How We Build Britain

Rob Gilbert

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

  1. 3d ago

    Why not knowing what Britain makes is holding us back

    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. Eighty years later we are asking it again, with vastly better tools and far less urgency. Rob Gilbert argues that we still can't answer it well enough, and that this is a state capacity problem rather than a data one. He explains why deployment investment doesn't automatically create domestic industrial capability, and what better industrial intelligence would mean for four things: spending public money more precisely, commercialising British innovation, attracting international manufacturers, and connecting productive capabilities across sectors that we currently treat as separate. Along the way: the closure of the UK's last continuous filament glass fibre plant in Wigan, the government's Global Supply Chains Intelligence Programme, and a surgical robotics exercise that found twenty-nine times as many relevant British businesses as conventional analysis. Britain cannot manufacture everything. It has to choose. But those choices only work if we understand what this country can already make, and what it could make next. How We Build Britain explores how Britain can rebuild its industrial strength through energy, infrastructure, investment and production.

  2. Jul 15

    Reindustrialisation: what Britain in 2026 can learn from 1897

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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.

  3. Jul 1

    Has Brexit damaged British industry?

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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, particularly for goods-producing sectors and smaller exporters. But Brexit did not begin Britain’s industrial decline, and many of the constraints blamed on Brussels were in fact the result of domestic political choices. The episode also considers the opportunities created by regulatory autonomy, new trade agreements and greater freedom to support strategic industries — and why those freedoms have yet to produce a meaningful industrial dividend. The central question is no longer whether Brexit was right or wrong. It is how Britain now works with its European allies, uses its independence where it creates genuine value, and rebuilds the industrial capability on which prosperity, security and national power depend.

  4. Jun 17

    Tim Pick - Britain's First Offshore Wind Champion (recorded at Global Offshore Wind '26)

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 ports, the bet on floating wind in the Celtic Sea, and why the North Sea starts to sustain itself in the 2030s. Tim is also clear about the cost of politicising all this. The question underneath it all is the one this show keeps coming back to. Do we build, or do we buy? Feedback, guest suggestions and future episode requests are always welcome.

  5. Jun 3

    Why investing in industry helps solve Britain’s NEET crisis

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 runs to around £125 billion a year.  As Britain’s industrial base declined, it took the way into work with it, the apprenticeships and vocational routes that asked for a start rather than a degree. You cannot fix worklessness without work, and for too many young people the first rung simply isn’t there any more. Part of why this is so hard to act on is how, over decades, we have come to measure the worth of public investment, counting the costs that land now more confidently than the returns that build slowly: industrial capability, supply chains, and jobs in the places that have waited longest for them.  The episode makes the case for a broader idea of value, and sets out four things we need to do to act on it: count value differently, use what the state already buys, rebuild the routes into work, and let our institutions take long-term risk. If you find this podcast useful, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

  6. May 20

    Why geography might be the answer to economic growth.

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail  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 land overlaps with the map of where the last one was lost. But geography creates the opportunity; it doesn't guarantee it. I make the case for counting the social returns the system currently ignores

  7. May 5

    What can Britain learn from three crises in six years?

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail

  8. Apr 22

    How other countries built the industries Britain let go.

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 opposite. Four industrial strategies launched and abandoned since the early 2000s. The highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. A manufacturing share of GDP that has halved in a generation. In this episode, I look at what the countries that built lasting industrial strength actually did, what happened when the United States tried to do it at speed and then reversed course, and what Britain can learn whilst it has the chance.

  9. Apr 7

    Britain is investing billions in energy. Can it rebuild our industry?

    If you have questions, comments or suggestions - please send us a mail 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 industrial strategy, I make the case that energy is not just a climate or technology story. It is the cause and the cure for Britain’s deindustrialisation. This is the first in a three-part series on the energy transition, from a broader podcast that will focus on energy, infrastructure, and industry.

  • 9 Episodes

About

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. 

Information

  • Creator
    Rob Gilbert
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    9
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 How We Build Britain
  • Show Website
    How We Build Britain

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