Naylor Industries

Naylor Industries was founded in 1890 by George Wilfred Naylor, who set up a clay-pipe works near the Denby Dale Viaduct in West Yorkshire, part of a family with roots going back to Daniel Naylor in the 1730s, originally brickmakers and railway contractors before the pipe-making side took over. The business stayed in Denby Dale and has run as a family company ever since, now in its fourth generation under Edward Naylor, who returned to take over as chief executive in 1993.

That handover wasn’t a smooth inheritance of a thriving business, though. When Edward took the top job, Naylor was loss-making, turning over just £12 million, and dependent on clay sewer pipes at exactly the moment plastic alternatives were eating into that market, all while the UK construction sector sat in recession. He spent the following decades pushing the company into plastic products, launching that side of the business in 2000, and later into concrete too, diversifying well beyond the clay foundation the company had been built on.

The investment kept coming. In 2017, the Duke of Kent opened a £5 million factory extension, and the company has continued pouring money into expanded manufacturing capability since, including larger-diameter plastic drainage pipes aimed at flood defense, driven partly by what Edward Naylor has described as increasingly unpredictable weather patterns. By 2020, marking its 130th year, Naylor was turning over more than £55 million, employing around 400 people, exporting into 65 international markets, and running Yorkshire Flowerpots, now the UK’s largest manufacturer of terracotta garden pots, alongside its drainage and construction work.

The biggest shift came in 2024, which the company itself called a transformational year: Naylor finally closed its clay pipe business altogether, the product line it had started with back in 1890, and restructured into two separate entities, Naylor Drainage Ltd and Naylor Industries Ltd, under shared ownership. More than 130 years after George Wilfred Naylor built that first clay-pipe works, the business that still carries his name has effectively moved on from the material it was founded on while staying in the same family’s hands throughout.