About Johnsons Hotel Linen

Johnsons Hotel Linen, part of Johnson Service Group PLC, is one of the UK's largest hotel laundry and linen providers, created by the amalgamation over recent years of several high quality family laundry businesses including Afonwen, Bourne, PLS and, our latest acquisition at the end of 2019, Fresh Linen.

We’re known collectively as Johnsons Hotel Linen but, in recognition of the deep family business values and traditions of the companies and people we’ve acquired in recent years, have two sub brands: “Johnsons Hotel Linen by Afonwen” (which trades across Wales and much of England) and “Johnsons Hotel Linen by PLS” (in Scotland).

We’re extremely proud to have the benefits of the heritage of being created from leading family businesses but with ownership today under a financially strong and highly supportive PLC, giving us the best of both worlds: financial strength and passionate, local service.

As part of Johnson Service Group PLC, we are one of the UK's leading providers of Textile Services across the UK with sister businesses including "Johnsons Workwear", the leading supplier and launderer of textile garments in the workplace and "Johnsons Hotel, Restaurant & Catering Linen by Stalbridge", "Johnsons Hotel, Restaurant & Catering Linen by South West Laundry" and "Johnsons Restaurant & Catering Linen by London Linen", collectively supplying linen services to hotels, caterers and restaurants across the country including many of the leading restaurants within the London market.

Today, Johnsons Hotel Linen regularly collects, launders and delivers millions of items of linen each and very week.  We are trusted by our customers and have developed strong relationships over many years with a wide range of nationwide hotel chains, family run hotels and leisure & gym facilities, many of whom share the same values of offering high class customer service at a cost-effective price.

In addition to investing over £16 million a year in linen products, we have also invested heavily in state-of-the-art laundry facilities so that our equipment is second to none, providing a higher quality and greater reliability than more traditional operators and is at the leading edge of productivity. 

Our modern equipment minimises energy consumption, automates our processes and benefits from leading technological advances in automating quality control far in excess of our competitors.

In the Spring of 2021, we also opened our £10 million investment in a major new leading commercial laundry in Leeds covering the Yorkshire and North East of England market to strengthen our local service in this important region.

Together with Leeds, our 9 commercial laundries strategically placed across the UK allow us to offer an increasingly fully nationwide service, sharing best customer practice and enabling our customers to be serviced by committed local businesses wherever their hotels are located offering a consistency of quality, service and product regardless of where the customer is supplied from.

We also benefit from having a dedicated national accounts team for our major hotel group customers and an ability for all customers to be able to access the senior management team who care passionately about ensuring we seek to deliver high quality linen, on time, in full, with no surprises.

We don’t cut corners, we invest in training and rewarding our people and we strive to reinvest and recycle whenever we can.  We provide confidence to our customers and are working hard to build upon our reputation as one of the strongest, experienced and high quality teams delivering consistency and reliability at a fair price where we help our customers achieve a cost effective service whilst enabling us to reinvest continuously in our business.

We have one of the most loyal customer bases in our industry, recognising our reputation for pro-active service and being a safe pair of hands! Our leadership team has the most experience of running hospitality laundries of any major national supplier in the UK. Passionate laundry people running a passionate laundry company. Committed to exceeding customer expectations and delivering a first class service.

Welcome to Johnsons Hotel Linen.

Our Customers

We supply a wide range of Hotel sectors

Branded hotel sector

Working with many of the leading international hotel brands from around the world, we supply an extensive range of hotel groups and franchisee hotel operators on either a national or regional basis linen to major hotel groups from the UK, France, Germany, United States of America and beyond across the majority of hotel market segments including upscale, mid market and the budget hotel sectors.

Luxury hotel resorts

We supply many leading Hotel resorts offering a range of hotel, restaurant, leisure and spa linen to 4-5 star luxury golf resorts, premier holiday resorts and traditional seaside operators in the key ’Staycation’ sector including prestigious customers such as Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland and The Celtic Manor Collection in Wales.

Budget hotels

We work with all of the leading national budget hotel brands in the UK as well as the majority of innovative new entrants into this rapidly growing segment of the hotel market across much of the United Kingdom.

Independent hotels

From luxury, boutique, city centre accommodation to gourmet country house hotels we supply a range of standard and premier linen.

Gym Clubs

Through our recently acquired business, Fresh Linen, we are market leaders in the provision of laundry services to many of the leading gym club brands across the UK with a particular emphasis on the core London and South East market.

We've been at the cutting edge of laundry since 1885….

Here's our history… from where we came from and how we evolved into Johnsons Hotel Linen…

1885
Our Chester business was founded in Chester way back in 1885 in the same year Gilbert & Sullivan’s the Mikado opened in the West End for the first time; Gladstone’s Government lost a vote of no confidence following the fall of Khartoum and violence in Ireland and the Statue of Liberty was completed in New York. Laundry is one of the oldest professions after all!
1920
Fresh Linen can trace its laundry origins back to 1920 when the Moore family founded Coggeshall and Kelvedon District Laundry as a predecessor to the business that ultimately became Fresh Linen
1932
Bourne was founded by Ernest Stroud and John Norman as Bourne Hygienic Laundry
1935
Afonwen Laundry Founded by William George, the brother of former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George and two business partners, one of whom was a local preacher! During the Second world war, it supplied several military and internment camps in North Wales.
1938
Bourne Hygienic Laundry became a limited company with Ernest Stroud as the first managing director
1946
Bourne expanded into dry cleaning opening shops in the local area
1970s
Bourne commenced marketing its service as a franchisee of a national laundry supplier which Afonwen also joined in 1980s Bourne extended its service across East Anglia to the edge of London and north towards Yorkshire
1986
The predecessor to Fresh Linen started operating from its current site on Stephenson Road in Clacton-on-Sea bringing together Malvern and Twilight laundries owned by the Moore family as part of Eastern Counties Laundries, eventually becoming Fresh Linen .
1987
Zip Textiles was founded in Digbeth, Birmingham
1992
Bourne set up a workwear joint venture which it subsequently sold
1996
PLS Laundry founded in Edinburgh before moving to its current site in Bonnyrigg in 2000, starting to service the local fine dining trade before progressing into supplying hotel laundry services.
2006
Zip Textiles moved to its current site in Tyseley in 2006 with significant investment and expansion coming in 2015 just prior to its acquisition by Johnsons
2007
Afonwen Laundry established Whiteriver Laundry in Leeds which in 2020 evolves from an Afonwen Laundry depot into a state-of-the-art £10m investment project in a leading new production facility!
2008
Afonwen Laundry opened a £6 million production facility in Cardiff with financial support from the Welsh Government.
2010
Fresh Linen founded following its demerger from Eastern Counties Laundries
2011
Afonwen Laundry opened new depot at London Heathrow, expanding its Cardiff site and became Wales’ fastest growing private company in the FastGrowth50 awards.
2013
Afonwen Laundry opened its third production facility, a £6 million laundry in Reading, Berkshire which it expanded again in 2015 and was one of the fastest growing laundry production facilities ever built in the UK.
2014
Bourne Textile Services acquired by Johnson Service Group PLC, the first business acquired for its entry into the high volume linen market, evolving into Johnsons Hotel Linen during in 2020
2016
In February, Zip Textiles in Birmingham became the second business acquired by Johnson Service Group plc for its high volume linen business, alongside Bourne and rebranded to Bourne Birmingham. In April, Chester Textiles became the third company to be acquired and the next day, Afonwen Laundry became the fourth company, bringing a significant step change in our evolution with Afonwen having significant production facilities in Pwllheli, Cardiff and Reading as well as its Leeds depot.
2017
£3.5m invested in modernising and transforming the Chester site rebranded as Afonwen Laundry In July PLS, a high quality laundry on the outskirts of Edinburgh, joined Afonwen and Bourne as part of the Johnsons family of high volume linen rental plants.
2019
We announced plans to open in 2020 a £10million production facility in Leeds as Afonwen Leeds depot coverts to an operation production facility In December, we acquired Fresh Linen, a leading supplier in London and the South East for hotels and gym clubs.
2020
We began the year rebranding the business to Johsons Hotel Linen and in Q2 our new Leeds £10m production facility will be open… And.. Did you know? Our top 14 leadership team has collectively 332 years laundry industry experience between us, an average of over 23 years per person, making us the most experienced hotel laundry management team in the country!

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