Those searching for evidence of a healthy manufacturing business in the UK should take the small, country road to Hixon in Staffordshire where, on an unassuming and pleasantly situated industrial estate, they will find the factory and offices of Allett, manufacturers of high-quality, cylinder lawn mowers.
Allett’s story starts in 1965, when Reg Allett created the company. Within a few years, Allett machines were generally accepted as the cream of professional, cylinder mowers, cutting the outfields of England Test Match venues, the pitches of football clubs across the nation and even supplying mowers to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to maintain precious military cemeteries around the globe.
Allett’s Staffordshire Factory.
In 2007, the business was bought by the company Turfmech, owned by Allett’s MD, Austin Jarrett, and moved to the Staffordshire base. Jarrett is a passionate and knowledgeable lawn care expert, with faith in the power of a premium brand, and whose mission is to revive and refurbish British mower manufacturing and the Allett brand, and take them to the future. He made sure the globally recognisable Allett professional brand heritage, represented by its silver, black and gold livery, was maintained .
In 2011, Allett acquired the design and manufacturing rights to a range of cylinder-style lawn mowers formerly owned by Bosch, and previously marketed to a largely domestic audience under the Atco and Suffolk Punch brand names. These mowers have had a small but loyal following amongst homeowners dating back many years but there was feeling that under their previous ownership they had become a little neglected and deserved more, so when Allett came to their aid it was generally welcomed.
With this symbiotic move, merging the prestigious Allett brand name synonymous with quality and British-made professional products, with these respected domestic lawn mowers, Allett has protected and enhanced them and in return is now able to offer a complete range of cylinder mowers from small-scale domestic to semi-commercial and large-scale professional.
The cylinder roller mower, with its crisp finish and defined stripe, has always been a peculiarly British phenomenon and Jarrett has done something unique; he has created a manufacturing base dedicated to producing specialised “premium lawn care products”. Building the Rolls Royce, Dyson or Rolex of lawn care – the best of the best – for those who will appreciate it.
The contemporary Allett mowers developed from the Atco and Suffolk Punch, the Classic and Expert ‘green and gold’ ranges, are reliable, pleasing to the eye, superior mowers and are bought by people who understand what it takes to create a good lawn, continuing the heritage of their predecessors.
They are hand built, using top-grade materials, expertise and the kind of personal involvement and attention to detail associated with an older, wiser and more thoughtful Great Britain.
To Jarret and his team, it’s all about producing a fine lawn, the finish, and the defined stripe. As Jarrett says, it’s about “great lawns, not just fine mowers”.
This passion is backed up by Allett’s collective knowledge of lawn maintenance and lawn care solutions.
For example, Allett’s MD is able to explain, with skill, the difference between the finish achieved by a rotary mower, and a cylinder mower with its sharp and carefully ground forward rotating blades and roller. “The cylinder” he tells us, “produces a precise, scissor-like cut, avoiding damage to grass blades”. This creates a perfect finish; and with the roller achieves a far more defined and long-lasting stripe than you will get from any other mower.
His knowledge of lawn biology is exemplary. He describes, for example, how soil needs to be loosened to allow roots to grow and develop, or how deep into the lawn you need to go to remove heavy thatch and stop clogging. This gives him a solid scientific foundation for his vision.
Jarrett is very proud of the fact that his business is made up of people who share his passion and knowledge, and who also believe in taking turf care seriously.
Allett’s Regal Cylinder Mower
Allett has earned its reputation for producing some of the finest lawn mowers made in the world today, one of the reasons why Allett machines are used as far afield as football clubs in Japan and cricket clubs in India. Allett mowers service golf clubs, cricket wickets, tennis courts, and bowls lawns around the world and have prestigious clients that include some of the top football clubs in Europe and – a strange but true story – are so popular in Saudi Arabia, that it is written into law that their football clubs must use Allett mowers.
As Allett’s MD reminds us, their clients include Lords Cricket Ground, Edgbaston, Queen’s tennis club and Premiership football clubs, and they still supply the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, in addition to several royal properties and last, but by no means least, Hambledon C.C. – the spiritual home of modern cricket – a fact of which Allett’s head man is justifiably proud.
Jarrett wants to spread this quality further into the domestic market. He points to independently conducted market research, which shows that people who buy lawn mowers are split into several groups. From the group who really can’t abide the process, through the larger group who don’t mind it but to whom it is a necessary task, right up to the buyers to whom achieving the best finish possible is the main criteria when purchasing a lawn mower.
To this last group, roughly one in five (in fact 21%), mowing and caring for their lawn is part of their lifestyle. Their healthy and smart sward is a reflection of something in themselves and their values, and they take pride in the angle and health of every last blade of grass.
Allett Buckingham
Allett domestic mowers are made for this last group and Jarrett believes, with some justification, that their range offers such consumers the perfect all-round solution to meeting their lawn care needs.
In fact, Allett has an almost holistic approach to lawn care. You don’t just treat symptoms by mowing the lawn and leaving it, you get involved in treating and maintaining every aspect of your lawn.
Subsequently, new for 2013, they are introducing a range of six separate lawn care cartridges that can be fitted easily into the petrol powered Kensington machine, making it, not merely a mower, but a complete lawn care system, including:
• an aerator to open the soil up for better moisture absorbance and to prune roots to encourage more growth
• a scarifier to remove moss
• a dethatcher for really getting into the soil and removing dense thatch
• a ten-bladed mowing cylinder for very fine cutting
• a verticutter for removing lateral growth and moss
• a tough lawn brush, which performs a number of tasks, including leaf and detritus clearing, and working in top dressing.
These tools are meticulously designed and built for those who truly care about their lawns, who are passionate about their feel, their health and their appearance, and to whom the perfect striped lawn is a badge of honour representing aesthetic and horticultural excellence.
And as to the other four out of five lawn mower buyers, well, Jarrett is realistic and aware that quality cylinder lawn mowers are not for everyone and some will happily mow when they need to and leave it at that.
However, anyone who has witnessed the smart and crisp finish created by the Buckingham, or the pile of dense grass-strangling material pulled from the lawn by the Kensington’s dethatching cartridge, might think twice about treating lawn maintenance as a bi-annual event to be got over with.
If expertise, quality manufacturing and passion count for anything, then Allett, still a wholly British-owned company, should become a household name, at least in households where quality and distinction count for something.
Certainly, if everyone who cared about their lawns owned an Allett lawn mower, the gardens of England would be smarter, healthier and greener places.
So don’t sit there in your deck chair this summer, wondering about the state of British manufacturing and staring at a brown expanse of thatch, moss and worm casts. Get out there and look at these premium machines from Allett, who are proving that British manufacturing, quality engineering and genuine, unashamed excellence in lawn care are alive and well and living in Staffordshire.
Andrew Whelan
