Jewson Brand Guidelines: An Earith Timber Merchant of 1836, Now Part of STARK

A trading business at Earith grows into a timber merchant.

Jewson began in the Fens. George Jewson bought a business at Earith, in what was then Huntingdonshire, in 1836, to trade goods across the Huntingdonshire Fens of East Anglia, English Wikipedia says. The National Archives catalogue, which describes the firm’s surviving papers, gives the same start: the firm began at Earith in 1836.

The move that shaped the company came a generation later. English Wikipedia says John Wilson Jewson, George’s son, had thirteen children, and that the eldest, also called George, was working for a timber merchant in Norwich and suggested the family expand there. John Jewson bought a house in Colegate, in the centre of Norwich, in 1868, and built up a timber, coal and builders’ merchant business from the city. The National Archives record says that in 1868 the firm opened at Norwich and Yarmouth. The Jewson family also took part in civic life in Norwich and Norfolk, English Wikipedia notes.

Growth then followed the East Anglian coast and beyond. The firm opened a branch at Lowestoft in 1899 and another at Lincoln in 1907, and it became a limited company in 1919, according to the National Archives catalogue. The company’s historic records, trading as Jewson and Sons of Norwich, timber merchants, cover the years from 1841 to 1964 and are held at the Norfolk Record Office as a collection of sixty files.

A merchant for the trade.

A builders’ merchant is not quite a DIY shop. Jewson sells mainly to small and medium building contractors, English Wikipedia says, and its branches are built around a trade counter and a yard stacked with timber, blocks, aggregates and sheet materials rather than a shop floor of decorating ranges.

By the end of the twentieth century Jewson was part of the Meyer group, and in April 2000 it was acquired, as part of that group, by the French building-materials company Saint-Gobain, English Wikipedia says. The Construction Index confirmed in December 2022 that Saint-Gobain had owned Jewson since 2000. Under the French owner the chain kept adding branches; in 2011 it took over the Build Center chain from Wolseley UK, English Wikipedia says.

Jewson was the main name in a wider set of businesses that Saint-Gobain ran in Britain as Saint-Gobain Building Distribution. When that business was sold in 2022, The Construction Index listed what came with it: about 600 Jewson branches and distribution centres, the Gibbs & Dandy chain with 28 branches across England, JP Corry in Northern Ireland, and the specialist brands Jewson Civils Frazer, Minster and International Timber. Together they employed about 8,900 people at the time. Jewson Civils Frazer carries the Jewson name into civils work, while the sister brands keep names of their own; the paper noted that Jewson’s managing director at the time had moved across from Jewson Civils Frazer in May 2022. English Wikipedia counts the general merchant chain on its own at around 500 branches across Great Britain.

Sheds, counters and catalogues.

DIY chains, home-improvement retailers and builders’ merchants present themselves through the places where customers meet them. A home-improvement store is usually a large warehouse-style building with long aisles, high racking and a garden or timber area, and the chains describe those stores in their own words on their websites. A builders’ merchant is more often a yard and a branch, where tradespeople buy timber, bricks and fixings across a counter. For a design reader, the shed, the yard and the counter are where the colours, signs and lettering of these companies are seen at full size.

Many trade suppliers also sell from a catalogue and a website, with orders collected from a counter or delivered to site. Printed catalogues, product codes and click-and-collect services appear in the companies’ own descriptions, and in the trade press that covers them. Liveried vans and lorries carry the same names and colours from the branch to the building site, so a merchant’s identity often travels further on the road than it does on the high street.

Store and own-label naming is usually plain. Chains carry a founder’s surname, two merged surnames, or a literal compound of a product and a place, and many sell house ranges under their own names alongside the branded tools and materials they stock. Groups often run several trading names side by side, one for each trade or customer type, rather than folding them into one.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: founders, owners, listings, demergers and the investment groups that sit behind many chains. Ownership in this sector changes more often than the shop signs do, so the guides in this series date each change of owner to an independent source, describe each name and colour as documented, and treat the palettes shown here as unofficial interpretations.

From French to Danish ownership.

The sale ended a long withdrawal. The Construction Index reported on 12 December 2022 that Saint-Gobain had signed a deal to sell Saint-Gobain Building Distribution, Jewson included, to STARK Group, after a competitive sale process, and described it as the end of an 18-month withdrawal by the French company from distribution in the UK. STARK Group, headquartered in Copenhagen, sells heavy building materials to the trade in Scandinavia, Germany and Austria and is owned by the private-equity firm CVC Capital Partners, the paper said. It had bought Saint-Gobain’s German distribution business in 2019.

The takeover completed on 1 March 2023, ahead of expectations, The Construction Index reported that day. The UK businesses were placed in a newly formed company, STARK Building Materials UK, led by a former chief executive of Travis Perkins. Saint-Gobain said that with the sale it no longer had any distribution businesses in the UK. With Jewson and its sister brands added, the paper reported, STARK Group had more than 20,000 employees and about 1,150 builders’ merchants, specialist outlets and distribution centres across its markets, and the UK became its newest country alongside the Nordics, Germany and Austria.

Since then the changes have been mostly organisational. In March 2026, as Jewson marked three years with STARK, the Builders Merchants Journal reported that it had reorganised its regional structure into three divisions: one for the Southeast, Central England and Wales, one for Scotland and the North, and one for the Southwest. The Jewson name, carried for 190 years from a Fenland trading business to a national merchant, stayed on the branches through each change of owner of Saint-Gobain and then of STARK.

For a design guide, Jewson shows how a family surname can work as a trade brand: plain, short and tied to a yard full of timber rather than to any one owner. Compare Travis Perkins, another long-established British builders’ merchant, and Wickes, a home-improvement chain that began as a timber name. For this guide we use a yard blue, sawn-timber brown and sawdust tones with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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