Category: Factory visits

Breanish Tweed has all the hallmarks of a Harris tweed weaver: old single-width looms stored in draughty sheds; decades of experience in hand weaving; a stunning but hostile location that constantly reminds one of tweedâ...

Up in Harris, or rather Lewis, this week at Breanish Tweed. More next week. Photo: Andy Barnham...

Last week saw a visit to the Brooks saddle factory in Smethwick, just outside Birmingham. A full report will appear in the end-of-year issue of The Rake, but in the meantime I thought I would take the opportunity to try ...

In the UK, good shoes split into two very clean categories: benchmade and bespoke. With the former, workers use a series of hulking Victorian machines to make the shoes. Each applies force in a different way, whether str...

I mentioned in my previous post on the Kiton factory outside Naples that the shirt manufacturing impressed me post. In fact, it wasn’t so much the manufacturing operation as the handwork that resulted – something you...

My most extensive visit while in Naples this week was around Kiton’s factory, which is just outside the city. It is a big, well-aired facility that serves a frankly cracking lunch. I’ve never had mozzarella like it. ...

Rummaging through the image archive this week, I stumbled across these pictures from my trip to the Dent’s gloves factory earlier in the year. They are from the Dent’s archive, and show five pairs of gloves – two f...

Bill Amberg has recently moved to lovely new premises in Queen’s Park, north London. The landlord that owns most of the street apparently refuses to turn it into flats, renting the lot out to small businesses instead. ...

Of course, this isn’t exactly Tanner Krolle‘s factory. The original TK operation was on Mildmay Avenue in Islington, but was sold to Dunhill in the nineties and then knocked down. Dunhill moved its operations to ...

Brooks leather saddles are next in our cycling series. Unsurprisingly, the construction has much in common with benchmade shoes. Old, iron machines, worked by hand and crucial details finished by hand at every point. The...

I finally made it down to Dent’s heritage gloves factory in Warminster, and learnt a lot more about the traditional process behind English-made gloves. There were some interesting parallels with several other crafts, i...

  There’s an odd little bit of Selfridge’s between Ralph Lauren and the Kurt Geiger shoe emporium. It contains general accessories – hats, scarves and gloves – and stands out because it is the one part of the me...

There’s nothing like a factory you can get to on the Tube. So much less train time involved. The Alfred Dunhill leather factory and pipe workshop are up in Walthamstow; though it could be in Northampton for all the dif...

I was fortunate enough to be able to tour the Edward Green factory in Northampton last week. A new building (as they’ve moved around a few times since leaving what is now the John Lobb factory in the centre of town) it...

Due to popular demand (well, three people) here are some more facts about how the Turnbull & Asser shirts are made up in Gloucester. I know how much you love those little details. – As with a suit, the sleeveh...

There are so many facts, figures and geeky points about the construction of Turnbull & Asser shirts that I could be writing about them for days. And you’d be reading for hours. I’ll try to keep the description o...