Supporting British Industry & Craftsmanship
A prestigious cloth-maker which specialises in manufacturing handmade woollen and worsted fabrics.
At its peak the firm ran nine mills and employed nearly 4,000 people, and it's officially credited as the original creator of flannel — cloth it first produced in 1803 and held the trademark for into the 1950s.
The company also invented the khaki serge drape mixture around 1900-1901, later approved by the Prince of Wales, which was used to make military puttees and became one of the defining fabrics of the First World War, with Fox Brothers supplying over 8,000 miles of cloth to British and Allied forces. Ownership passed through seven generations of the Fox family before the company was bought in 2009 by Deborah Meaden, of BBC's Dragons' Den, and her business partner Douglas Cordeaux. Together they revived the firm and continue to run it today, drawing on the company's extensive historic pattern archive to supply cloth to designers, luxury fashion houses, tailors and film studios worldwide.
"It was great to witness the attention to detail and note how many hands the cloth passes through whilst being produced and finished in the mill. I was lucky enough to be shown an archive book dating back to 1773 - a calf-leather bound sample book with cloths and colours that could have been produced yesterday. After my tour of the mill, Director of Global Sales Patrick Osborne-Fox took me to see the rest of the site behind the mill in use - the Tonedale Mills complex which is almost 7 acres in size. Many of the buildings are now empty and at risk which seems such a shame. So much history is wrapped up in these buildings and even if they're no longer used for manufacturing they deserved to be saved. " Carmel King photographed Fox Brothers in May 2025 for The Archive.
