Sturmey-Archer Catalog — The Raleigh Works at Nottingham

— Catalog page —
The Raleigh Industries’ organisation at Nottingham, employing nearly 7,000 people, houses the
largest and most modern cycle plant in the world. With its new ten-acre extension, the factory now
covers an area of no less than forty acres. The design, quality and standard of its manufactures
are acknowledged to be the highest within the industry.

The resources of this great organisation are behind every Sturmey-Archer product built and sold
to-day.

A section of this huge factory is devoted to the designing and production of Sturmey-Archer gears,
brakes and Dynohubs.

[One leaf from a Sturmey-Archer publication, printed in blue on white, given entirely to a bird’s-eye
drawing of the Raleigh works at Nottingham. The plant is drawn from the air in fine line and blue
wash: rank after rank of saw-tooth roofs running back from the road, a covered bridge crossing
between two blocks at the center, chimneys, rail sidings, and RALEIGH INDUSTRIES LIMITED lettered
along the roof ridges of the three buildings nearest the viewer. Smoke drifts across the top of the
sheet.

The text above it is four sentences long and does one job. Sturmey-Archer is not asking to be judged
on a hub; it is asking to be judged on the factory behind the hub. Nearly seven thousand people, the
largest and most modern cycle plant in the world, forty acres after a new ten-acre extension. Only
the last line, set small in the lower right corner, mentions the products at all, and then only to
say that a section of the works is given to gears, brakes and Dynohubs.

This is the argument the Automoto sheets in this archive make in French thirty years earlier: the
works photograph as proof of manufacture. Here it is drawn rather than photographed, and the scale
has changed by an order of magnitude.

The page prints no year. Raleigh Industries employed about seven thousand people in the years after
the war, and the sheet is not from the Raleigh catalog of 1958.]