Huddersfield Fine Worsteds

Classic English suiting and Fresco travel cloth

Huddersfield Fine Worsteds carries more history than its name suggests. The company brings together several old English cloth houses, and the oldest reaches back to 1532, when Hunt & Winterbotham was already making cloth at Cam Mills near Stroud. Martin Sons & Co was founded in Huddersfield in the nineteenth century by Patrick Martin, who had come over from Belfast, and at its height it covered 42 acres and employed 1,750 people. Hardy Minnis, the third name in the group, dates from 1890.

Huddersfield itself explains much of this. The Colne and Holme rivers run off the Pennine millstone grit with soft water, ideal for washing raw wool, and the town built its Cloth Hall in 1766. By 1911 some 22,000 people worked in its textile trade, and Huddersfield became known the world over for fine worsted.

Today HFW is a cloth merchant, not a weaver. It designs and selects its books and has them woven by mills it chooses, many of them in Biella, and since the late 2000s it has been owned by the American cloth distributor HMS International. Through Hardy Minnis it holds a Royal Warrant from the King as a manufacturer of tweed.

The cloth it is famous for is Fresco. Martin Sons registered it in 1907: a high-twist worsted yarn in an open, porous plain weave that lets air through and springs back from creasing. It was the original travel cloth, and it has been copied so widely that the name has almost become generic. The Alsport tweeds were first worn by the Royal Family in 1929.

On sourcing, HFW names Australian merino in many of its bunches, says it aims to buy yarn farmed with best-practice methods, and keeps its cloth within the EU's REACH chemical rules. It does not publish formal wool certifications, so we quote none.

We like HFW for classic suiting: firm, dry cloth that holds a crease and a clean shoulder through a long day. Our Olive Wool Trousers are cut from a plain HFW worsted at 280 grams, an army green that deepens with wear and sits with navy, tan and grey. If you want a suit that travels, ask to handle the Fresco book at your fitting. Every HFW garment is made to measure in Sydney.