Luton
From 70M hats/year (1930s) to Vauxhall (120 years, ended 2025) to London Luton Airport (16.7M passengers 2024, expanding to 32M). Vauxhall site becoming £400M commercial park.
Luton built its first fortune on straw hats, pivoted to automobiles, and now lives off airplanes. The trajectory traces Britain's industrial evolution in a single town.
Straw-plaiting arrived from Lorraine in the 17th century. By the 1930s, Luton's hat factories produced 70 million hats annually—the global center of ladies' millinery. The skilled workforce attracted Vauxhall Motors, which relocated from London in 1905. Hatmakers became mechanics; precision stitching gave way to precision engineering.
For 120 years, Vauxhall defined Luton's economy. The plant that built cars until 2002, then commercial vans, employed over 30,000 at its peak. The Ellesmere Street factory was where Britain built its Astras, Cavaliers, and Vivaro vans. But Stellantis—Vauxhall's parent company—announced closure in April 2025, ending 1,200 jobs and 120 years of history.
The airport is now Luton's keystone species. Opened in 1938, London Luton Airport handled 16.7 million passengers in 2024 and supports 12,100 jobs on-site. EasyJet maintains its headquarters here. Government approval in 2025 for expansion to 32 million annual passengers will generate thousands more jobs in aviation services.
Goodman's £400 million acquisition of the Vauxhall site for commercial and industrial development will create 1,700 jobs—a deliberate attempt to replace automotive with logistics and light manufacturing adjacent to the airport.
By 2026, Luton tests whether proximity to London's fifth-largest airport can replace a century of car manufacturing.