Who Built Britain

  Building is in my blood; my mother's family ran a Midlands building company for ninety-nine years having previously been itinerant craftsmen. I remember with huge affection childhood visits to the 'yard'.

My last employment before I retired was as Chief Executive of Lincoln Cathedral where I learnt something of stone masons and the way medieval cathedrals were built. Most recently, I have been exploring the history of British manufacturing and the places where it took place. This brought me close to the building of mills, factories and urban housing, over a period spanning three centuries or so.

I needed to try to understand how it was all built and indeed who built it.

This research is about Britain and so the story of early English Building is relevant background and a good place to start. It will be my next post.

My next point of call is Rome. Roman architecture stands out because of the variety of materials used and structures built, but most of all because modern building from the Renaissance onward looked to Rome for both theoretical and practical ideas.

I go on from there to look at traditional building materials: wood, stone and brick. Glass comes next, linking the old to the new.

This is very much a work in progress. I hope you will join me in my quest. I plan to post further blogs in the coming weeks.

I explore classes of building; churches and military buildings starting with castles; church building over ten centuries consumed more labour, money and materials than any other form of building.

The sixteenth century, the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, marked a change in attitude as the English become confident and developed a tendency to show off. So, I move on to the great Country Houses and Urban Houses for the Wealthy and Merchant and, later, Middle Classes. The individual blog pieces take urban building in particular further forward.

As the eighteenth century draws to a close I come to Industrial Buildings which run hand in hand with Urban Dwellings for the poor who fled to the towns from deplorable Rural Dwellings.

I then explore the contractors who first emerged in the nineteenth century. They run hand-in-hand with new building materials: Steel and Concrete and the exploration of non-traditional building methods and materials. In addition to houses, they did of course build hospitals, schools, civic buildings, places of entertainment and infrastructure for transporting the nation.

The image is of the interior of one of the oldest buildings in Britain, the Broch of Mousa on Shetland dating from 2,500 BCE.

Visit my Who Built Britain blog

How Manufacturing Shaped Britain

 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 turnpike, canal, railway, road and air.

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.

In truth it is hard to say why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. But 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.

My most recent project involved the exploitation of such places and has resulted in a book How Manufacturing Shaped Britain. It is looking at manufacturing through the lens of geography. 

The book is available to buy on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback 

Visit my British Manufacturing History blog

Corporate governance again

Is not the problem that company law enshrines the primacy of the shareholder? Directors, whilst having regard to their stakeholders, have to put their owners first. 

As well as escalating dividends, this is manifest in share buybacks, using money that should have been invested in the business. Markets demand this as shown in comparative market ratings. It is also shown in the number of companies sold to overseas owners.

We may recall that Theresa May promised Company law

reform following her appointment as Prime Minister; nothing came of this. 

If Labour is serious about rebalancing the economy, Company law needs a radical overhaul to embrace all stakeholders, something that will demand the Wisdom of Solomon but also an eye to the practice in other countries.  

The role of private equity highlights the problem with so much of public life hidden from effective governance. 

Executive pay is demonstrably far too high as your leader and two previous articles rightly point out.

It seems that the coterie of senior executives and their counterparts in their large shareholders are some sort of mutual benefit society. However, what they are doing is not only legal it is almost encouraged by a company law that is wedded to the primacy of the shareholder. If you scratch my back…

Absurd levels of executive pay are bad enough, the primacy has for me an equally damaging impact: senior executives and shareholders all too often sell out to the highest bidder, leaving jobs at risk and the nation’s manufacturing sector denuded.

Theresa May said she was going to address this fundamental flaw and bring in wider responsibilities to all stakeholders. I hope that this government may at last take action.  

200,000 views of my random thoughts

 I write blogs on the subjects covered by my books: Military, Manufacturing, Biography. This blog is different and varied.  

My happy place - The British Library

I adore Shakespeare and so write of productions I have seen.

I am fed up with politics, but remain addicted

Some years ago I had a proper passion as chair of trustees at the Lincoln Arts Trust which ran the wonderful Drill Hall.

I love books and for some years chaired the Lincoln Book Festival. I offer occasional blogs on books I am reading. 

I hope you enjoy.

A wealth tax

 I have written elsewhere about the growing divide between the rich and everyone else. This wealth is substantially in the form of land and buildings which causes a problem since the payment of tax demands liquidity. That is a problem to be overcome.

I have written about the negative impact of wealth concentrated in the hands of the few and have suggested how such concentration may have happened. 

Recent debate about youth unemployment has prompted me to stand back from my research into the history of manufacturing and to see both how employment levels have varied and how the comparative shares of profit between capital and labour have shifted. 

AI brings another player on stage. How will that share be rewarded and how taxed? 

Youth Unemployment

Alan Milburn has published the first part of his report on Youth Unemployment. 

The Guardian ends its leader on target when it says say ‘there needs to be work’. What is the point in training for jobs that don’t exist?

I have spent the last five years exploring the story of British manufacturing witnessing from afar how more and more people were drawn into the business of making things. I have noted that there were years where jobs were good and reasonably paid. I have then seen jobs disappearing. 

Yes, some went overseas, but others went because the job was done. We had everything we needed; marketeers then worked at persuading us we needed more.  Or we can think of much of our infrastructure, the job was done we have a national grid. We now see that that that work needs doing again. 

Mechanisation did replace people, but if demand grew those people found work. Demand for many things is if anything shrinking. 

So what can young people do?

We need more houses and they need to be built by people. AI can’t do plumbing. The existing housing stock needs upgrading and insulating and this definitely needs people.

The care sector is growing and demand is not being met. The same is true within the NHS. These are people-facing jobs where AI won’t work.

People talk of fast growing tech businesses and it is true that these need people, but not that many and those needed require high qualifications. 

It may be true that ultimately it will be the few which drive the economy. When that becomes the case, people, not just young people, still need work. There are always jobs to be done and payment can be achieve by a universal basic income. 

Government needs to acknowledge that, as manufacturing employment reduced, manufacturing activity didn’t and it was capital which benefitted. So there is a tax dimension too.

I have seven grandchildren and I want them and their peers to have fulfilling lives.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ - Philip Pullman

 This book is both disturbing and rewarding. Whilst Pullman emphasises that it is a story, it does follow, in a great many respects, the story of Jesus as told in the Gospels.

There is a jarring early on as the Annunciation is replaced by a rather equivocal scene with Mary and an angel in the guise of a young man. The result is twins and this provides the machinery of the plot. The elder, Jesus, is a good man who does not claim to be God. His younger and weaker twin brother, named Christ, has no such scruples. Jesus is passionate about calling all to repentance for the Kingdom of God is very close at hand. Christ is altogether more circumspect.

There is real pleasure in coming across stories from the Gospels told so refreshingly and well. That of the Prodigal Son would come first on my list. But there are then those stories, which although based on the Gospel account, deviate in some material way. This can both upset and let the hackles rise, until the note on the back cover is recalled: This is a Story. It is a story and, for a story to work, particular actions and motivations must be present. On a second reading and on reflection these deviations begin to shed light. Some are precious Gospel stories and so the deviations also jar deeply.

Peter’s confession at Caesarea Phillippi is met by a furious denial by Jesus, but, in the context of this story, this is in character. The Feeding of the Five Thousand in this story is about sharing. The parable of the wise and foolish virgins is given an intriguingly different twist. With others the precious elements are missing. The journey to Emmaus has none of the burning in the disciples’ hearts as the scriptures are revealed; Jesus is not recognised as he breaks bread. There is no Last Supper and so no washing of Peter’s feet. The Eucharist is introduced after the resurrection and then misunderstood.

For all the jarring, I found myself drawn yet more closely to Jesus of Nazareth and his goodness and honesty. Pullman has created vivid depiction of the man, even if many Christians would dispute his theology.