James Cropper gears up for release of full ‘warts-and-all’ documentary

James Cropper Paper & Packaging is gearing up for the release of its new 30-minute documentary, ‘The Last Mill Standing’, following a series of digital teaser clips and an exclusive trailer premiere at London Packaging Week earlier this autumn.

The documentary was created by the new commercial video arm of Print Monthly and SignLink, with commissioning editor at the magazines, Jonathan Pert, directing the project.

The film offers a ‘warts-and-all’ insight how the UK's last remaining specialist coloured paper mill has managed the transition of institutional knowledge across generations, overcoming a range of business challenges to return to significant success and output.

According to the company, the narrative focuses on the unquantifiable aspects of manufacturing demonstrated within James Cropper’s 180-year-old Burneside mill, including the human intuition required to read fibre behaviour and manage complex colour formulations – positioning these human skills as a critical foundation for modern commercial resilience.

Paul Barber, managing director of James Cropper Paper & Packaging, says: "Specialist manufacturing tends to focus on the things you can put on a spreadsheet: jobs created, economic contributions, products made, and production speed. But the true value of these sites exists in the knowledge, capability, and experience accumulated over generations, and in what businesses continue to do with it."

The documentary also highlights the current pressures facing the wider British print and paper supply chain. Industry data indicates that as domestic manufacturing sites close, the surrounding ecosystem of suppliers, converters, printers, and designers faces increasing fragmentation, often driving creative brands to source specialist materials from overseas.

Barber continues: "Mills sit at the heart of an ecosystem containing papermakers, technicians, engineers, suppliers, converters, printers, and designers.

“As British mills have closed, parts of this ecosystem have disappeared with them or moved overseas, reducing the concentration of people, processes, and material expertise once found within the UK. Machinery can be replaced, but rebuilding the relationships between expertise, inspiration, and intuition developed over generations is considerably harder."

James Cropper's current production footprint is built from six generations of material history at Burneside, where the company manufactures over 1,000 unique papers annually including a dedicated palette of 184 shades of black and 62 shades of white.

While the mill pioneered early synthetic dye applications in 1856, its current portfolio has expanded to include alternative plant fibres, upcycled waste streams such as coffee cup recycling, and thermoformed fibre packaging.

Barber adds: "For brands, designers, and procurement teams, it means looking beyond unit cost when choosing materials and manufacturing partners. Provenance, technical support, resilience, and access to specialist expertise all have commercial value, even if that value is harder to capture in a spreadsheet."

"A mill is simultaneously a production site, laboratory, archive, school, and community. The Last Mill Standing brings those roles together, offering a warts-and-all look at a one-of-a-kind UK manufacturing site and the people responsible for keeping its expertise relevant. It captures the pressures facing specialist manufacturers, but also the adaptation, investment, and ingenuity required to come through them stronger."

The full documentary will be available to view online, with more information set to be announced by James Cropper in the coming days.