More than 170 years later, profits from the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, a stellar event to showcase Britain’s technical and artistic skills at the height of its global power, are still funding the country’s industrial innovators – as 38-year-old entrepreneur Yusuf Muhammad can testify. The co-founder of Plumis, a London-based company manufacturing fire-safety devices, […]

Renishaw is embarking on a recruitment drive for young graduates and apprentices as a company admired as model for UK manufacturing and innovation seeks to rebound after months of uncertainty. The company – which faced the prospect of a takeover earlier this year and has suffered from a weak global economy – has made a […]

  A company run by two 34-year-olds in a former coal mining town in South Yorkshire has become an unlikely success story from the pandemic. After investing £18m in machines and research in the past two years, Bluetree has grown into one of the UK’s biggest makers of personal protective equipment (PPE), a sector that […]

The right mix of imagination and grit will carry you a long way. In the mid-1970s, engineering graduate Andrew Ritchie was working as a landscape gardener when a cycling enthusiast asked him to come up with a better fold-up bike than the ones available back then. The idea gripped him – so much so that […]

High-volume manufacturing isn’t a strategy that makes sense for every company. Sometimes businesses in technology sectors feel they should step back from production to focus on development and support for customers. Plessey’s processes are based around making light emitting diodes– the semiconductor-based light sources that have revolutionised the global lighting industry (all photos by Daniel […]

In a large industrial building on the outskirts of Crewe in north-west England, modern manufacturing blends seamlessly with traditional artisan skills from a different century. This is the home of Bentley Motors, a doyen of the UK’s luxury car making sector.  On the assembly line, there is hardly a robot to be seen: instead, teams […]

Idleness can be tolerated, says Chris Rea – in some circumstances, at least. Some of his company’s machine tools stand unused for as much as 60 per cent of the time. They whir into action only when urgent orders come in that require vital parts to be manufactured on demand. “The money I ‘waste’ on […]

Britain should make advanced manufacturing a key element of its economic recovery plan following the pandemic, Made Here Now founder Peter Marsh will tell an online audience on June 9. Marsh is among the speakers at an event organised by pan-European thinktank Radix on “achieving above-trend growth” to address the economic and social damage caused by Covid. […]

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. The procedures governing how the UK operates […]

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. The revamped scheme comes after the demise of an earlier effort led by the Cabinet Office and Department of Health and […]

  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, […]

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 […]