Northgate Brand Guidelines: Noble Self Drive of 1981, Darlington Vans and the Zigup Parent

A Darlington hire firm inside an 1897 shell.

Northgate began in Darlington, County Durham, in 1981. English Wikipedia says the business was set up that year by Alan Noble as Noble Self Drive, and that it later traded as Northgate Motor Holdings. ZIGUP, the listed group that owns the brand today, describes Northgate as “operating in the sector since 1981.”

The company that bought it was much older. English Wikipedia says Goode Durrant plc was incorporated on 2 July 1897; in January 1987 the business, then called Goode Durrant & Murray Group, was acquired by Ariadne Australia through its Hong Kong-listed arm Impala Pacific and renamed Goode Durrant plc. In July 1987 Goode Durrant bought Northgate Motor Holdings, and the Darlington van hire firm became the core of the group.

Growth came by acquisition. Goode Durrant bought the vehicle rental arm of Transport Development Group in 1997, and in 1999 it renamed itself Northgate plc, taking the name of its Darlington subsidiary, English Wikipedia says. In 2002 Northgate bought 40 per cent of Furgonetas de Alquiler SA, a Spanish van rental company, and later exercised an option to buy the rest; in 2005 it bought the UK vehicle rental business of the transport group Arriva.

The next step was a merger. In 2020 Northgate plc combined with Redde plc, a motor claims and replacement-vehicle company that ZIGUP says was founded in 1992, to form Redde Northgate plc. ZIGUP’s history page lists the deals that followed: Charged EV, a supplier and installer of electric vehicle charging equipment, in July 2021; Blakedale, a supplier of traffic management and support vehicles for the highways industry, in July 2022; and FridgeXpress, which rents temperature-controlled vans to food and pharmaceutical businesses, in May 2023.

A new parent name, and more Northgate on the vans.

The parent company changed its name in 2024. Shareholders approved the change at a general meeting on 15 May 2024, the rebrand began on 20 May, and on 22 May 2024 the company confirmed that it was now ZIGUP plc, with its London Stock Exchange code moving from REDD to ZIG, according to its regulatory announcement. The same notice said there would be no change to the group’s operating brands, “which have significant market profile in their specialist areas.”

ZIGUP’s website says the corporate name reflects “our ambitions and forward looking, increasingly technology-enabled approach,” and gives the group’s purpose as “To keep customers moving, smarter.” English Wikipedia says the group is a constituent of the FTSE 250 index, with its headquarters in Darlington and operations in the UK, Ireland and Spain.

While the corporate name changed, the Northgate name spread. On 10 March 2026 Bodyshop magazine reported the creation of Northgate Mobility, bringing together Northgate Vehicle Hire UK and Ireland, Auxillis, Blakedale, FridgeXpress, ChargedEV and Principia Law. Over a phased transition of 12 to 15 months, Auxillis, Blakedale and FridgeXpress were to become Northgate Insurance Services, Northgate Highways and Northgate Temperature Controlled, while ChargedEV and Principia Law kept their names.

By 5 May 2026 Bodyshop reported that Blakedale and FridgeXpress were now known by their Northgate names, under what the group calls a “One Road, One Fleet” customer service model. Northgate’s own website now lists Northgate Insurance Services alongside them, and describes Northgate Temperature Controlled as “formerly known as FridgeXpress.”

Fleet figures depend on what is counted. In March 2026 Bodyshop reported a “One Fleet” of 80,000 vehicles, including more than 2,000 specialist traffic management and temperature-controlled vehicles and 15,000 cars, across 73 rental and workshop locations. Its May 2026 report, like Northgate’s website, gives a fleet of around 60,000 vehicles across 63 UK and Ireland locations.

Fleet livery and depot photography.

Truck, trailer and refrigerated-vehicle leasing firms sell something customers mostly see on the road: the vehicle itself. Their fleets carry the company name and colours across highways, depots and delivery yards, so the livery does much of the work an advertising campaign would do elsewhere. Penske Truck Rental, for example, describes its rental fleet as yellow trucks with blue stripes, while English Wikipedia describes Ryder’s commercial rental vehicles as white trucks.

Colour also helps sort a fleet. Companies in this field often separate their brands by service, keeping a consumer rental name apart from a leasing or logistics name, and some publish photographs of tractors, box trucks, refrigerated bodies and trailers lined up at their own depots. Those depot images, along with maintenance bays and wash lanes, appear on company websites and in press releases.

Much of the customer relationship now runs through software. Leasing companies publish online booking for rental vehicles, mobile apps for drivers and fleet managers, and customer portals that show maintenance schedules, vehicle data and invoices. Penske names its system Fleet Insight, and Ryder has introduced apps and platforms under names such as RyderGyde and COOP, according to English Wikipedia.

Corporate pages tend to stress scale and ownership. These firms often list how many vehicles they manage and how many maintenance locations they run, and they set out who owns them, from family holdings to listed parents, joint ventures and investment funds. In this guide, fleet and location counts are given only as a dated source states them, and each brand’s owners are named as of the time of writing.

Hire terms, van sizes and a wider group.

Northgate’s website sells van hire by term rather than by day. Flexible Hire has a minimum commitment of one month and lets customers change vehicle when they need to; 12Months+ covers rental terms of 12 to 48 months, with customers specifying extras such as livery and racking; and under “We buy, you rent” Northgate inspects a business’s existing vehicles, buys them at an agreed valuation and rents back a replacement. The company says servicing, maintenance and breakdown cover come as standard on its main hire options.

The vehicle range runs from small, medium and large vans to electric vans, refrigerated vans, traffic management vehicles, business cars and micromobility; ZIGUP’s site describes handing over an electric cargo bike for use on a housing association’s estate in central London. Around the vehicles sit fleet services that Northgate lists as fleet management, telematics, asset tracking and fuel cards, plus its Drive to Zero consultancy for businesses moving their fleets to electric vans.

The wider group carries other names. ZIGUP describes Van Monster as a seller of used vans and cars in the UK and Ireland with an online auction platform, and says Northgate España offers monthly rentals in Spain from a fleet of 60,000 vehicles, opening that service to private individuals in 2021. The claims and repair side trades as FMG.

For a design guide, Northgate shows how an operating brand can stay fixed while the companies above it change: Noble Self Drive, Goode Durrant, Northgate plc, Redde Northgate and ZIGUP, with the Northgate name now extended to businesses the group bought. Compare Dawsongroup, another British vehicle leasing group that renamed its businesses under one title, and Ryder. For this guide we use deep teal, van white, a signal amber and road grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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