During 1982, the Ashley Road premises were extensively rebuilt to appear like a home with an adjacent garage, rather than a shop front. Similarly, in 1983, the company completely rebuilt the front of its Washway Road premises   to again remove the image of an ordinary retail shop. Both these premises have now been sold to make way for our most successful funeral home to date in West Timperley.

By the mid to late 1970s, the larger corporate garages and petrol suppliers had flooded the market with commercial garages, buying out or outpricing small privately run garages (the same was to happen in the funeral industry during the late 70s, 80s and 90s and thankfully Arthur Gresty Ltd. has managed to hold on to its own market). There were large changes being made in other areas of the industry, such as the structure of the emergency breakdown service. Robert and Arthur could see the life of their garage might be limited and decided to put 100% focus on the funeral side of the business to further its development. The garage work was closed down but the garage was retained to store and maintain the company vehicles. Over the last 20 years the car hire, taxi work and wedding hire have also been overtaken by the funeral side of the company, which is now the main source of business, and the family are delighted with the amount of help they can give to the community and the quality of service they can offer.

Arthur died in 1988, sadly four years before the creation of the company’s best and first fully self contained funeral home offering all the best facilities to the families it serves. As a tribute to his memory, his grandson David opened a new funeral home in Sale Moor  in 2005, next door to the garage on Marsland Road (which is still owned by Robert Gresty), where the business began all those years ago.

The company has always tried to be at the forefront of modern thinking and technology in its approach to the service it provides. In 1981, the company replaced its electronic memory typewriter with an ICL computer, becoming one of the first Funeral Services in the country to adopt a fully computerised system. Robert had to study, adapt and interlink several software programmes to suit its purpose and the special requirements of writing invoices, keeping accounts, storing and sorting data for a Funeral Director’s business. Robert has since been able to advise many of his colleagues on the pitfalls of buying a computer, and been able to assist a software house which was writing a specialised system to sell to Funeral Directors.

The current fleet of cars includes two Rolls Royce Hearses (a Silver Shadow and Phantom VI), Mercedes and Rolls Royce Spirit 6-door limousines ( a new Mercedes Hearse and Mercedes Limousine are on order for the end of 2006), Mercedes Vito and Toyota Avensis removal vehicles, plus a number of staff cars, including an environmentally friendly Hybrid Toyota Prius.