How FinTrU is honouring the past and looking to the future
Long before FinTrU moved into Carlisle House, the premises were a bustling hive of industry. In the 19th Century, quite some time before the term Client Lifecycle Management had been coined, ‘Carlisle House’ was one of Derry/Londonderry's biggest shirt factories.
In 1847, with growing interest in the high-quality shirts produced by the ‘Derry Factory Girls’, London menswear manufacturers Welch Margetson expanded their operations to Derry/Londonderry. Their first base of operations in the city was a warehouse in Waterside. By 1876, with business booming, the company moved into new premises at the corner of Horace Street and Carlisle Road.
This vast Victorian red-brick building was one of many designed by the architect JG Ferguson and soon became home to 1,000 employees. This was no flash-in-the-pan, start-up either. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the Derry shirt industry employed 8,000 people, providing work for an additional 10,000 outworkers. In the 1850s there were five shirt factories in the city, by 1926 there were 44.
As the 20th Century rolled on, the world, along with manufacturing, changed, and in 1991, the shirt industry bid farewell to Horace Street and Carlisle Road.
In 2018, FinTrU moved in to the lower floor of what had now become Carlisle House and today, one floor above, a new, fully refurbished space has been created. It is now a thriving home to state-of-the-art-facilities and technology with artwork and fittings all supplied locally – the factory might have gone, but the heritage remains. So, when our employees arrive at Carlisle House in the morning, or glance at the wall in the afternoon, they will still see that original red brick. A different industry perhaps, but one that is still driven by the people of the city. A building that holds a thousand memories and one, we hope, that will hold a thousand more.
The redevelopment of Carlisle House is the first part of a multi-phase plan for FinTrU’s North West operations, with a newly redeveloped Technology Hub set to launch next year.
For media enquiries, please contact communications@fintru.com.
Related Articles
