On the fringes of the Harrison Spinks mattress factory in Leeds is a small workshop that Simon Spinks says is out of bounds to most visitors.

“We call this the toy shed,” confides Mr Spinks, the company’s managing director and a member of the family that has owned the 290-employee business since 1840.

Inside the workshop are several rows of novel machines for turning out new kinds of springs – including helical springs shaped like coils of DNA and even “endless” springs where hundreds of small springs laid next to each other are formed from one extremely long piece of steel wire.

It is in the toy shed where Mr Spinks, 42, who has worked for the company since the late 1980s, devised with the help of a small team of technical experts a new “Spinks spring” that is much smaller than the conventional pocket type that goes to form many mattresses.

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