Reindustrialisation: what Britain in 2026 can learn from 1897

In June 1897, the Royal Navy assembled the greatest fleet in the world at Spithead for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Among the vessels in attendance was a small experimental boat from the Tyne called Turbinia.

By the end of the day, she was the star of the show. Powered by Charles Parsons' steam turbine, an engine the Admiralty had been slow to take seriously, she raced past the assembled fleet at thirty-four knots, and nothing there could match her. Nine years later, HMS Dreadnought launched with Parsons turbines. Within a generation, the same technology was generating the world's electricity.

Parsons didn't just invent the turbine. He engineered, built and tested it on one river. This episode asks why that connection between invention and production once defined British industry, where it survives today, and what it should teach us now.

Along the way: how Sheffield turned a clockmaker's frustration into a century of steel, why the economist Alfred Marshall said industrial knowledge lived "in the air", what happened to graphene after Manchester discovered it, and why Derby, Barrow and the Tyne still hold the pattern that built Britain.

It ends with four tests for deciding what Britain should build next.

Transcript

Turbinia And The Power Of Making

Speaker 0:04

In June 1897, the Royal Navy assembled an immense fleet at Spithead for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Battleships, cruisers, and gunboats stretched across the anchorage, steel machinery, and naval engineering on a scale that few other countries could match. It was a demonstration of British industrial power in all its stately glory. And then a small experimental vessel came racing through the middle of it. She was called Turbinia, a little over a hundred feet long, built on the Tyne and powered by something no ship had ever had before, Charles Parsons' steam turbine. She passed the assembled fleet at more than 34 knots, and nothing there could match her speed. The Admiralty had been slow to take Parsons seriously, but the demonstration of her capabilities and the transformative power of her engine meant that just nine years later, HMS Dreadnought was launched with Parsons turbines, helping make every existing battleship obsolete. The same technology went on to become one of the foundations of modern electricity generation. What I love about the Turbinia story isn't just the invention. Parsons didn't simply design the turbine on the Tyne, he engineered, prototyped, built, and tested it all along the banks of the river. The story of the steam turbine is invention to industrialization all in the same place. That connection was once a defining feature of British industry. Today I want to look at why it matters, where it still survives, and what it tells us about the industries that Britain should choose to build now.

How Industrial Clusters Really Work

Speaker 1:37

But first, a quick word for anyone new. I'm Rob Gilbert. I've spent nearly 20 years working in energy, industry, and investment across the public and private sectors. I started my career in textile manufacturing, and one of my first jobs was to help offshore the last remnants of that great British industry. I've spent much of my time since asking the same question. Why don't we value industry more in this country? Today, I'm a partner of Beringa, currently on secondment into government to lead the design and delivery of Great British Energy's £1 billion supply chain investment program. This podcast is my own production. I'm not speaking here for government, for Great British Energy, or for Beringa. The premise is simple. Generations of deindustrialization have damaged our economy, our society, and also increasingly our security. We need to change course. This podcast and its guests explore how. If you find it useful, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We tend to remember Britain's industrial history through what it produced. Ships on the Clyde and the Tyne, steel in Sheffield, wool across Yorkshire, pottery in Stoke, coal in South Wales and the Northeast. But the products were only the visible part of the system. Britain became the workshop of the world because particular places learned how to solve industrial problems over and over again. They brought specialist workers, suppliers, workshops, finance, and institutions together in a small area. An improvement made in one business spread through the surrounding economy. One generation trained the next, and knowledge accumulated. Sheffield is a good example. In the 1740s, a clockmaker called Benjamin Huntsman needed better steel for his clock parts. What he could buy was inconsistent, so he developed a crucible process that produced steel of a far higher quality. That invention became one of the foundations of Sheffield's steel industry because it moved beyond the original workshop. It spread into tools, processes, and products across the city, carried by generations of people who learned how to make the material and how to work with it. The economist Alfred Marshall later described the knowledge inside places like Sheffield as being in the air. He meant that knowledge did not just live in patents or textbooks, it lived in experienced workers, relationships between firms, and the accumulated, uncodified understanding of how to solve practical problems together. Today, we would call that a cluster. But a real industrial cluster is not a collection of businesses placed on a map and given a moniker. It is a production system. Companies that buy from one another, people who can change employer without leaving town, colleges that understand what local industry needs, researchers working on problems manufacturers actually face, investors who understand the sector, and customers prepared to buy what comes out of the manufacturing process. Britain's industrial cities were built on this model. They were also underpinned by institutions that helped hold it together. Technical colleges, municipal infrastructure, local rooted finance, and civic leaders with the confidence and authority to shape their own economies. This reinforcing system is why industrial capability becomes stronger over time. And it's also why loss capacity is so hard to reverse. Because when a major factory closes, a country doesn't just lose the output of that factory, it loses suppliers and apprenticeships, specialist equipment, technical judgment, and the ability to develop the next generation of products. Industrial decline compounds, but industrial capability compounds

When Breakthroughs Leave

Speaker 5:22

too. There is a line I hear too often in my day job that all the important technology is being developed overseas. Thankfully, I know many people who would disagree. Britain's industrial decline has not primarily been caused by a shortage of ideas. This country remains one of the world's leading sources of scientific and technological invention, and has been for generations. You would not be listening to this podcast today without the UK's contribution to the phone in your pocket. In June 1948, at the University of Manchester, a machine ran the first program stored electronically in a computer's memory. Decades later, at Oxford, John Goodenough and his colleagues developed the cathode material that made the rechargeable lithium-ion battery possible. That scientific heritage remains alive today. In Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield, and university cities across the country, British researchers are working at the frontier of life sciences, quantum technology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials, and engineering. Where things too often go wrong is after the breakthrough. Britain struggles to turn invention into repeatable production, production into a growing company, and a growing company into an industry anchored here for the long term. And invention alone is not an industrial capability. To become one, it needs skilled people, production equipment, suppliers, patient finance, and customers willing to take a risk on something new. Most importantly, it needs opportunities to manufacture, test, fail, improve, and manufacture again. Production is not simply the final stage after innovation. Production is part of the innovation process. Graphene illustrates the problem. In 2004, in Manchester, Andrei Gaim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick, exceptionally strong, conductive, light, and flexible. Their work won them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. But graphene is not a finished global industry that Britain invented and then lost. Commercializing it has proved exceptionally difficult, and companies around the world are still working out where it can beat established materials at a price customers are willing to pay. But what happened after the breakthrough is still revealing. The discovery took place in Manchester, while much of the patenting and production development and work on commercial applications has spread to China, Korea, and the United States. An intellectual property office study in 2015 found that nearly half the graphene patents in its dataset were first filed in China, and around 1% were first filed in the UK. Now, patents are not factories, counting them tells us little about quality or commercial value, but they do provide a signal. Other countries have moved quickly to build capability around a British discovery. The lithium-ion battery followed a similar international journey. Good enough's work at Oxford produced the cathode breakthrough that made a practical rechargeable battery possible. The modern battery was the product of cumulative American, British, and Japanese research, but Japanese industry carried out much of the manufacturing development needed to make it at scale. I'm not arguing that Britain should manufacture every product it helps to invent, and nor does scientific leadership automatically confer industrial leadership. But in a world increasingly divided between countries that control critical technologies and countries that depend on them, Britain needs to be far more deliberate about the discoveries which it chooses to build industrial capability around. This means recreating something our industrial cities once understood instinctively. Places where the journey from idea to production becomes easier because the people, equipment, finance, and customers are already there. Places where industrialization is once again in the air.

The UK Places Still Built To Build

Speaker 9:12

And the good news is that such places still exist. There are parts of Britain where invention, engineering, and production remain wired together. In Derby, Rolls-Royce assembles and tests some of the world's most sophisticated aero engines. Its UK facilities build and test engines across the Trent family. Design, production, and testing remain close to one another. Engineers see how components behave on the production line. Manufacturing experience becomes engineering knowledge, and that knowledge feeds into the next generation of design. The technology changes, but the production system keeps learning. That capability is now stretching into nuclear. Rolls-Royce SMR announced that Derby will host PioneerWorks, its first manufacturing development center, where it will develop the assembly, welding, and testing processes needed to build small modular reactors. The technology is new, but the underlying capability isn't. It will draw on generations of experience in turbines, high integrity components, and safety critical engineering. Another place where the connection survives is Barrow and Furnace, where Britain's nuclear submarines are designed and built. Around 10,000 people at the Barrow site work on the astute and dreadnought programs, supported by a much wider network of suppliers, engineers, and training institutions. You cannot recreate that capability. It rests on people, facilities, and production knowledge built across successive generations of submarines. Barrow also demonstrates why the renewed emphasis on defense investment matters industrially. Advanced military capability cannot be bought at the moment it is needed. It depends on retaining the ability to design, manufacture, integrate and support complex equipment over decades. Sheffield provides another version of the same model. The city no longer has the breadth of steel and heavy industry it once did in Alfred Marshall's day, but an advanced form of its old industrial system remains alive. Sheffield Forge Masters produces technically demanding castings and forgings, including components for nuclear applications. Down the road, the University of Sheffield's advanced manufacturing research center allows researchers and manufacturers to develop production techniques side by side. Boeing placed its first European manufacturing facility next to the AMRC precisely because of that combination of research, skills, training, and production. Research and production are not separate stages there. They are part of one learning system. And finally, back to the Tyne and the Northeast, where generations of shipbuilding, offshore and heavy engineering expertise are being applied to offshore wind foundations, substations, subsea equipment, and the infrastructure on which the energy transition depends. Tabinia may now sit in a museum, but the river that built her is still working. These places are not relics of Britain's industrial past, they are fragments of a living system. They show that the capability to design, build, test, and improve complex products has survived, and that it can be applied to the industries of the future.

Four Tests For What Britain Builds

Speaker 12:07

Which brings me to the question I have been asked by so many people since starting this podcast. What should Britain actually build? The obvious answer is not everything. We are a medium-sized, open economy, and we will continue trading, importing components, attracting international investment, and building products with our allies. But what I have seen firsthand in championing the energy industrial base is that Britain can do more. What we need is a better way of choosing where to concentrate our effort. I think we should focus most heavily where four things overlap. First, where Britain holds a genuine scientific, engineering or technological advantage. There are many such opportunities across our academic and innovation ecosystem, but advantage at the point of discovery is not enough. We need to connect research to commercialization and commercialization to production. Academia, finance, industry, and government all have a role to play in building that bridge. Second, where there is an existing base of companies, skilled people and production knowledge on which to build. As I said before, industrial capability is cumulative. Starting with an established base is usually faster, cheaper, and more credible than attempting to manufacture an entirely new cluster from scratch. This does not mean preserving every existing company or production process indefinitely. It means understanding which capabilities can evolve into something new. Third, where Britain has a substantial and durable demand. That matters particularly in sectors where the state, regulated infrastructure, or nationally important industries will be buying at scale. Britain is very good at creating demand-side markets. The opportunity is to connect those markets more deliberately to investment in domestic capability. In technologies, we already know we will buy in enormous volumes. Procurement is a form of industrial policy, whether we acknowledge it or not. That demand will build factories, skills and supply chains somewhere. The question is where. But durable demand cannot mean permanent dependence on a single subsidy or a mandate. The test is whether the initial market provides a credible route to scale, competitiveness, and customers beyond the original public or regulated buyer. And fourth, whether resulting capability would create either a strategic security or a credible international advantage. These are not always the same thing. Some capabilities matter because losing them would create an unacceptable dependency. Others matter because Britain could become internationally competitive, export at scale, and build a self-sustaining industry. The strongest opportunities will sometimes do both. Where all four tests line up, I do not think Britain should be neutral about whether production happens here. There is also an important qualification. Some foundational capabilities may warrant attention even when they do not look like the growth industries. Modern economies still depend on basic materials, chemicals, components, and industrial processes. For example, Grangemouth is now Britain's last operating ethylene cracker. Ethylene is a building block for plastics and thousands of industrial products. It doesn't mean that every individual plant must be maintained, whatever the cost, but allowing a foundational capability to narrow to a single site creates a dependency. We should understand such dependencies before decisions become irreversible. Britain cannot build the industries of the future without considering the materials and processes on which they rely. So, which industries pass the four tests? I have a list, and some of the entries might surprise you. That is for a future episode, where I will go through them one by one. What Britain already has, what we are at risk of losing, and where we could genuinely lead. For now, the method matters. We should concentrate effort where our technological strengths, existing capabilities, future demand, and strategic interests reinforce one another. And when we do, our industrial history tells us that location really matters.

The Turbinia Lesson And Closing

Speaker 16:06

Proximity helped British industry invent, produce, improve, and export. So to conclude, Britain cannot manufacture everything it invents, but we should be deliberate about the technologies where making things here creates lasting value. Strategic capability, specialist employment, resilient supply chains, exportable industries. And the production knowledge needed to build whatever comes next. It means connecting research to manufacturing and demand to our domestic capability. It means giving places, the institutions, infrastructure and investment to build on what they already know how to do. The task is not to rebuild all the industries of the past. It is to take the capabilities that survived and use them to build the industries of the future. There is a larger argument, though, sitting beneath all of this, about just how Britain came to value immediate cost over long-term capability like this, and about the institutional changes needed to reverse that. We will get there too. The thought I want to leave you with is one that we began with. Charles Parsons invented a revolutionary turbine on the time, but Turbinia did not emerge from a single idea alone. It required engineers who could turn drawings into machinery, workshops capable of producing unfamiliar components, a shipyard able to integrate them into a vessel, and a river on which the whole system could be tested. The lesson of Turbinia is not simply that Britain can invent extraordinary things. It is that invention becomes industrial power only when a country retains the people, places, and productive capability to build it. We still have those places, and we still have those people. Now we need to build around them. I'm Rob Gilbert. This is how we build Britain. Thank you.