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. 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.