The draft manuscript for my history of British Manufacturing since 1951 is out for review. The book, Vehicles to Vaccines, follows How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

The book is a quest to discover what happened to British manufacturing in the decades after the Second World War. People say that we don’t make things any more. Is this true?

I try to answer this question by exploring what happened in manufacturing sectors and to major manufacturing companies. I seek out manufacturing heroes, and try to map out where we are as the twenty-first century gets underway.

In 1951, the Festival of Britain was celebrating British manufacturing; we built ships, wonderful aircraft like the Viscount and cars a plenty. Seventy years later a British company and a British University teamed up to produce a vaccine that saved thousands of lives from Covid.

It has been a period of astonishing change, from a third of the working population employed in manufacturing to now just one tenth. Britain now ranks eighth among the world’s top manufacturing nations.

This book seeks to explore what has changed: the story of British manufacturing from steam trains to semiconductors; from cotton mills to 3D printing; from ocean liners to satellites; from Manchester’s ‘Baby’ computer [the image is a replica in Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry] to Cambridge’s ARM.