Beginnings...

the history of Heygates

As the Domesday Book testifies, there has been a mill on the very same site at Bugbrooke Northamptonshire for over one thousand years. Since 1562 the Heygate family has farmed in the same English county, and in the eighteenth century became involved in flour milling. The business in its present form was established by Mr Arthur Robert Heygate in the late nineteenth century.

Arthur Heygate was still overseeing the activities of the company sixty years later, by which time his sons John and Arthur Robert junior and their sister Anne were running and developing the beginnings of what would become the Heygates of the present day.

Today the sons of these two brothers, grandsons of Arthur senior, are joint managing directors of this ever expanding and diverse company, under the chairmanship of Anne Tetley. Paul and Bob (the third Arthur Robert) work with great commitment to keep the family tradition alive, whilst developing every opportunity to make this old established company and its products a leading force in the twenty first century.

The Heygate group now employs 820 people, compared with just twenty in 1935, and has six flour mills on three sites – Bugbrooke, Tring Hertfordshire and Downham Market Norfolk.

Between them they mill over 350,000 tons of wheat each year and produce over 5000 tons of flour every week. Their Animal Feed division produces in excess of 100,000 tons annually, and their bakery, Fine Lady of Banbury, is one of the most modern in Europe, having the capacity to bake over two million loaves a week – plus a wide range of morning goods and speciality products.

The Bugbrooke site is steeped in history, but can also boast the most modern of facilities – from a new flour mill that was completed in the late 1990’s, to research laboratories and a state of the art test bakery that was completed in 2005. This is where Heygates speciality flours, some developed exclusively to the customer’s needs, can be demonstrated and seen in action.

Heygates, today as it has always been, is at the heart of the most historic of the world’s products … our daily bread.

Bugbrooke Mill, mentioned in the Domesday Book.