The city of Hull has its critics. It's had the dubious honour of being named simply the Crappest Town in Britain, and in a 2007 Channel 4 survey of the worst places to live in the UK, it came second behind Middlesborough. That was actually an improvement - it came first in the same survey in 2005.

This cliched view of the city is, if I'm honest, hard to dislodge from the mind as you approach Hull by train. It's fair to say that many cities that historically made their name with working trades like manufacturing, fishing, or ship building do still bear the scars of their decline in the outskirts. However, also like many contemporaries, the ubiquitous gleam of chrome and glass that modern architects seem to associate with regeneration is almost blinding once you hit the city centre.

Ideal Standard wrote itself into Hull's history back in 1936 and while at first glance its factory, like the city, may be tarnished with age and lack the shine of its modern European equivalents it's still there and, also like it's hometown, its trying to find its place in a new global manufacturing environment.

It's fitting then that I'm here to see Roger Cooper, Hull born and bred, and pretty much Ideal Standard born and bred too. This year marks his 38th anniversary with the company, a career that has taken him from Hull at its height, to a vice president's chair looking after several countries. In that time he's seen the manufacturing market slowly shift from the UK to the Far East and beyond as well as shifting ownerships and the closure of several historic British factories.

His commitment to the company, and the bathroom industry as a whole, saw him on stage back in March picking up the 2008 Special Achievement prize at the kbbreview Industry Awards. It's an annual gong given to those individuals
whose contribution has shaped the UK industry for the better but settling down in an office overlooking the factory, a typically humble Cooper isn't recalling the moment he realised it was coming to him with particular pleasure.

"I found it hard to sit and listen and I didn't know where to look," he laughs. "It was a very strange feeling thinking 'Roger, you're in the limelight here and you're not comfortable being in the limelight.' But I just felt it was a real honour and I'm pleased it wasn't called a Lifetime Achievement Award because I don't feel that my lifetime in the business has finished yet."

But let's start at the beginning. Cooper left school at 16 with hopes for a career in advertising. After a couple of short jobs with advertising agencies, on March 2 1970 he walked through the gates of the Hull Ideal Standard factory,
a memory he can still vividly recall 38 years later - "I was just fascinated that I was allowed to be shown round all the factories and see cast iron bath tubs, cast iron boilers and sanitaryware being made."

He started as an assistant to the publications officer, a long title which simply meant producing brochures and installation instructions and mailing them out to customers - a very different situation than someone starting in the
same job today.

"The speed of communication would be the biggest change," Cooper says, "and the number of different ways of communicating too. It's awful to think now that we used typewriters with carbon paper in those days. We didn't have
email or faxes or mobile phones. In fact, later on I introduced mobile phones to the sales force and they said 'what do we need these for?' But the speed of everything now means the speed of decision making has had to get that much
faster too."

Cooper was recruited by John Lawton, now in his 80s and still a good friend,  finding its way in a new world order of
manufacturing. and after two years moved over to what was then called 'Sanitary Products' - perhaps not the wisest choice of name in retrospect - and then in 1974 became product manager, his first foray into the dedicated bathroom
side of the business.

The heating side of the business was sold in 1976 and Cooper became marketing director in 1980, just ten years after walking through the gates for the first time. "It was one of my goals to be a director under the age of 30," he says. "I'd written down early on that it should be an achievement - sometime or other I also wrote down that I should retire at 55 too but, well..."

In 1987 he took over as sales director as well as marketing and in 1994 became md after Norman Bennett retired. Most recently, in 2005, he became vice president for Western Europe. So if the speed of business has changed in 38 years, what about other aspects of the industry?

Cooper cites design as one of his biggest interests and his work with Robin Levien has resulted in some of the most successful products in the history of the company.

"The pleasure I've had in working with Robin has been tremendous," he says. "I like working with designers anyway because they come at things from a completely different angle to a salesman or fi nancial person. 'What does the consumer want? What is their taste? What will they want in fi ve or ten years? What is form and what is function?"

And with Studio, they had a product that is still selling after more than 20 years, arguably bringing design to the mass sanitaryware market for the first time.

"That's where we as a company need to be," he says. "People say that the mass market is going to get squashed and there's either rich people or poor people in the world and there's no point considering the middle, but I actually don't hold with that at all. If you present a product that looks very attractive and is affordable - even if it's a bit over budget - then people will stretch themselves to buy it."

Cooper's experience and steady hand has seen Ideal Standard through several ups and downs but it's still unusual for anyone to have stayed with one company for so long. So where does the loyalty come from?

"I've had chances outside," he confi rms, "but I suppose there's always the devil you know and the devil you don't...The company has been very good to me and, yes, we all have our upsets and days where we go home and kick the cat, but they play a straight bat, we've never welched on any deal or any with. We believe we can do it because the logistical costs for that shipping are becoming greater and are sometimes more than the cost of making the piece in the first place.

"That means we can make an automated factory in the UK that can compete with China - and if we meet that goal fully then we've got the benefit of not having six to eight weeks worth of stock on the sea and we can respond to demand changes much faster. I'm a fi rm believer that you do need local manufacturing, as a country we should be able to make our products if we can. You can't just be a service economy surely?"

Credit crunch

After 38 years with one company, it's safe to say that Cooper has seen several global economic disasters come and go and this time around he is quite philosophical about Ideal Standard's long term future. Yes, house building is falling person. We've had bad things to do but we've never had to do it on a shoestring, the company has been
good to people."

The 'bad things' Cooper laments are the factory closures, like the ceramic plant in Stoke-on-Trent or, most personal of all, the sanitaryware production line at Hull.

"The hardest one, without a doubt, was closing the Hull pottery factory," he says. "When I started it was on that site and it was everything to me. But every one is hard, it's always a very tough decision. You look at the number of people, and look at the age profile, and you hope everyone will want a nice retirement package and go home happy, but that's never the case. However, we have worked with some fantastic out-placement people and, even in Hull, I think 90% of people were placed in other jobs within six months. One or two went to be taxi drivers in London, another went to Australia, we kept tabs on it for a long time afterwards."

So, are decisions like this an indication that the decline of British manufacturing is simply an inevitability now?

"No, it's just a more difficult place to manufacture because of global competition, you have to have high levels of automation or you need to specialise in luxury or more complicated pieces," Cooper says. "The mass market pieces
that can be shipped in from India or China are going to be tough to compete but the nature of Armitage Shanks in particular means the still buoyant market of hospitals, schools and other government expenditure gives them a real buffer against the storm. There is one aspect of it, however, that is markedly different. "The sheer speed is the thing," he says. "In the early 1990s you saw it coming for two years beforehand. Now, literally in eight weeks we went from an ok situation to an 'oh no' and it's going to get tough. I don't think the depth of it is going to be any different this time around though, there'll be people who'll be much more affected than we are, we'll be alright."

As we wrap up we come back to the Special Achievement Award and how pleased he was that it wasn't marking the end of his career. This brings up the whisper a couple of years ago that he was seriously considering retirement,
Cooper just laughs at this.

"The rumour went round a while ago because I was taking on the vice president role and we didn't want to announce it before it was ready to happen. We needed a new md for the UK so once you start the search it inevitably gets out. The job I have fi ts me to a tee, I'm enjoying it and I'll carry on doing it. There will be a time when I'm ready to try something else, sorting the balance between family and work is always tricky but while I can manage it, it's fine.

"When I'm going to retire, you'll be the first to know."