Tarmac Group
British building materials company headquartered in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
Tarmac Group Limited was a British building materials company headquartered in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. It produced road surfacing and heavy building materials including aggregates, concrete, cement and lime, as well as operating as a road construction and maintenance subcontractor. The company was formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange and was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The company was founded in 1903 by Edgar Purnell Hooley two years after he patented the road surfacing material tarmac. The company grew quickly, first being listed on the Birmingham Stock Exchange in 1913 and on the London Stock Exchange in 1922. Despite intense competition and other challenging factors, Tarmac expanded both geographically and in its range of services, particularly as a consequence of intense demands of the Second World War. By 1953, Tarmac was processing over two million tons of slag per year while its road surfacing activities had developed into a substantial civil engineering business in its own right. During the 1950s and 1960s, it acquired numerous competitors, becoming the largest roadstone and construction group in Britain in 1968 following a three way merger between Tarmac, Derbyshire Stone and William Briggs.
During the 1970s, Tarmac Group made a decisive shift towards private home construction; by the end of the decade, it was building 4,000 houses annually and would become the largest housebuilder in Britain. At the end of the 1980s, its housebuilding activities accounted for half of Tarmac Group's profits, somewhat overshadowing its performance in other areas, such as its expansion into North America and other international markets.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tarmac Group” as british building materials company headquartered in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the places & architecture register because the source frames it as british building materials company headquartered in Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7686346. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1903, 1913, 1922 and 1953.
A single description cannot reconcile every naming convention, rebuilding phase or administrative transfer associated with a place. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Tarmac Group” 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.