Vehicles To Vaccines

<p>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 anymore. Is this true?</p><p>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 with the twenty-first century well underway.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>