|
Firmengeschichte der Firma Berkel & Parnalls:
In 1820, William Parnall started trading in a cellar in Narrow Wine Street, making weights and measures, and later branching out into other shop-keeping equipment:scale pans, tea bins, canisters and scoops.
The weighing machines and the shop fittings became two distinct businesses, and by the 1880s, Parnalls was the biggest shopfitting firm in the country, with branches in London and Swansea, warehouses and showrooms in Narrow Wine Street, a scale works at Fishponds and a showroom in Fairfax Street for shop fittings.
They fitted out shops in London as well as the West and supplied "the latest novelties and improvements — scoops, harrows, counter boxes, tills, tickets, window name plates, tobacco cutters, bottling machines, beer engines, hand carts, coffee mills, tea mixers, hoists and lifts."
For butchers they even supplied sawdust: "There is hardly a city or town in Great Britain where their productions are not known and appreciated", said a description in the 1890s. They had ten representatives on the road and employed 400 workmen, and in 1889 went into shop-fronts as well, providing: architectural ironwork, iron and glass canopies, gates and railings and display units.
In 1899 they became associated with W. and T. Avery, and the manufacture of weighing machines was phased out in favour of shop-fitting. In the 1914-18 war, their workshops were used to produce 600 aeroplanes and seaplanes.They moved to their present home in Fishponds in 1923 and supplied a new generation of shopfronts, with lobbies and island windows.
Famous contracts at the time were for the bronze shopfronts and display cases in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station and the stainless steel canopies at the Savoy Hotel and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon.
They also did extensive work for the Co-op, Liptons, Sainsbury’s and Selfridges, from the turn of the century. Between the wars they started making and fitting cold storage units and refrigerated display units. The Second World War brought a return to aircraft work — Parnalls made airframe components and fuselage sections in metal and wood for famous marques from the Tiger Moth to the Horsa glider, and the work continued in peacetime with the interior finishing of the Britannia aircraft, exploiting the use of a new material, plastic.
In the late Forties, they began catering for the new shopping fashion, the supermarket, and developed metal shelving and display units. Parnalls postwar has had contracts at the best addresses: 10 Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the QE2.
Links finden Sie die Modelle, die Berkel und Parnall’s produziert haben
|
