Bristol manufacturing history

 In 1843 Isambard Kingdom Brunel built a revolutionary ship in Bristol’s western dock. It was iron hulled and had both steam engine and sails. The principal innovation was the screw propeller replacing the paddles used up to that point. The image is of a replica of the original propeller on the conserved SS Great Britain at its home in the dry dock in Bristol.

The ship made the trip to Australia some thirty times and ended its service coaling the British fleet in the First World War. It offered luxury

Alongside hardship

Steerage class

Bristol’s history is maritime and inevitably bound up with slavery as were so many British ports. The maritime link led to the city’s principal businesses WD and HO Wills with cigarettes and JS Fry with chocolate. The city also refined sugar. The presence of these businesses and extensive foreign trade encouraged the development of banking in the city which, until comparatively recently, prided itself on its ability to finance its own business.

Shipbuilding was important, but, like textiles and iron, Bristol didn’t have the advantages of competing northern cities. Nonetheless the city had a major cotton mill for over a century. Before this, like many parts of the country, it was a centre of the woollen cloth trade. It gained a reputation for skilled iron work. The size of the dock limited the size of ships that could be built. The same was less true of non-ferrous metals.

The Mendips had reserves of both lead and zinc. Lead was mined and smelted during the nineteenth century. The arsenic content hardened the metal making it suitable for use as shot. It was a Bristol engineer who invented the process of making shot by dropping it from a tower through a sieve into cold water thus producing perfectly spherical shot.

Zinc had many uses. Added to copper, mined in Cornwall, it made brass largely for Birmingham manufacturers. The smelting of the ore released sulphuric acid used in the production of tin in Swansea just over the Bristol channel. Zinc was also used in galvanising first iron and then steel. John Lysaght set up in Bristol to exploit this process; he added mills in Newport and Wolverhampton and eventually became part of GKN. A fourth use of zinc as an oxide is used in medical products.

Bristol's relationship with zinc came in two major phases. William Champion began exploitation in 1743 and the industry thrived and then declined as Birmingham took more of the processing. The First World War offered a resurgence. Then zinc ore was coming from Australia and was being smelted in Germany before subsequent import into Britain. Clearly the war put a stop to this and Winston Churchill commissioned a major zinc production plant on Avonside, the National Smelting Corporation, which was completed in 1923. In 1928 it became part of the Imperial Smelting Corporation and then faced a long period of decline as the demand fell back to peacetime levels. Imperial Smelting, also in Swansea, became part of RTZ.

WD and HO Wills distinguished themselves from the many other cigarette makers by their technical innovation and marketing. In 1902 they became the largest part of the new Imperial Tobacco. Both Wills and Fry had attracted packaging businesses. ES & A Robinson emerged as a leader and later merged with Dickinson of Hemel Hempstead. Printed packaging materials were needed in ever increasing quantities. The most significant manufacturer became part of Imperial which later dramatically increased production only for it to fall back as cigarette smoking declined in popularity.

The GWR connected Bristol to London in 1841, with the workshops at Swindon. Nevertheless there was room for more, and engineering came to Bristol in the form of locomotive and railway wagon builders. These were followed by trams, out of which the Bristol Aeroplane Company emerged. In the Second World War it employed over 50,000 people and built such iconic aircraft as the Blenheim. Bristol Aero Engines was later bought by Rolls-Royce; their Olympus powered Concorde. The British Aircraft Corporation, into which Bristol Aircraft merged, built their Concorde at nearby Filton. I write of this in Vehicles to Vaccines. BAE Systems still manufacture aircraft at Filton where Airbus UK also carry out design work. At nearby Abbey Wood, BAE Systems manufacture combat vehicles. The Bristol Motor Company was a child of the city. The Douglas Motor Cycle company manufactured many thousands of motor bikes in the First World War. This was bought by Westinghouse Brake and Signal and made brakes and signals but also Vespa scooters.

More recently Bristol attracted service businesses and also inward investment; Hewlett Packard built a factory to the north of the city in the 1980s. The semiconductor manufacturer Inmos (later owned by Thorn EMI) had a design centre in Bristol. Bristol now thrives as a predominantly service economy.

Further reading

• Industrial Change in Bristol since 1800 (http://historycd.uwe.ac.uk/)
• E.J. COCKS and B. WALTERS. A History of the Zinc Smelting Industry in Britain (London: George Harrap. 1968)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Crawley manufacturing history

 Crawley was a village on the Weald and had played its part in the early Wealden iron industry until the seventeenth century. The Weald supplied iron ore to local and then London based foundries for the production of weapons before both trades gravitated to the coal of the West Midlands. I write more about the Wealden iron industry in a separate blog piece.

In the eighteenth century Crawley's position on the main London to Brighton road brought carriage trade which increased with Brighton's popularity. The arrival of the London to Brighton railway put pay to this, but brought Crawley closer to the ever growing London.

After the Second World War, Crawley was eventually designated a new town and prospered as a result. Manufacturers were attracted but only few larger concerns, the majority being SMEs.

Vent Axia was formed with the invention of the first electrically operated window ventilator in 1936. The company provided ventilation equipment for 10 Downing Street during the Second World War and moved to a factory in Putney in 1946. In 1957 it took a 99 year lease of a factory in Manor Royal, Crawley where it still manufactures after a short period of offshore manufacture in China. Vent Axia was bought by Halls of Dartford and the combined business became part of APV.

APV, founded in Wandsworth in 1910, set up in Crawley in the fifties. Its full name was the Aluminium Plant and Vessel Company and was working with a new way of welding aluminium. It began making heat exchangers and developed into supplying equipment for the dairy, food and chemical industries. In 1987 it merged with Baker-Perkins, but the APV business was bought be Siebe in 1997. At one time it had 1,600 employees.

The subsequent massive growth of Gatwick airport encouraged a good many supporting businesses and housing for a large number of airport employees. The Manor Royal business district has also attracted a good number of businesses, many with international connections.

In recent years Crawley had become the headquarters for Gatwick Diamond a designated economic development area comprising Crawley, Epsom & Ewell, Horsham, Mid Sussex, Reigate & Banstead and Tandridge. It is home to 45,000 businesses and claims better economic performance than similar areas: Thames Valley including Reading, South East Midlands including Milton Keynes and Enterprise M3 including Woking and Greater Medway including Chatham. It highlights Life Sciences and Knowledge Based Industry as key areas.

Further reading:

Peter Gwynne, A History of Crawley (Chichester: Phillimore, 1990)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.

Reigate and Redhill manufacturing history

 This area of Surrey is rich in sand, chalk, clay and rock all suitable as building materials. Some of the sand is very fine and so ideal for glass making. There is also evidence of some twelve windmills dating from early times. Geared water mills had been introduced by the Romans and some 6,000 are mentioned in the Domesday Book. It was long thought that these were only for grinding grain and a good many were. However, certainly by the early Middle Ages water mills were adapted to other uses including fulling cloth, hammering hot metal and sharpening tools.

The Reigate area had the disadvantage of a lack of constantly running water. I write elsewhere of the use of ponds to regulate water flow; the solution in Reigate was the windmill and a number of the twelve mills mentioned were powered by wind. Fullers earth was also found nearby and so the application of wind mills to fulling was entirely feasible; there was also no shortage of sheep.

The Surrey Iron Railway built in 1805 was planned to go all the way to Portsmouth to facilitate transport during the Napoleonic wars, but in fact ended at Merstham just short of Reigate. Nevertheless it did serve to assist in the transport of Merstham rock and other building materials in great demand as London expanded.

One of the watermills, Salford Mill, was extensively upgraded including the installation of steam power and this was said to have been used by Dr Kellogg for the flaking of wheat until he moved his breakfast cereal business to Manchester

In 1919, the Redland Tile Works began making concrete tiles using the local reserves of sand; local chalk and clay were also available to make the necessary cement. The business was successful, given the demand for building following the war; there was also ample labour in the shape of ex-servicemen.

Carter Wilkinson engineers invented a tile making machine that dramatically speeded up the process and it became a subsidiary of Redland which then exploited the invention through granting licences in many countries. The Redland Engineering business remained in Reigate, but tile making moved to the Moorhouse Tile Works in Kent. In time Redland opened tile works at Syston in Leicestershire and elsewhere across the country. It bought small local brick companies, and in 1984 bought the famous traditional tile manufacturer, Rosemary Roof Tiles. Redland expanded considerably in the seventies and eighties. A revolutionary flat roof system, Icopal invented by David Anderson, had followed the concrete roof tile in 1923 with a factory in Trafford Park in Manchester. Redland was acquired in 1997 by the French Lafarge. The Anglo-Irish company BMI now owns both Redland and Icopal.

A survivor from early times was the British Wax Refining Company of Redhill which purifies and bleaches beeswax. Beecham Research Laboratories were at nearby Brockham Park

The Monotype works at Salfords, near Redhill, was founded in 1899 to manufacture compositing machines for the rapidly expanding printing industry. Monotype Corporation originated in the USA and owner Tolbert Lanston invented a method of mechanical hot metal typeset whereby a typed script could be automatically converted into metal characters. As the twentieth century progressed, the style of type face became more and more important and different families of fonts were devised, for example the well known Times New Roman. Monotype Ltd was very much a partner with its US parent being as involved in developing technology and design. The UK company was floated on the London Stock Exchange with a British board of directors including Harold Macmillan of the publishing house of the same name. Monotype expanded and bought the rival system Linotype which worked with lines of text rather than individual characters.

Reigate, Redhill and the surrounding area are now predominantly residential.

Further reading:

• Derek Stidder, A Guide to the Industrial History of Reigate and Banstead (Reigate: Surrey Industrial History Group, 1996)
• Derek Stidder, A Guide to the Industrial Archaeology of Reigate and Banstead District (Reigate: Surrey Industrial History Group, 1979)

I wanted to explore British manufacturing history geographically, having looked at it chronologically and by sector in my books How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines. 

Follow this link to a list of the places I have explored to date.