History & Heritage
‘Little Greene’ was the name of a tiny 18th-century hamlet just to the east of Manchester. It can be seen on ancient maps of the area, including the one on all our paint tins.
Records dating from 1773 show a small company operating on the bank of the rivers Irk and Irwell, called The Little Greene Dye Works. Here, its entrepreneurial owner, Joshua Rowlands, oversaw the supply of pigments and dyes to local weaving mills. The area was central to the boom in cotton trade during the Industrial Revolution.
The Little Greene Paint Company, as it is today, was established very close to this original site. We have seamlessly adopted Joshua Rowlands’ business of formulating colour, and his philosophy of doing so without compromise.
Our current headquarters are now located a little further down the road, standing proudly in the heart of an area with a rich and envied manufacturing pedigree, just a short distance from the centre of Manchester. This is where our dedicated team works behind the scenes, from hand-pouring sample pots to creating beautiful new colours and wallpapers for our upcoming collections…
The fundamental principles of formulating and making our paints have not changed much since the era of The Little Greene Dye Works. With our own factory nestled in the foothills of Mount Snowdon in North Wales, we are the only British paint maker still producing a complete range of traditional and modern finishes. Our paints are made without compromise, using only the finest natural, organic ingredients and safe-synthetic pigments to give superb depth of colour. We carefully curate and rigorously test our recipes to make sure we deliver products of a consistently high quality.
We still manufacture on a scale that’s small enough to measure ingredients in kilograms not tonnes. Much of the process is undertaken by the hands of time-served craftspeople rather than automated machines, right down to our sample pots which are filled by hand from a glass jug.
Our premium quality recipes and highly pigmented formulations mean that our paints have excellent opacity and unrivalled coverage – making them practical, beautiful and very economical too. Our paint colours are steeped in history, with many of them having been recreated from authentic, historic colours found in some of Britain’s most-treasured properties. The result is an incredibly versatile, timeless palette of elegant, muted tones and brighter colours, all designed for the modern interior.