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.
If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail Why can’t Britain finance the factories it says it wants to build? The UK has some of the deepest capital markets in the world, yet industrial businesses still struggle to raise the patient, long-term capital needed to expand. That problem is not new. In 1931 a committee was established by the government to assess the UK economy and finance sector, amongst its findings was a structural gap in access to capital for sm...
28 Aug 2026
Are we actually bad at buying British?
If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 problem. Buying from a British company is not necessarily the...
12 Aug 2026
Beer, bread and bombs: why industrial foundations matter
If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 story about the industrial foundations beneath everyday li...
29 Jul 2026
We won’t reindustrialise Britain without better intelligence.
If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 to find unused and latent capacity across the country. Eigh...
15 Jul 2026
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 laun...
1 Jul 2026
Has Brexit damaged British industry?
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 automotive, agriculture and food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, defence and financial services. The evidence points to a real economic cost,...
17 Jun 2026
Tim Pick - Britain's First Offshore Wind Champion (recorded at Global Offshore Wind '26)
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 stands, AR7 and the job of turning an allocation round into built projects, why Ardersier has upended the conventional wisdom on po...
3 Jun 2026
Why investing in industry helps solve Britain’s NEET crisis
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 answer. The review’s findings are stark: more than a million 16 to 24-year-olds are NEET, six in ten have never had a job at all, and the cost ...
20 May 2026
Why geography might be the answer to economic growth.
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 geography, exactly where the energy transition has to be built. For the first time in decades, the map of where the next economy needs to l...
5 May 2026
What can Britain learn from three crises in six years?
22 Apr 2026
How other countries built the industries Britain let go.
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 with competitive energy. And each now has options that countries without industrial depth simply do not have. Britain has done the op...
7 Apr 2026
Britain is investing billions in energy. Can it rebuild our industry?
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 fails to capture the industrial value that comes with it. From the offshore wind content gap to the stop-start history of British indus...
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