Avon Tyres

The business began in 1885 when E. G. Browne and J. C. Margetson bought Avon Mill, a former cloth mill on the River Avon at Limpley Stoke in Wiltshire, where rubber articles had been made since 1875. In 1890 it moved to Melksham and was incorporated as The Avon India Rubber Company Limited. Pneumatic cycle and carriage tyres followed in the 1890s, the first beaded-edge motor tyre moulds were ordered in 1903 and Avon car tyres were advertised for the first time in 1906. The company went public in 1933, the year its tyres were chosen as original equipment for Rolls-Royce; it absorbed George Spencer, Moulton and Co. in 1956, and by 1961 the Melksham plant was making 1½ million tyres a year. In 1963 'India' was dropped from the title and the company became Avon Rubber.

For Land Rovers Avon made two long-lived patterns. The Avon Traction Mileage, a strong crossply developed for serious off-road work with rugged shoulder buttresses and central tread ribs, was fitted as original equipment to Land Rovers and is still made in 6.00-16C and 7.00-16C for the Series I, II and IIA, now sold exclusively through Vintage Tyre Supplies. The radial Avon Rangemaster, a 7.50R16 engineered in the United Kingdom, was the original tyre of the Land Rover Defender 90 and 110 and remains in production in that one size.

In 1997 Avon Rubber sold the tyre business to Cooper Tire & Rubber Company of Findlay, Ohio, and concentrated on respiratory protection for military, police and fire services, becoming Avon Protection in July 2021 and Avon Technologies in August 2024, still headquartered at Hampton Park West near Melksham. Goodyear completed its purchase of Cooper, and with it Avon Tyres, in June 2021 for about US$2.8 billion.

Car tyre production at Melksham had already been cut back: from 2018 the factory made only motorsport and motorcycle tyres, other production having gone to Serbia. In October 2022 Cooper Tire & Rubber Company Europe announced that the site was no longer competitive and would close, with 350 redundancies. The last tyres were cured at the beginning of December 2023 and the factory closed on 20 December 2023 after 112 years of tyre making; in January 2024 Goodyear was negotiating the sale of its Avon Motorsport and Avon Racing assets to a third party. The Avon brand continues under Goodyear for tyres made outside Britain.