Review of a year of upheaval in Lamonde – From the Manor

Their products include programmable logic controllers (PLC), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), frequency converters, servo systems, stepper motor solutions, temperature controllers, power supplies, push buttons, selector switches, indicator lamps and much more.

While much of this means little to the average person, Lamonde’s products and services are critical to successfully automating systems in a variety of industries, from food production and transportation to medical and pharmaceuticals. With over 40 years of experience, customers rely on Lamonde’s expertise to keep their businesses efficient and productive.

In 2020, when COVID 19 set in, Lamonde moved to Manor Royal.

In this week’s “From the Manor” column, Naomi Gollow reflects on a year of changes and challenges:

“Having outgrown our previous premises in Caterham, we signed a brand new lease in January 2020 and picked up the keys to our much larger mixed storage and office unit in Lloyds Court. It took several weeks to adapt the building to our needs, and we finally moved in the first week of March when Covid 19 stretched its deadly fingers from mainland Europe to the UK.

Two weeks after we moved in, we took most of our employees on leave, and our beautiful new premises, which still smell of fresh paint, were almost empty.

All summer long we worked with a state of emergency because our customers – transport, food production and medical supply stores – had to work and still needed replacement parts and spare parts.

Manor Royal in lockdown was, as in so many places, apocalyptic. No traffic; no noise from nearby shops coming through the windows; no airport traffic – neither people nor airplanes. Just empty streets, empty buildings and empty skies, punctuated by the occasional conversation with one or two work neighbors, while the world held its breath and hoped through the phenomenal heat of summer.

We got everyone back to work in August last year with a mixture of home and office work, and got all of our employees back to work by January of this year, and we are lucky that we did not have to lay off any redundancies.

We saw and felt people and companies gradually return, although it was still much quieter as so many companies have adapted to working remotely.

The impact of working from home on traffic was welcome at the time, although it is quickly becoming a distant memory as Manor Royal returns to something more in keeping with its pre-Covid self.

Unfortunately, some companies will never return because they have been exposed to the world’s financial stress for so long. Other buildings stand still and empty as companies and their employees understand the financial and health benefits of working remotely and have chosen to keep working that way.

More positively, we also welcomed new residents to neighboring units such as Fast Signs, MacMan and The Real Pizza Company, all of whom have moved to Lloyds Court to make the most of the larger space for their growth.

Manor Royal is definitely different these days and it may never look or feel like it did in early 2020; but the streets are buzzing again, the sky and the parking spaces are filling up again and the lunch lines at the food trucks are longer than ever – all positive signs of growth and testify to a timidly recovering local economy.

At Lamonde, we are seeing life gradually return to normal and demand for our products and support grow, which gives us confidence in our future here at Manor Royal. “