One in six of Britain’s cutlery companies is still in Sheffield

Sheffield’s reputation for cutlery and steel is usually discussed in the past tense. We were curious whether the register agreed, so we counted.

Across 146 manufacturing trade codes at Companies House, there are 196,215 active companies. Sheffield is the registered office of 1,740 of them, which is 0.89%. That is the number every other figure here should be read against: if Sheffield were simply a big city with a bit of everything, it would hold roughly 0.89% of any given trade.

It holds 16.1% of the cutlery trade. Twenty of the 124 active companies in Britain filing the cutlery code are registered in Sheffield, which is eighteen times the city’s baseline share.

The specialism is real, and it is specific

A large city can look specialised in everything at once, so the interesting question is not whether Sheffield is above its baseline somewhere. It is whether the trades it concentrates in are the ones the reputation names.

They are, and the shape is unmistakable once the codes are ranked:

Nine trades, and every one of them is metal: making it, heating it, forming it, or putting an edge on it. Sheffield holds a quarter of its manufacturing companies in the metals codes, 26% against 13% nationally.

Now the same measurement on trades the city is not known for:

Printing lands at 1.0×, which is to say exactly what a city of Sheffield’s size should have. Clothing and spirits are below it. This is what makes the metals result worth something: the method is not flattering Sheffield in general, it is separating one group of trades from the rest.

What this does not say

Four limits, and they matter more than the headline.

It counts companies, not output. Twenty companies is not a sixth of the cutlery made in Britain, or a sixth of the people employed making it, or a sixth of the revenue. A one-person workshop and a factory of three hundred are both one row on the register. We have no figures on volume and are not implying any.

The trade codes are self-filed. A company chooses its own SIC codes when it files, nobody audits the choice, and firms working across several trades pick whichever they think fits. A. Wright & Son, a Sheffield knife works, files both the cutlery code and the tools code, so it appears in two rows above. Tyzack Machine Knives does the same.

A registered office is not a works. It is very often an accountant’s address. We checked whether that was driving the result: the twenty cutlery companies sit at nineteen distinct addresses and the forty-five toolmakers at forty-three, so no single agent’s client list is producing this. But a registered office in Sheffield is not evidence that anything is manufactured in Sheffield, and we are not presenting it as such.

The match is on the postal town. Postal Sheffield takes in Dronfield and other addresses outside the city boundary.

There is also a real reading of the cutlery figure that cuts against the romantic one. One in six sounds commanding until you notice the denominator: there are 124 cutlery companies in the whole of Britain. Sheffield’s share of the trade is remarkable. The trade is small.

The twenty

Eight of the twenty are in our catalogue, with products we can link to. The other twelve we have not listed, which usually means they sell through trade rather than direct, or have no online shop we have found.

Listed here: A. Wright & Son, British Silverware, Francis Howard, Michael May Knives, Taylor’s Eye Witness, W. Wright Silverware, William Whiteley and Sons.

Also filing the cutlery code, and not currently listed: APOSL Sheffield, Chimo Sheffield (Manufacturing), Egginton Forgings, F.E. & J.R. Hopkinson, George Wostenholm & Son, John Barker & Dixon, Legacy Silverware, Rodgers Wostenholm, Rusnorstain, Samuel Eales Silverware, Special Steel Co., The Sheff Cutlery Shop, and Tyzack Machine Knives.

Among the forty-five toolmakers we hold Burgon and Ball, Crown Hand Tools, Ernest Wright, Footprint Tools, Robert Sorby, Spear and Jackson, Thomas Flinn & Co, Vanta Tools and six others. Henry Taylor (Tools), a Sheffield firm since 1834, files the code and is not yet in our catalogue.

Method

Every figure above comes from Companies House advanced search, enumerated by trade code and filtered to active companies. Trade code descriptions are from the Companies House condensed SIC list. A company counts as Sheffield if its registered office address names Sheffield.

The counts were taken on 29 September 2026 and the register changes daily. The script that produces them is sheffield-concentration.ts in our repository, and it takes a --city argument, so the same measurement runs for anywhere else.

We have not adjusted for company size, age or activity beyond the register’s own active status, and the limits in the section above apply to all of it.