Westley
Richards
Founded in Birmingham in 1812, Westley Richards has occupied a distinctive place in British gunmaking for more than two centuries — a house where traditional craftsmanship has repeatedly been matched by important mechanical invention.
Birmingham craftsmanship
with an inventive spirit.
Westley Richards began in the flintlock era and lived through nearly every major transformation of the sporting gun that followed. The firm’s history encompasses percussion ignition, breech-loading arms, military rifles, the hammerless boxlock, ejector systems, hand-detachable locks and the sporting rifles that accompanied generations of travellers and hunters.
The company’s story is therefore not simply one of survival. Many of the mechanisms associated with Westley Richards became part of the wider vocabulary of British sporting gunmaking.
The founder and the beginning of the firm.
William Westley Richards came from an established Birmingham family of craftsmen and traders that included gunmakers, silversmiths, jewellers and cutlers. He established the firm bearing his name in 1812 while still in his early twenties.
Richards quickly developed a reputation for both quality and invention. His earliest years coincided with rapid experimentation in ignition systems, and he contributed a succession of patents during the transition from flintlock to percussion arms.
The standard he set for the business was expressed simply: to make as good a gun as could be made. That ideal would survive long after the founder’s own working years.
A Birmingham maker with a London presence.
Birmingham remained the firm’s centre of manufacture, while a London presence placed Westley Richards before the fashionable sporting clientele of the capital. A New Bond Street operation was established early in the company’s history, with William Bishop becoming the celebrated London representative of the house.
The trade labels preserved from different periods chart the firm’s changing addresses, appointments and identity while reflecting a business whose roots remained firmly in Birmingham.
A tradition built around invention.
Selected moments illustrating the firm’s development from the percussion era to the mechanisms that became signatures of the Westley Richards sporting gun.
A purpose-built home for the Birmingham gun trade.
In 1894 Westley Richards moved from its earlier High Street operation to a purpose-built factory at Grange Road in Bournbrook. The building provided dedicated spaces for the many specialist trades involved in gun and rifle manufacture.
The firm remained there for 114 years. In 2008 it moved to Pritchett Street, close to Birmingham’s traditional Gun Quarter, continuing a manufacturing identity that has remained rooted in the city since the company’s foundation.
The action that transformed the sporting gun.
In 1875 William Anson and John Deeley, both closely connected with Westley Richards, patented a hammerless action in which opening the barrels cocked the internal locks. The mechanism placed its working parts within the body of the action rather than on separate sidelock plates.
The design was mechanically simple, strong and adaptable. It became known universally as the Anson & Deeley boxlock and went on to influence sporting guns made throughout Britain and far beyond it.
The hand-detachable lock.
The most recognisable Westley Richards action grew from the Anson & Deeley principle. In 1897 John Deeley and Leslie B. Taylor patented an arrangement allowing the complete lock mechanisms to be removed from the action as self-contained units.
Commonly known today as the “droplock,” the design combined the strength and compactness of a body action with unusually straightforward access to its lock work. It also left the sides of the action largely uninterrupted, giving engravers an expansive surface on which to work.
The hand-detachable lock became a defining Westley Richards model and remains one of the mechanisms most closely associated with the house.
- Hand-Detachable Locks
- 1897 Deeley & Taylor Patent
- Derived from the Anson & Deeley Body Action
- A Signature Westley Richards Design
Innovation made into tradition.
Few British makers illustrate the relationship between invention and tradition as clearly as Westley Richards. The Anson & Deeley action, the firm’s ejector work and the hand-detachable lock were created as practical solutions, yet each became part of the visual and mechanical identity of classic sporting guns.
More than two centuries after William Westley Richards established the business, the firm remains in Birmingham and continues to build sporting guns and rifles around mechanisms whose origins reach back to the nineteenth century.
Continue exploring British gunmaking.
Discover the histories, craftsmanship and traditions of other celebrated British gunmaking houses.