Old Travel Blog Photograph Hepworths Shop Cromwell Street Stornoway Scotland

Old photograph of the Hepworths Shop, people and cars on Cromwell Street in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. Joseph Hepworth was the clothing manufacturer who founded Joseph Hepworth & Son, a company which grew to become the United Kingdom's largest clothing manufacturer and which is now known as Next plc. Joseph was born in 1834 at Lindley in Huddersfield, England. He left school at ten to join George Walker's Mill in Leeds in 1844. In 1864 he went into business with James Rhodes, his wife's brother, as a tailor in Leeds. By 1881 their factory in Wellington Street employed 500 people and, unusually, made all three pieces of a gentlemen's three piece suit. In the 1880s they innovated further establishing shops to sell their suits direct to the public. By 1890 they employed 2,000 operatives who sold their stock through 107 shops. Hepworth married Sarah Rhodes in 1855 they went on to have three sons and four daughters. Joseph Hepworth died in Harrogate in 1911 and within 6 years of his death Joseph Hepworth & Son was the largest clothing manufacturer in the United Kingdom



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