Northgate Textiles
Worsted weaving mill · Huddersfield, since 1889
What they look for (Trades & Construction): Mill operators, engineers, and apprentices willing to learn a 130-year-old craft. We are one of the last vertically integrated worsted mills in the UK and we hire deliberately for the long term.
What would make you valuable to a mill that thinks in decades?
Inside Huddersfield's last vertically integrated worsted mill
Northgate Textiles has been weaving worsted cloth in the same valley since 1889. The mill survived the collapse of the British wool trade in the 1980s by becoming smaller, slower, and considerably more selective about whom it sold to.
Why vertical integration matters
Almost every mill that survives in the UK now is a finishing house — buying woven cloth and dressing it. Northgate spins, dyes, warps, weaves, and finishes under one roof.
The apprentice question
The mill runs a two-year apprentice scheme that takes three to four people each year. It is genuinely competitive: most years there are over 200 applicants.
What the future looks like
Northgate's leadership is candid that the next twenty years will be harder than the last twenty.
"We are not a heritage brand. We are a working mill that happens to be old."