Building Name

A C Wickman Limited Banner Lane Tile Hill Coventry

Date
1937 - 1938
Street
Banner Lane
District/Town
Tile Hill, Coventry
County/Country
Warwickshire, England
Client
Axel C Wickman
Work
New Build

In the 1930s A C Wickman Limited was a rapidly expanding machine tool firm. Their premises in Queen Victoria Road had become inadequate and A C Wickman began to think in terms of a new factory on a green field site. In 1937 he acquired a site at Banner Lane, Tile Hill and commissioned W S Hattrell & Partners to prepare the designs. The new factory was completed towards the end of 1938 or early 1939.

Reference           Coventry Evening Telegraph February 1994. Page 9

Axel C. Wickman, the founder of the top machine tool firm Wickmans, was born on 23 February 1874. Following an apprenticeship at Albert Herbert, he began the firm in a converted garage at the Charterhouse Works in Northfield Road, Stoke. In its heyday, it was the largest producer of multi-spindle machines in Europe and the second largest in the world. At the huge glass-fronted factory more than 2,500 people were employed, while the firm also had subsidiaries in all parts of the world from South Africa and Australia to Italy and Brazil. Wickman died in America in 1970. The firm went into receivership in 1993