Dorma Group ltd.

Dorma was founded in 1841 by the Roberts brothers from Manchester with the intentions of producing the finest quality fabrics in the world.

In 1920 the Dorma brand was created and for the first time bed linen was available pre-packaged straight from the manufacturer to the consumer.

From this point on Dorma dominated the market in bed linen and was the first company to produce printed bed sheets in the 1960s.

The company was also the first to mass produce quilt covers and invented the revolutionary easy care cotton products.

Dorma`s first factory was the old Sykes Paper Mill built in the 1800s by John Sykes and renamed the Forge Bleach Works.

The Site spans across 34 acres in total with 8 acres beeing occupied by buildings and various mixing tanks and offices, the site also includes its own mini resevoir used in the production of dying the fabrics.

Sadly Dorma closed its operations down at the Forge Bleach Works in 2003 selling the site to Kaleidoscope Coluration ltd. The site remained open until 2005 when Kaleidoscope went into administration and left the tax payer to foot the bill for its 100 staff.

After knowing of this site for some time myself and Cyclone thought it was about time we payed the place a visit.

When you enter this site you have no idea of just how big it is, as the majority of the buildings are obscured, its only when you approach the boiler house you start realise the scale of the place.

Due to its location we thought the site would be completely deserted, unfortunatley we where wrong.

After 5 minutes of exploring we heard very loud banging noises coming from inside the main factory site and spotted a white transit van.

Thinking no more of it we proceeded to an open doorway and started snapping away, when we exited though we where suddenly confronted by what we thought was security, turns out though he was one of the site demolition team currently gutting the place.

After questioning our intentions and initialy going to escort us of the premises he changed his mind and ended up giving us the history of the place as well as a quick guided tour then left us to have free reign over the entire site.

This site is huge and the lighting is fantastic, this place is definatley worth a trip, we spent nealry 3 hours in there before fatigue finaly took over.