In advance of the 2024 Budget, the Chancellor committed to ‘to make the UK a world leader in manufacturing’. Hold on, in the lifetime of many of us Britain was the top manufacturing nation; what has happened?

Phil Hamlyn Williams has spent the last ten years exploring aspect of British manufacturing. His most recent book, Vehicles to Vaccines, tells the story, industry by industry,ofjust what has happened. What has gone and why; what has stayed and grown; what came and went; what new manufacturing thrives; and whether government initiatives over the decades have helped.

One reader of his book has commented: 

“You have done a truly outstanding job in condensing a huge amount of data into a very readable, even compelling volume – I was surprised at how much I read on first sight.

“There’s a huge amount of detail in this book organised into industrial sectors, making it an interesting lexicon of the ghosts of companies and people of our manufacturing past and where our manufacturing is at present.”