Elliott Brand Guidelines: The Peterborough Site-Cabin Name That Became Algeco UK in 2022

Site cabins, modular blocks and a company with many earlier names.

Elliott was, until the spring of 2022, a British name for portable cabins, welfare units and modular buildings: the kind of units delivered to a site to serve as an office, a canteen or a teaching block. International Rental News, the KHL Group trade title, described Elliott in February 2022 as one of the largest site accommodation and mobile space rental companies in the UK. The business was run from Peterborough, and a February 2021 report in Place North West called it a modular construction firm headquartered in the city, with modules built at Elliott Group’s factory in West Yorkshire. The same report also gave the trading name OSS Modular alongside Elliott Group.

The company behind the name has a longer paper trail than the brand. The UK company register shows that the business traded as Elliott Group Limited from November 1995 until February 2022. Before 1995 the same company had carried a string of other names, among them Falcon Industries, The Davis Service Group Limited, Godfrey Davis (Holdings) and Davis Falcon, which ties it to the Davis services group of the 1980s and 1990s. In February 2022 it was renamed Algeco UK Limited, the name it still holds. The register lists two activities for it: other manufacturing, and the renting and leasing of machinery, equipment and other tangible goods.

That double role, as a maker with its own factory and as a hire company with depots, shaped how Elliott met its customers: a unit could be bought outright or rented for the length of a project, then collected and sent on to the next site.

TDR Capital, Ristretto Group and Modulaire.

Elliott’s modern ownership story begins in 2005. In March 2008 International Rental News reported that the London private equity group TDR Capital had bought the French modular firm Algeco from TUI AG in September 2004, and in May 2005 further acquired Elliott Group in the UK, creating a holding called Ristretto Group. The Construction Index, writing in February 2022, gives the same order of events: Algeco was the first modular building firm TDR bought, in 2004, and Elliott Group of the UK was added in 2005, in the group later known as Modulaire Group.

Under that umbrella Elliott kept its own name for more than fifteen years. Modulaire added other British businesses in the years before 2022, The Construction Index reported, including Carter Accommodation and Procomm Site Services, suppliers of portable and modular buildings. A fourth company, Advanté, which rents and sells mobile welfare cabins, sat in the same British family.

Ownership changed again in 2021. According to The Construction Index, TDR agreed to sell Modulaire in June 2021 to Brookfield, and International Rental News reported that investment funds managed by Brookfield Business Partners completed the acquisition of the Modulaire Group in December 2021. Within weeks, the new owners chose to bring the British companies under one name.

Modulaire’s own description, published by Algeco UK in April 2026, calls the group a leader in European modular services, and says it operates in 23 countries with about 319,000 modular space and portable storage units, and that Algeco is its largest brand.

Design and documentation.

Modular and portable-building firms sell something people mostly see from the roadside: a cabin at the edge of a building site, a stack of steel modules beside a school, a row of storage containers in a depot yard. Their websites lean on that picture. Product pages show single units and stacked blocks photographed outside and in, often with the furniture and fittings that turn a box into an office or a classroom, and case studies show finished complexes from the air.

The units themselves carry much of the identity. A company name on the side of a cabin is seen by everyone who passes a site, and colour can become a signature: Algeco says the dark grey finish it introduced with its Progress range in 2005 is now emblematic of the market. Some names have become so familiar that the companies ask for them not to be used as generic words; Algeco’s French website has a page making exactly that request.

Much of the selling now happens online. WillScot’s website, rebuilt in 2024 when it folded the Mobile Mini site into its own, offers configurable packages for furniture, entrances and fencing, a fencing estimator and a search for units on sale. Configurators of this kind let a buyer assemble a building from named parts before anyone visits the site.

Behind the cabins sit corporate pages written for investors. Firms in this sector publish fleet sizes, country counts and the names of their owners: Modulaire Group, for example, gives its fleet as more than 330,000 modular space and storage units across 24 countries. This guide uses such figures only as dated, attributed statements, and notes where a claim rests on a company’s own word.

From one UK name to one European brand.

The Elliott name was retired in 2022. The Construction Index reported on 2 February 2022, and International Rental News two days later, that Elliott Group, Carter Accommodation and Procomm Site Services would all rebrand as Algeco, with the change taking effect from 31 March 2022. Advanté was left out of the rebrand and kept its own name. The combined British business was to be headquartered in Peterborough, with 23 locations across the country, according to both reports. The managing director of Algeco in the UK told the trade press that adopting the Algeco brand provided a link with the group’s heritage while signalling the change the British business was going through.

Elliott therefore no longer trades under its own name. The cabins, modular buildings and hire depots it ran now carry the Algeco name, and the address elliottuk.com forwards visitors to the Algeco UK website. That site presents a broad range of temporary and permanent buildings: site offices, canteens and welfare units, modular building hire, used modular buildings, and shipping containers for hire. On the permanent side it lists turnkey projects, offices, schools and classrooms, healthcare facilities, retail and restaurant buildings, and sports halls, with containers offered in lengths from 10 to 40 feet. The site’s top menu links to sister Algeco sites in some twenty other countries, from Australia and New Zealand to Norway and Portugal; International Rental News reported that the 2022 change was meant to create a single brand across the UK and Europe. It also sets out the group’s circular business model, which Modulaire calls “Loops within Loops”: units built to last, refurbished and sent back out rather than discarded.

For a design guide, Elliott shows how a hire-fleet name works as identity: a single word on hired units that move from site to site, read at a distance, and then replaced in one programme when a new owner chose a single brand across Britain and Europe. Compare it with the Algeco brand guide, the name that replaced it, and the Portakabin brand guide, another British portable-building name. For this guide we use cabin slate, hoarding white and brick clay with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Elliott’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.