Huthwaite - former CWS hosiery factory - 1907 entrance

Image: © Dave Bevis Taken: 2 Apr 2013

This large factory occupies most of a rectangular site extending about 475 ft north-south along North Street and 350ft east-west along High Street in Huthwaite. When first built in 1907, it only extended 230ft along North Street, but was expanded in 1919 further down North Street. Various buildings had been added later, the most recent being the block along the north side of the site. In 1940, the British Royal Navy took over this 4-storey block to be the headquarters of their medical supply department for most of World War II. The architect of the 1907 building was Mr. F.E. Harris of Manchester and the contractor Mr. J. Dickinson of Derby. The factory was built by the Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS) for the manufacture of hosiery. It is sometimes referred to as the Belmont Clothing Factory, but I suspect that "Belmont" was a clothing brand name, rather than the name of the building. When first opened, it was expected to employ 400 people, but probably employed even more in its heyday. It was certainly the major employer of female labour in Huthwaite (New Hucknall Colliery being the major employee of males). At some point, the hosiery factory became part of the Coats Viyella company. Coats Viyella was once one of the UK’s leading textile businesses with retail (Jaeger), thread (Coats) and manufacturing (CV Clothing) businesses. The building is currently occupied by the Quantum Clothing Group. Quantum was created as a management buy-out from Coats Viyella in December 2000 and currently employs around 5000 people worldwide. All the business’s UK operations including warehousing, design, development, commercial and finance operate from this site in Huthwaite, together with a small office in Ireland. In July 2012, the Quantum Clothing Group was acquired by Japanese conglomerate Itochu Corp. In April 2015, Ashfield District Council granted planning permission for the "demolition of the existing warehousing and factory complex". For more web-based information on this factory, please see http://www.huthwaite-online.net/hucknall/press/1907-cws.php , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huthwaite#Hosiery_Factory , http://archiveshub.ac.uk/search/summary.html?rsid=1310488424&startRecord=1&maximumRecords=20&hitposition=1#rightcol , http://www.quantumclothing.com/AboutUs.aspx and http://www.knittingindustry.com/quantum-clothing-acquired-by-itochu/ . For further images of this factory please see Image, Image, Image, Image and Image

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0