How We Build Britain
A podcast about energy, infrastructure and industry. Exploring why Britain no longer seems to value building, making and engineering things… and what it would take to change that.
Episodes
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Britain's public sector spends close to £400 billion a year (with £90bn of government contracts). So are we really failing to buy British?
In this episode I look at the evidence, which suggests that the majority of direct public sector procurement spending goes to suppliers classified as British. That figure comes with real limitations, but it points at a deeper p...
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In 2018, Britain started running short of beer.
The cause was not breweries, hops or malt. It was carbon dioxide, and one of the reasons for the shortage was that fertiliser plants had stopped making fertiliser.
That strange connection is the starting point for this episode of How We Build Britain.
From Billingham on the Tees to Bishopton in Renfrewshire, this is a ...
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Britain is talking seriously about reindustrialisation again. But do we know our own industrial capabilities well enough to decide what to retain, what to build and where to invest?
In 1940, Britain had to answer a version of that question and found it couldn't. Government set up an Industrial Capacity Committee, working through regional boards and local knowledge...
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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,...
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Has Brexit damaged UK industry?
Ten years on from the referendum, the debate is still dominated by politics. But what does the evidence actually show?
In this episode, Rob Gilbert examines the Brexit balance sheet for British industry. He looks at the impact on trade, productivity and investment, and explores what the new trading relationship has meant for automoti...
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Just how is the offshore wind industry in the UK really doing?
I put that question to Tim Pick on the fringe of Global Offshore Wind 2026 in Manchester. Tim is Britain's first offshore wind champion, a former clean power commissioner, vice president of the Energy Institute and chair of the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership.
We cover where the industry really s...
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A million young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training, the highest level in over a decade. Alan Milburn’s interim review into young people and work has laid out the scale of it. This episode argues that underneath the headline numbers is a story about what happened to British industry, and that rebuilding it is part of the answe...
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I reflect on Great British Energy's first year and ask an honest question: what has actually changed for the places that have been on the wrong side of industrial decline for a generation? The answer is complicated, but there is a genuine reason for optimism. The coasts, the estuaries, the old industrial heartlands are, by an accident of physics and geograp...
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How has Denmark prospered from one big industrial bet? How did South Korea build an industrial economy that excels in everything from shipbuilding to cutting-edge batteries? Why did Japan keep its heavy industries when everyone else let theirs go?
Each made deliberate choices. Each sustained them across decades and changes of government. Each underpinned them ...
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Britain has deindustrialised more than any other developed nation. The energy transition, the largest industrial demand signal this country will generate for decades, offers a chance to reverse that trend. The question is whether we take it.
In this first episode, I explore why Britain has become world-class at deploying energy infrastructure but consistently fail...
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