The house building boom which followed the Second World War presented tremendous opportunities for the Armitage potbank, but management had many challenges in the shape of a depleted workforce, outmoded equipment, dilapidated buildings, and insufficient housing in the village for more workers. There were also opportunities for expansion overseas.
Richard Ewing, in this final volume of his history of the potbank, describes how management and the workforce rose to meet these challenges, making Armitage Shanks the leading sanitary ware manufacturer in Britain. This history ends in 1980, when Blue Circle purchased Armitage Shanks and it ceased to be an independent company.
We have travelled from the era of bottle kilns and hand-made osier packing cases taken to Armitage rail station by horse-cart to that of tunnel kilns and robotic pressers, via the rage for a certain colour named Avocado. In this final volume, Richard Ewing also focusses on the men who worked 50 years or more at the company, and contributed so much to the business and the vibrant community in which they lived.
