Workshop of the world?

I was fortunate enough to be asked to attend a press briefing yesterday at Kew Bridge Steam Museum, as a guest of Control Techniques. While there, I was able to see The Grand Junction 100-inch engine in action. This engine was built by Harvey & Co in 1869, first pumping water in 1871. According to the museum, around 70 per cent of London’s water was pumped by engines such as this one.

A number of people commented at the event that ‘we don’t do engineering like this anymore’. On one level, of course, that’s true: in terms of aesthetics we don’t do engineering quite like the Victorians. However, ‘we’ certainly do engineering, given that ‘engineering’ itself is an extremely broad discipline, even if we do leave the people who come to fix the heating out of the equation.

So what then is meant by the idea that ‘we don’t do engineering like this anymore’? We’ve already mentioned aesthetics, although to suggest that modern engineering was without an aesthetic would be a strange idea: it does, it’s just a different one. But we don’t do engineering where every component is made in the UK anymore, that’s perfectly true. Indeed, the UK is a key area for developing intellectual property.

It follows that I’m a bit suspicious of people who suggest that things aren’t what they used to be. I’d rather face up squarely to the notion that we do engineering in the midst of an international division of labour, where the UK is unlikely to ever become, once more, the workshop of the world.

Lyndon White
Editor, Processingtalk

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