Brooks Stairlifts Brand Guidelines: Fred Brooks’s 1972 Lift, From Camberley to Lincoln

An engineer’s stairlift and a Camberley company.

Brooks Stairlifts traces its start to 1972. The company says Frederick “Fred” Brooks, an engineer whose background it describes as work for Daimler, designed a stairlift for use in his own home that year, and that word of it spread quickly, with private buyers and care professionals from around Britain asking him to build lifts for them.

The Companies House register shows the company being incorporated on 11 February 1972 as Fred Brooks (Stairlifts) Limited, a name it kept until November 1985, when it became Brooks Stairlifts Limited. The company’s own history puts the formation of the Fred Brooks Stairlift Company in 1973, in Camberley, Surrey, and links it to growing interest in the invention, particularly from local councils. The register shows the registered office in Camberley until July 1996.

The first model was called the Mk1; a second, the MkII, followed around 1975. The company says production was split at that time between Lincoln, where the motors were assembled, and Camberley, where the rest of the lift was made. Both early models were driven by a motor at the top of the stairs that pulled the chair up on a nylon rope. Around 1977 the Deluxe became the first Brooks model hauled by wire rope.

A British Standard for stairlifts was put in place in 1979, the company says, and it built its next models to that standard. Around 1980 it brought production together in its first dedicated factory unit in Lincoln, where it made the Premier, a slim lift with a fixed seat, and the Elite, which had a swivel seat.

Supreme, Lincoln and a move north.

Around 1987 Brooks launched the Supreme, its first model to carry the motor on the chassis, the layout the company says conventional stairlifts use today, and its first chain-driven lift. Business grew, the company says, and at this time it moved to a site in North Hykeham, on the edge of Lincoln.

The British Standard BS5776 came into force in 1996, according to the company, and by 1997 it had developed a model to meet it, named after its home city: the Lincoln. The first Lincoln ran on mains (AC) power and, in its last production year, 2001, was also offered with battery (DC) power. The same year the company developed a “New” Lincoln, which it says combined newer technology with the look and handling of the original.

The company says that in the latter part of 2001 it was no longer viable to keep the operation in Lincoln, and that the business moved to West Yorkshire. The Companies House record fits that period: the company moved its accounting year-end to 30 September in 2001, and in 2003 it changed its registered office from Guiseley, in West Yorkshire.

The current product is the Brooks Lincoln straight stairlift. The company’s product pages describe a battery lift that recharges at the end of each trip, a joystick control, a wireless remote so the chair can be called or sent between floors, arms, seat and footrest that fold away, a seat that swivels and locks at 45 or 90 degrees, and a rail fixed to the stair treads rather than the wall. It says its lifts are designed to comply with BS5776 and BS5900, and it presents them for people who may find getting up and down their stairs difficult.

How lift makers present themselves.

Home-lift and stairlift makers sell machines that end up in private hallways and living rooms, and two Swedish makers, Aritco and Cibes, present them that way. Aritco names its range around the home, with the HomeLift, HomeLift Compact and HomeLift Access, and credits the Swedish designer Alexander Lervik for several models; Cibes Lift Group says its customers choose from colour, material and function options picked by local design teams.

Naming often begins as engineering shorthand. Cibes still uses letter-and-number models such as the A5000, launched in 1992, and groups its lifts as A-lifts, with their own shaft walls, and B-lifts, which the company traces to a screw-and-nut design of the early 1970s. Aritco moved from numbered models, from the Aritco 7000 of 1995 to the Aritco 9000 cabin lift of 2013, to the named HomeLift and PublicLift lines from 2016 onwards.

Both companies describe selling largely through partners. Cibes Lift Group says it works through more than 270 certified distributors as well as its own offices in 20 countries; Aritco says it sells in 60 countries through more than 170 distributors, and that it set up a global network of installation and service partners in 2014. Cibes has also bought local lift companies and kept several of their names, such as Kalea, Aesy Liften and Apex Lifts.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: who owns the company and where the lifts are made. Cibes names its factories in Gävle, Jiaxing and the United States and a components unit in Gdańsk, and its owner, the investment company Nalka, lists it as a holding. Aritco describes its factory in Veddesta, outside Stockholm, and its place in Innovalift, a business area of Investment AB Latour. This guide sets out what can be checked for each brand, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A founder’s name kept inside a larger group.

Brooks Stairlifts is today a subsidiary rather than an independent firm. Its website footer places it in Steeton, West Yorkshire, describes it as “part of the AMSL Group of stair lifts companies,” and links to Acorn Stairlifts. At Companies House, Brooks Stairlifts Limited is an active private company whose registered office is at the same Steeton business park as that of Acorn Stairlifts Limited. Since its accounts for the year to September 2016 it has filed audit-exempt subsidiary accounts backed by a parent-company guarantee, most recently for the year to 30 September 2025, filed in July 2026. The register classes its business as other manufacturing.

The brand that survives online is small and plain: a site with the line “helping people since 1972,” a freephone number, a quote form, pages on surveys, installation, servicing and an extended warranty it calls the Golden Care Warranty Programme, and a single current model. The company says it has more than 20 customer care engineers around the country and that each lift is built to the measurements of the customer’s staircase after a home survey. It says every lift comes with a guarantee of 12 months from the installation date, covering replacement parts and labour, and that a consultant visits the home first to carry out a survey at no obligation.

The flagship model is named after Lincoln, where the company says it made its lifts from the mid-1970s until 2001, and the company name still carries the founder’s surname. Model names across five decades stayed short and plain: Mk1, MkII, Deluxe, Premier, Elite, Supreme and Lincoln.

For a design guide, Brooks Stairlifts shows a heritage name kept alive inside a larger group: the founder’s surname, a model named for a factory city and a single founding year on the home page. Compare Stannah, the Andover stairlift maker, and Otolift, which began as a Dutch smithy in 1891. For this guide we use brick red, ink blue and warm stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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