A well-known North Yorkshire company is calling in the administrators despite having completed an impressive list of award-winning projects.
York Handmade Brick, based at Alne, near Easingwold, has filed an application to appoint administrators on Friday, represented by law firm Addleshaw Goddard, according to court records.
Its most recent accounts, filed in 2024, stated it had 26 employees.
The firm has supplied bricks to some highly prestigious projects. These included The Shard, the London skyscraper which opened in 2013.
York bricks were also used at London Bridge railway station, Magdalene College Library in Cambridge and the restoration of St Albans Cathedral in Hertfordshire.
More recently, its bricks were used in the Bustardthorpe development at York Racecourse.
Last month, that project won York Handmade Brick the Sustainability award in the 2025 Brick Awards.
The family company was launched by David Armitage, a fifth-generation brickmaker, in 1988. It is still a family business, with David’s son Guy now the company’s managing director.
After their awards success last month, Guy Armitage said: “We are tremendously proud to have won the Sustainability Award this year and have also been shortlisted for two other fantastic projects. This is a great honour.
“Huge thanks are due to the management team and employees at York Handmade for their imagination, enterprise and hard work, which all combined to make these projects so successful and so memorable.”
York Handmade has a tremendous track record in the Brick Awards, being highly commended for its work in 2023 in the Individual Housing and the Refurbishment categories for its work on Green Acres, a stunning new detached house in Effingham in Surrey, and for Holy Trinity Church in the heart of Sunderland, respectively.
These commendations come hard on the heels of York Handmade’s success in the RIBA Stirling Prize 2022, which the company’s Magdalene College Library project in Cambridge won.
The company was also honoured for its work on St Albans Cathedral in 2021 and for both the Peter Hall Performing Arts Centre at Perse School in Cambridge and the Loxley Stables residential housing project in Hertfordshire in 2019.
In 2018 the company was honoured for its involvement in the acclaimed Westgate Centre in the heart of historic Oxford and for the magnificent Halifax Library.
News of its decision to call in the administrators comes after another company in the dector, Michelmersh Brick Holdings, forecast a drop in revenue in 2025 amid “a notable slowdown in the construction market”.
York Handmade Brick is not commenting at this time.
