Warwickshire is globally renowned for innovation and manufacturing

While the county of Warwickshire is associated with car makers like Aston Martin Lagonda, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover and London EV Company, maker of the iconic London Taxi, the area is rich in other innovative manufacturers. Here we take a wider look at manufacturing in Warwickshire and the products that can be found in Shakespeare and George Eliot’s county.

The city of Coventry and the county of Warwickshire are known around the world for innovation and manufacturing, from bicycles to engines and transmissions to four-wheel drive and amphibious technologies to driving simulation and battery chemistry to software management systems.

Today it is home to two great universities in the University of Warwick and Coventry University, two advanced manufacturing catapult centres and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC), as well as Greenpower Park, the West Midlands site for a new battery cell plant.

The manufacturing sector is extremely important to the government’s plans to grow the economy, with the imminent new Industrial Strategy. The UK is currently the 12th largest manufacturing nation in the world, although it has been placed as high as seventh in recent years.

The manufacturing sector supported 2.6 million jobs, with an annual contribution to the UK economy of £217bn, according to figures published by Make UK in 2024.

The West Midlands is home to the largest manufacturing cluster of any UK city region, with its 300,000-strong manufacturing workforce accounting directly for 11.2% of all local employment. This is well above the national average of 7.6%.

However, while Warwickshire is the home of global automotive giants Jaguar Land Rover and Aston Martin, it is also the base of other cutting-edge manufacturers who are designing and innovating new products which are attracting highly skilled people to the area as well as those just starting out on their careers. Some of these businesses can trace their roots back decades while others are more recent arrivals.

Dennis Eagle, part of the Terberg Environmental Group, is a world leader in the design and manufacture of refuse collection vehicles and manufactures over 1,000 vehicles every year for local authorities in the UK and private sector contractors from its headquarters and manufacturing base in Warwick, where it employs 460 staff, including 32 apprentices.

The company can trace its roots in Warwick back to 1907 and the Eagle Engineering Company, an agricultural and general engineering firm. It made oil and petrol internal combustion stationary engines and some small agricultural equipment. It provided municipalities with refuse vehicles and road sweepers and tower lorries built on Dennis chassis. It came together with Dennis in 1971 as part of the Hestair Group.

Most of the refuse vehicles seen on British roads come from the company – it currently holds over 70% market share and in 2020 it launched the e-Collect, the only OEM designed, fully integrated, 100% electric Refuse Collection Vehicle. The company has a continually expanding customer base overseas, including in continental Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and the US.

Keith Day, Manufacturing Director of Dennis Eagle, said: “We are very proud of where we are today in this demanding marketplace. We look to maintain this share while helping our customers navigate the new simpler recycling legislation and other market changes, while educating customers and stakeholders in the area of decarbonisation and electric vehicles, demonstrating our range of Refuse Collection Vehicles.”

The brand JCB is known all over the world for construction excavator equipment, but it is Warwickshire that leads in the UK for site dumpers. Thwaites has been manufacturing in Cubbington since 1946. Over in Bedworth, Mecalac UK can trace its roots to the Benford brand to the 1950s in Warwick, moving north as part of Terex in 1999, and becoming part of French company Mecalac in 2016.

The 81,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Bedworth houses the national production of its site dumper and compaction roller operation which includes the manufacture of its new innovative Revotruck, the only dump truck in the world with 360-degree visibility from the cab.

The Bedworth premises are the most environmentally-friendly, sustainable site within The Mecalac Group, featuring air source heat pumps, internal and external LED lighting, rooftop solar panels and rainwater harvesting.

Remi Tourtet, Global Sales Manager at Mecalac UK, said: “We started production of the Revotruck in 2024 and its biggest feature is that the cabin can turn 180 degrees so you have much better visibility when you are on-site or on the road so it is a massive health and safety improvement.

“The R&D was mostly executed by our engineering department based at the factory, and the production is also fully carried out here. We are very closely located near our suppliers since Warwickshire and the West Midlands is a hub of SMEs that supply most of our components.”

Another local manufacturer with a global impact is Godiva, a world leading provider of fire pumps for the emergency services.

The company began life as part of Coventry Climax, the manufacturer of engines which diversified into fire pumps in the 1930s. It was the creation of a powerful, light-weight fire pump engine in the 1950s that caught the attention of F1, and during the 1950s and 1960s, Climax became synonymous with British motor racing success around the world with Lotus and Cooper.

After Climax became part of British Leyland in the late 1960s, Godiva was merged into the Iso-Speedic Company in Warwick, where it remains today.

Now, US-owned Godiva is launching a new Blaze Warrior 10/10 portable pump in Spring 2025 which has been designed to deliver 1,000 litres of water at ten bar pressure in a small, lightweight package.

Guy Jackson, Product Director at Godiva, said: “In the fire and rescue industry, the Godiva name and brand is synonymous with both vehicle mounted and portable fire pumps. The need for portable fire pumps is as important as ever because they are used to deal with both flooding and wildfire events.

“Our talented design engineers have delivered a product design that meets a critical performance standard in the most compact and lightweight package on the market.”

Vitsoe is a more recent arrival to the county. For more than 65 years it has been Vitsoe’s goal to make long-living furniture, based on the classic designs of former Braun designer Dieter Rams.

The company actively chose to move into headquarters and production to Leamington Spa to an iconic factory building on the entrance to the town, to continue making high-quality furniture which it has built a world-wide reputation for since 1959.

Managing Director Mark Adams said: “We should have moved here 20 years ago but we hung on for longer than we should have in London.

“The majority of our suppliers are within 90 minutes of our building which is important for the assembly of our furniture since every order is bespoke to our customers who are in 90 countries.

“We sell to every EU country, every week. When our suppliers come here they tell us all the time how they are proud to work with us and that they love our building. It is amazing how short our supply chain is because most of our components are from the UK.

“We have 75 employees and our retention rates are higher being in Leamington Spa than in Camden in London. We have a high percentage of employees with families who can make a long-term commitment to the business because they love bringing their children up here.”