How Wisbech Became the Canning Capital of England

The flat fields around Wisbech produce some of the best soft fruit and vegetables in England. The rich black Fenland soil, the long growing season, and the mild maritime climate make the area ideal for peas, strawberries, gooseberries, plums, and a dozen other crops. In the early twentieth century, a group of entrepreneurs realised that this abundance, combined with new preservation technology, created an industrial opportunity. The result was one of Britain's most significant food manufacturing industries, centred on this small Fenland town.

The Beginning: Smedley's Arrives in Wisbech

The canning of food in England dates to the early nineteenth century, but it remained a craft industry, small in scale and limited in reach, for much of the Victorian era. It was not until the 1910s and 1920s that the technology and the economics aligned to make large-scale commercial canning viable in Britain.

In 1921, S.W. Smedley and Company established a canning facility in Wisbech. The company had been producing preserved foods in Derbyshire, but Wisbech offered something Derbyshire could not: direct access to enormous quantities of the right raw materials, grown on the doorstep. The decision to locate in Wisbech was straightforwardly geographic. The Fens grew the crops; Wisbech would can them.

The early years were concentrated on soft fruits: gooseberries, plums, and strawberries grown within a short distance of the factory. Processing had to happen quickly after harvest, and the proximity of factory to field made this possible in a way that no inland site could match.

The Pea Viner: A Revolution in the Fields

The next step in the story is the pea, and a machine that changed everything. In 1926, the Wisbech operation introduced the pea viner to England for the first time. The pea viner is a field machine that harvests peas mechanically, separating the peas from the pods while still in the field and delivering them ready for processing. It had been developed in the United States, and its introduction to England at Wisbech was a significant agricultural innovation.

Before the pea viner, harvesting peas was entirely manual. Women and children would move through the fields picking by hand, a slow and labour-intensive process that limited the scale of any processing operation. The pea viner removed that bottleneck entirely. Peas could now be harvested, transported, blanched, and canned within hours of leaving the field, preserving their colour, flavour, and nutritional value far more effectively than any hand-picked operation could achieve.

The combination of Fenland soil, a mild growing climate, and the pea viner meant that the area around Wisbech became the premier source of canned peas in England. The crop was perfectly suited to the flat, well-drained fields of the surrounding area.

The Scale of the Industry

By mid-century, the Wisbech canning industry was processing extraordinary volumes. At peak production, the Smedley's operation in Wisbech was capable of producing around 500,000 cans per day during the main season. The factory worked around the clock during harvest periods, when the peas and soft fruits were arriving from the fields and had to be processed immediately.

From Smedley's to Princes

The Smedley's brand became a household name in British food. For generations of British families, tinned peas meant Smedley's. The Wisbech factory was central to that brand identity. The company changed hands over the decades, as consolidation swept through the British food manufacturing sector in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Wisbech operation eventually became part of Princes Foods, one of the UK's largest food manufacturers.

Princes maintains a major operation in Wisbech today. The scale of production has grown enormously from the early years: the current Princes facility is capable of producing over one billion cans annually, making it one of the largest canning operations in Europe. Wisbech remains central to British food manufacturing more than a century after Smedley's first arrived.

In January 2026, HRH The Princess Royal visited the Princes factory in Wisbech, marking over a century of industrial food production in the town.

A Wider Industry

Smedley's and later Princes were the largest operation, but they were not the only canning businesses the Wisbech area supported. The ready availability of skilled workers, engineering expertise, and the agricultural infrastructure built around the canning industry drew related businesses to the area. Cold storage, packaging, agricultural machinery suppliers, and food technology businesses all grew up around the core canning industry.

The pea viner itself generated an entire support industry. As more farms in the Fenland region contracted their pea crops to canners, the pattern of agriculture across a wide area changed: fields were reorganised to suit mechanical harvesting, drainage was improved, and varieties of pea were developed specifically for canning quality rather than fresh consumption.

The Fenland Landscape Today

The influence of the canning industry is still visible in the landscape around Wisbech. The large, flat, geometrically organised fields that characterise much of the Fenland are suited to the large-scale mechanised agriculture that the industry required. Visitors cycling or driving through the countryside outside Wisbech in late May and early June will see vast fields of flowering peas covering the flat ground to the horizon. The harvest follows quickly: pea vining machines move through the fields, and the crop goes directly into the factory within hours.

It is an industrial process, but it takes place in a landscape of remarkable scale and quiet beauty. The wide skies and flat horizons of the Fens have their own austere grandeur, and the pea fields in flower are part of that landscape in a way that connects directly back to the story of the 1920s and the machine that changed British agriculture.