This book sets out to discover how manufacturing shaped this island. Why manufacturing spread across the country, how it grew, why it declined and what was left.
It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography.
Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disparate communities were linked first by sea then by Roman Road, turnpike, canal, railway, road and air. New communities formed on these links.
Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time, as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.
None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.
Books have explored why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. And it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany, and France, and replaced by developing countries. This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.
This book is for people who wish to understand what has happened.
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