John Boot opened a small herbalist store in Nottingham in 1849. The firm quickly expanded to become a chain of chemist shops, with more than 500 stores by 1914.

It remains a fixture on most UK high streets, but it merged with Alliance Unichem in 2006, and finally left British hands in 2007, when Alliance Boots was bought by private equity firm KKR for £11.1 billion.

The Raleigh Bicycle Company was formed in 1890, and by the 1960s it was the biggest cycle maker in the world.

However, the company moved production out of the UK in 2002, and was sold to a Dutch rival in 2012.

The roots of the business were in farming, as early as the 1920s, when a number of businesses were brought together to form Associated Dairies and Farm Stores in 1949.

In the 1960s, when the Asquith Brothers opened the Queen’s supermarkets in Pontefract, Edlington and South Elmsall, the farmers saw the potential, and merged with the supermarkets to form ASDA. In 1999 the chain was sold to Walmart in the US.

The company started life in 1849 as the National Freehold Land and Building Society. It gained its name after merging with the Abbey National Building Society in 1944.

It was the first building society to become a bank in 1989. It then merged with the National and Provincial Building Society in 1996, and the whole lot was sold to Banco Santander in Spain in 2004.

The origins of the company were in the Swallow motorcycle sidecars produced in 1922. The firm moved into car production and adopted the name Jaguar in 1935.

The success of the range of sports cars produced after 1948, and the racing triumphs in subsequent years, made Jaguar a household name. However, in 1989 the company was bought by Ford in the US, and then sold on again to Tata Motors in India in 2008.

The company started in the 1930s with the advent of steam power, as a mail delivery service. It soon expanded services further East, and in 1840 it became the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, carrying mail, cargo, and passengers.

In the 1950s it diversified into tankers, and through the 1990s and 2000s it focused increasingly on its ports around the world. At that point it became an acquisition target - and was sold to DP World in 2006.

The telecoms firm started life in 1985 as Cellnet. At that point it was part-owned by BT, but the telecoms giant later bought the rest of the business. It was spun off from the BT business in 2002, at which point it was named O2.

Just three years later it was sold to Spain’s Telefonica for £18 billion. Part of the agreement was that O2 couldn’t change its name, and it still had to have a headquarters in the UK.

Powergen was formed with the privatisation of the electricity industry between 1988 and 1991. In 1999 it became the first UK company to sell electricity and gas to UK companies via the internet.

After buying a US energy company in 2000, it became an acquisition target itself in 2002. At that point it was sold to German energy group E.on.

In 1974, ten major water authorities were created by the Water Act, the largest of which was Thames Water. In 1989 it was privatised and began a global expansion programme that meant by 1995 it was the third largest water company in the world.

As a result of its global footprint, it was bought by the German utility company RWE in 2001 for £4.8 billion. Four years later it was sold to a consortium led by an investment fund run by the Australian Macquarie Bank for £8 billion.