Jon Hilton’s story is one of perseverance and curiosity, a journey that stretches from engineering tunnels underground to soaring thousands of feet above the earth. Known as the founder of Legal Brokers Ltd and a record-setting microlight pilot, Hilton has built a career that blends technical expertise, entrepreneurial skill, and a lifelong love for adventure. His life captures the rare combination of practicality and vision that defines true innovation.
Born in Bury, Greater Manchester, to Geoffrey and Peggy Hilton, Jon’s early years were marked by both challenge and determination. His father worked as an insolvency accountant, while his mother devoted her time to social work. Hilton’s childhood was disrupted by a serious abdominal illness that required emergency surgery, forcing him to miss large portions of school. This setback led him to leave higher education earlier than planned, but it also awakened in him a quiet resilience. Rather than viewing it as a limitation, he treated it as motivation to carve his own unconventional path.
Hilton began his professional journey through a Youth Training Scheme as a tunnel engineer, a role that combined physical endurance and technical precision. During this time, he earned an Ordinary National Certificate in Civil Engineering, reflecting his ability to learn through action rather than academics alone. Yet fate intervened again when a work accident caused a spinal injury, ending his engineering career prematurely. What might have been a conclusion became instead a turning point. Hilton chose not to retreat but to reinvent.
His next move was into the world of property and finance. Starting as an estate agent, he soon expanded his expertise to become a mortgage and insurance broker. Through years of consistent work, Hilton developed a strong foundation in financial systems and client trust. In 2005, he qualified to use the designation CERT PFS after passing rigorous exams with The Chartered Insurance Institute’s Personal Finance Society. The discipline and precision required in finance resonated with the same attention to detail that had once guided him in engineering.
Hilton’s creative instincts, however, drew him toward a very different field, lighting. His career in illumination led him to projects that literally lit up global landmarks. One of his most famous contributions was to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. He had reached out to a Paris-based technology company with a bold proposal, personally driving a seven-kilowatt Xenon searchlight through the Channel Tunnel to demonstrate its capabilities. The light’s twenty-mile range left an impression, and Hilton returned home with a deal that would transform the Paris skyline. The rotating beams that crown the Eiffel Tower today are partly the result of his work, a lasting emblem of ambition meeting execution.
Hilton later managed another historic lighting project, this time for London’s Millennium Bridge. The design by Lord Foster envisioned a narrow blade of light running the length of the bridge, casting an elegant glow over the River Thames. Hilton oversaw the installation that turned this vision into reality, ensuring the bridge would be as striking by night as it is by day.
By 2004, Hilton was ready to build something entirely his own. With only a small overdraft and a clear concept, he founded Legal Brokers Ltd. The company began as a simple service connecting clients with trusted conveyancing solicitors and gradually expanded into a nationwide network providing legal and financial solutions. Through patient growth and careful leadership, Hilton transformed the firm into a multimillion-pound business. The company’s success stands as a reflection of his entrepreneurial instinct and his belief that professionalism and persistence build trust faster than any advertisement can.
Even as his business flourished, Hilton’s lifelong fascination with flight remained undimmed. At twenty-two, he traveled to Missouri in the United States to earn his private pilot’s license. He later began commercial flight training, but a corneal ulcer forced him to abandon the goal of becoming a commercial pilot. Still, he refused to give up flying. Instead, he focused his passion on microlight aircraft, small planes that tested endurance and courage as much as technical ability.
In 2013, Hilton completed an extraordinary flight from England to Canada and back in a microlight aircraft, famously sustained by 200 chocolate bars packed for the journey. The feat earned him the Britannia Trophy from the Royal Aero Club and the Chairman’s Trophy from the British Microlight Aircraft Association. In 2016, he attempted to fly around the world in a microlight, an ambitious effort that ended in Jordan but nevertheless demonstrated his resolve. That same year, he became a trustee of the Microlight Flying Foundation, helping to promote the future of ultralight aviation in the United Kingdom.
Hilton later chronicled his adventures in two books, Decision Height and Phoenix: Twelve Months in a Microlight, blending storytelling with the technical insights of a pilot who has experienced both triumph and turbulence firsthand. He continues to fly his Flight Design CT microlight, which was manufactured in Ukraine, often using his flights to raise funds for Clatterbridge Cancer Research Charity. For Hilton, flying has always been more than a pursuit of records; it is a form of giving, a way to transform personal passion into shared purpose.
Away from the air and office, Hilton maintains the same endurance that defines his work. He lives in Bolton with his long-term partner and their daughter, balancing family life with an active routine. He has completed multiple Ironman triathlons, run marathons across different countries, swum the English Channel as part of a relay team, and even participated in Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls. He also holds a black belt in Jiu-Jitsu, an achievement that mirrors his lifelong discipline and determination.
Jon Hilton’s life cannot be summed up by a single profession or title. He is an engineer turned entrepreneur, a businessman turned aviator, a man who continues to turn challenges into milestones. Each chapter of his story reveals a willingness to learn, to fail, and to try again with greater focus. Whether building companies from scratch, illuminating world landmarks, or flying thousands of miles alone in the open sky, Hilton has lived by the same guiding belief that courage is not the absence of failure but the refusal to stop moving forward. His journey is not just about building, flying, and leading; it is about inspiring others to see possibilities where others see limits.
