Apollo Brand Guidelines: The Havant Fire Detector Maker That Became Part of Halma

A detector maker on the Hampshire coast.

Apollo is a company from the south coast of England. The UK’s Companies House register shows Apollo Fire Detectors Limited as incorporated on 5 March 1980 under an earlier name, Apollo Manufacturing Limited, with its registered office in Havant, Hampshire. Its owner, Halma, says that since 1980 Apollo has designed and built fire detection products, and Apollo says it specialises in the design and manufacture of fire detection for commercial and industrial buildings, from its base in Havant.

Apollo was not independent for long. Halma’s summary of an investor visit to Apollo, dated 29 September 2016, says Halma bought its first infrastructure safety business in 1983 with the purchase of Apollo Fire Detectors. English Wikipedia’s article on Halma gives the year as 1984 and describes Apollo at that time as the largest manufacturer of smoke detectors in the UK; the two sources differ by a year, so both dates are given here.

The buyer had an unusual past of its own. English Wikipedia says Halma began in 1894 in what is now Sri Lanka as The Nahalma Tea Estate Company, switched to rubber in 1937, became an investment and industrial holding company in 1956 after its estates were nationalised, took the name Halma Limited in 1973 and became a public limited company in 1981. Its acquisitions in engineering began in the early 1970s; Apollo came a decade later. Halma is based in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and is listed on the London Stock Exchange as a member of the FTSE 100.

Ranges with names, not numbers alone.

Apollo’s products are detectors and the devices around them. Its website groups them by system type. The addressable ranges are XP95, Discovery and Soteria; the conventional ranges include Series 65 and Orbis. Each range includes heat, optical smoke and multi-sensor detectors with matching bases, and the site lists marine, intrinsically safe and SIL-rated versions of some of them, alongside wireless and two-wire families.

The ranges are a study in naming. Some carry engineering labels such as XP95 and Series 65; others carry words — Discovery, Orbis, Soteria. Design shows up most clearly in the Soteria Dimension. Introducing it at Firex International in 2020, the trade portal GIT Security described it as a flush-mounted optical smoke detector intended for commercial interiors with high aesthetic requirements, with a flat surface that is easy to clean. The current range also lists black versions of several detectors.

Within its owner Apollo matters a great deal. In the 2016 investor summary Halma called Apollo its largest company, which is Halma’s own description. In 2020 the company marked 40 years at Firex International, GIT Security reported. Apollo also says it was awarded the Royal Warrant in 2009, and the 2020 report described it as a Royal Warrant holder.

Design and documentation.

Fire protection makers sell to engineers, contractors, insurers and building owners rather than to shoppers, and their pictures tend to show the product at work in a building. A common image is the sprinkler head in close-up: a small brass or chrome fitting, often with a coloured glass bulb, photographed against a ceiling. Another is the pipework itself, grooved or threaded, running in red-painted lines above warehouse racking or through a plant room.

Suppression systems are shown in the rooms they are designed for. Catalogues and project pages picture rows of gas or water-mist cylinders standing in a side room next to a server hall, a control room or an archive, with pipes leading off to nozzles in the ceiling. Detectors and alarm panels appear in the same matter-of-fact way: a round detector head on a plain ceiling, a call point on a corridor wall, a panel with its status lights in a plant room.

Testing and training make up much of the rest of the imagery. Makers and their distributors publish photographs of test rigs, live-fire demonstrations and installer courses, and many list training centres and technical schools alongside their products. Approvals and listings from testing bodies are usually printed on data sheets and in catalogues.

The trade meets at shows. The NFPA Conference & Expo in the United States and Firex in London are among the events where makers set out sprinklers, valves, cylinders and panels on stands for contractors and engineers. The brands in this guide range from privately held specialists to units of large building-technology groups, and their colours, names and typography are set out here as an unofficial reading of how each presents itself.

One of a family of fire companies.

Today Apollo describes itself as based in Havant, with regional offices in the UK, China and Germany and partners and distributors on every continent, selling into more than 100 countries. Halma names its German arm as Gesellschaft für Meldetechnologie, in Gütersloh, and lists a separate German website for it. Apollo also sits among a group of Halma fire businesses. The 2016 summary records that Halma bought Advanced, a maker of fire control panels, in 2014 and its first fire suppression business, Firetrace, in 2015; English Wikipedia adds the fire detection business Ampac in 2019.

Recent company news is about the factory rather than the product. In May 2026 Apollo said it had moved its labelling to a single cloud-based system built with the specialist Bar Code Data, cutting more than 5,000 label templates to fewer than 800. In October 2026 it reported that its zero-landfill and circular manufacturing programme had been recognised at the 2026 International Green Apple Environment Awards. Both are the company’s own accounts.

The 2016 visit gives a picture of where Apollo sits in the group. Halma then organised its businesses into sectors, and the one that held Apollo, Infrastructure Safety, was its largest, covering five activities: fire detection, fire suppression, elevator safety, door safety and security. Halma said the sector had operations in 36 countries, and it held the investor day at Apollo’s headquarters in Havant, where the company’s managing director gave an introduction and a tour. On its own corporate site Halma now refers to the “Apollo group of companies,” describing it as a specialist in fire detection for commercial and industrial applications with regional offices in the UK and Germany and a distribution network reaching more than 100 countries. Apollo, in turn, says it is proud to be part of Halma.

For a design guide, Apollo shows how a component maker that most people only see on a ceiling builds a brand through named product ranges and a long run inside one owner. Compare Firetrace, its sister company within Halma, and Notifier, a maker of fire alarm systems. For this guide we use a harbour navy, ceiling white and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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