A London-headquartered engineering group, founded in 1851, whose businesses include John Crane (seals and rotating-equipment technology) and Flex-Tek (engineered components).
Smiths Group is a British engineering company with its head office in London. According to Wikipedia, its two current divisions are John Crane and Flex-Tek, following the sale of other businesses in recent years. John Crane makes mechanical seals, which stop liquids and gases leaking from pumps and compressors, along with couplings, filtration and services to keep that equipment running. Flex-Tek makes engineered components such as heating and flexible fluid-handling parts. The group has changed shape a lot over time, so check its website for the latest line-up of divisions.
The story starts in 1851, when watchmaker Samuel Smith opened a jewellery shop in south-east London. In 1904 the firm started selling motor accessories and delivered its first speedometer, for the king's Mercedes. It built a factory in Watford in 1907 and the Cricklewood Works in north London in 1915, and it became a public company in 1914. Over the next century it moved through clocks and watches, aircraft instruments and medical products into industrial engineering. John Crane, founded in 1917, became its best-known engineering brand. In 2026 it supplied filtration sieves used on NASA's Artemis II mission, according to Wikipedia.
We could not find a group-wide purpose statement. John Crane, the largest division, lists five core values: Respect, Ownership, Integrity, Customer Focus and Safety. Its centenary event at Slough in 2023 was themed 'Pioneering Progress for Over 100 Years', and its leaders spoke about staying true to core values while adapting to what customers need. Those values and slogans are the company's own claims.
John Crane's headquarters are in Slough, on the Slough Trading Estate, where it has been the longest-running tenant for a century (to 2023). The Slough site employs over 280 people in engineering and technology roles, and the company says it has hired hundreds of apprentices from local colleges. It is also developing dry gas seals with more than £900,000 of UK government funding aimed at helping industry cut its emissions. The group has about 15,000 to 16,000 staff worldwide (Wikipedia, 2026).
A business like this needs many people. At Slough you would find design and test engineers, people who run automated test rigs and 3D printers, manufacturing engineers working on automation, and commercial, finance and digital teams. Staff also get involved locally through the Slough Business Partnership and local charities. If you enjoy engineering, physics, design and technology or computing, the products here, from a seal used in the pump that helped put Apollo II into orbit in 1969 to modern net-zero equipment, give you real examples of those subjects at work. Which roles are open at any time is shown on the company's own site.
Website: www.smiths.com
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