, while being converted into apartments, August 2006 Frederick Hopper was born in 1859, and in 1880 started a bicycle repair business in a former
blacksmith's shop in
Barton-upon-Humber. Run as two rival companies, in 1913 Hopper bought out his fellow investors and closed the Elswick site, merging the two companies at the Barton-upon-Humber site in 1914 under the title
Elswick Hopper Cycle and Motor Company. The Barton-upon-Humber site began to boom, producing both bicycles and many of their own components, where if he needed more production capacity Fred would simply construct another building. In 1936, after the death of Fred, Elswick Hopper was listed on the
London Stock Exchange. In 1974 Elswick Hopper plc began a period of expansion, purchasing
Wearwell Cycles, which had been established before 1872. In 1978 the company acquired
Falcon Cycles, which was operated as a subsidiary before being later merged at Barton-upon-Humber. By the mid-1980s, Elswick Hopper plc was a diversified
conglomerate, spanning manufacturing, engineering, and distribution. But the company was losing money at both group and subsidiary level, and was in desperate need of reorganisation. Under a new
Chief Executive, the group company renamed itself Elswick plc in 1984, and renamed its bicycle division Falcon Cycles, the name of its most popular selling sports bicycle brand. Ending production of bicycles under the Elswick brand in the same year, all bicycle manufacture was moved to a new factory at
Brigg. In 1987, the company bought the manufacturing and wholesale distribution businesses of rival
Holdsworth, which included both the Holdsworth and
Claud Butler brands. However, by the late 1980s cheap imports from
Asia were flooding the UK market, and with a severe decline in the bicycle components industry, the company was reliant on importing those as well, and only assembling at Brigg. By this point, production had dwindled to just under 120,000 bicycles per annum. Having rebuilt Elswick plc as
printing and
packaging business focussed on
self adhesive labels and
garment labels, the group sold the bicycle division to Casket Ltd., a company who controlled the Townsend brand. Having sold the dilapidated Barton-upon-Humber site, in September 1994 the residual Elswick plc sold itself to
Ferguson International, which itself went into liquidation in January 2000. ==Present==