In the first part of the Destination Carlisle visit to Warwick Mill Business Village, general manager Emma Skelton described the former textile mill as 'Carlisle in microcosm' - a place full of hidden businesses many people 'would never know even existed'.
To understand what she meant, I knocked on some doors.
The first stop is Pettit Singleton Associates (PSA), a building services engineering consultancy whose work is often hidden in plain sight.
The building designers
The firm specialises in mechanical and electrical design - the heating, ventilation, lighting, power, fire alarms, security systems and internal infrastructure that allow buildings to function.
Julian Sargent, associate director for Cumbria, has been based at Warwick Mill since 2014, when the Preston-founded company decided there was enough work in the county to justify opening a Carlisle office.
"It was just me to start off with," he said.
Julian had previously worked for Capita Symonds, and then Cumbria County Council, before being approached about setting up Pettit Singleton's Cumbrian base.
He chose Warwick Mill for refreshingly practical reasons - access, parking, convenience and peace.
"But also it gives us good links onto the A6 and M6 as we do work up and down the county, so travelling-wise it’s great for us", he said.
The firm has moved around Warwick Mill several times as it has grown.
"We can get work easily enough, it's people we can't get," he said.
Part of the problem, he said, is that building services engineering is not well understood as a career.
From Warwick Mill, the firm has worked on projects including council buildings, NHS sites, Carlisle Library, the former CHOC building, H and H, Kendal Rugby Club, Outward Bound centres and the new football ground in Workington.
But the appeal of the site itself remains simple.
"For us it's quite homely to be honest," Julian said. "You get to know people. It's just a nice place to be, and working on an industrial estate would be pretty boring."
The superstar hat makers
A few yards away, in a stand-alone green industrial unit beside the old mill, is something rather more colourful.
Sharon Lee is a headwear specialist, marked from outside by a red sign carrying the words 'since 1947'.
Inside are walls of caps, production rooms, embroidery machines, stock areas and boxes upon boxes of headwear waiting to be customised and sent out, usually far beyond the borders of Cumbria.
"Welcome to the madhouse," said owner Lee Parkin, as he and manager Sally Johnston showed me around.
The company relocated its production operation from Essex to Warwick Mill in December 2024, after Lee bought the business and decided to bring it north.
The sales and design operation remains in Braintree, but Carlisle is now the heart of its in-house production.
"We started from scratch personnel-wise up here, and it was a very short turnaround," Sally said. "I'd been in textiles for years, so it made sense for me to come on board."
Lee said the business holds around one million units of stock at Warwick Mill, across dozens of styles and colours.
There are two sides to the business. Fully bespoke work is designed through the Braintree team and produced through long-standing overseas manufacturing partners.
At Warwick Mill, the focus is on stock products that can be decorated, customised and turned around quickly.
"It’s mad May," Lee said. "When we do the Champions League finals.
"You don’t know the finalists until the semi-finals have concluded, so it's all hands on deck as soon as we know."
Speed matters because much of the work is event-driven. Lee recalled one urgent Goodwood order where goods had been delayed in transit.
A dedicated van was sent to wait at the port at midnight, then deliver the order to a field using only GPS coordinates so it could be ready the following morning.
"We're not the cheapest, but in our game, trust is everything," he said.
The company has worked with customers linked to major sporting events, film premieres, West End shows, fashion retailers and long-standing institutions.
Lee said one of its longest-serving customers was the MCC at Lord's, while it has also produced headwear for Carlisle United and worked with Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squat brand.
Sally said: "One of the things about this company is that we can’' really shout about ourselves because we’re under so many NDAs, so nobody really knows we’re here and nobody really knows what we do."
For Warwick Mill, the fit is quite poetic.
“Being part of an old textile mill really fits our story”, she said
And finally, 'farming excellence'
The third business, Downland Marketing, has one of the more misleading names at Warwick Mill.
It is not a marketing agency in the usual sense. Instead, it is a national network of agricultural merchants supplying and supporting independent, family-owned businesses that provide farmers with animal health products, veterinary medicines, grass seed, dog food, supplements, buckets, blocks and other farming essentials.
Chief executive Sophie Smith said the company arrived at Warwick Mill after being flooded out of premises in Dalston in 2005.
“We moved there temporarily at first,” she said. "We'd been at a property out in Dalston which was flooded, and we lost a lot of our paperwork.
I was desperate for somewhere to relocate the business and we moved to Warwick Mill at that point — on the third floor, so we knew we would never get flooded.
“And it worked really well for us so we stayed.”
The practical benefits included motorway access, meeting rooms, a serviced reception and flexibility.
"In our early days we had quite a small team - just me and a part-time person - and we could run a small company efficiently whilst managing the expense," Sophie said.
Since then, Downland has moved within Warwick Mill four times. Sophie said turnover has grown from around £4m to about £18m, while still operating with only four full-time-equivalent staff.
It now has 31 agricultural merchants in its UK-wide network, including Northern Ireland.
Three businesses, then, and three very different versions of the same story.
Behind Warwick Mill's doors are firms designing buildings, producing caps for stadiums and supporting farmers across the country - all from a former textile site just outside Carlisle.
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