Insider Media Limited

Historic furniture manufacturer Barton Products has slumped into administration. The Long Eaton-based company, which supplies its designs to high street names John Lewis and Laura Ashley, said almost a third of its workforce had been made redundant.

Administrators from the Nottingham and Birmingham offices of corporate recovery company Begbies Traynor have been appointed to handle the collapse. They said the search was now on for potential buyers.

Twenty-five of the 69-strong workforce have been made redundant.

Barton Products, which also supplied ammunition boxes for the First World War, specialises in producing solid and laminated timber chairs and seats for both the retail and office markets.

The family-owned company supplies its products indirectly to the likes of retailers John Lewis and Laura Ashley.

But the £2.5m-turnover business is now being run as a going concern with a view to finding a buyer, confirmed administrators John Kelly and Andrew Cordon.

Cordon, from Begbies Traynor's Nottingham office, described the company as "a wholly British business keeping skills and craftsmanship alive in this country".

"This is a firm offering high quality furniture made by committed people," he said. "It is a fantastic opportunity for someone to come in and purchase a company which has fallen on hard times but which was once the sort of bedrock manufacturing operation on which Britain relied. It could be again."

The timber mill was originally located in Nottingham but switched to Barton Road, Long Eaton, in the late 1960s.

Today the company operates a 54,000 sq ft factory on a freehold site and specialises in creating customers' bespoke designs.