Sharp firm designers

'Sharp firm designers' is used in this encyclopedia as a generic attribution where a specific named designer at Sharp Brothers or Sharp, Stewart and Co. is not individually recorded in the available historical sources, covering the output of the Atlas Works in Manchester through its various corporate identities from the 1820s to its absorption into the North British Locomotive Company in 1903.

The Sharp firm produced locomotives for a very wide range of British and overseas customers through the Victorian era, and the design responsibility for individual classes was often corporate rather than individual — a reflection of the commercial locomotive builder's approach to design as a production exercise rather than the named-engineer tradition of the railway company's in-house works. Where a specific designer's name is associated with a Sharp product it will be found in the individual designer entries; where the attribution is to the firm as a whole, this entry applies.

For the firm's history and manufacturing output see the Sharp, Stewart and Co. workshop entry. For the design office's broader context see the Sharp Brothers design office entry.