While 2021 will hardly be easy for the UK’s manufacturers, there is room for optimism, even with many of the details over Brexit remaining unsettled. The key date is January 1, the end of the transition arrangements for the country’s slow and inglorious departure from the European Union.

A pioneering initiative to make reusable hospital gowns in UK factories has been revived, boosting hopes that the government will support measures to source more personal protective equipment (PPE) for Covid-19 domestically and improve its sustainability.

With Brexit-related uncertainty overshadowing the UK economy, would you bet your company’s future on a new product area in one of the world’s most technologically demanding industries? That’s what Andrew Churchill (pictured above) did with his family-owned aerospace business – and the gamble seems to be working.

Churchill is executive chairman of JJ Churchill, based near Leicester. It makes key parts for jet engines and is an important supplier to Rolls-Royce, the big British aerospace manufacturer.

Since 2016, JJ Churchill has invested £10m in its growth programme. It plans to double annual sales over the next two years, on the back of orders stretching to 2029 of £210m, mainly from Rolls-Royce and Safran, the French aero-engine maker. [Note this article was originally published in 2019.]

Central to Churchill’s plans is building on the technical prowess of his company’s 160 employees, with an emphasis on recruiting young people.

The company has 10 apprentices, mainly in their 20s, and aims to take  on five each year. Churchill is an adviser or governor of three schools in the Midlands and is on the steering board of the 5 Per Cent Club, a group of UK companies promoting apprenticeships.

“Giving teachers and school pupils an accurate view of UK manufacturing is vital if companies such as ours are to recruit the workforce we will need for the next 20 years,” he says.

If the plans work, Churchill thinks that by 2022 the company could employ 200, up from 90 a decade ago.

The 50-year-old says his company is a good example of a UK “niche” manufacturer, “involving complexities of tolerances, materials or geometries”. He adds: “The businesses aren’t necessarily the cheapest. But they compensate by being innovative and offering superlative service.”

JJ Churchill’s most important customer – Rolls-Royce – plays a crucial role in UK manufacturing. Besides employing more than 20,000 people in Britain, the company has roughly 2,300 UK suppliers. It buys parts and services from them worth some £2.3bn annually – about a third of its global purchase bill.

Rolls-Royce – which has a reputation for tight management control and rarely discusses its suppliers either in Britain or elsewhere – has recognised JJ Churchill with a series of technology awards. The company was set up in 1937 by Andrew Churchill’s grandfather. It is among a small number of preferred suppliers for several of Rolls-Royce’s families of small engines that power corporate jets.

JJ Churchill is playing a leading role in remedial work on compressor blades for Rolls-Royce’s Trent 1000 engines (pictured below)  that power the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Rolls-Royce discovered in 2018 that some of the blades on these engines were wearing quicker than had been anticipated.

Due to the mishaps with the Trent 1000, Rolls-Royce faces a £1.6bn bill to pay for the remedial programme (including compensation to affected airlines) in the four years to 2021. The problems have grounded dozens of the aircraft and annoyed airlines such as BA and Virgin that operate the Dreamliner.

In an update in August 2019, Warren East, Rolls-Royce’s chief executive, said the engine issue was still “causing a number of our customers significant disruption”.

Apart from JJ Churchill, a handful of other companies – only one of which is also based in Europe – are working on the programme to produce a new higher-durability form of the compressor blades that power the Trent 1000. The UK company’s work on this programme is a strong indicator of its technological prowess – even though it provides only a modest amount of revenue.

JJ Churchill’s key niche is making metal blades for jet engines. These fit into the compressor or turbine of a jet engine and play a central role in providing thrust for the aircraft.

The blades operate under immense stress. Each can be just a few centimetres long. Yet they withstand forces equivalent to a weight of about 10 tonnes (equivalent to two adult elephants) hanging off them.

In 2016 JJ Churchill decided to stop making compressor blades for aircraft engines (and other types of gas turbine, for example for power generation) and concentrate solely on turbine blades for aerospace.

“We needed to move up the ‘technology curve’,” says Churchill. “Compressor blades are more straightforward to manufacture and at greater risk of becoming commoditised. Though challenging and risky, from a strategic perspective, turbine blades seemed the way to go.”

Behind the strategy lie the differences between the two types of blade. Compressor blades “squeeze” air to increase its pressure. The air is then mixed with fuel and ignited, with the resulting hot gases powering the engine’s turbine blades. These are generally smaller than compressor blades but must withstand greater stresses and extremes of temperature.

As a result, turbine blades have more exacting specifications. The £1,000 cost of a typical turbine blade could be twice that of a comparable compressor blade.

Because they involve more technical challenges, fewer manufacturers globally compete in the market for turbine blades, compared with compressor blades.

“Once we decided on this route it meant we had to invest a lot in new machines to make the higher specification blades. We felt that the company had the technological capability to make a success of the move and it would eventually lead to new markets and higher sales,” says Churchill.

According to Churchill’s plans, his company’s forecast sales this year of some £29m should rise to about £60m in 2021/22, with two thirds of the total coming from turbine blades, up from zero three years ago.

The work JJ Churchill is doing on the Trent 1000 engines’ compressor blades to some degree diverts the company from its new focus on turbine blades. But the company sees it as a highly worthwhile exercise not least because it demonstrates a high level of capability for a medium-sized company. In this project, Rolls-Royce’s engineers designed the new blades but left JJ Churchill to decide how to make them.

The manufacturing process involves machining high-strength pieces, made from titanium-based alloys, with accuracy of up to 6 micrometres. “Our job was to work out how to make the blades efficiently and ensure they operate as designed,” says Churchill.

This article appeared in Made Here Now on August 19 2019

Britain has abandoned a £75m plan to make vital items of reusable protective clothing to guard against a second wave of Covid-19, denting hopes of concerted government action to promote sustainable manufacturing, and triggering dismay among industry observers. [This article first appeared in Made Here Now.] The millions of protective gowns for health workers would have come from UK factories and could have been reused up 100 times each.

Made Here Now Comment  by Peter Marsh: Need for a sager stance on health hardware

The demise of an imaginative proposal to reset the UK’s approach to procuring personal protective equipment for health and care workers – based on reusability and domestic production – is extremely regrettable. It is tempting to regard this as simply another example of the government’s flawed decision-making during the pandemic.

But the impulse simply to attack ministers and officials should be resisted. The project’s termination is a sorry episode. Yet it highlights key issues about the UK’s approach to public procurement, especially of health equipment. Understanding what went wrong could help Britain in the future, especially in an era where the threat of dangerous viral diseases is much greater.It is impossible to overlook the government’s ham-fisted handling of the discussions.

Having assembled an impressive range of people from textiles manufacturing and associated fields, officials were given a range of ideas on how a “reusable gowns project” might have worked. After lengthy conversations plus much work by textiles companies in testing fabric and producing samples, officials closed the discussions on the basis that the garments were no longer needed.

Despite this, these discussions have brought into sharper focus several key issues about the UK’s approach public procurement. Lessons can and should be learned.Britain has placed too much reliance both on overseas producers, and on buying PPE such as gowns and masks on a “just in time” basis and holding minimum stocks. Particularly in the early days of the crisis, these factors left Britain woefully short of vital equipment.

As a result, Britain was left in a weak position during the scramble to secure supplies from abroad. There are suspicions that suppliers and distributors – in the UK and overseas – capitalised on its weakness, forcing the UK authorities to overpay for essential supplies. The £15bn allocated by the Treasury for PPE during the pandemic suggests as much.Britain’s focus on single-use PPE also looks increasingly out of step with 21st-century thinking on sustainability.

In the past decade, the National Health Service has moved firmly away from reusable health equipment and towards items such as disposable gowns. Key factors have been the availability of such products at low prices from manufacturers in China, plus financial pressures placed on the UK health system by government austerity. The true costs of such hardware – especially considering the hidden impact of environmental degradation – have rarely been considered.

It seems obvious that it is worth paying more for an item that can be used dozens of times than for one discarded after seeing service just once. Yet this is a rubric that the Department of Health and Social Care and the Treasury – responsible for NHS funding – seem not to prioritise. It is time they did.All this said, the industry/government conversation about gowns shows how a dialogue between different groups can lead – potentially at least – to a viable project.

The involvement of commercial laundry companies was especially important. Their message was that – contrary to what many believed – Britain has plenty of capacity and the expertise to build an effective 21st-century system based on reusable hospital clothing. Instead of regarding the attempt to do so by the Cabinet Office and business as a historical footnote, the government should use it as the basis for a renewed drive to put Britain’s system of PPE procurement on a secure and sensible footing.

The article appeared in Made Here Now in 2020

While the coronavirus crisis has dealt a hammer blow to many manufacturers, for Joe McBride it has brought an opportunity. After switching much of his textile production from pillows and related household goods to face masks, his company has seen a huge spike in orders and is working flat-out to meet demand. [This article appeared first in May 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when face masks suddenly became close to essential for many people.]

McBride – along with the entire textiles industry in the UK –  has withstood relentless pressure. But he believes the sector has a future. In his company’s case he says:  “We have the capacity to make 1,200 masks a day but to match the demand we’d need to make five times more. If I could find more sewing machinists, I’d hire them immediately.” In recent weeks he has added six people to his workforce, which numbers 41.

The spurt in output has come after a long battle by the 52-year-old McBride – helped in recent years by co-director Joanna Mulawka – to establish a footing in a UK textiles industry that over the past 25 years has been hard hit by the rapid rise of competitors from countries such as China.

McBride and Mulawka are pictured above at the company’s factory in Burnley, near Manchester. (While this photo was taken in 2024, other pictures here of inside the plant were taken in 2020 by Asadour Guzelian.)

Even though Lancashire Textiles  is decidedly low-tech, McBride has targeted the quality end of the industry while embracing the internet rather than conventional retail outlets as his main sales channel. The story underlines how tenacity, imagination and strategic thinking can lead to success in even the most unpromising industrial sectors.

A key influence has been Mulawka, a 34-year-old graduate in English and American literature from Poland who joined the company in 2012 as a part-time administrator and is now in charge of finance and accounting.

McBride says: “If I’d not found Joanna, I’d have struggled. While I can do practical things, accounts and administration are a blind spot. Joanna’s got an amazing ability to learn. She is key to the business having a future.”

Wajid Khan, Burnley’s deputy mayor, says: “It’s great to see a local business that’s adapted to difficult circumstances and is contributing to the economy and employment.” While Lancashire Textiles’ job count does not sound high, Keith Prytharch, general manager at British Velvets, another Burnley textiles business, says: “Given the problems the industry has faced, if you’re employing more than 40 people you’ve got a good business.”

After leaving school at 15 with no qualifications and starting out as a factory labourer, McBride says a “life changer” was when Smith & Nephew – the industrial group for which he worked in the 1980s – sent him on a one- year part-time course to learn about cotton processes such as carding and spinning. “I’d always been mechanically minded. The course opened my eyes to acquiring knowledge. It made me think I could make a future in textiles.”

After a range of jobs, McBride started Lancashire Textiles in 2001 in a disused mill in Burnley, built in the 1890s when the town was at the heart of Lancashire’s thriving cotton industry.

While the mill would look ordinary to most people, Mulawka says it is a “beautiful, amazing place”. She adds: “Joe and his company have given me a passion for making things and a belief that the concept of ‘Made in Britain’ is viable. In my earlier years I had been looking for something to put my heart and soul into and I ’ve found it here.”

It was Mulawka – who became a director in 2015 and now owns 10pc of the company with McBride owning the rest – who came up with the idea of making masks.

This was in March 2020, before the real impact of Covid-19 became apparent to most British people. At the time, unlike many people in eastern Europe and Asia, few in Britain thought wearing cloth-based masks in the street or while shopping was a useful way to limit their risk of exposure to the virus.

“After talking to people in Poland, Joanna suggested we started making masks as there seemed a good chance people would want to buy them here as well,” McBride says.

“At first I wasn’t keen. But then we spoke to one of our machinists and she came up with the design. We started making the products, people seemed to like them and now we’re inundated with orders.”

The masks – made from two layers of fabric – are of a type that have become more popular in the UK as concerns have mounted about the escalating effects of the pandemic, even though they are far from the sophistication needed for hospital workers.

Lancashire Textiles sells its masks online at £9.99 each, with discounts available on some styles. Out of every sale of the main product, £1 is given to the National Health Service.

“I aim to make a profit of about £1 per mask which I don’t think is excessive,” McBride says. “My main aim in doing this is to keep my factory going, employ people and to make products that people find useful.”

As a result of the foray into masks, plus brisk demand in other product lines, Lancashire Textiles’ 2020 sales could reach about £7m, as opposed to the £4m or so McBride envisaged at the start of the year. “I’m struggling to cope [with demand],” he says.

McBride has resisted the temptation to push quality and prices downwards, arguing that aiming at higher quality is the best long-term strategy. All the pillows, cushions and related items the company makes use a special Taiwanese-made fibre – conjugate hollow fibre polyester – for the internal “fill” to provide extra springiness.

“The fibre costs up to twice as much as what’s used by competitors,” McBride says. “While this increases our prices, the extra quality gives us a better market position.”

Growing internet sales have also been vital to the company’s success. Originally, Lancashire Textiles relied on mail-order companies and retailers for most of its revenues. But by 2019 the internet was responsible for 90 per cent of order volumes, roughly half of these coming via Amazon.

“If we didn’t have the internet I doubt if we’d be in business,” McBride says. “It gives us a direct contact with consumers and allows us to set prices.” But the policy comes with risks. “If you get a bad [online] review and fail to do anything about it you can be in trouble.”

McBride knows many challenges lie ahead, not least keeping his workforce fit and healthy at a time when many are worried about their own and their families’ well-being. He believes, however, that he has shown “textiles manufacturing in the UK can be viable – if you approach it in the right way”.

The photo shows the author at the factory.

Mask confusion clouds Covid-19 response

 Lancashire Textiles’ move into masks comes amidst a prolonged debate about the effectiveness of protective equipment for coronavirus, both for ordinary people and key workers in hospitals and care homes.

The basic cloth masks made the Burnley company are increasingly being used by people when going shopping or walking in the street.

While medical staff rely on high-quality protective masks, more people are turning to basic versions when walking in the street or going shopping

That is despite government advice that masks are unnecessary and may even be damaging in that they encourage people to believe they have greater protection than is the case and so take more risks.

The UK government’s stance follows the guidance of World Health Organisation, which says wearing rudimentary masks has little impact in reducing exposure to the pathogen.

However, the mayors of London and Liverpool have both called for simple non-medical masks to be made obligatory in public spaces, in line with strict regulations in countries including Austria, Poland, and Czech Republic.

There are three broad types of masks that people use in efforts to slow the spread of the virus.

The most basic type, such as those sold by Lancashire Textiles, are regarded as having only a limited effect in stopping the person wearing them from inhaling the virus or droplets containing it. There is no protection for the eyes – which is a route for the pathogen to enter the body.

However even extremely simple masks – such as an old tee shirt folded into sections – can offer a partial barrier to stop people who are carrying the virus, perhaps unwittingly, from breathing it out.

As a result, rudimentary masks have been touted by some experts as a worthwhile investment for whole populations, not so much to protect the wearer as to safeguard others with whom they may come into contact.

At the next level of sophistication are surgical masks, which are closer-fitting and made from better materials. These are designed to be used by medical staff, often in conjunction with other protective gear such as visors and specialised water-repellent gowns.

The third type are respirator masks, which are more sturdily designed and contain filters to prevent tiny particles from entering a person’s respiratory system.

Two of the most common respirator masks are N-95 masks and N-99 masks, which, when used correctly, prevent 95 percent and 99 percent, respectively, of airborne particles from entering a person’s mouth or nose.

Such masks require careful fitting, if they are to work properly, and are generally reserved for medical staff and others in extremely exposed environments, such as when treating Covid-19 patients in intensive care units.

The two more sophisticated types of mask have been the subject of headlines concerning shortages of protective equipment for health and social care workers.

These shortages are made more acute by the fact that very few of these high-spec masks are made in the UK, so huge international demand has limited the supplies available.

In contrast, basic cloth masks should be easy to produce for anyone with a sewing machine. However, ready-made versions are also in short supply, at least in Britain, which explains the rush of orders that Lancashire Textiles has received.

The article appeared in Made Here Now on May 1 2020.

A team of UK engineers is working on an innovative mask that uses principles borrowed from diving helmets to shield wearers from the devastating impact of the coronavirus. [The article first appeared in Made Here Now.]  The new hood-based mask could be manufactured in UK factories and made available to frontline medical staff as well as workers in key areas including care homes, supermarkets and factories making health-related products.

The development comes as Britain is battling to increase its stocks of protective equipment for key workers against a background of what appear to be severe shortages especially in the health and care sectors.

Mike Bradley of Greenwich University demonstrates a prototype of his group’s protective hood.

John Colvin, professor of viral epidemiology of the Natural Resources Institute at Greenwich University in London, said he “could not overstate the potential importance” of the device in slowing the impact of the disease. Colvin is among the directors of Worksafe Design, a company set up by the group to push the project to a commercial stage.

Consisting of a plastic hood enveloping the head fed with filtered air driven by fans, the device is being developed by a team of industry specialists coordinated by Mike Bradley, professor of particle technology at Greenwich and another Worksafe Design director.

Prof Neil Mortenson, a vice president at the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “From what I can see of [the Greenwich hood] it could help meet an urgent need for new equipment, especially if could be made available quickly using UK suppliers, and on the assumption it passed necessary tests.”

Kate Hills of Make It British, a manufacturing lobbying group, said; “This is the sort of opportunity Britain should be pursuing vigorously to use UK innovation to address the crisis.”

The UK arm of Japanese carmaker Toyota is among several companies evaluating how they might help the project move towards volume production.

Toyota has yet to decide how much assistance it could give. Some of its engineers are discussing the ideas behind the project with the Greenwich team.

Insufficient Poor protection for health workers may be among the factors behind Britain’s slow progress in checking Covid-19.

The key to the device is that it is designed to protect the wearer from threats in his or her immediate surroundings, in this case the deadly virus. This is the opposite approach to most protective gear that health workers use, which mainly protects patients from pathogens carried by medical staff.

The shortages of adequate protective equipment are thought to be a factor behind both the rapid spread of Covid-19 and its devastating economic consequences as many areas of industry and commerce shut down.

The key field of caring for old and vulnerable people in residential homes and in their own properties is another exposed sector.

Kevin Lewis, chief executive of Caremark, a care agency whose staff of 6,000 look after 7,000 people at home, said: “We do not have the masks we need to protect either our care workers or our clients, many of whom are in the high risk category. The current situation is dire and consequently I would be delighted to help support this project.”

Staff and old people in care homes are among the high-risk groups.

Shipments could go also to poor nations that experts fear could soon face immense threats due to the virus.

The World Health Organisation warned in early March that industry and governments needed to increase manufacturing of suitable masks by 40 per cent to meet rising global demand.

Up to April 13, 1.9m people had been reported as infected by the coronavirus, of whom 120,567 have died. The number of untested individuals carrying the highly contagious pathogen is thought to be much higher. The disease could cause 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US, the country that has been worst affected so far.

On April 13, Britain had 88,621 reported cases and 11,329 deaths, which around mid-April were rising at about 10 per cent a day.

The design of the new units is based on the experiences of Prof Bradley and other members of his team in working with big companies in sectors such as nuclear power and chemicals. Many of these workers use protective equipment made by companies such as Sweden’s Esab and 3M of the US to minimize exposure to radiation or dangerous materials.

“The protective systems used in industry work effectively but are too expensive and cumbersome for ordinary workers,” says Prof Bradley, head of the Wolfson Centre for Bulk Solids Handling Technology at Greenwich University. “We have used the same ideas but adapted them to make a simpler but equally effective system that can be made for far less money.”

The units use disposable filters, housed in a plastic case worn on a belt, which does the job of screening out particles including viruses and the moisture droplets that carry them. Other parts of the design including hoses and the hoods themselves would be disposable while the casing would need to be decontaminated regularly with bleach or common disinfectants.

Peter Slee-Smith, director of Cambridgeshire-based Gatehouse Design and one of the engineers working with Bradley, said the device was “brilliantly simple and effective”. He is convinced it can be adapted for mass production with little difficulty. Jack Gover of Print My Part, a manufacturer of plastic components, said: “The manufacturing side of [the device] looks very credible. By utilising ‘off-the-shelf’ components where possible, we can keep the customised and more costly parts to a minimum.”

A key part of the development would be to ensure the system complies with safety standards, specifically over air flow and electrical compliance, and can be used effectively in hospitals. Charles Williams, managing director of Promtek, a systems engineering company in Stoke-on-Trent, who is also part of the Greenwich team, said that while he was sure the concepts behind the unit were sound, he and other engineers in the group were also addressing vital issues linked to “safety, practicality and usability”.

Both Slee-Smith and Williams are directors of Worksafe Design. Other directors include Isabeau Walker, a consultant anaesthetist at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and Adrian Sims, managing director of Vent-Tech, a specialist in industrial ventilation based in Bristol.

Another important part of the project is to bring on board companies in the textile industry who would produce the disposable hoods. Jenny Holloway, managing director of Fashion Enter, a textiles company in London which is making large quantities of hospital gowns for use in the crisis, said: “This seems like a massive opportunity and we’d be ready to play a part, assuming we had the capacity.”

Joe McBride of Lancashire Textiles, a sewing specialist based in Burnley that is also making conventional masks, was happy to look at how his company could get involved.

The Greenwich device could be made in the UK to supplement protective equipment produced mainly in other countries

News of the development comes amid a major UK effort to produce hospital ventilators, vital machines for treating patients with respiratory diseases such as that caused by the coronavirus.

While UK hospitals have access to about 8,000 of these machines, it is thought they will need around 18,000 in the next few weeks. Several groups of British manufacturers are gearing up to make them including Dyson, BAE Systems, Meggitt, JCB, Renishaw and The Technology Partnership (TTP) – the last three companies all being current sponsors of Made Here Now.

In addition, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, an industry /government technology group and another Made Here Now sponsor, is playing a key role in the effort. The catapult is co-ordinating a large consortium of manufacturers. Dick Elsy, the organisation’s chief executive, said he had fielded “hundreds of calls” from engineering companies wanting take part.

A test of government commitment: comment from Peter Marsh

While “re-shoring” has become a hot topic, few manufacturers have done as much to make it a reality as David Nieper, a mid-sized clothing manufacturer based in the Midlands. The number of garment manufacturing jobs in the UK has fallen by 90 percent since 1980, pushing the country far down the world league table of textiles producers. [This article initially appeared in 2020.]

Undeterred, David Nieper is investing in local manufacturing, backed up by initiatives in technology, training, design and environmentally sustainable production. A new £4.5m fabric printing unit at the company’s HQ gives it a “massive opportunity to be more flexible and less wasteful” says Christopher Nieper, managing director.

Committed to encouraging more young people to consider careers in textiles, Nieper’s business has built links with local primary schools. It welcomes children to its main factory in Alfreton, Derbyshire,  where they can learn about the rudiments of the industry (see the photo above).

The company has set up its own training centre and has taken over the running of a local secondary school, while it has also become a standard bearer for “green” manufacturing through new processes and more sustainable energy sources.

According to a report by ecological experts at Nottingham University, which the family-owned David Nieper commissioned, emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the company’s domestic production processes are 40-60 percent lower than if the same clothes had been made in countries such as China, Bangladesh or Turkey.

“Consumers are much more aware today of the environmental cost of fashion, and with Brexit too, now is the time to re-shore production,” says Christopher Nieper, pictured below. He adds that David Nieper has become “more agile and more profitable by staying and investing in the UK”.

David Nieper is among a handful of companies that have chosen to buck the trend that says the best way to sell clothing in developed markets is to import from plants in cheaper regions such as Asia.

Others include Burberry, the fashion brand with its main UK plant in Yorkshire; Derbyshire-based John Smedley; Johnstons of Elgin, which runs two factories in Scotland; and Fashion-Enter which is in London.

In the past decade David Nieper has spent about £8m on new production units at its Alfreton HQ where the company was founded in 1961 by Christopher Nieper’s father, David. Its annual sales are running at about £18m and it employs just over 300 people. Other photos here were shot in its main plant.

The newest investment is a £4.5m fabric printing unit, opened in autumn 2019. This gives the business increased flexibility to introduce new designs in its market – premium women’s clothing – and respond faster to changes in demand.

As part of a commitment to education and skills David Nieper has over five years trained in its apprentice centre 85 mainly young people – most of them have stayed with the company.

The company has admirers both locally and further afield. Councillor Steve Marshall-Clarke, a member of Derbyshire county council and who lives in Alfreton, credits it with “bucking the trend in UK manufacturing”. He says it “adds up to a significant local force in jobs and training”.

Lise Edwards-Warrener, head of UK manufacturing at Burberry, says David Nieper has done a “superb job”. Kate Hills, founder of the textiles trade group Make it British says: “David Nieper is a fantastic example of how garment making in the UK is viable and sustainable and Christopher is a visionary of the industry.”

As well as its original sewing factory, David Nieper has units for knitting, document printing (creating 10m catalogues a year) and fabric cutting. Its new unit creates printed fabrics for garments such as dresses and swimwear.

Christopher Nieper says: “Sadly, most of the textile ecosystem in Britain has disappeared, so we’ve brought much of our supply chain in-house. There is so much waste and inefficiency in supply chains. [In contrast] when it’s all under one roof we make the right quantity of the right components at the right time.”

The fabric printing unit illustrates this. “In the past if we wanted to create a new fabric print for a dress, we might have to order our supplier’s minimum run of, say 500 metres and then wait several weeks for the order to arrive,” Nieper says.

“With the in-house plant we can print the exact quantity we need and without waiting. The new factory gives us a massive opportunity to make ourselves more flexible and less wasteful. We can increase the number of prints we offer, without the risk of left-over stock.”

Throughout the business the emphasis is on keeping lead times as short as possible to enable the company to react quickly to changes in the market. As part of this process, David Nieper stopped selling via retailers several years ago, instead selling direct to consumers online or via catalogues. “Being closer to the end customer brings multiple benefits, [including] better informed designs, greater customer loyalty and higher margins,” Nieper says.

The company runs its own apprentice centre, training mainly young people in sewing – a traditional UK strength where skills are now in short supply. Of the 85 who have been through the centre since it opened five years ago, nearly all are still with the company.

Faced with a severely diminished textiles supply chain in the UK, the company has sought to replace it with in-house production.

“The average age of our staff is over 50 and [many] will retire soon,” says Nieper. “As the [clothing] sector has largely disappeared from Britain’s shores, so have the skills. So, we either have to go offshore ourselves, or start all over again with young people. If we want to ensure there is a future for British textile production, we need to recruit and train and step up efforts to enthuse young people.”

The initiative over the local school – now named the David Nieper Academy – is not directly related to textiles but based on giving children “a rounded education in all subjects so they are equipped for any career route of their choice”, Nieper says. The school is run by an educational trust.

Nieper hopes that at least some of those leaving the school will end up working at his company – or in other local manufacturing businesses. “There is a view that young people don’t aspire to work in manufacturing, [but] this isn’t strictly true. It’s all about people and knowledge of careers. We offer young people [from schools in the region] the opportunity to visit our operations and we hope that at least some will think we could be a good place to work.”

Cutting a dash – the Midlands clothes maker aims its garments at an upmarket niche in women’s fashion.

In other education activity, David Nieper organises events at nearby primary schools, aimed at introducing young children to concepts of design and production. For instance, the company runs an annual “fashion for free” competition in which children create clothes using recycled materials they find around their home or school.

The company also works with the University of Derby and Chesterfield College, nearby educational establishments, to support fashion and textiles students.

On the issue of sustainability, while the Nottingham report scores David Nieper’s processes highly in terms of energy use, it also points out that garment production accounts for only a small proportion of the overall “carbon footprint” of most items of clothing. Much bigger percentages come from the manufacture of the materials used in the garments, including yarn and fabric, with these operations mainly happening far from the UK, in places over which David Nieper and other materials purchasers have little control.

Nieper says the study’s findings are a reminder of how far the company still has to go with its sustainability efforts. This has spurred it to organise new projects including increasing its use of solar energy and heat recovery units and moving to more energy-efficient production processes. The company’s ambition in the next few years, says Christopher Nieper, is to become a prime “exemplar of eco-friendly production”.

 The article was published in Made Here Now on February 10 2020.

The technology behind the most potent weapon systems ever devised could help the world move to low-carbon energy production, say the scientists and engineers behind one of the UK’s most innovative businesses.

Tokamak Energy is developing small fusion reactors for producing energy, crucially without the use of fossil fuels implicated in climate change. The science and technology challenges are among the most difficult faced by product developers in any industry.

Meanwhile the UK government has delivered a boost to fusion developments by announcing two big projects, including committing £220m to the design of a fusion power station – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production– that could be ready by around 2040. [This article initially appeared in 2019.]

Indicating confidence that the momentum behind fusion power is accelerating, Tokamak Energy has set out plans to triple employment to 200 by 2022. “We will need more experienced engineers and scientists,” says David Kingham, Tokamak Energy’s executive vice-chairman. “But we will also be offering opportunities to younger technically qualified people who want to get involved in a new industry working at the frontier of new engineering applications.” Kingham is in the picture above, with students the plant on work placements.

Tokamak Energy also illustrates ways in which manufacturers and technology developers can contribute to reducing carbon emissions. The manufacturing dimension to combating climate change – by finding alternative ways to make products or generate and transfer energy – will feature in stories in Made Here Now in coming months.

The technology being developed in all fusion programmes is based on the ideas behind hydrogen bombs. Detonated in tests but never used in warfare, these weapons are reckoned to be at least 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that devastated two Japanese cities at the end of the second world war

Tokamak Energy’s Melanie Windridge inspects a prototype of the company’s fusion reactors

Fusion is also the process that powers the Sun and other faraway stars. Ultimately it is responsible for human evolution and for all the energy consumed on Earth.

Tokamak Energy thinks its “compact spherical tokamaks” – each the size of a large room – will be ready for full operation by the 2030s. They would be probably be manufactured in several locations spread globally and sell for close to £1bn.

Mark White of UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, a venture capital company that has invested in Tokamak Energy, says: “I know there will be setbacks but I genuinely think that if anyone can do it [produce working fusion rectors by the 2030s] then they can.”

Based near Oxford, Tokamak Energy employs 65 people and is backed by £50m in investments. It aims to build on knowledge created from some of the world’s big publicly funded programmes in fusion power – such as the Joint European Tokamak in the UK, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) in France and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the US.

Tokamak Energy and its commercial rivals in other countries believe that their approach – based on much smaller reactors than most of those under development in the state sector and using key technical advances especially in magnet technology – could be the way to deliver fusion power relatively soon.

Other companies developing compact tokamaks include Commonwealth Fusion Systems and TAE Technologies in the US and General Fusion in Canada. Two small UK start-ups are Pulsar Fusion and First Light Fusion.

Above: A close-up of part of the complex structure needed to hold in place plasma at a temperature of 150m deg C.

Kingham says: “While the publicly funded research programmes are important in creating much of the scientific basis for what we do, private initiatives are needed to ensure that we move ahead [in fusion] quickly. The extent of climate change means we don’t have the luxury to wait [for fusion power] – we will need it a lot sooner.”

Fusion power is based on forcing atoms such as hydrogen, held as a hot plasma, to combine, which releases large amounts of energy. The technologies Tokamak Energy is tackling include building the powerful superconducting magnets used to contain the plasma.

The plasma will be held at 150m deg C, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun, and will consist of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. While deuterium is easy to isolate from seawater, making large quantities of tritium is trickier.

It is done by bombarding lithium metal with neutrons using devices called “lithium blankets”, which would be embedded on the walls of working reactors. The process is “possible but difficult”, Kingham says.

An operating tokamak will require 20m amps – an amount of current some 100,000 times higher than that drawn by a typical UK household – operating continuously at a very low voltage. Attaining these high currents requires complex electrical engineering.

“We have a room full of 30 racks of high-tech supercapacitors required to discharge such large amounts of electricity in a short spurt,” Kingham says. So far, the company has cranked up its equipment to deliver 3m amps in short spurts.

The work required is expensive. Tokamak Energy’s research and development spending was £9m in 2017. It rose to £15m the year after and in 2019 it is likely to be almost £20m.

Over the next few years Tokamak Energy will need additional investment of “several hundred millions”, says Kingham. “We don’t anticipate too many problems in raising the necessary money. We have been making good progress and we have had a lot of interest.”

The current prototype system at Tokamak Energy is the ST40, a four-metre-tall steel vessel filled with a hot plasma of hydrogen contained in a powerful magnetic field. The plasma temperature reached 15m deg C in 2018. The company plans to attain 100m deg in 2020.

The next engineering model will be the ST-F1, which Tokamak Energy hopes to build in 2025. At about 10m tall and 10m in diameter, ST-F1 will be considerably bigger than the current machine – and only slightly smaller than what the company hopes will be the working machines.

Assuming the plans work out the final versions of the reactors that Tokamak Energy will build will produce roughly 150MW of electricity, about the tenth of the output of a conventional large gas-fired power station.

Exacting technologies hold the key to making fusion power work

Every second deep inside the sun hundreds of millions of tonnes of hydrogen combine to make energy, some of which reaches Earth and sustain lives. It all sounds so simple – doing the same thing in machines made by humans is a lot harder.

If the ideas being worked on by Tokamak Energy can be made to work, then success in developing several key technologies will a key factor. Among the areas under development at the company are superconducting magnets, digital power control, computerised modelling and 3D printing – which will be used to make key components in working fusion systems in later stages of the company’s developments. A company prototype is pictured above.

John Bromley of Legal & General Capital, an investment arm of the big financial group and a Tokamak Energy investor, believes the company is ahead of others in the same field “in terms of its technological knowhow” and is also moving ahead in developing the supply chains that would be needed for manufacturing.

Prof David Ruzic, director of the Center for Plasma Material Interactions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has studied Tokamak Energy’s technology programmes and has a research contract with the company. He says that in combining several different technologies, Tokomak Energy has found the “best approach” to making fusion power work.

Fusion involves pushing together atoms that have an immense internal resistance to combining. As a result formidable amounts of energy are needed to start the procedure. It’s the opposite process to fission – the technology for splitting atoms that formed the basis for the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, causing more than 200,000 deaths.

The company’s technical staff liaise with counterparts working on other fusion reactors. Pictured here is part of the interior of the government-funded Joint European Torus fusion reactor, under development in Oxfordshire

Nuclear fission – still hard to make work but easier than fusion – is the technology used in conventional nuclear reactors to produce energy.

Probably the most important technology in Tokamak Energy’s fusion power development concerns superconducting magnets. Fusion reactors required incredibly hot plasma, which is extremely diffuse and fragile – a million times less dense than air.

To keep the plasma from being contaminated and cooled by contact with material surfaces, it must be confined in a powerful magnetic field.

Creating the strong magnetic fields that are required is no easy matter. The answer, according to Tokamak Energy – and some of its competitors – lies in “high-temperature” superconducting magnets. Such magnets can provide the high currents needed for ultra-strong magnetic fields and require less energy than more conventional “low-temperature” superconducting magnets.

The difference between high and low temperature – in this context – is critical. A superconductor is a material with zero electrical resistance when it is extremely cold, so it doesn’t heat up when current flows through.

Conventional superconductors are cooled by liquid helium to minus 269 deg C (4 deg K). These forms of superconductors are used in ordinary superconducting magnets – hence the term low-temperature magnets. High-temperature superconducting magnets are based on materials that become superconducting at around the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, minus 196 deg C (77 deg K). While still cold, this is appreciably warmer than for the magnets’ low-temperature counterparts.

High-temperature superconducting magnets can generate a magnetic field of up to 40 Tesla, 20 times stronger than the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) systems in hospital scanners.

For its reactors, Tokamak Energy is working on high-temperature superconducting magnets that will deliver 20-25 Tesla.

A key factor has been the availability of skills in the Abingdon/Oxford area around where Tokamak Energy is based. “The fact that this area is one of the world’s leading clusters for superconducting magnets has been hugely helpful,” says David Kingham, executive-vice chairman at the company.

Participants in the cluster include publicly funded research operations such as Oxford University Materials Department and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory as well as companies such as Oxford Instruments and Siemens Magnet Technology. The Joint European Torus international fusion project is also located close by.

Among the technical challenges are producing laser-based systems for monitoring the condition of the plasma inside fusion reactors. The photo shows a researcher working on a laser system for the Joint European Torus

The key material used in the superconducting magnets being developed at Tokamak Energy is rare-earth barium copper oxide, a family of chemicals with special properties. Superconductors based on these compounds can sustain stronger magnetic fields than those that use other superconductor materials. The materials are delivered to Tokamak Energy as thin tapes, each containing just one micrometre (billionth of a metre) of the high-temperature superconductor within the tape.

Kingham says: “We are using tape from four of the 10 manufacturers worldwide that can make it. The quality is already good enough for our purposes, but the manufacturing volumes need to increase, and the cost needs to come down.”

For the time being, Tokamak Energy is validating its engineering using copper magnets – but in later prototypes it will need to use high-temperature superconducting magnets capable of stronger fields. Kingham says the company’s work on superconducting magnets has gone “better than expected” and is two years ahead of schedule.

In other developments, to ensure the plasma inside Tokamak Energy’s machine is free from contaminants it must be held in a near perfect vacuum. In practice this works out at one hundred billionth of normal atmospheric pressure – the level of vacuum experienced deep in outer space.

The “superfuels” that will power a new generation of reactors

Handling tritium – an exotic gas that is highly difficult to make – is an essential part of creating energy from super-hot plasma. Pictured here is Eva Belonohy a plasma containment expert working on the international Joint European Torus.

For fusion reactors to work they will need a reliable supply of an exotic gas that is unusually hard to make and which is about 2,000 times more expensive than gold.

Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen that is very rare in nature. When it is combined with deuterium – another hydrogen isotope- massive amounts of energy can be generated, as in hydrogen bombs.

Under Tokamak Energy’s plans, the first supplies of deuterium and tritium will be introduced to the company’s prototype machines in a few years’ time. Up to then, the systems will be put through their paces without any of these gases in place.

Since the amount of energy locked inside hydrogen is 10m times greater than fossil fuels, the company believes that one of its fully developed 150MW machines will run with only small amounts of fuel – about 10kg of deuterium and 15 kg of tritium a year.

If all goes to plan, Tokamak Energy’s plasma vessels will eventually be filled with gases that at current market prices cost up to £100,000 a gram. To put this into perspective, a conventional power station fired by coal would require 250,000 to 400,000 tonnes of fuel to provide the equivalent amount of energy.

Deuterium is relatively abundant – about one in 6,000 of the hydrogen atoms in seawater is deuterium. Extracting it is relatively straightforward. The gas is used as an isotopic marker in research and in various processes in the chemicals sector.

Tritium on the other hand presents huge challenges. The total world inventory is thought to be no more than 40kg, much of this associated with secret military programmes.

So a fusion reactor will need to “breed” its own tritium fuel from lithium. The idea is that a neutron will hit a lithium nucleus in a “blanket” around the tokamak – and produce tritium in situ.

While deuterium is cheap, the “market price” of tritium costs is close to £100,000 a gram, making it one of the world’s most expensive materials. The price would probably fall considerably if scientists worked out how to make it in volume.

State funds provide a boost to fusion developments

The UK government has delivered a sizeable fillip to fusion power with the announcement of two new projects that will involve collaboration with scientists and engineers from academic research and industry.

The bigger of the projects involves a £220m design of a “commercially viable” fusion power station. The government is also setting up a £22m fusion energy research facility in Rotherham.

Both UK programmes will involve work by the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire together with partners such as the Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult – which is a Made Here Now sponsor.

The power plant – the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production – that could be ready by 2040 or soon afterwards.

According to the UKAEA, STEP offers “the realistic prospect of constructing a powerplant by 2040”. The design of the project should be finished by 2024.

Andrea Leadsom, UK business secretary, said the STEP programme was “a bold and ambitious investment in the energy technology of the future”. She said nuclear fusion has “the potential to be an unlimited clean, safe and carbon-free energy source” adding that she wanted the first “commercially viable [fusion] machine” to be in the UK.

Governments around the world have spent heavily on developing fusion technology since the 1960s. Total expenditure on the research is put at about £2bn a year. However many of the government programmes are considered stull to be far from delivering the prospect of operational power plants. Many observers believe that fusion power based on the government projects to date is unlikely to lead to commercial systems until around the end of the century.

The article appeared in Made Here Now on October 22 2019.

Britain’s biggest trade body for manufacturing is launching its first large-scale event aimed at 16- to 24-year-olds, underlining how efforts to attract more young joiners are increasingly viewed as vital to the sector’s long-term prospects.

The format for MakeUK’s event in Birmingham on October 12 2019 has been devised with the help of a 12-strong “culture council” of people in their late teens and early-20s, set up by MakeUK to ensure the agenda reflects this age group’s interests. (This article dates to September 2019.)  

“Our message is that manufacturing is highly relevant [as a career] to young people with technical interests. If they want to have a positive impact on the world then manufacturing in its various forms gives them a great opportunity to do this,” says Mark Bernard, head of strategy at MakeUK.

The organisation has 5,000 member companies, a well-established apprentice training programme and strong links with government. It wants its Makers Meet event – which it hopes will attract 1,000 people – to become an annual fixture.

The launch marks a significant boost to long-running attempts by manufacturing to enlarge the sector’s talent pool and combat widespread skills shortages by selling itself more effectively to young people.

The ideas behind Makers Meet fit in with the strategy of Made Here Now, set up to promote a more positive image of UK manufacturing and assist in recruitment. MakeUK is a long-term supporter of the project, having been a sponsor since Made Here Now launched in 2014.

Makers Meet will highlight the idea that manufacturing in its 21st century guise covers a broad range of activities, from making traditional products such as power generators and ships, to developing new digitally enhanced devices such as miniaturised communications equipment for satellites.

Analysing data from such devices for customers such as weather forecasters is becoming as important a source of revenue for some manufacturers as product sales. This illustrates how providing services is increasingly becoming an essential part of the way manufacturers operate.

Equally, careers in manufacturing can involve working for small start-up businesses as well as established companies employing thousands of people.

The range of activities touched on by manufacturing is much bigger than most people think, says Andrea Bull, head of next generation marketing at MakeUK.

Modern production can encompass new ideas in virtual reality, as illustrated by work at the High Value Manufacturing Catapult in designing components for nuclear power stations

“The fields where manufacturing is relevant extend to areas such as fashion and music. The job of our event will be to highlight the possibilities [in manufacturing] and broaden the horizons of the people who come to it.”

Makers Meet will feature presentations and “hands-on” workshops organised by small manufacturing businesses such as robot builder Hausbots – a company in Birmingham started by 21-year-olds Jack Cornes and Harry Smith. It will involve discussions by experts in social media and marketing and will look at how manufacturers can play a part in reducing use of material resources and energy while also creating wealth and employment.

Role models – the youthful engineering team at Birmingham robot builder Hausbots. Left to right: Mike Skitsas, Jack Cornes, Harry Smith and Jenna Luchak

“Our research has found that a lot of younger people are saying they are drawn to career possibilities in businesses with an interest in social responsibility and sustainability,” Bull says.

Other groups that will discuss what they are doing at Makers Meet include XBlades Racing, an organisation promoting the development of new drones and that also organises drone races, and Snapmaker, which produces 3D printing machines. Big companies that will play a part include the UK operations of Siemens and Schneider, two large international businesses with a strong British presence.

In the past, most big events in the UK aimed at generating interest in technical subjects among young people have focused on engineering in all its forms, rather than on manufacturing specifically – MakeUK’s chosen field.

The trade body has enlisted the help of other organisations – most of which have a broad engineering-based agenda – to help promote Makers Meet. These include the engineering charity Smallpeice Trust; EngineeringUK, a promotional body for the whole of engineering; the Semta engineering skills organisation; the Stemnet network for science and technology “ambassadors”; and Birmingham Tech Week, a series of events in the Midlands based around engineering and backed by groups including Barclays and NatWest banks.

The 1,000 people that organisers hope will come to Makers Meet are likely to be a mix of school and higher education students plus young people already in work, including some of the apprentices taking courses at MakeUK’s training centre in Birmingham.

The article appeared in Made Here Now in 2019