About Street Crane

Our history

Serving Industry Since 1946

Since its formation in 1946 by Peter Street, our business has grown steadily to become the UK’s largest overhead crane manufacturer and its only volume wire rope hoist manufacturer.

Born in Sheffield in 1921 Peter Street was destined to be an engineer. The youngest of four brothers, in a family that had connections to the steel industry, Peter grew up with a fascination for things mechanical.

Peter served his country as a WWII Spitfire pilot and played an active role in many wartime events including campaigns in North Africa and Italy. Within a week of returning to civilian life on leaving the RAF, Peter took his £88 gratuity and started a business in the “steel town” of Sheffield servicing and repairing the neglected cranes in the local workshops.

The company grew by reputation and by the late 50s the firm was seeking larger premises.

Relocation and expansion

Street Crane relocated to Chapel-en-le-Frith in 1957 where a larger, more modern facility provided the solution to manufacture the larger cranes that were being demanded for factories of the time.

The mid-sixties saw the next phase of development and by this time the business of servicing the growing number of Street manufactured cranes in the field had become an important business in its own right.  A decision was made to establish a dedicated service operation and the sister company Street Cranexpress was born. Due to the concentration of existing Street cranes in the area, Sheffield was chosen as the natural location for their headquarters.

Continuous product development

Innovation has always been at the heart of the Street Crane and over the following decades, Peter Street pioneered new overhead crane technology that kept the business ahead of all the major competition.

As the first CAD programmes became available, the company was quick to capitalise on this technology and used it to develop new lightweight box beam design and their hugely successful NX hoist range.

Building a global network

In the late 1980s, Street Crane had firmly established itself with over 50% of the UK crane market and the business realised that it now had to grow its export business in order to provide sustainable growth.

They realised that the key to this export market was to develop and launch a world-beating standard product. Further investment in FEA and CAD technology meant that their NX could evolve to incorporate more unique hoisting features and the first generation of  ZX wire rope hoists was born.

Starting with a small handful of carefully selected distributors dotted around the world, Street Crane now has over 80 distribution partners covering every corner of the planet.

Our vision for the future of our business is very simple.

Throughout our 75 years of designing and building cranes and electric hoists, Street has built a firm reputation for quality, reliability and up to date crane technology.

We are continually striving to set ourselves higher and higher performance targets that will bring technical and commercial advantages to all our distributors and crane users.

We aim to provide all of our UK and International customers with lifting equipment and solutions that surpass all of their expectations in safety, performance and reliability.

ENJOY THE FUTURE WITH STREET.