How the Machine That Made Modern Bread Explains Why British Industry is Toast
Burnley invented the best thing since sliced bread. Then it stopped making it.
Grüezi!
A quick note: 7 Things usually focuses on geopolitics and the multipolar world we’re navigating. But sometimes the biggest strategic questions – how the West lost manufacturing capacity, why Europe became vulnerable to Chinese industrial dominance, where Western economic power actually went – are best understood through the specific story of one company in one town making one machine. This is that story.
In the early 1960s, a small engineering firm in Burnley, Lancashire, built the machine that would transform bread-making worldwide. Thirty years later, its operations had been shuttered, absorbed, and relocated. The machinery still dominates global industrial bread production. Britain makes barely a fraction of it.
This isn’t just another story about British industrial decline. It’s a case study in how world-leading innovation, successful commercialisation, and global market dominance can all precede – and fail to prevent – the destruction of the place that made them possible.
1. The Innovation
Our story begins in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, at what was then the British Baking Industries Research Association. In 1961, its industrial chemists developed what became known as the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP).
Their innovation was genuinely revolutionary. Traditional bread-making required hours of kneading and fermentation. CBP reduced the entire process – flour to sliced, packaged loaf – to about three and a half hours.
It did all this through adding a small amount of fat, some Vitamin C (a fast-acting oxidising agent) and some high-speed mechanical mixing. The process also made use of Britain’s lower-protein wheat instead of expensive North American imports.
Post-war Britain, still shaking off the memory of rationing and the grey “National Loaf,” got cheap, soft, sliced white bread with a long shelf life. Sandwiches got simpler.
For British wheat farmers, it meant a viable domestic market. For industrial bakers, it meant efficiency and scale. Even with sourdough back in vogue, around 80% of UK bread is still made using CBP.
But the Chorleywood Process needed the right equipment for that high-speed mechanical mixing. Enter Tweedy of Burnley.
2. Built in Burnley
George Tweedy & Co. had already been engineering in Burnley for a century when it developed the high-energy vacuum mixer the Chorleywood Process needed.
As CBP entered widespread commercial use in 1965, Tweedy’s machine became, in the words of a corporate historian, “the preferred mixer for plant bakers around the world.”
But there’s some detail that official histories miss. Jane, whose father was involved with Tweedy, can bring some of that history to life.
Her dad’s life was a classic example of a lost Britain that could have been. He moved from being a merchant navy chief engineer during the war to manufacturing aircraft parts.
Then, inspired by his wife’s nursing experience, he developed the Clinimatic (a hospital machine for disposing of bedpans), before going on to collaborate with Chorleywood’s chemical engineers.
I discovered all this whilst researching my own family’s history – a genealogical detective story that DNA testing still hasn’t quite resolved. Jane turned out to be a vital missing link, and as we pieced together the family puzzle, she shared these memories of her father’s work. What began as a search for personal history uncovered this tale of British industrial transformation.
Jane’s father adapted an impact plate mechanism used in cake-making to meet the very different requirements of bread dough. Then he bought out Tweedy and ventured into industrial bakery.
Around Burnley there was a little innovation ecosystem. Bertwistle’s bakers in Padiham, a mile from Tweedy’s factory, was the test site. The first commercial Tweedy mixer went there, and the owner was so impressed with the prototype that he immediately ordered one for his small-batch organic wholemeal operation.
Tweedy used Bertwistle’s to demonstrate the machine to potential customers – including a potential client who flew from Japan to inspect the dough (that’s the picture at the top).
This was Lancashire light engineering at its peak: tight user-producer networks, rapid iteration from prototype to commercialisation, practical problem-solving rather than laboratory R&D, and global export reach from a regional industrial cluster.
3. Rationalised
In 1968, three years after CBP’s global success, the makers of Wonder Bread in the US bought Tweedy. They weren’t interested in the mixer engineering business, they already owned a British company producing flour, yeast, and raising agents. They wanted to optimise their portfolio – vertically integrate, consolidate supply chains – and make life harder for competitors.
By the late 1980s, they sold Tweedy on to an engineering firm that owned another British bakery equipment maker. In 1993, Burnley’s manufacturing was relocated 150 miles south to a plant in Peterborough.
A part of Burnley’s manufacturing knowledge embodied in people, relationships, and places went with it.
Consolidation was standard practice. Buy up competitors, merge operations at one site, close the others.
Every transaction moved decision-making further from the sites where innovation happened. Every closure or relocation improved the cost structure and share price. Every one destroyed a little more of the regional manufacturing ecosystem that had made the original innovation possible.
Each acquisition was financed by and generated returns for City of London institutional investors – pension funds, insurance companies, asset managers. British workers did benefit – through pension pots and marginally lower insurance premiums.
But the benefits were individualised and diffuse.
The costs were concentrated and communal: regional manufacturing capacity destroyed, intergenerational skills not passed down, economic purpose lost.
4. What Replaced It?
At the beginning of the 1980s, 45% of Burnley’s workforce had manufacturing jobs. Today, it’s about 15%.
In 1982, the town’s last coal mine closed, and Bertwistle’s Bakery, which had passed down generations since 1884, was sold off when the owner’s son chose teaching over continuing the family business.
By the 1980s, the relative returns to different types of work had shifted. Professional services and public sector jobs offered better prospects than continuing a family business. The light engineering capacity didn’t reproduce itself because the economic ecosystem that had supported it had disappeared.
Lancashire’s mill towns – Burnley, Blackburn, Rochdale – were hit earlier than most of Britain. Textiles declined from the 1950s, but diversification into light engineering and aerospace supply chains provided a buffer through the 1970s.
Then the early 1980s recession devastated what remained. Over just two to three years, according to Lancashire County Council, “whole sectors of industry we had taken for granted simply disappeared.”
So what replaced Tweedy’s engineering capacity in Burnley?
Nothing, really.
Or rather, there were service-sector jobs (often part-time, often poorly paid), some public-sector employment (until austerity hit), benefit dependency, and the social dislocation that created a fertile ground for the far-right.
There were race riots in 2001. The year after, the far right British National Party won its first council seats in Burnley, increasing its vote in the early 2000s. In 2016 the town voted heavily for Brexit.
5. The Global Irony
Could different choices have saved Tweedy’s manufacturing in Burnley? Perhaps not – at least not without trade-offs Britain’s political system never forced anyone to consider.
Germany’s path: Regional banking and “patient” capital might have kept Tweedy independent and Burnley-based longer. The Mittelstand model shows how regional banks with long-term stakes can prevent portfolio optimisation logic from destroying local capacity. But German engineering firms now face their own crisis – caught between Chinese scale manufacturing and high costs, dependent on energy supplies that proved strategic vulnerabilities.
France’s path: State coordination might have maintained dispersed manufacturing capacity through strategic policy, rather than allowing consolidation. But this would have required a political consensus that Britain lacked and fiscal commitments that strain even French resolve. France’s champions worked where economies of scale and state procurement mattered (aerospace, rail, nuclear). Did industrial baking equipment qualify? Not really.
Italy’s path: Networks of small firms, shared services, flexible specialisation. Tweedy stays small, specialised, part of a Lancashire engineering cluster. Works brilliantly for fashion, ceramics, machine tools – sectors where variety and customisation create defensibility. Industrial bread mixers for global standardisation?
Britain’s path: Portfolio capitalism, consolidation for “efficiency”, financialised returns. Tweedy was absorbed, its manufacturing relocated, Burnley’s capacity erased. The consolidated British company was then sold to Germany anyway. Britain kept some manufacturing but lost regional diversity, embedded knowledge, and ultimately ownership. Burnley got deindustrialisation and political backlash.
Maybe no structure could have preserved Burnley’s capacity.
But Britain never debated which pain to accept, which benefits to prioritise, which trade-offs were tolerable – and whether concentrating manufacturing in fewer British locations was worth destroying regional ecosystems.
6. The Crumbs
Tweedy’s story wasn’t unique. BTR – the company that merged with Siebe to form Invensys – had perfected what might be called the “Dignitas” model for UK engineering.
Companies went there voluntarily for what was presented as a “rational” solution, with “predictable” outcomes.
Before absorbing APV (and thus Tweedy) through the Invensys merger, BTR’s track record included:
Aberdare Holdings (Welsh cables and wires) – closed
Pilkington tiles – closed
Bestobell (Skelmersdale valves) – relocated, then closed
Glenfield & Kennedy (Kilmarnock valves) – relocated, then closed
The pattern was consistent: acquire, rationalise, relocate, close. Each closure improved the cost structure and share price. Each made the company more attractive for the next stage of consolidation.
And each destroyed a little more of Britain’s regional manufacturing ecosystems – the tight networks of suppliers, customers, and skilled workers that made innovation possible in the first place.
The consolidation logic that killed Burnley was being replicated across Wales, Scotland, and northern England. Different towns, different products, same mechanisms, same outcomes.
Portfolio managers in London were making decisions that devastated Kilmarnock and Skelmersdale and Burnley. The returns flowed to pension funds and insurance portfolios. The costs stayed local – unemployment, lost skills, broken communities.
And there was nowhere this trade-off could be debated, contested, or chosen collectively.
7. Death by a 1,000 slices
When Tweedy’s Burnley operation closed in 1993, who represented the town’s interests? The local MP was from an opposition party with no leverage over commercial decisions.
In politically centralised Britain, there was nowhere Burnley could contest the closure or demand that consolidation gains be shared.
No regional authority could say: “If you’re moving production to Peterborough, you owe Burnley compensation or retraining or industrial replacement.”
The costs were borne locally. The benefits went to shareholders whose portfolios were geographically diversified and whose political influence was concentrated in the capital.
By the time political consequences became visible – Burnley’s race riots in 2001, the BNP winning council seats in 2002, the 66% Brexit vote in 2016 – the industrial capacity had vanished, and no one bore any accountability for its loss.
This is the democratic deficit at the heart of contemporary capitalism: economic power operates globally and consolidates freely, whilst political representation remains fragmented across sovereign territories with no mechanism for democratic contestation of decisions that transform entire regions.
Across the UK, nearly a quarter of the population live in “older industrial areas” that have seen industrial jobs evaporate since the early 1980s.
These areas – former coalfields, steelworks sites, heavy engineering concentrations, Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns – provided core support for Brexit.
They’ve embraced far-right parties and anti-immigrant sentiment, sharing the populist reaction to “elites” who benefited from transformations that devastated their communities.
The Chorleywood Bread Process remains a genuine British success story – a technical innovation that achieved global adoption. But Britain went from inventing the process and building the equipment to being a minor player in a market dominated by German, Swiss, American, and Japanese firms.
The capacity loss happened not through inevitable economic law, but through specific mechanisms: portfolio acquisitions, consolidation logic, political indifference, and the treatment of manufacturing knowledge as relocatable rather than embedded.
Tweedy of Burnley pioneered the machinery that made modern industrial bread.
The place and the people that made innovation possible are gone.
That’s not just Lancashire’s story. It’s Britain’s.
Thanks for reading,
Best,
Adrian
Family histories contain multitudes – the intimate secrets we seek and the economic forces we didn’t know we’d find.
Sometimes the most important stories about national transformation aren’t in the aggregate statistics but in the specific memories of one family, one firm, one town, one machine – and what happened next.
Hope you enjoyed this one.
Great article Adrian. It feels like loss of faith in the invisible hand is what is fueling so much grassroots energy to break the system. Then manipulative leaders like ours in US, are capitalizing on that.
An excellent account, Adrian, bringing an interesting story of regional industrial decline bang up to date with the democratic deficit and the rise of populism. My dad played a small part in a similar story, beginning at the textile mill in Quorn, a little village in Leicestershire, which has 'executive flats'. My childhood was spent in Asia as he helped set up textile factories in Malaysia, China and beyond. I'm not sure industrial policy was on his mind but perhaps it should have been.
Not sure I can forgive crusty captions like "no pain, no gain," but otherwise, thank you for yet another thought-provoking article.