Whether you're a night owl or an early riser,
we've all got one thing in common - sleep.
Which helps explain why we spend
nearly £2 billion a year on mattresses.
Soft, medium or firm,
we all spend around 26 years of our lives lying on one.
And surprisingly, for something SO comfy,
most of them start off life as this - cold, hard steel.
The transformation happens in here,
in one of the largest mattress factories in the country.
Ha-ha-ha!
I'm Gregg Wallace,
and I'm springing into action,
discovering the astonishing engineering
that goes into delivering a good night's sleep.
It's a bed of nails!
Wow!
I'm Cherry Healey...
No bedtime story, though, we don't have time.
..and I'm investigating whether brainpower can be boosted
by an afternoon snooze.
Go!
And historian Ruth Goodman...
Oof!
..draws the short straw,
checking out some ancient bedding.
It's better than lying on the floor, isn't it?
Here, in the factory that never sleeps,
they produce 600 handmade mattresses
in just 24 hours.
Welcome to Inside the Factory.
This is the Harrison Spinks factory, in Leeds.
They've been helping us catch 40 winks for nearly 180 years.
Here, more than 600 people sew together
465 different styles of mattress.
And there's a lot more to them than you might think.
Whether it's a single or a super king, each one contains
more than 5,000 individual components!
From springs, vents and tufts
to frames, fabrics and fleece.
All prepared on this 6.5-acre site.
Today, we're following production of their king-size,
pocket-sprung Emerald mattresses.
It all starts
not with the soft bouncy filling...
..but with a delivery of heavy-duty steel.
Four lorries arrive here every week,
each one laden with 24 tonnes of steel rod,
destined to become mattress springs.
Seeing in today's delivery is Manufacturing Director
Darren Rhodes.
Morning, sir. Morning, Gregg.
Right... How are you? ..what have you got in there?
There's 12 coils of two-tonne steel.
That's heavy, heavy-duty.
You are making beds, right? That's correct.
And they're going to become the springs? That's correct.
Each coil contains 10.7 km of steel rod
and the factory gets through 48 of them every single week!
That's over 500 km of steel.
Why do you use steel? Because that can't be cheap.
It's abundant, it's resilient, it's strong, it's a perfect material
for making springs. When you were a kid, did you have
a Slinky? Yeah, that was my favourite toy. It wasn't, was it?!
It was! Brilliant! Right, this has got to get unloaded,
how long to unload this? About 30 minutes. Right, come on.
Our mattress production begins.
The 128 km of steel rod on this lorry
will make the springs for 600 mattresses.
Turning this lot into springs looks like it's going to be a challenge,
but getting it to this stage is no easy ride,
as Cherry's finding out.
Our steel rod is manufactured
55 miles away, at this
huge site in Scunthorpe.
It produces a staggering 2.8 million tonnes of steel every year...
..and 5,000 tonnes of that
head to our mattress factory.
Plant manager Jim Worsley is showing me around.
I seem to have found myself in the fiery pits of Mordor!
What is going on inside that massive cauldron?
This is the process where we turn liquid iron into liquid steel.
It's a little bit like a big chemistry set,
or making a cake. CHERRY LAUGHS
Steel is one of the most widely used alloys in the world.
A mix of iron and carbon.
The recipe they work to here
requires 260 tonnes of molten iron,
bulked up with
50 tonnes of scrap steel,
which is blasted with oxygen
to remove impurities.
The final ingredient is carbon.
A high carbon content produces steel
that's both strong and bendy.
At 1,300 degrees Celsius,
our molten steel is cast.
Well, Jim, I thought it couldn't get any more impressive,
and you've brought me to a river of steel.
In this process, we take
the 300-tonne batch of finished liquid steel
and we turn it into a bloom.
Each of these rectangular blocks
known as blooms, weighs four tonnes.
It's hard to imagine
that those red-hot rectangles
are going to become springs for
a lovely, comfy bed.
I certainly wouldn't want to lie on one of those. No.
But first, these eight metre-long blooms
need to be squashed down into five and a half millimetre-thick
round steel rod,
which involves a 32-step process
known as hot rolling.
It begins with reheating the blooms
to 1,200 degrees C.
Gail Raeburn oversees this operation.
Oh, the door of the furnace is opening...
and out comes a red hot-bloom!
The steel is pushed through
seven sets of rollers,
in what's called
the breakdown mill.
As we go into these mill stands, we're getting smaller and smaller.
The bloom gets longer and faster,
as it goes through the mill.
So, I can see it's got a lot smaller, it's almost half the size.
And then, when does it actually become circle?
Where does the magic happen?
So here, at stand six, that's when it finally gets
its true circular shape.
So, after all of that,
it's thinner and round,
and it's starting to look a little bit more like a wire. It is.
Now 123 millimetre in diameter,
our steel is chopped down into shorter lengths.
Then it trundles on to
the roughing mill, to meet
another 13 sets of rollers,
which eventually reduce it down
to 23 millimetres.
The important thing is that as we reduce it down gradually,
we keep the right properties of the steel.
So, if you did it all at once, it might become brittle,
it might not be the best quality wire? Absolutely.
The final set of ten rollers take it right down
to the required 5.5 mm.
It's coiled onto
a fan-cooled conveyor.
Each eight metre-long bloom
has produced 22 km of rod!
That's nearly 3,000 times longer!
Oh, that is absolutely beautiful!
It comes out at about 900 degrees.
And this coil pattern will tailor the cooling,
so we get the exact combination of strength
and bendiness in the final rods.
So, for the springs in the mattress,
it needs to be quite malleable, quite springy?
Yes. They want a lot of tensile strength, so that it'll withstand
the squash of a person lying on it,
but they also need it to be coilable.
Once cooled,
our freshly-made steel rod is formed into coils -
all ready to become a multitude of mattress springs.
Back at the factory, the delivery of
our steel rod is complete,
but, while it would make excellent
bed springs for a giant, for us mortals,
it needs to be slimmed down even more.
To do that, it's squeezed into shape.
It travels into this 14 metre-long wire drawing machine,
which will take its diameter from 5.5 mm
to just 1.5.
How exactly does it work?
Well, effectively, we're pulling the wire through a dye.
You draw that through that hole,
and that makes it 1.5 mm? Correct.
The steel heads into a tungsten carbide dye,
the diameter of which is slightly smaller than the wire.
It's pulled through with
a force of 2,500 newtons,
emerging 1 mm thinner.
It's then squeezed through another
nine increasingly smaller dyes,
finally emerging at
the required 1.5 mm diameter.
Why don't you just put it through
the shape that you want straight away?
Because the wire would snap.
Do you know what it reminds me of?
It's like a pasta machine. Exactly.
You keep on tightening the size of the hole you want. Yeah.
Same principle.
And just like with pasta,
as our steel gets thinner,
it also gets longer.
By the end of the drawing process,
each 10.7 km coil
is now a whopping 144 km long!
All this engineering, so that boys and girls can jump up and down on
their mum's bed when their mum and dad aren't looking?
Yep, it's all very technical.
Now drawn out, the wire is coiled into drums.
Wow! And that's what we use
for making the springs.
So now, at the end of all this engineering,
are we finally ready to make springs? We are.
From wire drawing, the drums
head over to spring production...
..where the 144 km coils
are loaded into what's known as
a pocket coiler machine.
I'm meeting Managing Director Richard Essery,
a man with a real spring in his step.
So, tell me, how exactly are you taking the straight wire I saw
and making it into the curly pigtail?
What we're doing, we're actually engineering memory
into that straight wire.
Steel has a remarkable ability to retain its shape,
and this machine engineers springy memory by forcing the wire
into a spinning wheel.
The tight coil that is made
is then opened out and evenly spaced
by a spreader bar.
Because it's high-tensile wire,
that memory stays,
and that's your convolution.
A convolution is a... It's a ring in a spring.
Convolution's a ring in a spring? Absolutely.
The springs for our king-size mattresses
are each made from 120 cm of wire,
which is spiralled into
7.5 convolutions.
The whole process takes just half a second.
How many of these springs,
these complicated springs,
would be in each one of the mattresses?
1,054.
1,054 in each mattress? That's correct.
What's the length of the wire, do you know?
It's 1,554 metres.
That's just short of a mile. That's correct, yeah.
A mile of wire? A mile of wire.
In a mattress?
This hardware will form the internal skeleton of our mattresses.
But when did we start sleeping on springs?
Ruth is getting into bed with the history.
The quest for a comfortable night's sleep
is one that has dogged mankind for tens of thousands of years,
but it was the invention of this,
the pocket-sprung mattress,
that was the real game changer.
It made the mattress modern.
But to find out how we got here,
I'm meeting Deborah Sugg Ryan, Professor of Design History
at the University of Portsmouth,
to sample the rudimentary mattresses
our ancestors would have slept on.
Deborah! Hello. Come on in!
Almost 3,000 years ago, we know that the Romans
were filling simple cloth sacks
with wool and feathers.
So, what about back here in Britain?
What were mattresses like before there were springs?
In the Middle Ages, around the 1200s,
people would have been making their mattresses out of sacks,
which they called ticks.
They were very strong
and densely woven together.
And even today, we still call the fabric that we use
around a mattress ticking.
These simple sacks would have been stuffed with straw.
It doesn't look all that comfy, does it?
So, if I had my sacks of straw,
I was a medieval peasant... Oof!
..how do I feel about this?
Huh...
Oh, well, it's all right.
It's better than lying on the floor, isn't it?
A more familiar shape emerged
in the 1700s, but mattresses
continued to be stuffed with natural fillings
throughout the 19th century.
Despite offering some comfort,
this basic stuffing soon got lumpy.
Luckily, the solution
to a sound night's sleep arrived -
in the form of steel.
Specifically, the steel spring.
This is a sprung mattress. OK. So, springs,
I should be hoping for...
Oof! Ha! It's quite bouncy, isn't it?
So, this was developed by a man called Heinrich Westphal,
in Germany, in 1871.
It was really the next big thing.
The biggest innovation for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
This innerspring technology
was the beginning of the mattress as we know it today.
Although it was a big leap forward in terms of comfort,
it wasn't without its problems.
So, you can see here,
we've got this series of steel springs connected together,
but when you move one,
you move a lot of them together.
Yeah, and I definitely felt that
when I was lying on it,
that the whole thing sort of...
SHE LAUGHS
..moved all at once. It was a bit sort of
seasick, in a way. Yeah.
But this innerspring technology
was soon superseded by a newer innovation -
the pocket sprung mattress.
So, who do we have to thank for a comfy night's sleep, then?
We have this man, James Marshall,
born in Canada in 1840.
He was an engineer, repairing things like early automobiles,
trains and farm equipment.
I mean, that sounds a million miles away from
beds and mattresses! SHE LAUGHS
Well, all these vehicles use spring suspension,
and springs had started being used
in the seating for different forms of transport.
Armed with an in-depth knowledge of
spring technology,
Marshall identified that by keeping
springs independent of one another,
a mattress would be more stable.
And he created the world's first
pocket sprung mattress.
That is it? Yes. Pocket sprung
is just a spring in a pocket.
But they're not done individually like that.
So, they're done in lines.
So, you can see on the edge here,
these kind of strips, with all the
springs in together. Yeah.
And then they sew the strips together? Yeah.
And this means that the springs can move independently,
without tangling with each other.
Ah, now, that makes enormous sense.
Each one has got to work on its own. Absolutely. It can't get
caught up with any of its neighbours. And it can only go in
the directions that the pocket
allows it. Absolutely.
So, it can mould to the contours
of your body. But also, of course,
there are two of you in bed
and it means that
you can move independently.
It's really very simple,
but very clever. So, finally,
after thousands of years of stuffing things in sacks,
we are entering the modern era of comfortable mattresses?
Absolutely.
James Marshall patented
this game-changing invention
at the turn of
the 20th century.
The Marshall coil set a new standard
in bedding and, 120 years later,
nearly 40% of all the mattresses sold in Britain today
still use this technology.
I don't think that James Marshall, even after the best night's sleep,
could have imagined leaving such a legacy.
WIRES BOING
And Marshall's legacy continues today.
All of the mattresses made here at the factory are pocket sprung.
So, our mile of newly-coiled springs
need to go into their pockets.
Durable and water resistant,
polypropylene fabric is used to make
the protective casings.
Polypropylene is folded around the springs and
ultrasonically welded. It's done what?!
It's ultrasonically welded.
Like Ultrasonic the Hedgehog? Absolutely.
This process uses high-frequency vibrations
to generate temperatures of over 160 degrees C,
heat-sealing the polymer cases
in just 0.2 of a second.
But the mattresses here don't just
contain springs. Oh, no!
Even the springs contain springs!
So, these little springs
are going into...
the back of the big springs. Why?
Basically, it's for extra support for the heavier parts of your body.
So, if I put my belly on there,
it would only go that far.
But if I put my belly AND my ego...
It'll be fully compressed.
GREGG LAUGHS
In our mattress, every third core spring
contains a baby pocket spring.
One hour since our steel rod arrived.
With springs made and safely tucked up in their pockets,
they might not look much like a mattress...
..but that's all about to change.
Wahey! It's a little train going through here, a train of springs.
What's happening? So, this is a glue assembler.
So, what we're doing now is assembling the pocket coils
into a mattress core.
For a king-size mattress, 31 strips,
each containing 34 springs,
are lined up,
then glued in place,
top and bottom.
Well, that looks like a mattress to me.
Or if not, the bulk of a mattress.
Almost. And how often does
one of these come out of this machine? Every three minutes.
So, that is coming off now, right?
It's coming off now, yeah.
So, we put it on the floor? Yeah.
Can I...? Absolutely.
Have a lie on it,
have a roll on it. You lie on it first. Sure. Come on.
I'm not coming to tuck you in!
Now, now, now...
this independent spring action, right? Yeah.
So, if I get in beside you...
We won't roll together.
We won't roll over together? No matter how big you are.
So, it's two o'clock in the morning, I've come out of the bathroom,
and I'm going to sort of bounce into bed, right?
Argh...!
There you go, I didn't feel a thing.
GREGG LAUGHS
Right... Agh...
..have you set the alarm?
Do you want to cuddle? No, I don't want to cuddle, no.
I'm a happily married man!
This might be a mattress factory,
but there's no time for sleeping on the job.
This lot are far from finished.
So, onto the next stage in production -
framing,
which is on a different level.
And there's a reassuringly, low-tech way of getting there.
He's just going to chuck 'em down the slide?! Yeah.
It looks like a kids' slide, but that's exactly what
we're going to do. It's a pretty steep slide. It is.
Do you ever go down there?
Absolutely not. Have you ever been down there? No.
Well, I wouldn't tell you, anyway.
Ready? Ready. Here we go. Let's just let it drop.
Yeah!
GREGG LAUGHS
The chute drops the mattresses to
Mattress Assembly, just next door.
It's the central hub of the factory site, where 114 employees
work on six different stages of mattress production.
I'm meeting Team Leader Gary Smith.
You all right, mate? All right?
Are you going to help me lift this onto the table? And I'll show you
how to frame it. Whoa!
We're attaching a steel frame onto each side
to support the spring core. Gives it a firm edge,
stops you feeling like you're going to roll off.
It also holds the structure better, the shape of the bed better.
It's a proper metal frame. Yep.
So, what we'll do, we'll fasten
the frame to the core unit,
using an hog ring gun.
A what gun? Hog ring gun. A hog ring? Why's it...?
It must be from the time when they put a ring through
a pig's nose. Ring through a pig's nose.
So, what we're doing is
just fastening the nearest ring to the corner...
to the frame.
The galvanised steel rings are fired
out of the hog ring gun with compressed air,
looping through the frame and mattress structure.
If you fix the corners, can I have a go at the straight bits? Yes.
Has anyone ever come and said, can you do their ear?
Er, no, but I have offered.
That's it. Woah-ho!
Fire it in... Whoa! You know what?
It's pretty heavy-duty, this bed making, isn't it?
It takes two people just
three minutes to frame each side of
a king-size mattress.
I think I'm slowing things down!
Gary, Gary, Gary,
pack it in, son, all right? Ha-ha!
It's not clever, all right?
You're just making me look stupid, all right?
We all know the benefits of getting a good night's sleep,
but what about grabbing 40 winks during the day?
Cherry's finding out whether we should be making time for a nap.
We all know the feeling -
the afternoon slump, when you
just can't keep your eyes open.
In many cultures around the world,
an afternoon nap is considered to be
a valuable way to recharge your batteries...
..but how many of us here in the UK manage to indulge?
I'm hitting the streets to find out.
Would you ever nap at work?
No.
No. No.
I work in a retail shop, so I can't really
sleep at the tills, or anything.
If I could, I would. Why do you think we don't nap in the UK?
Because it's not the tradition.
So, it seems like no-one is getting
any afternoon kip, but should they be?
To find out if there are any benefits to a daytime nap,
I'm meeting Dr Neil Stanley...
Hello. Hi. Lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you.
..who specialises in the science of sleep.
Should we be making time for naps?
I think we should. A nap is great for boosting your performance,
and the effects of the nap will last three or for hours.
Whereas many people go for caffeine -
coffee, tea - the effects of those are very short,
they may only last for 30 minutes.
So, less flat white and more lie flat?
Absolutely, yes.
37% of people in the UK say
they're not getting the right amount of sleep for them.
And, you know, we know the effects of poor sleep
are as bad as being over the drink-driving limit.
To get the most out of a nap,
it has to be the right duration.
20 minutes is optimum.
Any longer and we fall into deep sleep,
and it's waking prematurely from this that makes us feel groggy.
Timing is everything. So, a 20-minute nap - which requires about
a 30 to 40-minute window,
giving you that time to fall asleep -
means that you get the benefit of sleep,
without heading into that deep sleep.
To demonstrate just how beneficial a siesta can be,
we're heading to a drop-in sleep centre in East London.
Here, worn-out city folk can pay £8 for 40 winks.
Neil has set up an experiment
in what he's calling his reaction room.
Er, so, Neil, how on Earth
are we going to test napping
with something that looks like it belongs in the gym?
What we have here is a reaction timer.
These individual lights will light up,
and the subject's got 30 seconds to cancel
as many as they can in that time. And then, after they've done that,
they'll go upstairs for a 20-minute nap, come down
and repeat it. And hopefully, we'll see an improvement in
their reaction time score. All right, let the games begin!
Our weary volunteers arrive...
AUTOMATED VOICE: Get ready.
..and they begin cancelling those lights.
Go!
Time's up.
First test done,
now it's nap time.
I've made it nice and cosy for you.
No bedtime story, though, we don't have time.
To get the best out of your nap, you need a quiet,
dark room, with a temperature between 16 and 18 degrees C.
The best time is between two and three in the afternoon,
when our bodies naturally have a dip in energy levels.
But don't stress if you don't fall asleep straight away,
even closing your eyes to rest is proven to have a restorative effect.
20 minutes later, how do our volunteers feel?
I feel more relaxed. I didn't actually go to sleep.
Did you fall asleep quite quickly? It took me about five minutes.
That was a good 20-minute nap, I feel brilliant.
I feel good, I feel refreshed.
They report feeling better...
Get ready. ..but are their reactions better?
Go!
On average, our volunteers recorded an 11% improvement
in reaction times.
Time up.
But some individuals improved by as much as a third.
This is something that people can do
that really does have an effect on the way they perform. So,
it is an important thing that we should be doing each and every day.
So, our results show that a power nap
really is a powerful way to brighten up your day.
Wake me up in 20 minutes!
Back in Leeds, our mattresses are taking shape,
but no-one's getting a good night's sleep on these steel skeletons.
They need some comfy coverings.
Every mattress made at the factory is covered in tightly woven cloth
known as ticking, and this is also made on site.
Production Manager Matt Butler
is giving me a tour of the Weaving Room.
This is one of our weaving looms.
We've got six of them in the business and, er, we're producing
over 10,000 metres of tick a week.
This, to someone who's never seen it before,
is almost unbelievable.
The looms weave fire-retardant, viscous fibres together
to create the perfect outer casing for the mattresses.
Well, what this is, it's an air-jet loom.
It fires a jet of air straight across the cloth
and takes one of the cotton strands and fires it across.
And then when it's coming back,
it just reverses, and then shoots back with another jet of air.
These air-jet looms weave 30% faster than conventional machines,
producing the eight square metres of ticking
needed to cover a king-size mattress
in under 30 minutes.
Once woven, the ticking moves to the sewing building,
where it's cut to size to make the top and bottom panels
of the mattresses, and the borders.
Eight handles are attached,
and 16 nickel-plated air vents are punched in.
These little vents on the side, right, do you know what
I thought they were for? Like, when you bounce on the bed,
to let the air out. They are in the mattress
to let the air through and to let the mattress breathe.
Can I have a go at this? You can, yeah. Of course you can. Right.
This... This is a job I can do.
MACHINE HISSES
Oh... I didn't line up this line
with that line there, look. Yeah.
I've messed up my bit.
Although I haven't necessarily messed it up.
This could be like a limited edition. Exactly.
Every cloud!
Two hours and 34 minutes since we began,
back on the assembly line,
I'm catching up with mattress master Gary.
I've got all of these borders, right?
OK. Now, are you going to show me what to do with it?
Right. See these? Yes.
I put some of these on. Did you?
Vents. Look at that craftsmanship, look at that. Beautiful.
Hey, there you are!
A layer of polyester padding is fitted
to soften the edges of the mattress.
Ready for the border.
Now, we're going to slide this over the top of the spring unit.
We're just throwing it all the way over,
putting it round us corners.
That's it, nice and tight.
And then you'll put yours round the bottom end.
I'll put mine on the top.
Border in position,
it's now attached to the springs in the core unit,
using a surprisingly traditional method.
Now we're going to hand-stitch the bed. Hand-stitch?! Yes.
Using a 12-inch needle that is razor sharp on both sides.
Show me how to do it, boss.
Right, so, what we do...
is pull off three arm's lengths
of string. Thread us needle...
Using a super-strong nylon thread,
the hand sewn-seam is an additional
measure to hold the border firmly
in place and secure the springs.
That's going to take forever! Why not do it by machine,
why hand-stitch it? Because hand-stitching fastens the border
through the strings, wraps round the strings
and holds the border firm to it.
You can't get a machine that'll do that. Wow!
So, this company's been making beds for nearly 200 years and you still,
in the 21st century, have to hand-stitch it?
Gary pushes the foot-long needle
in through three core springs,
bringing it back out through the top.
He then threads it back through
the side and around the frame.
Right, I'm going to back off, stop talking to you,
show me the speed you should go at, please. Right.
This is sort of the speed
that we'd have to go at.
Remarkable!
Are you proud of the job you do?
Er, I've always taken pride in all the work I do.
A job worth doing is worth doing right. Do you think people that buy
these mattresses are aware that people like you have actually
taken this much care? Er, I don't think so.
Would you mind very much if I had a go? Yep.
We'll just start you on another side. Yeah.
You go down that side. You don't want me to continue your line,
do you? No, I don't want you to mess mine up! No. Ooh...
I can sew a button on.
How hard can it be?!
I'm never going to get it out of there! Ha-ha!
It's never going to come out of there, mate.
It's all about the angles.
Ooh... There you go.
Yeah, that'll do. Oh, oh... Whoa!
This is incredibly, incredibly difficult.
Not only can you not see where you're going,
you're stitching something that's nearly two-foot thick.
As well as having a practical use, this is actually really attractive,
isn't it, this hand-stitching here? Yeah. It completes
the overall look of the bed.
I tell you what, I've never really looked at a mattress -
I don't suppose many of us have -
but I'm going to take a much closer interest from now on in.
The mattress's sides now have their outer comfort layer,
but the core itself needs some added luxury, too.
More than 1,000 springs provide the basic bounciness,
but when we sleep, we need fine-tuned support,
and our mattresses are about to get more spring than
Zebedee on a pogo stick -
in the form of an entire sheet of micro springs.
This is a comfort layer.
It's thousands of points of contact
that moulds to your body,
to give you a better comfort.
There's another layer of springs about to go on. Another one?!
Well as they say, you can't have too much of a good spring!
These two layers contain an additional 6,048 springs,
bringing the total of our mattress now to over 13,000.
Springs sorted, there's one last tiresome topic to tackle.
Sweat.
No-one wants a sweaty siesta,
so a layer of breathable,
natural fibre is added.
So, this is hemp flax.
Hemp flax? Yeah. A hemp flex sounds like an indigestion tablet.
Well, hemp is actually from
the cannabis family.
Is it legal?
Er, yes, this is legal.
But listen, listen, listen,
underneath here, right? It's all quite pretty.
This makes it look like a donkey.
I feel like giving it a carrot and see if it'll go to
the other end of the warehouse. Look at it! Why do you use this stuff?
It's soft, it's very resilient,
and it's antibacterial.
And it also wicks moisture away.
Antibacterial, why is that important?
It stops it getting smelly. If I get hot and sweaty in the bed,
the hemp actually gets rid of the moisture AND the smell? Yes.
Right, we've got one, two, three layers of springs.
We've got sponge round the corners.
We've got a border. We've got your hemp that gets rid of
moisture and smells. Is that it?! No.
Are you pulling my leg?
The Princess would never detect a pea under all this a lot!
But, unbelievably, there is still one more layer to go on,
and that's wool.
It's no surprise that wool comes from sheep.
Cherry's down on the farm, finding out just how
muddy fleece becomes fine fibre.
The wool for our mattresses is found 22 miles up the road, here,
at the factory's farm, Hornington Manor.
To get a soft, cosy mattress,
you need soft, beautiful wool.
Farmer Liam McPartland...
Hi, Liam, lovely to meet you! Nice to meet you, Cherry.
..looks after a flock of 300 sheep here.
He's going to tell me what it is about wool
that makes it so good for mattresses.
What kind of sheep makes great wool?
The sheep in this field are a North England Mule,
which is a cross between a Bluefaced Leicester ram
and a Swaledale ewe.
They have a very spongy wool
and a fantastic crimp.
What is a crimp? A crimp is a springiness in the wool,
which is fantastic for mattresses.
We don't want a limp, soft wool, like what you'd use in clothing.
This natural crimp is essential
to help the wool layer in our mattresses
retain its shape and bounce.
So, Cherry, these are the sheep that we're going to be clipping today.
Look at those coats!
They need a haircut, pronto.
How will this work? We'll walk the sheep through,
they'll go straight into the pen, ready for the clipper man.
That way... Ooh, off they go!
That was so quick. Wow!
Look, bums are wiggling!
I make a pretty good sheepdog!
Fantastic, great work!
Shearing sheep is a specialist job,
so local pro Chris is in charge of the clippers.
So, I can see that he's got a bit of
a technique to it. What is he doing?
You can see Chris's left hand
is pulling the skin tight,
whilst the right hand moves
the hand-piece up the sheep.
Why does its skin need to be kept tight? If the skin isn't tight,
then the skin will bunch up like that,
and he could catch it with the clippers.
Each fleece is about 2.5 kilos
of wool and it takes Chris
just three minutes to remove.
Is she being well behaved?
She's being fine. And you're done!
Three down...
Go back to your friends.
..another 12 to go.
Oh, there she goes.
Well done, you! That's quite a severe haircut.
She only went in for a trim!
In just 45 minutes,
we have 15 freshly shorn sheep
and almost 40 kilos of wool!
I just cannot believe how much there is! Isn't it fantastic?
It's so incredibly greasy.
What is that? It's called wool grease,
and it gives the wool some really amazing properties. Like what?
Well, it's antibacterial, bacteria can't grow
on the wool grease. Right. So, it acts as a natural barrier? Mm-hm.
I can also see how springy
and fluffy it is.
You can see the crimp,
if you look closely.
What else is amazing about wool?
You can't burn wool unless you have a lot of oxygen.
Wool's fire retardant and it has
high levels of nitrogen and water content in it.
And talking of heat, wool's actually
a fantastic regulator of heat.
It keeps you warm in the winter
and cool in the summer.
There's no doubt about it,
these, erm, farm-fresh fleeces
definitely need a wash.
So, they head 30 miles down the road
to Thomas Chadwick & Sons...
Wahey!
..where our wool goes into the first of five industrial washing vats.
The first cycle is at a very toasty 73 degrees Celsius,
which removes stubborn dirt.
Mark Andrews oversees the operation.
If I've got a wool jumper... Yeah.
..if I wash it that hot...
Yeah, yeah. ..it shrinks. It'll shrink, yeah.
So, how are you preventing that? You're being very careful,
not giving it as much agitation as you would in a washing machine.
At the end of the first wash,
excess water is squeezed from the wool,
before it plunges into a second bath,
filled with detergent.
The soap removes contaminants
such as dirt, sweat,
paint, and the wool grease.
One of the advantages of the detergent is that
once it's washed the wool, it doesn't allow it to go back onto
the fibre. Just as your washing-up liquid does with your plate. Yes.
Wool grease, also known as lanolin, is a valuable ingredient
used in cosmetics, industrial lubricants
and even shoe polish.
So, it's filtered from the dirty water and sent to be refined.
After a third and final clean,
our wool is ready for the rinse cycle.
Is it a bit like when you're washing your hair?
It's the same process. You wet your hair,
you put some soap on your hair, you give it a good bit of agitation,
and then you rinse your hair.
With no trace of farm life remaining, our brilliant white wool
travels through a ten metre-long blow dryer,
emerging at the other end
wonderfully fluffy.
What an amazing transformation!
Our sheep have been sheared, washed, blow-dried
and turned into this amazing,
soft, fluffy wool.
I could use a lie down after that!
From farm to factory,
our wool heads straight to Fillings,
where it's transformed
into the top comfort layer of our mattresses.
I'm back with Matt to unload the wool bails
into the blending machine.
Ha-ha! I love this!
It's a beautiful thing, isn't it?
How many sheep do you have to shear to make one bail?
To make one bail, 280 sheep.
The wool we're feeding into the hopper is far too dense
to be a soft top layer, so the fibres are separated out
to give them more bounce.
The wool is picked up by a conveyor covered in spikes, and carried into
a series of spinning metal combs. It's a process known as carding.
Well, it's a big comb, basically.
Not something I know a lot about, combs!
As they spin, the metal teeth
detangle and tease out
the tightly-packed fibres,
creating a light and fluffy mesh.
As it's pulling through, it's just generally opening up, opening up,
until it makes one continuous web. I can't believe
that what I saw go into the machine
has transformed to that the other end!
That is so light, it's almost transparent.
That looks like a small waterfall.
Our featherweight fleece fibres
now travel to the cross lapper,
where they are concertinaed
into five layers.
What all this is doing is,
it's just layering your web
on top of each other,
building it up, to make
the first stages of the pad.
The wool pad may be beautifully light, but it's also
very delicate.
To stop it falling apart,
some reinforcement is required.
Matt, it's a bed of nails! Yeah!
That looks like a torture instrument!
What have a load of needles got to do with a soft mattress?
There's 6,000 needles in there.
The needles are penetrating through
the material. Every one has got slight barbs in it.
The barbs hold on and
it pulls back up through the fibre,
so it knits the product together.
So, once it's passed through,
you get this.
Bashing it continuously
with hundreds of razor-sharp needles
makes it stick together.
Well, it's quite brutal, isn't it?
Nothing sheepish about it at all, is there? Not at all.
The end product is a 3m-wide topper,
which is cut to the standard king-size specification
of two metres by 1.5.
This now looks completely different
from the wool that we started with.
Feels very, very different.
My stacking's a bit rubbish!
Practice makes perfect!
I think I need to take a few of these round to the next stage.
Can I grab some? Yep.
Can I grab some of yours? They're better rolled.
Of course you can, here you go.
Three hours and 21 minutes
since our mattress production began...
Er, put them on, here.
..I'm back with Gary on the mattress assembly line,
putting the wool pad on.
I cannot believe there's this many layers
in one of your mattresses.
There's still another layer yet.
The woven ticking is the final addition.
Just got to pin this side first.
30 10cm pins secure the ticking
and all the fillings in place on each side.
Gary, there's no way you can get any more in this mattress!
It's, like, almost bursting. Hang on, hang on, hang on,
how much does this now weigh? This weighs 68 kilos.
Before you buy one of these, you've got to make sure you've got
a bed frame that can support it. Ha-ha! That is ludicrous!
It looks all right, but what does it feel like?
Oof... Ha-ha-ha!
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
It's a good mattress, mate!
That works for me!
HE LAUGHS
Now this lot all needs securing to the spring core...
..which happens at the tufting press.
Here, strings known as tufts
are threaded through the mattress
and all its layers to hold it together.
But before all that,
we've got to give the mattress a serious squeeze.
Right, so, er,
we're going to compress the bed up to 50%.
You spent hours and hours plumping up the mattress,
why are you now squashing it down?
Erm, squashing it down because we've to get a tufting string in,
and the tufting string was not long enough to be able to put it in
without it being compressed.
Two side buttons, press down.
That scares me. Yeah.
I feel like it's going to rip. Not we'll be fine.
Once squeezed down from 25 to just 12.5 cm,
the press is turned 90 degrees,
ready for the 20 cm tuft strings to go in.
When the tufts go in, it goes straight through the mattress,
it holds all your springs in place. It holds all your fillings
in place, so they don't move. Because we're human rolling pins.
As we roll over in bed, we can move those fillings.
These sort of prevent that.
This is your tufting needle.
It's 18 inches.
Has it got to go all the way through? It's got to go
all the way through. You've got to get through 11 layers of bed?
Well, we'll fasten the tuft inside
the little hole, it's spring-loaded,
and we're putting the tuft string into the centre.
Can I have a go? Yeah, of course.
So, you're just holding that with
the tip of your thumb until it's in,
to the centre of the square.
In there, right? Yep.
Give it a push.
Oh. There you go, that's it.
That's in.
Ho, hey!
Tuft Master Wallace!
One more, one more, one more.
Here you go. There's something
ridiculously satisfying about spearing a fat bed!
GARY LAUGHS
32 tuft strings go into
a king-size mattress. Each spaced
35 cm apart, to spread the tension
evenly across the surface.
Oh, that's a beauty. Perfect.
Tufts in place, the tuft heads
are the finishing touch.
GREGG LAUGHS
Well, it was all big and tough and heavy-duty,
and then we got these little fluffy pom-poms... A tufty bit.
Just pulling the strings, so the majority's on this side.
Threading through
the plastic loop, pulling,
and just let it go.
The wool tuft heads stop the strings
from being pulled back through the mattress
when the press is released.
There's no job in this factory
that's too strange, is there? No. GARY LAUGHS
Squash your mattress half flat and put
little silky pom-poms on it! Yeah.
GREGG LAUGHS
Strung up and tufted on both sides,
the mattress is released.
That's got that kind of leather
Chesterfield look now, hasn't it? Yeah, it does.
A very tempting sight indeed.
I could do with a lie down, but...
An inviting bed isn't just about a comfy mattress.
It's also about a nice fluffy duvet.
More than 80% of us use them to keep warm at night.
Ruth's finding out when we fell in love with them.
Ah... Making the bed in the morning used to be such a chore!
Once your bottom sheet is nice and straight
then you need your top sheet.
And next, you start layering up the blankets.
Agh...
As many as you need to keep you warm,
according to the weather.
And that might be as many as seven or eight.
So, now you start tucking everything in,
and it's always best to start with the corners.
And you've got to do that all the way round the bed.
And then you've got the bedspread.
And finally, with your bed made,
you're ready to get on with the rest of your day.
This was the way beds were made for centuries.
But that all changed in 1964,
when Sir Terence Conran began selling duvets
in his iconic Habitat store.
SHE KNOCKS ON DOOR
I'm meeting one of the store's original staff members,
Maurice Libby,
who recalls his first brush with the duvet
on a trip with Conran to Switzerland.
I got a duvet in my room,
but I didn't know what a duvet was.
And you just assumed it was part of the mattress? Yes.
So, I just laid on top of it, yeah.
Good gracious!
Although Maurice was perplexed, Conran wasn't.
He'd fallen in love with a duvet on an earlier trip to Sweden.
He'd discovered it made bed making
faster and easier, and he was
convinced Brits would love it.
Conran knew it would
sell and make money.
He was proved right when they were stocked in
the new store on London's trendy Fulham Road.
It took off very quickly.
And lots of the customers were well-known people,
particularly actors and actresses. Right.
It was getting publicity, it was in the papers.
Once it took off, it never faltered.
I'm meeting design journalist John-Michael O'Sullivan,
to learn more about the launch.
It sort of seems to me like
the duvet's time had come, that the '60s was its moment.
Oh, I think it was just the perfect point in time.
It was the end of the ration era,
it was the dawn of that first generation post-war,
who were hungry for something new. It was the start of Swinging London.
Everything just came at the right place, at the right time.
Other shops had sold the duvet in Britain previously,
but it was this burgeoning chain
that delivered it to the masses.
So, I mean, how was it being advertised?
The '60s was the dawn of the era of the Sunday supplement.
So, suddenly, you had all these magazines and newspapers
featuring lifestyle.
And then, I think what really shifted it into the mainstream
was the arrival of the catalogues in the late '60s and early '70s.
You've got things like this
great shot from the early '70s,
showing a man making the bed,
which would have been... Oh! SHE LAUGHS
Yes! In gender roles of the day,
it was quite a playful, but also,
very clever sort of approach.
And I quite like the way, you know, yes, well,
of course he can handle it, it's easy, even a bloke can do it!
SHE LAUGHS And then, of course, I think
it was practical, it was easy. Quick.
So, this is actually for one of their French catalogues,
where you can see they lay
the whole thing out for you.
This idea of a 20-second bed,
in six easy stages. Ah!
Start to finish. I really quite like this.
It's so just sort of clear, isn't it? Bom-bom-bom-bom-bom... Done!
Where Sir Terence Conran led,
others followed.
You, had obviously, the other stores like Debenhams,
Woolworths, BHS.
And then into the '80s, of course, Ikea arrive on our shores
with their own version. And that's really when it becomes something
that's not only affordable but, actually,
is very cheap and universally available.
So, when did you get your first duvet?
It was 20 years ago, in this very store.
Still have that same duvet 20 years and four flatmates later. Wow!
Occasionally cleaned. Occasionally cleaned.
There. What a joy!
Mind you, you can't help but wonder
if Terence Conran had not made that trip to Sweden,
whether we would be a nation of duvet lovers today.
MACHINERY WHIRS
Back in the factory, our mattresses
are plumped and primped,
but there's one last flourish.
Tape edging.
I'm meeting Mikey Diouf, who's been adding the finishing touches
to the beds here for more than 15 years.
Mikey, Gregg. Hello, Mikey. Nice to meet you. You all right?
I'm all good, I'm all good. So, this is our final bit.
Your final bit, yeah. So, if Mikey messes up here,
we'd have to start all over again? No pressure.
Big panic, I'm shaking already!
Don't mess up, Mikey, this has taken me ages!
I'll try my best.
Mikey's job is to join the ticking,
all the layers of padding
and the border into one seamless taped edge.
So, what Mikey's got there
is an enormous sewing machine, and what's that doing?
That is stitching the tape, plus the top and the border? Yeah.
Together, yeah. Together. Hang on, the most difficult
bit must be going round the corner, right?
Going round the corner, yeah.
Oh, the machine comes round
the whole of the bed.
This specialised sewing machine is mounted on rails,
allowing it to be manoeuvred through 360 degrees.
Mikey controls it with his knee.
Pressing down on a paddle stops
the sewing, leaving his hands free
to stretch the tape around all six layers of filling and border.
That is finishing it, isn't it?
Yeah. That is finishing it beautifully.
It seems to be tightening up the whole thing as well... Yeah.
..making it, like, a completely finished shape.
Mikey's machine runs at
an incredible 2,800 stitches
per minute.
There's no room for error at this stage.
If you do make a mistake? I have to start all again. Rip it out
and start again? Start again, yeah.
Another risk is that the rapidly moving needle overheats and snaps,
so it's constantly cooled by
a stream of compressed air.
I reckon it was easier to get a space rocket to the moon
than it was to make one of your mattresses.
It is remarkable, absolutely remarkable!
Three hours and 41 minutes after our
lorry-load of steel rod arrived,
we have a completed mattress.
Thank you. Beautiful.
There it is! That's our finished mattress.
You know what? I can see the things on the outside of it,
like the handles and the stitching,
but no-one is going to have any idea of what's in there.
It's quite remarkable, isn't it?
It is, it's beautiful. All right, let's get it wrapped. Come on.
Checked for the correct number of handles, vents and tufts,
we're at our last stop,
Distribution...
..where I'm meeting factory owner Simon Spinks.
Simon. Gregg.
How you doing? Great.
On average, how many mattresses will go out of the factory every day?
500-600 a day.
Wow!
Is your business at all seasonal?
It is, we sell a lot of mattresses during the month of January.
You see all the adverts on TV for furniture sales.
But also, September, when the nights are getting darker,
we start to nest, ready to sleep for the winter.
So, we're at an end. Shall we put our final mattress on the truck?
I think we should. Come on.
Argh... Argh... There we go. Right.
Come on, then. Well done.
The mattresses from this factory
are bound for bedrooms all over the world,
as far afield as Australia and South Korea.
But back home, it's the South-East of England that buys the most.
We all sleep on a mattress and we all know what one looks like,
but how many of us have actually looked inside and seen what's in it?
Am I impressed?
I'll tell you what, I'll sleep on it!