Qualla: Hayes, Hillingdon

Hayes, Hillingdon: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andyfishburne, CC BY-SA 3.0. Turn over any Beatles LP made in Britain before 1979, look at the back, and you will find a small line of type: 'Manufactured in England by The Gramophone Co. Ltd., Hayes, Middlesex.' From the late 1920s until the vinyl plant closed, every Beatles single, every album, every Sgt. Pepper pressed for the British market - and most pressed for the world - came out of an EMI factory in this west London suburb thirteen miles from Charing Cross. The factory took up most of Blyth Road. Decca Records was around the corner. Marshall amplifiers started a few streets away in 1964. For most of the twentieth century, Hayes was where British recorded sound was made. Today the EMI buildings are repurposed as the Old Vinyl Factory complex, with a gold-disc installation in the town centre marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, manufactured here on 1 June 1967.

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Image: Andyfishburne | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hayes, Hillingdon: Brushwood by the Canal

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marathon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Hayes comes from the Old English hǣs - 'land overgrown with brushwood' - and the Domesday Book of 1086 spells it Hesa. For seven hundred years up to 1546, Hayes belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, an estate granted to him by the Mercian royal family in some long-fo...

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Image: Marathon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hayes, Hillingdon: The Gramophone Company

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1907 the Gramophone Company, the British arm of the firm whose 'His Master's Voice' trademark of Nipper the dog listening to a phonograph horn had just been adopted, broke ground for a new factory on Blyth Road. Dame Nellie Melba laid the foundation stone. The company grew int...

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Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hayes, Hillingdon: George Orwell on the Uxbridge Road

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0. Eric Arthur Blair came to Hayes in April 1932 as a schoolmaster at The Hawthorns High School for Boys on Church Road. He was twenty-eight, broke, and looking for time to write. In Hayes he finished a manuscript he had been calling 'Days in London and Paris' and renamed it 'Down a...

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Image: David Hawgood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hayes, Hillingdon: 7 July 1944

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ray Stanton, CC BY-SA 2.0. On Friday 7 July 1944, at 14:59 local time, a German V-1 flying bomb came down at the main entrance to a surface air-raid shelter at the Gramophone Company factory on Blyth Road. The concrete roof of the shelter collapsed. Twenty-four people were killed instantly. Twenty-one more...

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Image: Ray Stanton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Hayes, Hillingdon: Marshall and the Music

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Kelly, CC BY 4.0. In June 1964, drum-shop owner Jim Marshall opened a small factory in Silverdale Road, Hayes, with fifteen employees and 5,000 square feet of floor space. He had been building guitar amplifiers in the back of his shop in Hanwell because the American Fender amps that British rock g...

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Image: Richard Kelly | CC BY 4.0