The factory site at the western end of the village has for many years been the main source of employment in the village. Originally built in the 1880s by the Telegraph Manufacturing Company, as the Britannia Telegraph Works, the factory was used to manufacture cables, and was most recently owned by BICC Electronic Cables. It employed up to 5,000 people at its peak (from the Second World War until 1970), but continued to decline following a series of redundancy initiatives started in 1970, and the site eventually closed in 2002. The site was then redeveloped for retail, light industrial and residential purposes. The first completed development on the site was a Tesco supermarket, which opened in September 2005. In 2005 cable manufacturing returned to Helsby when Heat Trace Limited, a British specialist cable manufacturer, took over one of the last remaining industrial buildings on the site to expand their operations, taking advantage of the existence of the electron beaming unit on the site for the irradiation of their specialist heating cables.