Reindustrialisation: what Britain in 2026 can learn from 1897

In June 1897, the Royal Navy assembled the greatest fleet in the world at Spithead for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Among the vessels in attendance was a small experimental boat from the Tyne called Turbinia. By the end of the day, she was the star of the show. Powered by Charles Parsons' steam turbine, an engine the Admiralty had been slow to take seriously, she raced past the assembled fleet at thirty-four knots, and nothing there could match her. Nine years later, HMS Dreadnought launched with Parsons turbines. Within a generation, the same technology was generating the world's electricity. Parsons didn't just invent the turbine. He engineered, built and tested it on one river. This episode asks why that connection between invention and production once defined British industry, where it survives today, and what it should teach us now. Along the way: how Sheffield turned a clockmaker's frustration into a century of steel, why the economist Alfred Marshall said industrial knowledge lived "in the air", what happened to graphene after Manchester discovered it, and why Derby, Barrow and the Tyne still hold the pattern that built Britain. It ends with four tests for deciding what Britain should build next. If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail