Roke Manor Research
British research and development company
Roke (also known as Roke Manor Research) is a British technology and engineering company based at Roke Manor near Romsey, Hampshire. The company operates in the defence, national security and geospatial intelligence industries with clients in the public and private sector. Roke conducts research and development for technical areas including communications, electronic sensors, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science.
The company has been part of the Chemring Group PLC since 2010. It was originally an arm of Plessey and later of Siemens, during which time it operated primarily as a research facility.
History
Roke was founded in 1956 as Plessey Research Roke Manor Limited by the Plessey company. Harold J. Finden, an electrical engineer at Plessey, was appointed as the company’s first managing director. In 1989, the company became part of GEC-Siemens AG following a joint takeover, and in 1991 it became wholly owned by Siemens after GEC sold its share in Siemens Plessey Electronic Systems.
In 2010, Roke was acquired by Chemring Group. During the 2020s, the company was awarded several UK Ministry of Defence contracts related to land intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (ISTAR) programmes.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Roke Manor Research” as british research and development company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as british research and development company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7359973. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 1956, 1989 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roke Manor Research” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.