Brompton Bikes plans £100m wetland factory on stilts

theguardian.com:

Brompton has revealed plans to invest as much as £100m in a new UK factory that will secure its place as the UK’s biggest bicycle manufacturer. In an added twist it has decided to reject the normal grey shed, instead opting to build its plant on stilts amid a newly restored wetland.

The folding bike maker plans for the new site at Ashford in Kent to be open by 2027, on a 40 hectare (100 acre) floodplain. The stilts will be needed to prevent the factory being regularly inundated. It will also have no new car parking, instead relying on new pedestrian and cycle paths from the train station.

“The whole reason this works is everything about it is slightly mad,” said Will Butler-Adams, Brompton’s chief executive, speaking before the plans were approved by Ashford borough council’s cabinet on Thursday evening.

It is part of an expansion that will increase employee numbers from 850 to 1,000 in the next year. Butler-Adams said Brompton will also develop new products at the site, with an ultimate goal of building 200,000 bikes a year, compared with just shy of 70,000 in the year to March 2021, when Brompton made revenues of £76m (including a bike subscription service in some cities).

The company will move from a “nondescript great big grey box” in Greenford in west London to a custom-built facility that will also host a museum, visitor centre and café, Butler-Adams said. Brompton hopes the facility, designed by architect Guy Hollaway, will be distinctive enough to attract a small portion of the 4.5m annual visitors to the designer outlet next door. The Greenford factory will continue to operate until at least 2030 during a transition to the new site.

Part of the plan will involve restoring the new area to something similar to what it