagnostic company that bore the towns name and which became part of GE Healthcare whose UK HQ is at nearby Chalfont St Giles.

Hayes

Fairey Aviation was founded here in 1915. The Gramophone company set up in 1906 and would become part of EMI. You can read more by following this link.

Uxbridge

The town that made the flour for London's bakers. You can read more by following this link.

Inner London manufacturing history 19th and 20th century

 Inner London, having been for manufacturing a place where the many made things for the few, changed as technology advanced and became home to many young industries before they moved to more spacious pastures. Stephen Inwood in his masterly A History of London makes the point that in the interwar years it was not just London's new industries that prospered against the national trend but the old industries too. By this he doesn't mean the heavy industries, which were never really in London, but industries which met the needs and wants of a population that was growing not only in number but in prosperity. So, food and drink, tobacco, clothing, furniture and furnishings. The principle remained the same, London's focus was on the finishing trades in high value goods, so jewellery, musical instruments, printing, book binding, fine clothing and furniture, clocks and fur hats.

Camden

The principal product of Camden factories were pianos. The names of the factories read like a roll call of distinguished makers: John Brinsmead & Son, Collard & Collard, Gunther & Horwood and Chappells. There was also the organ maker Zewadski and the workshop of Henry Willis famous for organs such as that in Lincoln Cathedral.

Furniture making was a little further south on Tottenham Court Road with Heals and Maples. Goodalls and their rivals de la Rue made two thirds of the playing cards sold in Britain. The companies merged in 1922. The nation was also hungry for the things of literacy with De La Rue employing 1,300 in Finsbury and Waterlow 4,000 at London Wall. Wiggins Teape originated at Aldgate.

Mornington Crescent was home to the 'Black Cat' Carreras cigarettes factory built in an Egyptian style and later sold to Rothmans which manufactured in Darlington. Benson & Hedges were made in Oxford Street before production moved to Ballymena. Lambert and Butler were produced in Drury Lane.

There were bicycle makers in Holborn and jewellers around Fitzrovia. Holborn was also home to George Kent and his household equipment including his famous knife cleaner. Thrupp & Maberly built carriages in Oxford Street. They became part of the Rootes Group and moved to Cricklewood in 1924.

The Westinghouse Brake and Signal Company manufactured in York Road, Kings Cross before moving to Chippenham in Wiltshire in 1932. The conurbation was being built at a rate of knots and Cubitts employed 3,000 in their workshops in Grays Inn Road.

‘On 25 July 1837, William Fothergill Cooke, an English inventor, and Charles Wheatstone, an English scientist, made the first electric telegraph communication between the station rooms at Camden Town – where Cooke was stationed, together with Robert Stephenson, the engineer – and London Euston, where Wheatstone was situated. The directors of the London and Birmingham Railway were their audience, and their goal was to improve safety on the railways.’ Wheatstone subsequently developed his invention further to enable the transmission of text. Telegraph needed cables and the story moves Woolwich.

Clerkenwell and Finsbury

Clerkenwell became the home of scientific instruments and from there of electronics. Cossor made radio at Clerkenwell during the First World War before moving to larger premises at Highbury. Charterhouse Square was the original home of Ferranti Ltd. Hatton Garden, apart from being home to gold and silver and Johnson Matthey, was where Hiram Maxim perfected his machine gun before joining with Vickers and moving to Crayford. Elliott Automation originated near the Strand.

Of larger enterprises there was the United Electric Wire and Telegraph Company, the Albion Button Company, the Never Rust Plate Company, Bovril and Ingersoll watchmakers. There was also a significant American presence: the Grape Nuts Company, the Columbia Gramophone Company, Thomas Edison Phonograph Makers, the Singer Sewing Machine Company and the Glass Lined Syphon Company.

Finsbury, although London’s smallest Borough, had the greatest concentration of manufacturing among which were Colletts hatters, Ormond hairdryers, Whitbread brewers, Thomas De La Rue security printers, English Gin Distillers, Harella ladies coats, Coates Brothers printers, British Drug Houses, L.E.B. Engineering (Paper Tubes), Temple Press, Ferranti Radio and Television, Comoy’s Pipes, Alba Radio, and Union Glue.

Westminster

London's growing population needed feeding, so for example, in addition to flour mills, market gardens and countless small businesses, Crosse & Blackwell employed 2,000 people making pickles in the Charing Cross Road. The British Electric Telegraph Company exploited the patent of Cooke and Wheatstone in developing the telegraph. I wrote about this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Key to this was insulation provided by F. Wishaw near the Adelphi.

Electric lighting had arrived with Humphrey Davy's arc lamp, much improved by the incandescent lamp invented by the American Thomas Edison and Newcastle's Joseph Swan. Siemens Brothers provided the generators, wiring and lamps for the lighting of the Savoy Theatre. Other names, long associated with electricity, entered the field: Edison set up the Holborn Viaduct scheme in 1882, and, in 1886, Sebastian de Ferranti built the Grosvenor Gallery Station. Ferranti had worked for Siemens in their very new experimental department.

Humphreys & Glasgow of Victoria Street carried out major projects in petrochemicals and process engineering for ICI, BP, Beecham, Boots and British Steel, as well as plants in the USSR and other eastern block countries and India and Pakistan

There were still clothing factories in Soho and Westminster as well as Saville Row. The Royal Army Clothing Factory was in Pimlico employing 2,000. Pears Soap was made just off Oxford Street. Dunhill cigarettes are made in Westminster.

W and B Cowan made gas meters and appliances and later became part of Parkinson and Cowan.

The City

The massive improvements to communications with the railways and telephone and telegraph allowed manufacturing to move away from centre of the ever growing metropolis to make way for service industries and the growing importance of the City as the world’s financial centre. Crucial to this was the work of Joseph Bazalgette who master minded the London sewers to remove 'the great stink' at the same time creating the Thames Embankment and the extension of the Metropolitan Railway. There were businesses making everything that the growing number of offices in the city might require. I write elsewhere about finance for manufacturing in which London played a perhaps surprisingly small role. The Pharmaceutical Society was formed in London in 1841, one of its founding members was William Allen who was a partner in the Plough Court pharmacy, whose origins can be traced back to 1715. In 1856 Allen joined his nephews in Allen & Hanbury which grew particularly through it renowned cod liver oil. Scammell originated not far from Liverpool Street station in London where its vehicles served the local markets. It manufactured gun carriages and vehicle bodywork for the War Office in the First World War.

In his London in the Twentieth Century, a phrase from Jerry White stuck in my mind. ‘From the middle of the sixties London’s manufacturing industry virtually bled away, along with the port that fed it.’ He offers some telling figures: between 1959 and 1974 London lost 38% of its manufacturing jobs so by 1996 only 10% of the London workforce was employed in manufacturing.' A good deal of manufacturing moved to the north, east, west and south of London and in due course out to Metroland and into the South East.

Further reading:

• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)

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.

Further reading:

• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)

Inner London manufacturing history

 London does of course reach back into Roman times if not earlier. By 1700 it had a population estimated at 575,00 which grew to 900,000 a century later. It was by far the largest urban area in Britain having attracted migrants from neighbouring rural areas in search of work. In these early days inner London overlapped to the East and to the South.

Trade

London was wealthy largely as a result of international trade which flowed through the Port of London. I write in this link of the role of merchant adventurers. The types of imports and exports reveal an astonishing variety. Fine cotton garments and indigo dye from India, tea from China, ivory from Africa, gold and silver from south America, sugar from the Caribbean. Exports were needed to exchange for these goods, so London’s craftsmen made metal items of beauty and utility. The major export though was wool.

The Thames, from early times, was home to shipbuilders and I wrote of the companies and the ships they built in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Ships were built both for trading and for warfare, and yards on the Thames built both.

In spite of a massive growth in the volume of trade, the 'legal docks' had remained largely as they had been in the time of Elizabeth I - a stretch of quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London, although a further area of river frontage on the south bank had been added and ships were often unloaded by lightermen whilst at anchor in the centre of the river. The congestion would not be relieved until 1790 and I write about this when looking at East London.

The huge variety of goods traded attracted manufacturing activity.

Spitalfields

In the sixteenth century and probably long before, wool had been the backbone of the English economy. It is estimated that mid century nearly one fifth of the working population was employed in the manufacture of woollen cloth. London was by far the largest centre of population and so attracted a good share of the industry. I write below of later division of labour, but cloth production had seen this from early days not least with the distinction between spinning and weaving, but also dyeing and fulling and other processes. Rural areas surrounding London played their part especially with spinning.

In the late sixteenth century Margaret of Anjou encouraged silk workers to come to Spitalfields from her native Lyon and so began the English silk trade of which I wrote in my blog on Braintree.

The introduction of the knitting frame transformed the manufacture of hosiery and this mattered in eighteenth century London which had a growing middle class which was both fashion conscious and keen to display conspicuous wealth. With hosiery, the colour had to be exactly right. Much framework knitting took place in the Midlands where wage costs were lower and I write about this in my blogs on Leicester and Nottingham, but London held on to the fashionable end.

Fashion attracted retail outlets from regional manufacturers. Josiah Wedgewood set a shop in in Grosvenor Square and another in Greek Street in Soho. Matthew Boulton chose Pall Mall to display his 'buttons, buckles, saucepans, candlesticks and snuff boxes'.

Jerry White in London in the 19^th Century highlights the degree of division of labour in London manufacturing. I have positively eulogised about Birmingham’s workshop system. White suggests that London took this a stage further with the skilled making of an item broken down into a great many simple steps in which an unskilled person could be trained. These people would often work in their own home for many hours to scrape a living from truly mindless work. I wonder whether it was this that John Ruskin was critiquing when he wrote of his concerns of industrialisation in his writings on political economy, such as Unto the Last. Textiles would seem to have been a prime but far from solitary example with silk spinning and weaving carried out in Spitalfields but also garment making with the process subdivided many times over. White suggests that there were 250,000 textile workers in inner London in 1901. I wrote in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the plight of textile workers in Spitalfields in the early nineteenth century. Stephen Inwood uses the term 'sweated system' to describe the division of a skill into a number of unskilled processes thereby exploiting the large number of unskilled people flocking to London in the nineteenth century. He quotes some people as suggesting that this system achieved greater productivity then the clothing industry in - say - Leeds which took advantage of machinery.

Clerkenwell and Finsbury

Richard Tames in Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past writes of the sheer diversity of manufacturers. There were book binders and makers of book binding machines, manufacturers of addressing machines and ever pointed pencils, printers who specialised in railway tickets, a gilder who specialised in book edges.

Clerkenwell had some 7,000 people working in watch making in 1790; the process becoming increasingly subdivided. Of particular interest to me, the skills of watch making developed into mathematical, optical and surgical instruments in the Strand and Fleet Street; my great grandfather made surgical instruments at No 62 The Strand for Weiss & Co. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were 1,000 employees making cartridges at the Eley factory in Clerkenwell. Eley later joined 29 other companies in Nobel Industries Limited.

Furniture making for the aristocracy and growing middle class received a boost with the arrival of Huguenot and Dutch crafts men in the 1680s. Exotic woods were being imported from America and the West Indies: Walnut, rosewood, deal, satinwood, and mahogany and London became Europe's top manufacturer of fine furniture. Clerkenwell was home to Hepplewhite's furniture workshop; Chippendale had been in St Martin's Lane. Less well known but still highly skilled makers produced furniture in Mayfair for the well to do.

The growing population needed feeding and here mechanisation found a foothold in milling and brewing. Feeding the brain mattered too; William Caxton established the first printing press in Westminster in 1476. Printing and book binding prospered in the environs of Fleet Street.

Further reading

• Stephen Inwood, A History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998)
• Richard Tames, Clerkenwell and Finsbury Past (London: Historical Publications, 1999)
• The Finsbury Story (London: Pyramid Press, 1960)
• John Richardson, A History of Camden (London: Historical Publications, 2000)

Long Eaton manufacturing history

This midlands town was home to my mother's family who had been builders in the town since 1883. The company was called F.Perks & Son and played a large role in the main industry of the town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - lace making. I wrote of the industry in my blog on Nottingham which was the major area of manufacture. Long Eaton though had three large lace mills:

Bridge Mill built by my great grandfather's building firm, F. Perks & Son, in 1902 for the Long Eaton Bridge Mills Company of which members of the Attenborough family were directors.

Springfield Mills in Sandiacre built by the notorious financier Terah Hooley in 1888 designed by John Sheldon. I write of Hooley elsewhere in the context of Dunlop, Coventry and Trafford Park, Manchester. I noted in the Derbyshire archive that F. Perks & Son, had carried out a major improvement project on his house in the town.

Harrington Mill built in 1885-7 designed by John Sheldon

These were tenement mills occupied by a number of businesses and at the turn of the century some 4,000 people worked in them. The lace industry declined after the First World War.

Another Long Eaton industry was furniture and Wades stand out as the survivor

F. Perks & Son carried out much of the building work for the Army Centre of Mechanisation at the former shell filling factory at Chilwell.

Carters Gold Medal Soft Drinks were are nearby Sawley.

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

Scunthorpe manufacturing history

 The iron ore fields of north Lincolnshire attracted iron smelting to Frodingham and Appleby, two villages within what became Scunthorpe. Both companies added steel making, but Frodingham's pig iron production from the north Lincolnshire ore greatly exceeded its steel making capacity. This attracted Harry Steel, managing director of the Sheffield firm, Steel, Peech and Tozer, who, in the aftermath of the First World War, anticipated some consolidation in the industry. The two works and others were brought together in what became the United Steel Company. In the thirties both of these Scunthorpe plants were further expanded.

Lincolnshire ore was also exploited by Richard Thomas of South Wales at the Redbourn works. However, a plan to extend this into a major tinplating plant was shelved in preference for renewed investment in South Wales. Scunthorpe received further investment from John Lysaght at its Normanby Park steelworks in order to provide steel supplies for their other metal activities. John Brown of Sheffield had bought the Trent Ironworks in Scunthorpe and after the First World War moved their steel foundry to the town.

The nationalisation of the steel industry brought the Scunthorpe plants under a single umbrella. In 1972 the British Steel Corporation embarked on a ten year plan of modernisation and Scunthorpe was one of the centres identified for further investment.

In 1999 British Steel merged with the Dutch steel maker Koninklijke Hoogovens to form Corus. In 2007 Corus was bought by Tata Steel of India creating one of the world’s largest steel makers. British Steel Scunthorpe was bought from Tata Steel in 2016 and sold on to the Chinese Jingye Group in 2020.

Away from steel, Lebus Furniture built a 250,000 square foot factory in the town. I write about British furniture manufacturers in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Further reading:

J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)