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Private company

Crown Paints

Logo: Grolorito, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons3

Paint manufacturer

Crown Paints is a major paint manufacturer based in Darwen, Lancashire and Coolock, Dublin. It is owned by Hempel Group.2 It is part of Hempel A/S.1 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1850Founded1

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Crown Paints on Sculcoates Lane, Hull - geograph.org.uk - 6759347
Photo: Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons5

Crown Paints is a major paint manufacturer based in Darwen, Lancashire and Coolock, Dublin. It is owned by Hempel Group.2

Corporate structure

Crown Paints is part of a group headed by Hempel A/S. 5 entities, 3 countries on record. Switch between the flow chart and the network, and select any entity to see its details.

  • Hempel A/S Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
    • Crown Paints Darwen
      • Crown Decorating Centres Subsidiary
    • HEMPEL PAINTS (INDIA) PRIVATE LIMITED Subsidiary · 100% · Mumbai, India
    • HEMPEL COATINGS (HELLAS) SINGLE MEMBER S.A. Subsidiary · Athens, Greece

Built from parent and subsidiary links from GLEIF, the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (CC0); subsidiaries, stakes and holdings from Wikidata (CC0). Each entity in the chart links to its source.

What it owns

What Crown Paints reports owning in its annual reports to the SEC: buildings, land and equipment, real estate and locations, investments, intangible assets and inventory, at the end of its latest fiscal year and a year before.

Stakes and holdings (Wikidata)

  • Crown Decorating Centres

Things Wikidata records the company as owning, with the share when stated.1

The story

The origins of the business lie in the history of paint making in Darwen, which can be traced back to the late 1850s. It initially traded as WalPaMur after the initials of The Wall Paper Manufacturers' Company.

The company was acquired by the Reed Group in 1965.

Queen Elizabeth II visited Crown House, the Walpamur headquarters in Darwen, in 1968. The company traded as Crown Berger for over a century before it was taken over by Williams Holdings in 1987 and then by Akzo Nobel in 1990.

It was sold in a management buyout backed by the private equity firm Endless in August 2008, in a deal to satisfy the European Union's concerns of a possible monopoly after Akzo Nobel's takeover of ICI. The company were once sponsors of Liverpool F.C. and Blackburn Rovers F.C. In June 2011, the company was acquired by Danish paints manufacturer, Hempel Group.

The company holds a Royal Warrant from King Charles III.

From Wikipedia’s article on Crown Paints, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Subsidiaries and ownership

Parent company

Also owns

  • Crown Decorating Centres

From Wikidata.1

Timeline

  1. 1850Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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