Dunlop

The company was founded on 18 November 1889 by Harvey du Cros and John Boyd Dunlop, the Scottish veterinary surgeon who had developed the pneumatic tyre, as the Pneumatic Tyre and Booth's Cycle Agency Co. Ltd. It became Dunlop Pneumatic Tyre in 1895 and the Dunlop Rubber Company in 1901, the name it kept until 1967, when it became Dunlop Ltd. In 1912 it bought some 200 acres at Erdington on the east side of Birmingham, and from 1916 built Fort Dunlop there; the great main building designed by Sidney Stott and W. W. Gibbings went up in the 1920s, and the site, beside what is now junction 5 of the M6, became the group's principal tyre works. Castleton Mills near Rochdale was opened in 1914 to weave the tyre fabric.

Dunlop was the Land Rover's tyre maker from the start. The Dunlop Trakgrip T.28 was the original-type tyre of the 80-inch Series I: a 1951 80-inch sold by Bonhams was catalogued on 'very rare original-type Dunlop Trakgrip T28 tyres'. A leaflet issued by the Dunlop Rubber Company Limited, Fort Dunlop, Erdington, Birmingham 24, 'as approved by The Rover Co. Ltd for use with the Land-Rover' and received by the Automobile Association's technical library in February 1960, sets out the range for the Series II: the RK.3 pattern in 6.00-16, 7.00-16 and 7.50-16 as 'the standard equipment on the Land-Rover', a general-purpose tyre for road and off-road use; the Trakgrip T.29a in 6.50-16, 7.00-16 and 7.50-16 and the T.28 in 6.00-16 for work that was about 90 per cent off the road; the Gold Seal heavy-duty 6-ply tyre in 7.00-16 and 7.50-16 for hard smooth surfaces; and the 8.20-15 Dunlop Sand Tyre, export only, for desert use. The same leaflet gives Rover's recommended pressures for the 88 and 109 and refers overseas owners to Dunlop's Overseas Service Manager at St James's House, King Street, London SW1.

The group grew far beyond tyres, into wheels, aviation equipment, sports goods and general rubber, but by the 1970s it was in trouble. A 1971 union with Pirelli made the pair the world's third-largest tyre maker, but it was unwound in 1981; the Speke tyre factory near Liverpool closed in 1979 and Dunlop came close to giving up tyre making in Britain altogether. The tyre business was sold to Sumitomo Rubber Industries of Japan in 1984-85, and in 1985 BTR plc bought what remained of Dunlop Holdings for about £100 million, taking the aviation and polymer engineering divisions and ending the company's independent existence.

In 1999 Goodyear bought 75 per cent of Sumitomo's European and North American Dunlop tyre businesses in a joint venture that ran until 2015, after which Goodyear managed the brand in those markets. On 7 January 2025 Goodyear announced the sale of its remaining Dunlop brand rights to Sumitomo for US$701 million, completed on 7 May 2025; Sumitomo announced in December 2025 that from January 2026 Dunlop would lead its European portfolio, with engineering at Hanau in Germany. Sumitomo Rubber Industries now holds the Dunlop tyre trademark in Europe, North America, Oceania, Asia and Africa; the Indian rights remain separately owned.

Fort Dunlop itself stopped large-scale tyre production in the 1980s, though specialist motorsport tyres continued to be made there until May 2014, when the last production moved to Germany and France. The derelict main building was bought by Urban Splash in 1999 and reopened on 1 December 2006 as offices, shops and a hotel, with a grass roof that is the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom.