Lifetime achievement award winner looking ahead

Guest presenter at the awards, the broadcaster Gyles Brandreth, said: “Peter’s long and distinguished career as a designer, innovator and entrepreneur, together with his expertise – both as an engineer and as a businessman – has helped to change the face of the warehouse materials handling industry.”

He added: “Long-term British-owned design and manufacturing business success stories are all too rare these days and, in the fast moving warehouse handling industry, they are almost unheard of - which makes Peter a very worthy recipient of the FLTA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Peter Wooldridge has been designing ground-breaking warehousing trucks since the late 60s and building them himself in the UK’s ‘Black Country’ industrial heartland since 1976.

Today, Narrow Aisle Ltd is one of the few companies in operation that designs and builds forklift trucks in the UK and the Flexi range of articulated warehousing lift trucks is now squarely in the global material handling industry mainstream.

Peter Wooldridge commented: “I am clearly very happy to collect this award, which reflects the long term efforts of our whole team at Narrow Aisle and I hope that people don’t feel that, in some way, it represents a ‘full stop’ at the end of my career!

“I prefer to look forwards – not back, and I am as enthusiastic about the industry now as I was when I first entered it.

“Narrow Aisle has a team of talented and highly motivated people and it gives me great pleasure to work alongside them on the development of new products that I have no doubt will bring substantial benefits to the logistics community in the years ahead.”