Motorcycle Marque Norton Revs Up for Renewal Under New Roof

Norton — the iconic, 124-year-old British motorcycle manufacturer — suddenly needed a new home just as the pandemic started rumbling.

The brand was in a fragile state and needed to switch gears fast. Trust in the company had taken a spill, but the Norton family needed to get back in the saddle with a new place to gather: to make the bikes, to ceremoniously hand over custom builds and to allow its new, hopefully more sensible directors to behold — along with visitors to the space — a "theater of manufacturing."

Bennetts Associates got the call. Previously, for India's Tata Motors Ltd., the British architecture firm had brought to life a design, production and purchasing campus for luxury automobiles in Warwickshire. "It’s the place where Jaguar Land Rover does its thinking,” Bennetts Associates Director Julian Lipscombe told LoopNet.

When Norton’s new owners, TVS Motor Co., a family-run branch of another powerful Indian multinational conglomerate, came seeking a space for the same class of all-encompassing brand reverence under a single roof, they also turned to Bennetts Associates.

TVS had brought Norton out of administration in April 2020 after its previous owner, Stuart Garner, pleaded guilty to defrauding the firm, which he had controlled since 2008.

“Norton has an extraordinary history,” Lipscombe said. “It engenders incredible loyalty in the ‘family’ of people who are connected to the brand — they will stick with it through thick and thin. But in the preceding 10 years, it had been mostly thin.”

With TVS committed to “gather up the pieces of the company and its heritage,” it invested 100 million pounds (approximately $120 million) into all aspects of the company, including this new facility in Solihull, a historic green belt adorning Norton’s birthplace of Birmingham.

TVS’s goal was to maintain the “strong sense of connective tissue between company directors, designers, engineers, mechanics, and fans who’ve stayed loyal to the brand all their lives,” Lipscombe said. “Our goal," he continued, "was to make all that explicit in the building.”

As for the real estate, the team had to envision, from an empty distribution warehouse, a space that encompasses a high-tech industrial manufacturing facility as well as a showroom, a mechanical customer service center, an R&D hub, a historical art gallery, a hosting area for events and a place for at least 150 people to work.

The task also came with a nearly impossible deadline; there was no time to waste in redeeming Norton.

So, true to Norton fashion, the project burned rubber off the starting line.

Fresh off the purchase, TVS appointed Bennetts Associates in June 2020 — already revving with an ambitious goal of rolling an assembled bike off the line “by December.” Not as in the end of the following year, as Lipscombe initially assumed, but a mere six months later.

“The immediate concern was getting in and getting set up to start manufacturing, which we did,” he said. “It took another six months to finish the rest of the building. It was quite a challenge, but life would be dull if everything were easy.”

With a refresh still in flux, the team had to design infrastructure for a manufacturing process that could potentially change. “We had to design something that’s super flexible super quickly. Who else does stuff that’s super quick and super flexible?” he remembers pondering. “The events industry.”

Dormant during the lockdown, events specialists’ brains were ripe for picking. “We asked things like, ‘what kind of kit do you use to put up a Glastonbury music festival with 250,000 people that you then disassemble and take away?’”

Metal trusses suggested in those conversations as temporary fixes instead ended up literally becoming “the centerpiece” of the facility. “They came completely standard off the shelf, with nothing special about them at all — just bright aluminum,” Lipscombe said. “But one of the iconic things about the Norton brand is its relatively muted color palette, with pops of bright metal from a piston casing or an exhaust pipe. When the trusses came into the space, they had this similar kind of glint and sparkle about them, and it just started to bring the brand back to life in the very bones of the manufacturing process. And then we layered onto that.”

Those bright aluminum trusses came “pre-loved,” just like the building itself. Though TVS hopes to be there for a “significant period of time,” Lipscombe said, the operation will be able to take the trusses, air handling units and some other pieces of equipment with them should they need to move to a bigger facility.

“It's absolutely fascinating. It was the first time in my career that the parameters of a project had to do with spiritual beliefs as opposed to money and program.”

Julian Lipscombe, Director of Bennetts Associates

With a “deep commitment to sustainability” garnered from its Hinduism belief system, reusing an existing facility and participating in the circular economy was an “important part of the story” for TVS's Venu family.

The owners’ belief system played a huge part in the building’s layout as well.

Vastu Shastra, or the “science of architecture,” defines “a series of principles by which buildings should be organized and laid out to determine energy flow through a building, similar to Feng Shui,” Lipscombe explained. “It’s absolutely fascinating,” he said. “It was the first time in my career that the parameters of a project had to do with spiritual beliefs as opposed to money and program.”

Vastu principles dictated, among other things, that everyone should enter the building from the north. That meant the existing entrance had to go. “While uninspiring, it was perfectly serviceable, and given the speed and cost permissions, in any other project we would have been required to keep it,” Lipscombe said. “But this gave us the opportunity to move the entrance,” which ended up being cornerstone to the refreshed Norton ethos.

“It was very clear that the building should have one entrance,” Lipscombe continued. The normal solution may have been to include a multiplicity of doorways for different purposes, in which a customer might enter from one direction and staff may come in through the back, for instance. Instead, the new universal entrance created “parity," he said.

“A customer coming in might bump into an engineer, for example, and a lot of people who are passionate about the brand love that kind of interaction. So that was a kind of key change.”

Furthermore, rather than coming in from a “single-height space,” he said, “you come into the shed as a totality — a volume that is colossal.” It’s clear to anyone who enters that they’re part of the manufacturing of Norton motorcycles, he said. “You can’t see it right away … but the excitement starts building.”

Upon entering, you get a peek into a “crisp, sharp” service workshop, and into the “light tunnel,” where a model bike sits shimmering under specialized lighting used for end-of-line quality inspections. “Right in front of you, you see one of the bikes under this intense spotlight.”

Looking up, trusses glimmer and a mezzanine level winds through the vaulted space overhead. From there, “the views are amazing,” he said. “We wanted to create a visual spectacle … where the brand is the star of the show. We call it a ‘theatre of manufacturing.’ As a customer, you feel like you've been let into the kind of the inner sanctum of the company.”

The open balcony is one of the best examples of the space being “multi-purpose and super flexible,” Lipscombe said. “There’s all sorts of things we could have done with that — we could have enclosed it so that it was usable as office space, but that would have brought it right up to the underside of the crinkle tin roof. So we said, ‘why don’t we let the building tell us how it wants to be used?”

The response was that it made sense to leave the mezzanine open as a lounge that can be all sorts of things: an informal workspace where staff can hold a presentation, relax on a sofa for lunch, or meet clients and customers.

“If you have an event in the building, you can put the furniture on casters and you’ve got a fantastic space for 100-plus people overlooking the manufacturing hall. It couldn’t be more exciting to a motorcycle nerd.”

Underneath, a skin of glass encloses offices, which are out of the way but “always visually connected to the manufacturing process,” he continued. There’s little distinction between the factory floor, executive offices and customer experience, he said. “There’s no sense of ‘them and us,’” he said. “Everybody is in this together. It is one big family.”

The floor plan was dictated by a process-driven, operational point of view, Lipscombe continued, where it’s “very clear where engine build was, where quality control was, and the like — so you could absolutely make sense of it all." But the building is also laid out from a visual standpoint so that the “brand” really runs the show.

Brand signage delineates all areas of the shed, Lipscombe said. “With colleagues in the branding side of things, we did a lot of work designing to convey the clarity of the process, with simple things down to floor markings, to make it clear it’s a well-organized, high-quality, controlled environment — which is something that had started to slip with the Norton brand under the previous owners.”

Signs and placards speak to some of the “greatest moments" in Norton’s history, such as some of its many successes at the annual Isle of Man TT races, he said. “It’s clean and crisp. It almost has the quality of an art gallery. That's counter to what many motorcycle brands are doing … but it's quite deliberate. Norton is proud of its history, but doesn’t want to be hidebound by its history. It wants to move forward.”

After years of forklifts left their marks, the floor had to be resurfaced super quickly. But the goal wasn’t for it to be “too perfect,” Lipscombe said. The team used a Spanish coating product called Topcret that "can be troweled to leave a bit of texture and still get a sort of quasi-industrial feel, which, when combined with clean white walls, gives you a nice, found art gallery space.”

It’s a neutral container that allows the bikes to literally shine, he continued. “The building is not without personality, but it allows the bikes to be the stars of the show. The space is there to support that.”

The building, he continued, “is a sort of blank canvas for whatever direction the company wants to take the brand and its values. They can tune and tweak and adjust that space because it's not overly prescriptive.”