BRITAIN’S GLORIOUS AUTOMOTIVE HERITAGE SHOWCASED IN MALVERN

The Morgan Motor Company, which has been hand building classic cars in Malvern since 1910, has completed a major redevelopment of its visitor attraction, the Morgan Experience Centre in the town.

It is now open to visitors throughout the week and every Saturday.

The investment follows the purchase in 2019 of a majority share in the British company by European investment Group Investindustrial. The Morgan family retains a shareholding.

The new Archive Room hosts more than a century of artefacts, documents, photographs and footage that chart the unique history of the brand. The centrepiece is a full-length cabinet housing items of historical significance.

Morgan produces around 850 models a year, of which more than 70 per cent are exported.

World’s largest biomethane refuelling station to open at Avonmouth

CNG fuels, the UK’s leading operator of compressed natural gas refuelling infrastructure, is to open the world’s largest public access biomethane refuelling station for HGVs in Bristol.

The station, being built near the M4/M5 junction by the Reading-based company, will allow fleet operators to run vehicles on low-carbon fuel. It will be open by the end of the year.

Biomethane is derived from organic waste, such as food waste, treated in an anaerobic digester where microbes break down the organic matter in the absence of oxygen to produce biogas, which is then cleaned and converted to biomethane.

The Avonmouth station will be capable of refuelling 80 HGVs an hour from 14 high speed dispensers. It will join six existing refuelling stations already operational across the UK, and CNG Fuels expects to open a further 14 stations by the end of 2022 to meet growing demand.

Dairy Partners says ‘cheese’ in Stonehouse

A long-established, family-owned dairy company is building a 7,000 sq m headquarters just outside Stonehouse near Stroud.

Dairy Partners, which manufactures mozzarella and pizza cheese for some of the world’s biggest food producers, alongside other dairy products, is investing in new production and storage, as well as offices, a test kitchen and café. The building is on track for completion early next year. The company also has a manufacturing facility in Carmarthenshire.

A good night’s sleep for High Wycombe bed manufacturer after sale to US

Dreams, the High Wycombe-based UK bed and mattress retailer, is being bought by USA-based Tempur Sealy International from Sun European Partners for an expected purchase price of approximately £340 million. Dreams’ management team will stay in place.

With 2,000 employees across the UK, Dreams sells 11,500 mattresses, bases and headboards per week through its network of more than 200 stores and online. It makes its own-brand mattresses in Oldbury, West Midlands.

The sale is a marker of the turnaround Dreams has achieved over the last eight years. The company has delivered six years of consecutive growth and generated sales of approximately £327 million in 2020.

To infinity … and beyond (for worms)

Hundreds of tiny worms are going where no worm has gone before, as they fly to the International Space Station as part of an experiment to understand more about human muscle loss and how to prevent it.

Using hardware designed by Oxfordshire-based Kayser Space, a research team aims to determine the causes of muscle changes during spaceflight and find ways to mitigate these biological changes.

Discovering more about muscle loss in space should expand our understanding of how ageing a ects our muscles; this could lead to more e ective therapies and new treatments for muscular dystrophies here on Earth.

Surprising as it might be to learn, the worms currently heading into space share many of the essential biological characteristics of us humans and are a ected by biological changes in space, including alterations to muscle and the ability to use energy.