Two Sister Furniture Firms Went Into Administration on the Same Day. Close to 500 People Lost Their Jobs Between Them.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
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In short. Westbridge Furniture Limited (Holywell, Flintshire) and Belfield Leisure Limited (Ilkeston, Derbyshire), sister companies under the same owners, both had administrators appointed on 23 March 2026, London Gazette notices confirm [1] [2]. Westbridge's own administrators confirm 297 redundancies [3]; Belfield, circa 200 staff, was wound down with all staff made redundant by the time trade press reported it in May [4]. Both graded REPORTED, status departed.
One ownership group, two Gazette notices, one date
Westbridge Furniture and Belfield Leisure were both incorporated on 4 February 2025 and both sat under the same ownership, trading as part of what press coverage calls the Belfield group [5]. On 23 March 2026, Interpath Advisory's Christopher Pole and William Wright were appointed joint administrators to both companies on the same day. Gazette notices confirm each appointment separately: Westbridge Furniture Limited, company number 16229524 [1], and Belfield Leisure Limited, company number 16229543, under High Court case CR-2026-002297 [2].
Interpath's own appointment-day release put Westbridge's Holywell site at circa 300 staff and Belfield's Ilkeston site at circa 200, and named the causes separately: Westbridge hit by operational disruption following an earlier acquisition, the loss of a key customer and weak early-2026 trading; Belfield hit by fragile consumer confidence across the wider UK leisure market, unable to secure the capital injection it needed [5]. Westbridge supplied sofas and upholstery to M&S, John Lewis and Next Home; Belfield made soft furnishings for the leisure market, a different customer base entirely, sharing little beyond ownership and an administrator.
Two companies, two timelines to zero
The two businesses did not fail identically. Westbridge's production ceased on 2 April 2026, and Interpath's own update confirms the majority of its 297 remaining staff were made redundant by 23 April, with the brand's product IP and design rights sold on to competitor Whitemeadow [3]. Belfield ran longer: administrators initially kept it trading to attempt a controlled wind-down, and it was not until trade press reported the company had collapsed owing creditors almost GBP7m, with the last staff retained for wind-down also made redundant, that its story closed too [4]. Unsecured creditors across both businesses are expected to recover nothing. AI is not cited as a cause anywhere in the reporting checked for this piece.
Add the two confirmed figures together, 297 at Westbridge and circa 200 at Belfield, and close to 500 people lost their jobs from one ownership group inside a few weeks of each other, in two different nations of the UK, Wales and England, under two different Gazette notices that nothing in national coverage ever linked into a single total.
How the ledger logs it
Both graded REPORTED: Gazette Appointment of Administrators notices, directly confirmed for each company, meet this ledger's highest sourcing bar for the events themselves; the headcounts come from Interpath's own releases and updates. Both status departed: all staff at both companies, including those initially retained to help wind down operations, have since been made redundant. Logged as two separate events.csv rows, one per company and region, because that is what each Gazette notice and each redundancy round actually is; covered here as one article because the ownership, the administrators, and the appointment date are all one story. This is the fifth backfilled discovery gap logged on this ledger this week, after Agetur, Merit Holdings, Unimetals Recycling, Orbex and National Timber Group, and like National Timber Group it was specifically searched for and rejected as stale by an earlier pass on 6 November 2026 before being re-examined and confirmed today.
Sources
- The Gazette, "Appointment of Administrators: Westbridge Furniture Limited," 26 March 2026. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/5092042
- The Gazette, "Appointment of Administrators: Belfield Leisure Limited," 26 March 2026. https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/5091943
- Interpath, "Westbridge Furniture Limited administration: update," 23 April 2026. https://interpath.com/media-hub/articles/westbridge-furniture-limited-administration-update/
- The Business Desk (East Midlands), "Belfield Leisure collapsed owing creditors almost GBP7m after failed turnaround," 12 May 2026. https://www.thebusinessdesk.com/eastmidlands/news/2110379-belfield-leisure-collapsed-owing-creditors-almost-7m-after-failed-turnaround
- Interpath, "Administrators appointed to Westbridge Furniture Limited and Belfield Leisure Limited," 24 March 2026. https://interpath.com/media-hub/articles/administrators-appointed-to-westbridge-furniture-limited-and-belfield-leisure-limited/