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Jonas Bendiksen Stuart Franklin Bruce Gilden David Hurn Peter Marlow Martin Parr Mark Power Alessandra Sanguinetti Chris Steele-Perkins

Panesar Food Perfection Foods Powerpanels Kirkpatrick Brooks England Angle Ring Casting PLC Frank Baines Wedge Galvanizing HS Marston Aerospace Daines & Hathaway Holdens Brewery Alucast Midland Snacks Weston Beamor Jaguar Land Rover Bombardier Camira Fabrics Nissan Tate & Lyle Sugars Queen Mary’s Hospital Limbless Football Associaton Vauxhall Brompton Bikes Alcatel Lucent Fuller’s Windsor & Eton Brewery Britvic Renishaw Airbus BAE systems Soigneur Robin Mather WSP Textiles Ted James Design Libertine Bicycles Aardman Animations Cameron Balloons Corgi Hosiery Alison Tod Cardiff Theatrical Services Flexicare Medical Ltd BCB International Burts Potato Chips Spinnaker Westaways Sausages Summerskills Brewery Dartmoor Brewery Tavy Ales Conway Stewart Vi-Spring Tideford Organic Foods Bandvulc Tyres Ltd Princess Yachts Whitelee Wind Farm Gaia-Wind Allied Vehicles Pelamis Wave Power EMEC OpenHydro Scotrenewables turbine Seatricity Aircraft Carrier Alliance William Halstead Area Rugs & Carpets Abraham Moon & Sons British Wool Marketing Board H. Dawson Harrison Spinks Ltd Texere Yarns Ltd Calderdale Carpets Knitting group at Shipley Garden Centre Standard Wool Siemens Croft Filters Headen & Quarmby MOCAPONE Manchester University Fablab Lazarian HMG Paints LTD Carradice Swifty Scooters Wigs up North Fine Castings David Buckley Terrance Singleton 2-DTech Marble Beers Manchester Craft and Design Centre Inventid Calder Textiles Panesar Food Perfection Foods Powerpanels Kirkpatrick Brooks England Angle Ring Casting PLC Frank Baines Wedge Galvanizing HS Marston Aerospace Daines & Hathaway Holdens Brewery Alucast Midland Snacks Weston Beamor Jaguar Land Rover Bombardier Camira Fabrics Nissan Tate & Lyle Sugars Queen Mary’s Hospital Limbless Football Associaton Vauxhall Brompton Bikes Alcatel Lucent Fuller’s Windsor & Eton Brewery Britvic Renishaw Airbus BAE systems Soigneur Robin Mather WSP Textiles Ted James Design Libertine Bicycles Aardman Animations Cameron Balloons Corgi Hosiery Alison Tod Cardiff Theatrical Services Flexicare Medical Ltd BCB International Burts Potato Chips Spinnaker Westaways Sausages Summerskills Brewery Dartmoor Brewery Tavy Ales Conway Stewart Vi-Spring Tideford Organic Foods Bandvulc Tyres Ltd Princess Yachts Whitelee Wind Farm Gaia-Wind Allied Vehicles Pelamis Wave Power EMEC OpenHydro Scotrenewables turbine Seatricity Aircraft Carrier Alliance William Halstead Area Rugs & Carpets Abraham Moon & Sons British Wool Marketing Board H. Dawson Harrison Spinks Ltd Texere Yarns Ltd Calderdale Carpets Knitting group at Shipley Garden Centre Standard Wool Siemens Croft Filters Headen & Quarmby MOCAPONE Manchester University Fablab Lazarian HMG Paints LTD Carradice Swifty Scooters Wigs up North Fine Castings David Buckley Terrance Singleton 2-DTech Marble Beers Manchester Craft and Design Centre Inventid Calder Textiles Panesar Food Perfection Foods Powerpanels Kirkpatrick Brooks England Angle Ring Casting PLC Frank Baines Wedge Galvanizing HS Marston Aerospace Daines & Hathaway Holdens Brewery Alucast Midland Snacks Weston Beamor Jaguar Land Rover Bombardier Camira Fabrics Nissan Tate & Lyle Sugars Queen Mary’s Hospital Limbless Football Associaton Vauxhall Brompton Bikes Alcatel Lucent Fuller’s Windsor & Eton Brewery Britvic Renishaw Airbus BAE systems Soigneur Robin Mather WSP Textiles Ted James Design Libertine Bicycles Aardman Animations Cameron Balloons Corgi Hosiery Alison Tod Cardiff Theatrical Services Flexicare Medical Ltd BCB International Burts Potato Chips Spinnaker Westaways Sausages Summerskills Brewery Dartmoor Brewery Tavy Ales Conway Stewart Vi-Spring Tideford Organic Foods Bandvulc Tyres Ltd Princess Yachts Whitelee Wind Farm Gaia-Wind Allied Vehicles

OPEN OR BUSINESS

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Introduction In 2013, Multistory and Magnum Photos commissioned nine of the world’s leading photographers to document contemporary British manufacturing. During a period of great economic instability, and where questions are being raised about the strength of western economies within the worldwide market, there has never been a more relevant time to explore the condition of Britain’s manufacturing future.

As a country built on the success of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing is intrinsically linked to Britain’s worldwide economic position. The Industrial Revolution also marks a significant period of visual recording, including the paintings of Joseph Wright and LS Lowry. This documentation was continued and expanded on with the invention of photography and by postwar photographers such as Maurice Broomfield and Walter Nurnberg, creating a rich and diverse historical archive. Magnum’s own collection of British industrial photographs begins with WWII and shows the very resilience of British manufacturing being explored

by Open for Business. These new commissions build on this photographic history of recording manufacturing and create a contemporary British archive, to be gifted to some of the UK’s most significant collections.

The photographs here provide the means of exploring a wider change that globalization has had on production and process. Magnum’s UK photographers: Stuart Franklin, David Hurn, Peter Marlow, Martin Parr, Mark Power and Chris SteelePerkins; alongside three international photographers: Alessandra Sanguinetti (Argentina), Bruce Gilden (America) and

Jonas Bendiksen (Norway) have visited over one hundred workplaces across the UK; from one-man businesses to FTSE 100 companies. Their photographs take us from traditional, handmade crafts to modern, intelligent automation; from foundries and assembly lines to research laboratories and high tech cleanrooms, showing an economic sector of extraordinary resistance and diversity.

British industry faces several challenges and Open for Business reveals the daily struggle as businesses attempt to cut costs, streamline processes and level up to international competition. However, the overall tone is optimistic. Although manufacturing makes up a smaller part of total British GDP and employs fewer people than it did 50 years ago, its financial value has rocketed. Today, our tiny island, with less than 1% of the global population, is number 11 on the ‘league table’ for global manufacturing output in 2012 (latest available figures).

The big shift over the last few decades has been to ‘smarten up’: to invest more in research and development and this has been captured by the photographers in a range of visual approaches. Britain is now a world leader in aerospace, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments

and electrical machinery. It exports luxury fashion and food brands to every corner of the globe: from crisps to cars, sausages to mattresses, neurosurgical robots to carbon-neutral technologies.

To say something has been ‘Made in Britain’ carries an assurance of innovation and quality.

The photographs in Open for Business show what this means at a human level.

They reveal the shifting balance between white and blue-collar workers, the physical reality of process automation and of environments in which a growing staff manage activity from a computer screen. The project raises questions about the corporate responsibility of employers to their employees, highlights the significance of migration to our workforce and shows the pride exuded from our workers who make a huge variety of products. The project captures the current landscape of British manufacturing and its effect on culture and community life, celebrating the work, activities and lives of the employees who are critical to driving our industry forwards.

www.openforbusiness.uk.com

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Covers from left Top row: Jonas Bendiksen Stuart Franklin Bruce Gilden Middle row: David Hurn Peter Marlow Martin Parr

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Bottom row: Mark Power Alessandra Sanguinetti Chris Steele-Perkins

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There are nine Open for Business newspapers in total - the cover and centre spread changes with each edition to highlight the work of the Magnum photographer who has worked in each of the nine regions.

This free newspaper has been produced to accompany the exhibition, providing insights into each photographer’s approach with additional images that didn’t make the exhibition edit. The newspaper also contains essays specially commissioned from Sophie Howarth, who spent time in 2013 meeting some of the manufacturers documented by the photographers. Sophie’s essays provide a background and context to some of the issues affecting British manufacturing with personal stories from people who work in the companies.

Magnum Photos is a photographic cooperative of great diversity and distinction, founded in 1947 by four pioneering photographers including Henri CartierBresson and Robert Capa. Today it remains a co-operative owned by its photographer members and encompasses over 45 working photographers and 15 Estates.

With powerful individual vision, Magnum photographers chronicle the world and interpret its peoples, events, issues and personalities.

www.magnumphotos.com

Multistory works with outstanding artists to tell stories with, for and about, people’s everyday lives. Our aim is to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Based in Sandwell, in the Black Country, we start with what is local and invite participation, collaboration and partnership in our projects and this takes our work in many directions. In recent years, our projects have been realised through photography, exhibitions, film publications, archives and oral history.

Multistory gratefully acknowledges the support of Sandwell Council and Arts Council England.

www.multistory.org.uk

Jonas Bendiksen, Norway - Bradford

Manufacturers visited: William Halstead Area Rugs & Carpets Abraham Moon & Sons British Wool Marketing Board H. Dawson Harrison Spinks Ltd Texere Yarns Ltd Calderdale Carpets Knitting group at Shipley Garden Centre Standard Wool

Jonas at Abraham Moon and Sons, Bradford. Photo by Hayley Sargent.

Jonas Bendiksen

Bradford

When I got the commission to photograph the textile and wool industry around Bradford, I accepted immediately but not because I had anything particular to say about the topic, or because I had much prior knowledge. Sure, I knew that this area was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and that probably it didn’t really look like that anymore, but mainly I accepted because I generally like getting into situations I have to explore from scratch.

A part of me was very apprehensive, as it’s often a huge challenge to photograph industry and manufacturing. The facilities

are often incredibly sterile, the machinery automatic, and more and more one cannot really see so much of a human interaction with the process. It’s not great fun to photograph people in a clean room, monitoring an automatic process on a computer screen. I figured I had to be prepared to find a way around this.

But when I walked into the first mill, William Halstead, I realised quickly that all my preconceptions were wrong. The old mill buildings were filled with history, both in terms of people who have worked their whole lives in the mills but also in the machinery, the architecture and processes. I was intrigued by how much

the processes of weaving, scouring and wool processing have links to how it’s been done for the last hundred years.

To me, there was something innately beautiful, mesmerising, or even hypnotic about the various steps the wool goes through before it becomes clothing materials. The rhythms and choreography of the machinery had its own aesthetic, harking back to the Industrial Revolution.

I was inspired to explore this both with photography and video. I wanted to somehow connect the contemporary to the archaic, and the automatic to the human.”

H. Dawson. Bradford, West Yorkshire.

A 125-year old company that distributes wool to bespoke companies, both in the UK and abroad.

H. Dawson. Bradford, West Yorkshire.

A huge part of the wool supply chain with operations all over the world and a growing customer base. They buy wool from 75 countries in total which is more wool than anywhere else in the world.

Harrison Spinks Ltd, Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Makers of beds, mattresses and springs, Harrison Spinks, a family business for six generations, are keen on making virtually everything themselves, sourcing locally to supply own natural fillings. They have a sheep farm for getting wool for the innards of the mattresses and a forest in Yorkshire which supplies wood for the beds. Suppliers of springs worldwide, at the Leeds headquarters, they pride themselves on innovation in R&D spring technology.

Photographer 2

Calder Dyeing, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

Steam and water drops surround Roy Powels as he tends to a dyeing vat.

At Calder Dyeing in Dewsbury, Roy Powels mixes the right hues in a bucket. He then puts it in the giant vats, on the left in the picture, into which raw wool gets lowered.Â

Photographer 2

British Wool Marketing Board, Bradford.

“A man stands in a sea of wool at the British Wool Marketing Board. This is where different types of wool get sorted by hand, and sent around in big wheeled containers. I loved the fact that many of the processes have to be done by a trained human hand or eye.”

Abraham Moon & Sons., Guisely, Leeds, “The colour mixing room at Abraham Moon & Sons.

Coloured wools are mixed to create mixed hues in two cavernous rooms. The wool gets sprayed into the room via ceiling ducts and gets mixed as it drops, like snow flurries to the floor. The wool is then raked manually into vacuum chutes in the floor for further mixing.

Out of all the procedures I saw, this was the most Willy Wonka-like.”

Today, our tiny island, with less than 1% of the global population, is number 11 on the ‘league table’ for global manufacturing output in 2012 (latest available figures).

“Many of the locations I visited in the wool industry were in older mill buildings that are steeped in history. I felt as if I could feel years of production, wear, chemicals, sweat and work in the atmosphere of the buildings. Like in this wall-mounted gauge, half-covered in corrosion and Calder Dyeing.”

Calder Dyeing, Dewsbury.

“Trevor Rowe lifting dyed wools into the drying machine. Now in his sixties, the years of manual work and spare-time workouts have given him the appearance of being thirty years younger.”

Stuart Franklin, UK - Scotland

Manufacturers visited: Whitelee Wind Farm Gaia-Wind Allied Vehicles Pelamis Wave Power EMEC OpenHydro’s Open-Centre Turbine Scotrenewables turbine Aircraft Carrier Alliance, Rosyth Seatricity

Stuart photographing Pelamis Wave Power.

Stuart at Whitelee Windfarm. Photos by Georgina Wood.

Stuart Franklin Scotland

The sea, the coast, and port towns have always interested me. My first photographs, taken on a Yashica D twin-lens reflex camera, were taken in places like La Liberdad in El Salvador of banana boats being unloaded; I was nineteen. In the UK, as a student in 1978, I documented the switch from general cargo to container shipping, crossing to New York on the SS Atlantic Conveyor with Captain Ian North DSC. Four years later, “Captain Birdseye”, as North was known, was one of twelve crew-members of the requisitioned container ship to perish after an Exocet missile attack during the Falklands War: a war that I saw only from Portsmouth harbour - the HMS Invincible leaving, and from Punta Arena, Chile.

Moving on, I witnessed the last ship to be launched on the River Tees by the Smiths Dock Company before it folded in 1987. The workforce and their families stood behind ropes on the quayside, gazing up at the bunting. I recall that the

moment passed with so little note that the event failed to make the evening news. The Smiths Dock Company built the World War Two anti-submarine convoys described in Nicholas Monsarrat’s (1951) ‘The Cruel Sea’. I later documented the break-up of the Tyne shipyards and those in the Clyde. Pictures from some of this work were published in my (2005) book ‘Sea Fever’.

Given the chance to document the British manufacturing industry in 2013, I opted for shipbuilding. The only significant sector remaining in Britain is governmentfunded and commissioned by the Ministry of Defense. The biggest project by far, employing 10,000 people in one way or another, and costing over six billion pounds, is the HMS Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier construction at Rosyth.

Arriving there earlier this year, I found a world of predominantly white men toiling away night and day in a dry dock on a huge ship, then retiring to shoddy

pebble-dashed houses above the yard. It was a scene from the 1950s: men in blue overalls coming and going together in large groups to work, to eat or to rest.

It was most interesting to photograph at night, since much of the work was going on the flight deck, theatrically lit, and visible from the dizzy height of an overhead Goliath crane. From there, at least, the ship looked like an aircraft carrier. The size of the vessel was always a challenge to convey: small figures painting the hull gave a sense of scale. My abiding memory will always be of the disparity between the vessel as work camp - all steel and air and shuttered cable - and its future role, after 2017, as a warship carrying fighter jets off to battle.

The assembly of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Rosyth, Fife. The ship is one of two carriers to be built by 2020.

The ships are each 280 metres long and displace 65,000 tonnes, making them the largest in the history of the Royal Navy. The ships are being delivered by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a unique partnering relationship between Babcock, BAE Systems, Thales UK and the UK Ministry of Defence.

The flight deck of the aircraft carrier illuminated at night.

The assembly of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth at Rosyth, Fife. The ship is one of two carriers to be built by 2020.

The ships are each 280 metres long and displace 65,000 tonnes, making them the largest in the history of the Royal Navy. The ships are being delivered by the Aircraft Carrier Alliance, a unique partnering relationship between Babcock, BAE Systems, Thales UK and the UK Ministry of Defence.

One of the high tech computer consoles being installed beneath the bridge of the HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Orkney Islands.

Pelamis Wave power machine docked at Lyness on the island of Hoy. Workers conduct scheduled maintenance while the machine is on the quayside.

Renewable energy.

Scotrenewables tidal testing machinery off the coast of Orkney Islands.

Seatricity uses aluminium buoys, or ‘donuts’, connected to underwater pumps.

As the buoys move up and down, the pumps drive pressurised seawater to onshore turbines.

Whitelee wind farm south of Glasgow.

Whitelee Windfarm has been fully operational since 2009, producing clean and green energy.

An essay by Sophie Howarth

Health and Safety On 24 April 2013, while Magnum photographers were shooting the Open for Business exhibition in factories across the UK, the Rana Plaza building in Savar, Bangladesh collapsed. More than 1100 garment factory workers died and more than double that number were injured. It was the worst textile and clothing related industrial disaster in history and it drew international attention to the poor safety conditions that threaten millions of factory workers in the developing world on a daily basis.

Here in the UK, the vast majority of the working population feel they work in a safe environment. It is easy to overlook the significance of such an unspectacular statement, but many years of struggle lie behind that sense of security. Legislation for the protection of employees began in the 19th century with efforts to regulate the hours worked by children in factories.

But it was not until 1974, when the Heath and Safety at Work Act was passed, that there were clear responsibilities laid out for both employers and employees. In the twenty years that followed that legislation, the number of fatal injuries at work fell by 73% and reported non-fatal injuries by 70%.

Today, the campaigning of trade unions, politicians, whistleblowers and others to ensure that each of us feels safe to go to work every day are easily forgotten and ‘elf and safety’ is often a topic of ridicule. Many of us have heard stories about ‘jobsworths’ who can recite all 200 regulations and 53 Approved Codes of Practice set out by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), but refuse to make anyone a coffee ‘in case it burns their mouth’. Even the HSE itself seemed to admit things might have got a bit out of hand in 2012, when they launched a ‘Mythbusting Panel’ whose role was to report on some of the dafter excuses made in the name of health and safety.

The media had a field day reporting on factories that required risk assessments to be completed before any task and offices that banned Christmas decorations in case people slipped on them. The current Government has positioned its sympathies firmly with those businesses who argue that they are caught in a

“ In the current economic climate, there may be a temptation for employers to dismiss workplace well-being initiatives, particularly on mental health, as ‘nice to do’ rather than essential. Yet pressure to reduce costs, and reliance on staff to see organisations through these difficult times, mean that addressing mental health in the workplace is more than ever a business necessity.”

MIND - Mental Health Charity, Taking Care of Business report, 2011

stranglehold of red tape. In January 2012, David Cameron told a meeting of leading business executives that, “The coalition has a clear New Year’s resolution: to kill off the health and safety culture for good”.

One man who hopes that won’t happen is Alan Roffe who lost both of his hands in an industrial accident when he was fifteen: “I was still at school but I had a weekend job tidying and cleaning up in a timber yard. I was saving up to go camping and doing this work meant I could get about £15 every weekend. The guys would cut fence posts and then I would stack them up on the palette and help with other little jobs. I was told never to go anywhere near the machine but, this particular Saturday, they had just cut a big length of oak and it was really heavy so they asked me over to help carry it away. We each had a corner and, as I was walking away, my foot slipped and I fell onto my back. My hands went into the machine. Within a split second it was all over”.

Roffe managed to return to education and got a job in the packing department of Rank Video Services. At the height of his career he was responsible for as many as 200 staff on night shifts. “I was always conscientious about health and safety. In the warehouse, the guys liked using the palette truck as a scooter but you get little woodchips that break off the palettes and, as soon as a wheel hits a little wood chip, the palette truck stops dead and the guy goes flying over the top and hurts himself.

So anybody that I saw riding the palette truck as a scooter was out the door, no questions asked.”

Although there has been significant progress in recent decades, the UK cannot be complacent about its health and safety record. An estimated 20,000 people still die each year as a result of injuries or illnesses sustained directly because of their work and nearly 30 million working days are lost annually on the grounds of work-related illness. The big elephant in the room is mental health.

We may have become more diligent about eye protection and safety footwear, correct keyboard heights and ergonomic office chairs but we have our head in the sand when it comes to psychological matters. Work-related stress is estimated to be the most expensive occupational health problem in the UK in terms of

Work-related stress is estimated to be the most expensive occupational health problem in the UK in terms of days lost per case, while depression and anxiety are responsible for more incapacity benefit claims than back pain. In a recent Confederation of British Industry (CBI) survey of over 800 companies, 98% of respondents said they thought that the mental health of employees should be a company concern. Yet less than 1 in 10 of these companies had an official policy on mental health. days lost per case, while depression and anxiety are responsible for more incapacity benefit claims than back pain. In a recent Confederation of British Industry (CBI) survey of over 800 companies, 98% of respondents said they thought that the mental health of employees should be a company concern. Yet less than 1 in 10 of these companies had an official policy on mental health.

There is a compelling business case, as well as a moral argument, for addressing the workplace stress epidemic. Happy workers are more productive, take fewer sick days and stay with a company longer.

For Sir David McMurtry and John Deer, the co-founders of Renishaw, a hightech engineering company based in Gloucestershire, prioritising the wellbeing of their 3300+ employees is a no-brainer. They offer all staff an extensive benefits package that includes flexible working hours, private medical care, an onsite restaurant and gym and a wealth of social opportunities.

Their staff turnover is less than 4% and employees describe the company as an “unbelievable place to work”.

The employee environment at Renishaw is a far cry from the conditions inside the garment factories in Bangladesh.

However, if UK companies want the

benefits of trading internationally, and UK consumers want the benefits of buying cheap clothing, then we also need to accept our international responsibilities.

In Europe, health and safety has advanced from becoming an optional concern for individual factory owners to being a matter of EU legislation. The next step is to achieve global minimum standards. Anna McMullan works for ‘Labour Behind the Label’, a campaign that strives to improve conditions and empower workers in the global garment industry. She explains: “As consumers, we need to start asking more questions. There needs to be more transparency in the industry. We need to start knowing where our clothes come from, who was the person who made it, what was the address of the factory where it was made and what was the audit from that factory. The solution to this is very complex. It is about people at all stages of the supply chain waking up to the problems and trying to take responsibility for it”.

“Production doesn’t come first, safety does.”

Ken Wilson, Tate & Lyle

Bruce Gilden, USA - London

Manufacturers visited: Tate & Lyle Sugars Queen Mary’s Hospital Limbless Football Association Vauxhall Brompton Bikes Alcatel Lucent Fuller’s Windsor & Eton Brewery Britvic

Bruce at Vauxhall. Photo by Sarah Lloyd.

Bruce at Tate & Lyle. Photo by Marco Gualtieri.

Bruce Gilden London

Since I’m used to working on commissions, I can adapt quickly to new environments; I work very hard and very fast.

digital photography. This way I can see the pictures when I’m taking them, which is very important.

To work on this project, where I have to realise a number of images in a short period of time, I decided to do colour

My approach is to combine portraits of workers with surreal abstract photographs of the environment in order to bring my

personal vision of the place, add another dimension to the traditional setting, and give a new life to customary objects.

Employee at Vauxhall, London.

From left: Stuart, Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, London.

Conor, Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, London.

From left: Norman, Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, London.

Carolyn, Vauxhall plant, London.

From left: Andy, Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, London.

Rose, Vauxhall plant, London.

From left: Tony, Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, London.

Dave, Vauxhall plant, London.

Employee at Vauxhall, London.

Mohammed and Malki, Alcatel, London.

Queen Mary’s Hospital, London.

Alan Roffe, Queen Mary’s Hospital, London.

An essay by Sophie Howarth

A Life in Manufacturing

Ken Wilson, Community Affairs Manager, Tate & Lyle My father and my grandfather both worked at the Tate & Lyle refinery, so it just seemed like the natural thing to do. I told my dad to let me know if anything came up and I got my first job here in 1983. I was 23 and the job was as a lab analyst.

It was great, just what I wanted.

There were six of us in the laboratory. Every four hours you’d be out collecting samples around the refinery unit, picking up a crate of 24 plastic bottle containers and off you’d go filling up your containers, back to the laboratory, doing analysis on the containers. Writing it all down on a piece of paper, report, go to the shift chemist who’s effectively the supervisor of the laboratory and then on to the shift manager.

My dad was a shift manager.

We overlapped here for about three years.

I used to get very frustrated when I first started doing the lab work because I was surrounded by older people who basically just did the job. I could never work out in the early days why it took me two hours to do the process round and another guy could have it done in less than an hour. It was partly because I was learning all the time. As I’d go around I’d be thinking, ‘So where does that go?’ or, ‘What’s happening here?’ But I soon realised some of these older guys weren’t even doing the analysis; they were writing the bloody results down and chucking the samples away. I can’t work like that. I have to do things properly.

Probably the thing that had most impact on me happened when I was a manager of Royal Sugar. A guy died. He was a contract employee but he’d worked for us ever since I’d been up there, so effectively he was one of the team. The incident

was somewhat bizarre. It happened at something like 6:30am. I was just coming into work and there were police everywhere as well as the fire brigade and ambulance. ‘Someone’s gone into the river.’ ‘How?’ ‘They were lifting one of the vehicles and he was on the vehicle.

The chains broke and it went down.’

‘Why? You don’t go on the vehicle.’ ‘Who was it?’ ‘It was Keith.’ Keith was one of the older guys: middle-aged, sensible. Often talking about safety. ‘No, no. It can’t be him.’ ‘It’s him.’ I kept thinking: ‘Have I ever seen anyone riding a vehicle? Have I ever seen it and not said anything?’ But I had never seen anybody do that. There was an investigation, of course, and anyone who was on the jetty at the same time as the accident had to be suspended while we investigated. It was years before it was finally resolved completely. The question for the investigation was, ‘Why was the guy in the vehicle?’ They said to us, ‘There was no sign on the jetty saying: Do not ride on the vehicles’. I said: ‘You don’t need a sign for that; it’s obvious. Would you jump in a vehicle and be lifted 20, 30 foot in the air? I wouldn’t do that’. But what that did is make the company realise that you can’t take anything for granted. It’s got to be in your face; you have to tell people that this is what you can do, and this is what you can’t do. Because the reality is that people do cut corners. So these days, there are signs everywhere saying everything.

Safety really is the number one thing that we talk about. As you walk into the refinery, there’s a board that tells you what our statistics are. There’s another one, as you go further in, about the latest incidents and what’s happened. There’s more stuff on the board as you come in. There are posters around that are all reminding us to work safely and that kind of thing. You’ll see the same safety messages repeated all around the factory.

There are more and more work safety zones, as they call them. We talk about safety at the beginning of each shift and when you see somebody doing something that you believe is unsafe, then you don’t just walk on by thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that’, you actually say: ‘Do you think you should be doing that? Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves? Shouldn’t you this, shouldn’t you that’. It’s all about, basically, making that kind of conversation acceptable, not the kind of conversation in which someone ends up telling you to fuck off.

In the ‘90s, I started to get involved in taking some kids around the refinery and I spent time in a few local schools talking to the kids about what it’s like to get a job and how you behave at work, that kind of thing. Then I was asked if I would consider moving into community affairs full-time. At that time, I was a manager in the Raw Sugar part of the refinery. It was a difficult area. We hadn’t invested

You’ll see the same safety messages repeated all around the factory. There are more and more work safety zones, as they call them. We talk about safety at the beginning of each shift and when you see somebody doing something that you believe is unsafe, then you don’t just walk on by thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that’, you actually say: ‘Do you think you should be doing that?

Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves? Shouldn’t you this, shouldn’t you that’.

very much in it, the plant was very old and the people who worked there had a bit of a reputation for being difficult. I guess I’d got to a point where I was bit fed up with production. So when this opportunity came up, I said, ‘Actually, yes, I think I might want to do that’.

So it was off with the overalls and on with the shirt, out of the factory, into the community. I’d driven up and down the A13 to and from work all of those years but I really hadn’t taken a lot of notice of the local area. All of a sudden, I was getting out there, getting into schools, talking to people, going to meetings. It was a real eye-opener to me. I just found this fascinating place. The ethnic diversity was incredible. It’s a place of high deprivation. I think the last thing I heard was it’s the third most deprived area in London, and not far off that in the country. But I was so moved by meeting so many people who are out there trying to make it better.

For a while I was working with this guy, Michael, who led the CSR work. He was quite a progressive character. For a long time the company had been working with charitable and cultural organisations that someone at the top of the business liked: The Royal Opera House, Kew Gardens, the Tate, that kind of thing. That was the way a lot of FTSE-100 companies operated and, to a certain, extent still do.

Michael used to say: ‘Look, you shouldn’t be doing this. There is no good business reason for supporting Kew Gardens. The business case is to support locally’. He’d explain that because we’re working and operating in a deprived area, if we can do something, even in a small way, to actually improve this area then that has to be a good influence on our business. It’s also about having a community license to operate. We’re a big factory, we stick out like a sore thumb, and we need people to feel positive about us. If you’re seen to be trying to do good things, the right things, it gives you a little bit of slack. It’s putting coins in the bank, so to speak. So the strategy we have now is all about offering support to the local community.

When I first started doing the community affairs job, I transferred to Head Office. It was a big shiny building close to the Tower of London, fantastic view, all glass, big table where you could sit down and the catering

After the company was sold to ASR (American Sugar Refining) in 2010, I moved back to the refinery. I was actually on holiday when I found out about the sale. It was a complete shock.

They had to keep it secret because of share price opportunists. So only a handful of very top people were actually aware it was going to happen. was really good. I used it as a venue for some of our community stuff, bringing kids from Newham up there. I knew through whispers that people were asking, ‘What’s Ken doing here, bringing these kids into the Head Office?’ But my view was that it was something we should be doing as a business and that if there were one or two people who were turning their nose up at it, then I was just going to ignore them and do it anyway. I did start to wonder if all Head Offices are the same though. I think there’s a kind of Head Office culture. ‘I’ve got a PA and all of that.’

After the company was sold to ASR (American Sugar Refining) in 2010, I moved back to the refinery. I was actually on holiday when I found out about the sale. It was a complete shock. They had to keep it secret because of share price opportunists.

So only a handful of very top people were actually aware it was going to happen.

When the announcement finally came out, it wasn’t that long after Kraft had bought Cadbury and there was a lot of talk in the media about another great British name being owned by America. But, if I’m being honest, I was more worried about my job.

I was on a round-Britain cruise. I’d only just left Southampton. I had gone down to dinner and was telling the man sitting next to me what I did and he said, ‘Oh, they’ve just been sold’. I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yes; it was on Sky News’. By this time we were in the middle of the Irish Sea. I looked at my wife and said: ‘I don’t know if I’ve got a job. I just don’t know. It’s all news to me; I had no idea’. So I went up to the lounge and paid a fortune via satellite to find out what the news story was. I read the news clip and then I looked up ASR. I realised that Tate & Lyle PLC owned a number of refineries in the US, refineries that we knew, and that they had sold those refineries to ASR, so in a way it wasn’t an organisation that was completely unknown to us. The next day, I rang my boss and asked, ‘What does it actually mean?’ She said: ‘To be honest, we don’t really know. But, in terms of the

refinery, it’s probably the best thing that’s happened. ASR is a business that knows us very well; they are cane sugar refiners.

They’ve bought us with the intention of us being their first foothold in Europe, with the intention of growing us. So in terms of the business, it appears to be almost the best thing that could happen’.

We’d gone through years of hearing that Tate & Lyle PLC didn’t really want us; we were struggling to produce reasonable profits. Because Tate & Lyle is a FTSE-100 company, you’re always getting investors and people commenting on the share price and what Tate & Lyle should be doing or not doing. Often they’d be saying it should be selling its sugar business.

So maybe it was inevitable. Of course I had no idea what ASR’s policy would be around community involvement. The company is privately owned: they don’t have to produce an annual report, the guys running this business don’t have shareholders, so they can turn any kind of community support on or off. But so far they seem to recognise that it’s very important to us to have local support.

Not least to help us recruit locally. The truth is that this is not a particularly great environment to work in. You walk out of here at lunch time, where are you going to go? There’s not a load of nice shops or anything. If you get somebody to work here who’s local, then they are much more likely to be happy because it’s very easy to get here and they know the area.

They’re not looking to pop out and go shopping at lunch time. It doesn’t become such an issue.

My dad retired at 65 and died at 67. I’m quite determined it’s not going to happen to me. I want to retire well before 65. My wife and I have bought a converted church and vestry in Scotland and we’re going to move up there and rent part of it out as a holiday let. I’ve had a good career but there’s more to life than just coming to work for Tate & Lyle.

David Hurn, UK - South Wales

Manufacturers visited: Corgi Hosiery Alison Tod Cardiff Theatrical Services Flexicare Medical Ltd BCB International

David at BCB International. Photo by Kate Mercer.

David Hurn

South Wales I have spent more than two thirds of my working photographic life based in my home country of Wales. It can be a very joyous country; it can be very depressing.

I have documented the annihilation of the coal industry and the, more or less, decimation of steel. So many put out of wok, so many still out of work.

I was delighted to be offered the chance to work on a group project of British manufacturing. I was slightly daunted as I know all the photographers involved and I knew standards would be very high.

I wanted to be positive so deliberately chose small industries based on individual

skill and craft - experience has taught me that these usually bring job satisfaction and quality goods.

Who could not be enchanted by a firm set up in 1897 by the present owner’s great great grandfather: a miner who suffered from cold feet, selling socks to other miners living and working in the local area.

Corgi Hosiery Ltd now has a workforce of over 50 highly skilled workers, many who have been there for over 50 years making cashmere products of the highest quality.

At Flexicare Medical Ltd there was something surreal about a global supplier of very high quality plastic medical

apparatus being based in the South Wales valleys. It was fun to have to dress up like a character from science fiction to go into a clean room to observe very skillful people making drainage bags and breathing circuits; equipment that saves or enhances peoples lives.

Alison Tod I count as a dear friend. She makes hats, a milliner, but what hats! Each hand made; each a production of creative inspiration - in fact I would actually class her as a sculptor.

Corgi Hosiery Ltd, Ammanford.

Marie Dorritt, finishing socks.

Corgi Hosiery Ltd, Ammanford.

Roberta Jacob, hand finishing socks.

Angie Phillips, hand finishing socks.

Kayleigh Dorritt, hand finishing socks.

Corgi Hosiery Ltd, Ammanford.

Factory floor.

Corgi Hosiery Ltd, Ammanford. Socks on display with the company’s first ever Griswold circular knitting machine c.1893.

Corgi Hosiery Ltd, Ammanford. Cones for winding yarns.

Cardiff Theatrical Services Ltd, Cardiff. Rosie Savage and Nina Siddall with Augustus Gloop dummy for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Cardiff Theatrical Services Ltd, Cardiff. Front gauze for LOHENGRIN.

Cardiff Theatrical Services Ltd, Cardiff. Tool store in the prop department.

Flexicare medical products, Mountain Ash.

Bethan Jones and Suzette Fidler.

Processing breathing circuits.

Sarah Evans and Sharon Duffy.

Assembling breathing systems.

Flexicare medical products, Mountain Ash. Jordan Thorne demonstrating an Endotracheal tube on dummy.

Alison Tod studio and shop, Abergavenny.

Alison Tod and Tracey Williams.

The Vale Resort, Cardiff. A Showman’s wedding with Alison Tod hats.

An essay by Sophie Howarth

A Life in Manufacturing -

Paul Middleton, Marketing and Business Development Manager, Angle Ring I’ve been here many, many years. I was looking for a job after I finished my A-levels and I suppose engineering interested me, even though at the time I was working in Pizza Land. I just wanted a job that had something do with making but a job that was on the office side. Anyway, I saw the advert but I didn’t get round to applying. I forgot all about it and then a month later saw the advert again. They obviously hadn’t managed to find anybody, so I applied. That was twenty years ago.

It is interesting to have a job where you actually make something (which is what I like to do but I’m not particularly good at it!). I’ve got my own little workshop in my garage where I like to put things together and I’ll fix anything that’s broken. I’m making a box at the moment for my son.

He’s only eight and he’s got a diary to write his secret notes and wants a wooden box to keep it in.

Wembley Stadium we know that we’ve done the work for it and there is a sense of satisfaction. We’re doing a big staircase for the Wellcome Trust at the moment. If you get a piece of metal and you want to bend it to a radius, that’s quite straightforward.

It’s quite a gentle bend; you’re not actually stretching the material too much. If you want to bend it to an ellipse, that’s more awkward. If you want to bend it so it’s a cone, that’s more awkward still. And if you want to bend it to spiral, then that’s even more awkward! Well, this staircase is a spiral and a conical and elliptical shape, so it’s particularly problematic. It’ll be good to see it in a year’s time when it’s finished. We don’t normally get allowed out of the office too much but this being such a big project, I think we might be able to go and see it.

When I started at the company I worked in sales, then I started to do business development. Then I moved on to marketing. Now I probably do sales 80% of the time and new product development 20% of the time and marketing when we can squeeze it into the gaps. I basically speak to all of the suppliers.

By ‘new products’, I mean coming up with new ways of bending things. So if somebody gives us a drawing, it’s about finding the way to make what they want.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, people mostly made square, boring buildings. Now you can

ost people who work here think we are the best but M obviously if you went to our competitors they would probably think the same. We were one of the earliest companies doing it; we set up before our competitors.

They split off from us. We’ve generally been run by engineers rather than accountants, so we designed and built most of our own machines and they do things that other companies can’t.

When you’re actually doing something tangible, you can take pride in what you do. Of course, here in the company, we don’t make a finished product; we bend a piece of raw metal. But when we see the

have a beautiful curved building. We made the Azerbaijan Flame, which is a fountain in Azerbaijan that featured on the Eurovision song context. That was a very complicated bending process. It took all the machines

and all the people we had. It was £100,000 worth of work for us but it looked stunning when it was finished, absolutely stunning.

Those kinds of jobs are amazing but you’re often quoting against a dozen other companies and the prices are all driven down. Because of how cut-throat the industry’s been over the last few years, you end up doing jobs for nothing, just so you can say you’ve done a prestigious project.

The older I get, the more I appreciate doing a job for a run-of-the-mill customer; a fabricator who you can build a good relationship with. I like the day-to-day trading relationships.

Most people who work here think we are the best but obviously if you went to our competitors they would probably think the same. We were one of the earliest companies doing it; we set up before our competitors. They split off from us. We’ve generally been run by engineers rather than accountants, so we designed and built most of our own machines and they do things that other companies can’t. I still think we’re the best now. Although we lose work on price, it’s very rare we’d lose it on quality. People will normally come back to us and say, “We prefer your work; can you do a better price?” Generally the feedback we get from the market and from all of our customers is that we pay more attention to quality than anybody else. Of course, that means you lose work when you’re too expensive and you’ve got to weigh it up.

In the last five years, we’ve not really hired many people because of the cuts in construction. A pretty building full of curves costs more than a square building and everyone’s cutting costs. So there’s been a lot less demand for that kind of thing recently. We make stuff for heavy engineering: for oil rigs, things like that, and all that is still bobbing along quite nicely. In fact, the energy industry is the thing that’s kept us going, because there’s a lot of investment in renewable energy and we’re involved in bending metal for the new wind turbines and sea turbines. And there’s still money being spent on military and we bend plates for big army vehicles and that kind of thing.

It’s a hard industry, engineering in the UK. Luckily, we’re owned by a man who doesn’t run the place like an accountant; he runs it like a family. He’s not here every day because he’s a multimillionaire so he

“ I’ve been here 44 years. I live on the doorstep; I can walk to work in three minutes. It’s paid my mortgage; it’s brought my family up. My son works here too, on the same machine as doesn’t need to be but he does try and look after people. We’ve got a lot of staff who’ve been here a long time. Although me. He’s been here 20 odd years. There’s quite there are some machines that aren’t making a profit, and haven’t done for the a few families work here. I’ve got 18 months last few years, he’s keeping them going.

The company has probably made a loss to go. I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire three out of the last five years but we’ve not made any redundancies, whereas our main competitors have laid off about really. I don’t want to sit in the house all half of their staff. Once you’ve been in this industry there’s not a lot of options, not the time with the missus looking at me and many people do what we do. You can’t suddenly just jump to another company. finding me odd jobs; I’d rather be here earning There are obviously a couple of other companies like ourselves, but not many.

It’s quite a rare thing. money, you know what I mean?”

I’ll be honest, I’m quite money driven. At the end of the day I come to work for money. I’m not a charity; I don’t work for nothing. I had it ground into me when I was young: ‘you don’t not go to work, not for any reason’, and if you don’t work you don’t get paid. I’ve got a wife and two children and I work so I can look after them, tinker in my garage, or go for a walk in the woods or ride my bike. As much as you need to enjoy work when you’re at work, and have pride in it, you don’t work for the sake of work; you work for your family. I think that’s what life is about.

I’m not a big friend person; I’ve got a group of friends from school that I don’t see very often because they all have their own lives but I suppose they are my closest friends.

One lives down the road from me and I still only see him once a month, as is the way. In the company, we joke that we’re all colleagues rather than friends. The fact is we are actually friends; we would do a lot for each other. There are people who’ve had problems and been ill and we’ve all pulled together to get the job done, to relieve them. But we don’t go out that much as a group. Now and again we do; somebody will leave or somebody will get married and then we’ll have a night out. But I suppose when you’re working together 40-odd hours a week, you don’t tend to do a lot of out-of-work socialising.

I think I’ve got a good work-life balance but it took years to achieve. Everyone at work takes the mickey out of the fact my wife doesn’t work. I’ll say, “I want a new mountain bike and I can’t afford it”, and they’ll say, “It’s because your wife’s not working”. But when I was growing up, my mum worked all the time. She went back

Bob Brookes, metal bender, Angle Ring to work within two weeks of having me.

She worked as a restaurant manager, so she’d see us off to school and then she’d be there to meet us from school, and then she’d go to work for the evening shift. I didn’t want that for my children. So my wife stays at home and we try to have what some would class as a traditional family. It’s a decision that you make together and you have to try and get that balance right. I’m not a sexist person; it’s just that I earned more money than she did, so it was more sensible for her to not work than for me. If it had been the other way round, trust me, I’d have been happy about that!

was growing up my parents didn’t have a lot of money. They were both very clever.

My father worked in engineering at a company that made lots of little fasteners, bolts and things. My mother worked in the restaurant for quite a few years then she actually got a job in engineering as well. We grew up in a terraced house. It was a very normal family life really. But my dad’s 75 and he only finished paying the mortgage off when he was 73. He was working until he was 69 and my mum was working until she was 66. They had to do that to pay the mortgage off. I don’t want to be in that situation.

After I’d been here for a bit, I went back to college and did a HNC in Business and Finance. I was going to convert that to a degree but trying to do it whilst working full-time became problematic, so I just stuck with the HNC. It’d be nice to have a degree but it’s also sort of a fake goal.

You get it and realise that you’ve spent all that time studying to go, “Wow, I’ve got a degree”. I’d rather spend time with my children. When they’re older, I might do it, when I’m like 50-odd or whatever but, at the moment, the HNC is fine.I like to be organised about money. It’s not because I’m aiming to buy nice flash cars or things like that; it’s that if I lost my job I’d like to have some security behind me.

I’ve got a pension and some investments and the children have got a trust fund, which has only got hundreds in it rather than thousands, but at least I’m putting money to one side for the future. When I

I’ve got no particular aspirations; I don’t like setting long-term goals because if you don’t achieve them you might be slightly disappointed. So I just want to see the children grow up and I’ll retire early and do things that make me happy every day. I would like to travel a lot more though. Not necessarily go around the Amazon for six months but go to some different countries and different places. I did the InterRail thing where you pay your student fee and you get a ‘passport’ to go anywhere on any train in Europe for six weeks. But, after a couple of weeks, I got mugged in Marseille and ended up going up back home. So at some point I’d like to travel a bit more, just seeing different places in Europe. It keeps your mind active, seeing something different every day.

Peter Marlow , UK - Black Country / Birmingham

Manufacturers visited: Panesar Food Perfection Foods Powerpanels Kirkpatrick Brooks England Angle Ring Castings PLC Frank Baines

Wedge Galvanizing HS Marston Aerospace Daines & Hathaway Holdens Brewery Alucast Midland Snacks Weston Beamor Jaguar Land Rover

Peter at Jaguar Land Rover. Photo by Lorna-Mary Webb.

Peter Marlow

Black Country / Birmingham There could not be more difference between Frank Baines Saddlery in Walsall and the ‘Trim and Final’ XF production line of the Jaguar Landrover plant in Castle Vale. At Frank’s family business, there is no production line as the small team (Frank, his son Garry, and daughter Victoria included) work on individual saddles and are personally responsible for the quality of work they produce. To my eye at least, I am amazed at the quality of the final results produced entirely by hand with what look to me like very basic, but very sharp, rudimentary tools.

A few miles away in Castle Vale, there are areas of the production line so automated that human beings are actually fenced off from the manufacturing process. However, in both, there seemed to permeate an old fashioned idea of ‘craft’: leather saddles produced entirely by hand and cars produced by hundreds of people, with a major input by robots and machines.

In the steamy and spotless mixing area of Panesar Foods, the small team of mostly Polish workers are making barbeque sauce: molasses, spices, brown sugar, salt, spices and vinegar are being poured into a vast stainless cooking pot and the final mixture is pumped via a four inch stainless steel pipe to the next door bottling plant.

Panesar started as a family business in 1992, and has now grown to produce a range over seven hundred speciality foods and sauces. The mango chutney, or curry sauces, on the shelves of many mainstream supermarkets is most likely produced by them.

Throughout the project I visited twenty or so companies. I searched for elegance, beauty and nice light within these highly varied, and often unstructured, environments. I was initially attracted to the more traditional processes, which were visually arresting but were also the source of much dull and receptive work.

Diane Deeming, for example, at Brooks England (bicycle saddles), sits in front of an enormous stamping machine and every few seconds feeds a single part into it as the safety gate noisily crashes down. She seems almost part of the machine.

The big story is how many manufacturing success stories there are in the Black Country, an area decimated during the recession of the early eighties. I found there were so many small stories within each place: Carl Kirlew at Weston Beamor, who started work sweeping the floors as a cleaner having been given a skills test, is now sitting at a jewellers’ bench, next to six other highly experienced jewellers, quietly and skillfully setting diamonds into a platinum ring that will most likely seal the engagement of a Black Country couple.

Castings PLC. Metal foundry castings; 80% of production is supplied directly to multinational constructors of commercial vehicles and cars.

Angle Ring, based in Tipton, specialises in large scale metal bending.

Panesar Foods, who specialise in making ‘stir-in’ cooking sauces.

Rafal Joppeck, 37, a food processor operative at Panesar Foods. Joppeck is Polish and has worked at Panesar for five years.

Stuart Franklin

Scotland

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

Stuart Franklin

The Sound of Hoy in the Orkney Islands, UK. Scotland generates some of the biggest waves in the UK. This wave energy is being harnessed by Pelamis Wave machines. The Old Man of Hoy in the background.

In 2013, Multistory and Magnum Photos commissioned nine of the world’s leading photographers to document contemporary British manufacturing.

During a period of great economic instability, and where questions are being raised about the strength of western economies within the worldwide market, there has never been a more relevant time to explore the condition of Britain’s manufacturing future.

The photographs in Open for Business show what this means at a human level.

They reveal the shifting balance between white and blue-collar workers, the physical reality of process automation and of environments in which a growing staff manage activity from a computer screen.

The project raises questions about the corporate responsibility of employers to their employees, highlights the significance of migration to our workforce and shows the pride exuded from workers who make a huge variety of products. The project captures the current landscape of British manufacturing and its effect on culture and community life, celebrating the work, activities and lives of the employees critical to driving British industry forwards.

www.openforbusiness.uk.com

Angle Ring .

A press braking machine delivers 1,200 tons of pressure to create steel cylindrical sections for the energy industry, and aluminium parts for MRI Scanners.

Angle Ring.

Inspection and servicing hatch on a section bending machine, most of the mechanical equipment is below the machine.

Kirkpatrick’s Foundry.

Walsall, West Midlands.

Wedge Galvanising.

The UK’s largest hot-dip galvanizing organisation.

After ‘dipping’, steelwork for the construction industry is lifted out of the Galvanizing Bath, 21 metres long, 1.5 m wide and 3 metres deep.

A traditional foundry specialising in door furniture casting.

Brooks England (bicycle saddles), founded in 1866.

Still based in Smethwick, they are a national and international brand.

The leather top assembly of the saddle is created on a press then hand trimmed and treated in an oven for 45 minutes, then left on racks to absorb natural ambient moisture prior to assembly.

Frank Baines Saddlery.

Patterns for client’s bespoke hand-made saddles are all stored as a record of each unique made-tomeasure saddle.

A selection of traditional tools on the saddlemaker Simon Woolley’s bench who has been with the company for over 20 years, used for making saddles. Simon works on an individual saddle and is personally responsible for the quality of work he produces.

Weston Beamor Jewellery.

Working with a broad spectrum of customers for over 60 years, Weston Beamor is one of the most respected and trusted names in the jewellery industry.

Midland Snacks.

Manufacturer of pork scratchings and pork crunch.

Midland Snacks has twenty fryers where the small trimmed pieces of frozen pork rind are fried in oil.

The process is self perpetuating as oil is rendered down from the rinds and has to be periodically reduced and sent for recycling.

An essay by Sophie Howarth

High value manufacturing Amid the rolling hills and pictureperfect villages of the Cotswolds, a new industrial revolution is taking place. While local residents have refined their weekly shopping to include ethically farmed boar paté and honey-infused goats cheese, so local manufacturers have also moved up the value chain to produce products that include spacecraft payload interfaces, stereotactic neurosurgery tools and evaporative emissions systems.

For most of us, such items sound somewhat baffling and the companies who make these goods (including: Delphi, Spirax-Sarco, Rotork, Renishaw, Messier-Bugatti-Dowty and Moog) are hardly household names. However, they are responsible for 1 in 5 jobs in the Cotswolds and their global exports account for a significant part of the UK economy. “The things that Britain is best at making are not the kinds of things you and I get in the shops”, explains Sarah Smith, the BBC’s Business Correspondent: “I’m never going to buy an aeroplane engine - but if I did need one I would be well advised to buy British. We lead the world in aerospace engineering”.

skilled scientists and engineers to design, make and service a relatively small volume of very specialised products. Some of the more known HVM companies in the UK include: Rolls Royce, Airbus, BAE systems, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca.

Renishaw, a world leader in the design and manufacture of precision measurement devices, has its headquarters on the edge of the picturesque village of Wottonunder-Edge. Founded by two former Rolls Royce engineers in 1973, it now employs over 3300 staff globally, almost two thirds of whom work in its five Gloucestershire sites. Renishaw is a by-word for accuracy: if you want to position something in exactly the right place - down to the billionth of a metre - you will probably use one of their products to do so. They are used for applications as diverse as jet engine and wind turbine manufacture, through to dentistry and brain surgery.

Global demand for what Renishaw offers is high: last year, the company reported a turnover of £347 million, 94% of which was due to exports.

Only about a third of the staff at Renishaw are directly involved in making things. Roughly a third work in research and development and a third in sales and marketing. This kind of employee make-up is characteristic of the HVM sector, which provides value as much in design and after-sales service as it does by managing assembly lines. “It’s

he picked out Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Tim Berners Lee to be stars of the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony. Today, the pressure is on a new generation of innovators to show we have an industrial future as well as a past. There has been a lot of discussion about the long-term decline of manufacturing in Britain and concern about how much the sector has suffered as a result of the recession. But the government is investing great hope in the promise of HVM. The sector already accounts for over a third of all UK exports and many believe it could be the driving force for our financial recovery.

Jayne Bryant, Engineering and Technology Director for BAE Systems’ defence information division, reflects on the concurrent optimism and pressure: “The biggest challenge we face right now is in the exploitation of our products and technology for the export market; coming up with novel ways of using the technology we have, then making the most of its potential. We have to watch the wider commercial world, which moves with such speed. I believe there are important lessons to be learned from outside our traditional sector and markets and we must look for quick and more creative approaches when it comes to getting the most out of our engineering capability”.

“ The manufacturing sector generally has a poor public perception in the UK, with the belief often expressed that ‘the UK doesn’t make stuff anymore’ and generally has the image of grimy, oily environments, dominated by 50+ year old men operating manual machinery.”

Chris Pockett, Renishaw This sector is described as High Value Manufacturing, or HVM. It is characterised by the application of cutting-edge technical knowledge and expertise to the creation of products, production processes and associated services that have high economic value. Unlike traditional manufacturing in which relatively unskilled workers assemble large numbers of identical items, HVM uses

dependent on a lot of really clever stuff invention, making, building and servicing from design through to depot. It’s a really complex, high value chain of activity and a network of skills”, explains Jo Britton from EEF, a leading trade organisation for UK manufacturing.

Danny Boyle swelled the nation’s pride in its science and engineering heritage when

“ Once Northeners in flat caps hammered out those whippet flanges before posing for a Lowry painting on the way home. Now there are armies of engineers writing code and running workstations that help Rolls Royce design their single crystal nickel turbine blades for jet engines.�

Tim Worstall, economics writer.

Martin Parr, UK - Bristol / Barrow in Furness

Manufacturers visited: Renishaw GKN Airbus BAE systems, Barrow Soigneur Robin Mather WSP Textiles Ted James Design Libertine Bicycles Aardman Animations Cameron Balloons

Martin at WSP Textiles. Photo by George Bull.

Martin at Airbus. Photo by George Bull.

Martin Parr

Bristol / Barrow in Furness I love to photograph people at work.

There is a real challenge to try and capture that strange love/hate relationship we have towards work. With different jobs and different people that relationship changes but there is always some degree of tension, and of satisfaction, and I am always trying to find ways to express this.

How brilliant then to be commissioned to travel to some of the factories in the UK to try and capture the current state of British manufacturing. Because I was assigned the Bristol area, I photographed one of BAE’s research sites in the city but really I wanted to go and see the nuclear

submarine yard in Barrow in Furness, so I mentioned this to the PR guy who we had met and he said it may be possible.

So, a couple of months later I walked into what must be the biggest shed in British manufacturing as two nuclear subs were being slowly assembled. It is quite a sight to behold and we show it here, adding the man striding across the floor to give some indication of the scale.

In Bristol, we have GKN, Airbus and Rolls Royce and here we show the wing assembly plant for the A400M multi-role airlifter. Although quite huge, the detail of

the component assembly can be likened to being a dentist, such is the precision required when the parts are all welded or riveted together.

Aardman is one of Bristol’s and Britain’s recent success stories and I have watched this company grow exponentially in my own time in the city. I have known David Sproxton, one of the founders of the company long before he started up.

Watching the filming in their studios is fascinating as the progress is so slow, getting 5 seconds of animation done in a day is really going it.

WSP Textiles is the world’s leading manufacturer of premium billiard cloth.

John Cropton, WSP Textiles, Stroud.

Richard Allen, final inspector, WSP Textiles, Stroud.

Renishaw, Bristol.

One of the UK’s premier manufacturers, Renishaw have two manufacturing facilities in this region: Stonehouse Factory (metal cutting facility) is 80,000 sq ft. with 70 machine tools producing around 300,000 parts each month; Woodhouse (electronics assembly) was voted the best electronic plant in September, 2012.

Richard Molden, a Rigger, Aardman Animations, Bristol.

Aardman Animations, Bristol.

Making and filming ‘Shaun the Sheep’.

Airbus employs around 63,000 people and makes the world’s largest aircraft, the A380.

Since its creation, Airbus has so far delivered 7,877 aircraft.

There are over 4000 people employed at the Filton site in the design office and in business support roles such as procurement, finance and customer service. Core activities at Filton include the design, engineering and support for Airbus wings, fuel systems and landing gear integration. Teams also work on systems, structures, and aerodynamics research, development and test facilities.

More than 2,000 engineers at Filton are involved in a range of areas, including wing integration, flight physics, structures and systems. Filton is also responsible for wing assembly and for equipping the A400M multirole airlifter.

Airbus’ presence in Filton is being enhanced with the construction of a new aerospace business park that consolidates the site’s engineering, design, customer support and other employees into one highly efficient office block. Features of this 12-acre facility, which Airbus began building in March 2012, include modern office space and an auditorium.

They have research and test areas with fully working landing gear constructed inside a building in order to test landing sequences.

They carry out structural testing and fatigue material testing amongst others.

Airbus, Bristol.

Photographer 6

A dynamic family business founded in 1971, Cameron Balloons is a world leader in hot air balloons with 85% of their aerostats exported from Bristol, making up to 90 balloons in their workshop at one time. When a new balloon is completed, the workforce come together to test it before shipping them out to balloonists and corporate clients across the globe.

Cameron Balloons, Bristol.

Cameron Balloons, Bristo, Don Cameron.

An essay by Sophie Howarth

A Life in Manufacturing -

Chris Pockett, Head of Communications, Renishaw I’ve been with Renishaw all of my career. I grew up in Wottonunder-Edge where the company is based and I was always aware of it because my mum was the fourth female employee. She joined as an assembly operative in 1978. She was interviewed by the founder Sir David McMurtry, who was then just plain David. She said they laughed and giggled the whole of the way through the interview.

The company was very small in those days. They were basically operating out of an old ice cream making factory. They were only employing tens of people, whereas today we are over 3300. In fact Sir David was still working for Rolls-Royce.

He didn’t actually join Renishaw full time until 1979, even though he and John Deer started it in ‘73. When I was growing up, everyone used to call the company Renishaws. Many people still do today because in this part of the world, we often add an ‘s’ to things! I stuffed up my A-levels. I really lost focus in the last year.

As it turned out it was probably actually for the best, but at the time I needed to decide what was I going to do. I decided

I decided to apply for business management courses. I got an unconditional offer from Bradford University, which at the time was one of the top ten management schools in the world. And then I was approached by the careers department from my old school to say that Renishaw were looking to sponsor a business undergraduate. I went for two interviews and was given the offer. That was in 1984 and it was the company’s original sponsored student scheme. I had something like a £400 a year bursary from Renishaw in the final year, which now doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but this was almost 30 years ago, and I was from a working class background, so it felt amazing. I graduated with a 2:1, and I joined Renishaw full time in the autumn of 1988.

I’ve always worked in the commercial part of the company. I started in forecasting, and within about three or four months, I was given a temporary secondment to run the UK sales office. I went from barely managing myself to managing 13 people, which was a baptism of fire. I was the youngest person there. You can imagine the resentment, but I think that I won most people over. It was meant to be six weeks and ended up being nine months. It was an unbelievably valuable experience.

The company at that point didn’t really have extensive training schemes. So I had to learn how to manage people the

I stuffed up my A-levels. I really lost focus in the last year. As it turned out it was probably actually for the best, but at the time I needed to decide what was I going to do. I decided to take a year out and I taught myself BASIC computer programming language, and worked in a butcher’s to try and earn some money. to take a year out and I taught myself BASIC computer programming language, and worked in a butcher’s to try and earn some money. I also volunteered my services to my old school, coaching the football team. We won every game. That’s my 100% record as a manager!

hard way. It was a time when we were growing really quickly. We were often unable to fill orders and I had to deal with angry customers. I remember we were constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was a very, very challenging time.

For a while in the mid-2000s I was

also responsible for running both the UK sales office and a finished goods warehouse. I ran a six-sigma project that saved the company something like £80,000 to £100,000 a year based on some improvements we made to the warehouse. We had a real problem when I took over, our deliveries to customers were often behind the scheduled date, and no matter how hard we seemed to throw resources at it, it just wasn’t working. So we went through what’s called a DMAIC process. You have to Define the project, for the process you’re looking at then you Measure, you take Actions, you Implement and then you Control. I really enjoyed that kind of logical thinking.

I am always thinking about efficiency, how can we change things, and do them better. I’m actually Six Sigma Green Belt trained. There aren’t many Heads of Communications who are Six Sigma trained, but I suppose it’s a reflection of having come through the company, doing a lot of different roles.

I used to travel a lot in the ‘90s. I helped to build the first bespoke Renishaw exhibition stand in China in 1995. I shipped everything from the UK and built it with two Chinese colleagues. We only had four people in the whole of China then. Now there are 110 so it’s grown a lot. I actually met my wife when I was in Singapore attending a trade show.

She’s from Taiwan and she represented western magazines in the engineering, plastics and metal working area. I’m glad I don’t travel abroad as much now. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, staying in hotels and all that. Even if I work long hours now, I can be home in five or ten minutes.

I’ve been in my current job as Head of Communications since 2012. It’s a great role for me because I’m very passionate about the business and I really enjoy meeting people. I do a lot of public speaking and I really enjoy talking to all sorts of groups because I want to reverse the bad image that manufacturing’s had for so many years. Renishaw is still a fairly anonymous company. We supply enabling technology to lots of big blue chip companies that everybody knows - the Rolls-Royces, the Boeings, the Airbuses.

But part of my job is to get us mentioned more and more beyond our traditional trade media. That’s definitely beginning

I’ve been in my current job as Head of Communications since 2012. It’s a great role for me because I’m very passionate about the business and I really enjoy meeting people. I do a lot of public speaking and I really enjoy talking to all sorts of groups because I want to reverse the bad image that manufacturing’s had for so many years. Renishaw is still a fairly anonymous company. We supply enabling technology to lots of big blue chip companies that everybody knows - the Rolls-Royces, the Boeings, the Airbuses. to happen. There is certainly recognition of our name now in government. The company is also increasingly taking part in things like the Big Bang Fair, which is the UK’s biggest fair for science and engineering, targeting kids from about 8 to 18. And we also sponsor quite a few awards related to young people, engineering and business. Part of my role

I was sponsored as a student by the company. For a long time, the general opinion was you got a job, you went to university, but if all else failed you got an apprenticeship. There’s still a lot of snobbery around but we’ve seen a bit of sea change over the last three to four years. What switched on kids are seeing is that even before the hike in tuition fees

I’m a big believer in the value of apprenticeships, probably because I was sponsored as a student by the company. For a long time, the general opinion was you got a job, you went to university, but if all else failed you got an apprenticeship. There’s still a lot of snobbery around but we’ve seen a bit of sea change over the last three to four years. is obviously to present the company’s position on various issues but it’s also to extol the virtues of engineering and manufacturing generally. As I say, it has had a pretty bad press over one or two generations, and I want to help inspire kids and ensure that even if they don’t join us, then they’ll at least join our customers or suppliers.

I’m a big believer in the value of apprenticeships, probably because

that their brothers or sisters or people in their wider network, are coming out of university with debts of £20,000, £30,000 and aren’t able to get a job or are getting poorly paid jobs. The savvy ones have started to think maybe there are alternative ways. University doesn’t suit everyone after all.

The apprenticeships that we do at Renishaw are very rigorous. They last three to four years and 55 of our

apprentices over the last ten years have gone on to do a full honours degree that’s all paid for by the company.

Historically our apprentice profile was probably more towards the age 16, now it’s increasingly 18 and above, post- A Levels. We had 40 traditional engineering apprenticeship opportunities this year, and there’s a lot more interest now than there ever was. It makes good business sense because it generates a lot of loyalty. People feel that you’ve worked closely with them, you’ve helped develop them. It really does help longterm recruitment and stability. Our staff turnover is less than 4% in the UK, and I am sure apprenticeships, sponsored student schemes and other training has a lot to do with that.

There are a lot of strong values that run through this company, that mainly come from the co-founders. They set the tone. I’ve got a very, very strong work ethic which I took from my parents and I set very high standards for my team. If you’ve got a strong work ethic, and are willing to take responsibility, I think you will probably always be alright. This is an unbelievable place to work. It really is.

The conditions are fantastic and what we’re working on is really exciting. If I hear people moaning, I think just go out and work elsewhere.

Mark Power, UK - Derby / Sunderland

Manufacturers visited: Bombardier Camira Fabrics Nissan

Mark at Nissan car plant, Sunderland. Photo by Murray Ballard.

Mark Power

Derby / Sunderland Photographers have often used ‘work’ as a subject. For instance, Lewis Hine campaigned against American child labour at the beginning of the 20th century before, years later, he celebrated the men constructing the Empire State Building.

In pre-war Germany, the great August Sander made portraits of every ‘type’ of worker he could find.

Even today, many photography schools still set ‘Man/Woman at Work’ as an early project, asking students to describe a particular job through a single picture. This is much more difficult than it might sound: a photograph might superficially illustrate a process, and even aestheticise it, but it struggles to show toil, danger, heat, cold, boredom… or even skill. Instead it exposes the inadequacies of the medium: what it cannot do.

That said, when I was told I’d be photographing in the Bombardier factory, where they make trains, I was excited. Not because I have a peculiar affection for

engines (I don’t) but because it sounded like an interesting place to see.

add a layer to the pictures that I’ll use in the exhibition.

I began by visiting the extraordinary photographic archive held at the National Railway Museum in York. Their collection of images of the Derby Works (as it was then called) show, in epic scale and detail, a dark and grimy Victorian world of steam engine production; great steel monsters surrounded by an army of tiny, ant-like men.

My last two days were spent at Nissan, in Sunderland - the biggest car plant in Europe. Now this was spectacular but my camera failed to get anywhere near the real experience. In fact I wrote a blog post about it: www.markpower.co.uk/blog/LIFEOFF-SCREEN

Starting with the archive was a mistake. I knew the modern site wouldn’t look the same, but I was still a little disappointed to discover how clean and tidy it actually was. When times are good (and they aren’t always) Bombardier in Derby produces approximately one train every day. But the production line is long and slow moving; it’s certainly not spectacular. So, as well as trying to make pictures, we made recordings of schmaltzy, girlie-pop-music booming out of greasy, paint-splattered radios turned up far too loud; incongruous in such a male dominated space. They

So, in the end, my pictures don’t tell you very much. Moreover, they don’t say that I liked these people and was grateful for their friendly openness and willingness to be photographed. I became a little wiser in the intricacies of making trains or cars, but not very much. I knew this would happen: between 2003 and 2006, I followed the construction of the Airbus A380 only to gain a rudimentary knowledge of how a plane flies. It’s all very confusing, so all I can ever do is try to make pictures I want to look at. It’s enough for me.

Bombardier, Derby.

Train production.

Bombardier, Derby.

Train production, the office.

“What a gift this was! I was crawling around under desks and generally being nosey when I came across this well-worn sole. I was nervous the fellow wearing the shoe would stop me taking a picture, or would put his foot flat to the ground, but thankfully he played along…

Actually he was so involved in his work I don’t believe he even noticed. The office was a huge open-plan space; I’d been photographing bits of pot plants, bags of tomatoes, and tangled electrical wiring before taking to my stomach.

Lord knows what everyone must have thought.”

Bombardier, Derby.

Train production, the office.

Camira Fabrics are manufacturers of moquette (thick, durable fabric to cover/furnish rail interiors). They furnish rail interiors: buses, coaches, train carriages and supply Bombardier on some projects. Now the UK’s only supplier of moquette for London tubes and buses.

Holdsworth Fabrics, part of the Camira group, has been making custom designed fabrics for underground carriages since it came into existence almost 150 years ago.

Historically, custommade moquette

has been designed so that the colour of the fabric allows passengers to identify each underground line. Moving forward, one standardised design in a set colour option will be rolled out to all lines.

Nissan car plant, Sunderland.

“Parts of the Nissan plant looked like the set of Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’ but, try as I might, I was unable to get anywhere near the experience of being there with a simple photograph. Now, with some time having passed, this picture begins to resemble something out of Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ instead. I particularly remember being fascinated by the hydraulic device used to suspend their tools in mid-air, which was hypnotic to watch.”

Park Valley Dyers, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

Dyers of yarn.

Camira Fabrics, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, the office. Manufacturer of moquette, durable fabric for train and bus seat covers.

“Here I go again. I really don’t have a foot fetish, really I don’t. When I look at this picture now all I can think of is how bizarre the situation must have looked... and believe me, we had quite an audience. I was lying on my stomach, while Murray, my assistant, was pointing the flashgun directly at her bare ankles. But, like all the other people I photographed, this woman sportingly indulged me.”

An essay by Sophie Howarth

Make It Yourself:

The Personal Manufacturing Revolution We have always been makers.

Long ago we made tools in our caves; more recently we tinkered with electronics in our garages.

Alongside the grand history of scientific invention and industrial revolution there is a parallel history of hackers and hobbyists whose resourcefulness has played its part in human progress.

William Addis came up with the idea for a toothbrush while in prison in London in the 1780s.

He made his first prototype by tying bristles to an animal bone inside his cell and, on his release, launched a hugely successful business popularising his invention. Trevor Baylis devised the world’s first wind-up radio in his garden shed in 1991, after watching a TV documentary that proposed wider access to broadcast media could help spread essential AIDS prevention messages across Africa.

Today, the history of kitchen table invention is at a tipping point. The tools for small scale digital fabrication (3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers, programmable sewing machines) look set to become as ubiquitous in the next twenty years as computers have become over the last twenty. It is already possible to buy the first generation of these machines for a few thousand pounds. In another decade or so we can expect the machines to become more sophisticated, their prices to tumble, and more and more people to have a small-scale factory inside their home. Coupled with online access to the growing library of object design blueprints (many of them open-source), this sets the scene for a world in which almost anyone will be able to make almost anything.

David Feyerisen blogs about personal manufacturing: “In the future, when we need a part, a device, a product, or a widget - we’ll go online, download the specification for the widget, and we’ll feed that into our personal manufacturing system. It will click, grind and hum for a few minutes and then WALLA! It will kick out the widget in front of our very eyes - kind of like the Star Trek replicator”, he explains.

The implications of democratising manufacturing in this way are profound.

Until now, the history of manufacturing has been closely tied to the history of capitalism with the means of production owned by a small, wealthy elite but powered by a much larger proletariat. The economics of mass manufacturing necessitates large upfront financial investments that are later recouped, usually with profit, through widespread distribution. Today, many industrial objects are designed in one country, assembled in another, shipped to a third, and warehoused, distributed and sold in a fourth. Personal manufacturing could turn all this on its head, allowing anyone with access to the technology and raw materials to fabricate whatever they need, anywhere in the world, at the touch of a button.

The significance of personal manufacturing is not so much about being able to make what we might otherwise have to buy; rather it’s about being able to make what we could never possibly be able to buy: unique objects designed and fabricated in response to our individual needs. Mass production depends on making large volumes of exactly the same thing but personal

would be a joy for many of us, but for someone who suffers from deformed feet it could be life-changing. Being able to manufacture our own made-tomeasure furniture would delight many home owners, but being able to design and print a basic house could transform the lives of those who are homeless or living in slums all around the world.

The ‘WikiHouse’ promises just that possibility. It is an open-source construction kit, developed by a team of British architects, that allows people to download, adapt and print the basic pieces of a high-performance, low-cost house using locally sourced materials.

The house can be assembled in a day or two without any technical knowledge or specialist equipment, rather like a giant IKEA product. It’s already being tested by people in New Zealand to explore postearthquake development housing and by a group of residents in a Rio favela. Alastair Parvin is a member of the team behind the award-winning social innovation. He explains why personal manufacturing is such a ground-breaking development: “What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill. They’re challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it’s got to be one-size-fits-all.

And they’re distributing massively, really complex manufacturing capabilities. We’re moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone... If design’s great project in the 20th century was the democratisation of consumption - Henry Ford, Coca Cola, Ikea - it might be that design’s project in the 21st century is

“ We want to create a culture of people who think more about creating and making things, not just going into a shop and buying things.”

Eddie Kirkby, The Manufacturing Institute, which set up the UK’s first Fab Lab in Manchester fabrication allows objects to be produced for a market as small as one. To be able to print a pair of perfectly fitting shoes at less than the cost of a high street pair

the democratisation of production. When it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters”.

“ A convergence of several trends are enabling the ‘DIY revolution’: the growing online learning resources and digitally-facilitated distance collaboration; the increasing affordability of advanced tools and technology; and the expanding reach of online marketplaces to easily buy supplies and sell goods to dispersed set of customers.”

Zack Schildhorn, Forbes Emerging Tech Report Neil Gershenfeld has been described as the ‘intellectual godfather’ of personal manufacturing. He is a Professor of Physics who runs the Centre for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA. In the late 1990s, he began teaching a course alluringly called ‘How to Make (Almost) Anything’, in which students were given access to equipment that allowed them to prototype their own inventions. The course was regularly oversubscribed and Gershenfeld noticed that even students with little or no technical background were able to fabricate fairly sophisticated objects. It gave him an idea. What would happen if similar equipment where installed in areas of social and educational deprivation?

In 2003, he began an outreach project, kitting out a housing estate in innercity Boston with a mini version of the ‘Fab Lab’ (fabrication laboratory) at MIT. There was soon demand to re-create this inventor’s paradise elsewhere. Within a few years, Fab Labs were started in Costa Rica, Ghana, Norway, India, Peru and Afghanistan. Today, there are over 500 Fab Labs in more than 40 countries, predominantly in areas of disadvantage.

Fab Lab users in every corner of the globe are discovering the possibilities of a world in which they can create rather than just buy things; cutting out the middle-men and dissolving the traditional boundaries between designers, makers and consumers. In Jalalabad, Fabbers have built a free, city-wide WiFi network using plywood, chicken wire and a wireless receiver box. In India, they made a hearing aid that can be moulded for individual users and fabricated for no more than 20 pence. Here in the UK, Piers Ridyard used the Fab Lab in Manchester to prototype a device for adding storage to his MacBook.

Tentatively, he put his Nifty MiniDrive

onto Kickstarter hoping to generate a few thousand pounds to be able to make a first commercial run of the product. In less than a month, he had 10,000 backers to the tune of nearly half a million pounds.

All Fab Labs are linked by a broadband network so that innovations and objects made in one place can be replicated in another. A Fab Academy is enabling distributed courses to be taught in the labs and a Fab Fund is providing global access to capital and markets for new businesses incubated there. For Gershenfeld it has been thrilling to see the social impact of radically distributing the tools of invention: “The message coming from the Fab Labs is that the other five billion people on the planet aren’t just technical sinks; they’re sources. The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems. By bringing welcoming

but it’s where we are today. It breaks every organisational boundary we can think of”.

The possibilities opened up by distributed manufacturing are both thrilling and alarming. Dentists and surgeons are now able to print perfectly fitting false teeth, prosthetic limbs and replacement bones, while last year scientists succeeded in printing human organs using living tissue.

At the same time, open-source designs and 3D printers have already been used to print fully functioning guns and other ‘wiki weapons’, showing a darker side to the spirit of universal access and free licensing that characterises the ‘maker’ movement. From an ecological perspective, the developments also seem complex: manufacturing more things locally could drastically reduce the volume of goods we ship or fly around the world, while using discarded objects as raw material to print other objects sounds like a recycling triumph. But if more people are able to manufacture whatever they want, whenever they want, there is clearly also a risk of significantly increasing what ultimately ends up in landfill.

It is clear that the next manufacturing revolution is set to be a digital one and that it will lead to new ways of doing almost everything from cooking meals to distributing international aid. But the technology is still in its infancy and there are a great many unknowns, from both

“ What if you could design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that can be used to make almost anything? Imagine if you didn’t have to wait for a company to sell the product you wanted but could use your own personal fabricator to create it instead.”

Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms environments to innovators wherever they are, this digital revolution will make it possible to harness a larger fraction of the planet’s brainpower. I thought that was the projection for twenty years into the future

engineering and ethical perspectives. As Neil Gershenfeld sees it, the question for all of us to ponder is: “How will we live, learn, work and play when anyone can make anything, anywhere?”

Alessandra Sanguinetti, Argentina - Manchester

Manufacturers visited: Siemens Croft Filters Headen & Quarmby (Kinky Knickers) MOCAPONE Manchester University Fablab Manchester Lazarian HMG Paints Ltd Carradice

Swifty Scooters Wigs up North Fine Castings Inventid David Buckley Terrance Singleton Marble Beers Manchester Craft and Design Centre 2-DTech

Alessandra at 2-DTECH. Photo by Sarah Lloyd.

Alessandra Sanguinetti Manchester

Wherever there’s people I snoop and stare, so photography acts as my official permission to do this and not be punched, as I never tire of observing others, looking out for clues to their life.

Walking into the manufacturing world, faced with the impersonal row of desks, computers, machinery, fluorescent lighting and fast production pace, I made the choice of visually isolating people and their

work from the actual place, so they could be the centre of attention and I’d have the excuse to have them stop working long enough for us to meet eye to eye.

One common thread within these very disparate businesses was the way people seemed at ease and proud of their task.

Be it sewing Kinky Knickers, or welding custom made industrial filters, there was a matter of fact - getting on with

it - approach to the job, and a certain cheerfulness that seemed uniquely British.

This manner was contagious and made me do my own strange job (observing other people doing theirs) in the same way. I carried on, snooping into people’s cubicles with a foolish smile, always welcomed by a laugh.

FabLab, Jamie White, a Maker.

FabLab is a digital fabrication laboratory - a UK first - giving businesses, entrepreneurs, schools and communities the tools to turn their ideas and concepts into reality by giving them access to a range of advanced digital manufacturing technology such as 3D printing.

Croft Filters, Veronika Sharrock, filter manufacturer.

Siemens, junior apprentices.

Croft Filters is a filter manufacturer with over 25 years’ experience designing and manufacturing industrial filters to solve filtration challenges.

Headen & Quarmby (Kinky Knickers, Mary Portas), Manchester.

Liz Baxendale is a sewing machinist at Kinky Knickers, a purely UK underwear and nightwear manufacturer that reopened the huge Headen & Quarmby sewing factory in Middleton. The underwear is handmade using material from a Nottingham-based lace-maker and has been in such high demand they’ve had to double their employment.

FabLab, Julia Jacobs.

Croft Filters, Mark Burns, Director.

Trudi Madden is a canteen cashier at the Siemens Congleton plant in Cheshire. The canteen supplies meals for its 500 employees.

Siemens, Trudi Madden.

Siemens, Clint Nuttall.

Siemens, Scott Spencer.

Wigs Up North

Chris Steele-Perkins, UK - Plymouth

Manufacturers visited: Burts Potato Chips Spinnaker International Westaways Sausages Summerskills Brewery Dartmoor Brewery Tavy Ales Conway Stewart Vi-Spring Tideford Organic Foods Bandvulc Tyres Ltd Princess Yachts

Chris at Dartmoor Brewery. Photo by Lee Jackson.

Chris Steele-Perkins Plymouth

I have been photographing England: the people, the culture, the landscape, the ups and the downs, as a central part of my working life. So, to be commissioned to work around a topic in England that I had done little about in the past, manufacturing, in an area (Plymouth) I had spent little time in, was welcome.

I wanted to look at a variety of manufacturing and, in the time-frame of 10 days, I thought that one day per company, regardless of size, would be a good distribution of effort and each company should be refreshingly different; and this proved to be the case.

My approach is fairly simple. I don’t take batteries of lights with me but I do sometimes use some small flash guns and, generally, I don’t interfere too much, though I do ask people to perhaps repeat something they have done, or to move in order to change the dynamic of the picture.

While my interest is primarily about people, I photograph the things that interest me on different levels too, including details that I notice - fragments of the visual world that the photographer’s eye teases out of the mass of ‘stuff’ and so elevates it in significance.

The exception where I really do interfere is by making posed, small-group portraits.

Factories are collective enterprises, where teams have to work together. I make a few of these group portraits depending on the place and how I feel. They are pictures that are out of context at one level as they are constructed groupings but all still within the wider context of their workplace and, along with the photographs of process and of details, work together to allow some insight into these factories.

I often wonder how things are made. Most of us do don’t we? There is so much ‘stuff’ out there: manufactured ‘stuff’, whether

it’s a tyre, blu tack, a fountain pen, or a luxury yacht - where does it all come from? When traveling around, passing the uniformly dull facades of industrial buildings, I wonder, ‘what’s going on inside that shell’, so having access to photograph in a wide range of factories was fascinating for me. I expected there would be more automation (more robots with a few supervisors) but the places I visited, all around Plymouth, still required a lot of labour, much of it skilled and a surprising number from Eastern Europe.

I was only there for a short time, photographing in ten factories in two weeks. It was a good challenge to come away with some interesting photographs from each of the locations that were all so different. But that’s my job and in the factories I was another worker; making my photographs while they got on and made, say, potato crisps. It put everything in perspective.

Tideford Organic Foods, Totnes.

Tideford Organic Foods, Totnes.

In the bottling room.

From left, James Glen, Dave Perera, Alex Bowers and Steve Treston.

Stocking up lids for soup in the bottling room.

Tideford Organic Foods, Totnes.

Making soup.

 Vi-Spring, Plymouth, hand built mattresses.

Group with ‘encased coil springs’. From left: Steve Willcox, Jon Harris, Simon Andrews and Pete Turner.

Vi-Spring, Plymouth, hand built mattresses.

In the delivery warehouse, from left: Paul Harris, Phil Hersey, Steve Bettey, Adrian Hodgson and Kevin Kastell.

Vi-Spring, Plymouth, hand built mattresses.

In the showroom, from left: Peter Tasker, Jane Johnson, Charlotte Young, Hew Bussell and Chris Harrison.

Westaway Sausages, Newton Abbot.

On the production side.

Westaway Sausages, Newton Abbot.

Charles Baughan tests out his new sausages in his roadside van that is still being built.

Westaway Sausages, Newton Abbot. The office team, from left: Sarah Barlow (office support), Charles Baughan (owner), Tina Dobson (accounts manager), Claire Davis

(production manager), Hamish Maclachlan (accounts manager), Iona Baughan (owner) and Marilena Gill (technical manager).

Photographer 9

Princess Yachts, Plymouth. At the Coypool site, spray finish room.

Bandvulc Tyres, Ivybridge, near Plymouth.

Independent tyre re-treading.

Bandvulc Tyres, Ivybridge, near Plymouth.

Independent tyre re-treading. Top from left: Marek Tatarek, Damien Kupidura and David Glowacki.

Bottom left: Lukasz Sado, Artur Karpinski and Marian Wolanin.

Burt’s Potato Chips, Plymouth.

Some of the office staff, from left: Louise Dezfouli, business development; Jodie McPhail, business development; Paul Dennehy, regional sales manager; Rob Franklin, supply chain manager (glasses); Becky Woodward, technical manager and Sam Langridge, marketing executive.

Spinnaker International, Saltash.

Makers of electronic cash protection systems.

Marie Salih, goods in and quality coordinator Inspecting microcircuits.

Conway Stuart (pens), Plymouth. Christine Care, operations director, by a display of vintage pens.

Conway Stuart (pens), Plymouth. Engraving on silver pen.

An essay by Sophie Howarth

Made in Britain “We want the words: ‘Made in Britain’, ‘Created in Britain’, ‘Designed in Britain’, ‘Invented in Britain’ to drive our nation forward.

A Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers.” Chancellor George Osborne, 2011 budget speech.

No one can argue that British manufacturing has had an easy ride of late. In the last few decades, large volumes of production have been driven off-shore to countries where labour is cheaper and it has become a popular myth that everything we buy today has been ‘Made in China’. The facts are rather more nuanced. In the face of extreme global competition, British manufacturing has had to re-examine its strengths and has increasingly focused on catering for niche markets for whom the ‘Made in Britain’ tag has particular cachet.

another Devon company, who make luxury beds coveted by discerning consumers around the world. They describe themselves as ‘the Rolls Royce of the industry’ and there seems to be no shortage of people willing to pay anywhere between £2,000 and £30,000 to lay their head to rest on a Vi-Spring mattress.

“Using the finest natural materials, our expert craftsmen produce each bed by hand, using traditional skills perfected over time. We sell widely throughout the UK, across Europe, North America and we recently started exporting to Asia.”

Britain’s reputation for high quality goods extends well beyond sausages and mattresses though. Luxury fashion brands such as Pringle and Barbour regularly catch the eye of the international jet set and the UK exports nearly £4billion of clothing and footwear a year. British Wool is enjoying a particular renaissance, with celebrity fashion designers including Vivienne Westwood and Paul Smith

“ British goods have a reputation for high standards of safety and hygiene, animal welfare and environmental protection”, explains Charles Baughan, owner of Westaways Sausages in Devon who sells in over 300 supermarkets in the Far East: “In China, Westaways is considered the Gucci of sausages”.

Take sausages for example. In the first six months of 2013, exports of pork from the UK to China grew by nearly 600 percent. It might seem absurd for Britain to be peddling bangers to the global connoisseurs of cooked pork but China’s affluent middle classes will go out of their way to buy food with British provenance.

“British goods have a reputation for high standards of safety and hygiene, animal welfare and environmental protection”, explains Charles Baughan, owner of Westaways Sausages in Devon who sells in over 300 supermarkets in the Far East: “In China, Westaways is considered the Gucci of sausages”.

His comments are echoed by Mike Meehan, Managing Director of Vi-Spring,

insisting on Harris Tweed or Yorkshire yarn to create their high-end wares. At the Laxtons wool factory in Bradford, the surge of interest in buying British has led to a wholesale re-shoring of production.

The mill first opened in 1907, and in its heyday was one of the largest fancy yarn manufacturers in Europe, employing over 500 staff. By 2001, it had taken all of its production overseas but, in 2010, James Laxton, the fourth generation of his family to run the business, made a bold decision to bring production back home again. His reasons were typical of many companies who have chosen to re-shore in recent years: overseas labour costs are rising and, combined with increased shipping costs, longer lead times and unpredictable quality, the economic arguments for

manufacturing abroad make much less sense than they did a decade ago. “Having control again of the yarn manufacture enables us to tailor the twist levels to the weaver’s exact requirements to increase weaving efficiency and reduce overall fabric costs”, explains Laxton. “We recently produced the yarn for a Jaeger Menswear jacket, where the wool travelled literally no more than 40 miles from fleece to finished product. It’s important to our customers because it adds provenance.”

The trend for re-shoring can be seen across the high street. John Lewis launched a ‘Made in Britain’ product identification sticker in 2011, and last year further increased its commitment to domestic manufacturing by returning all of its textile production to the UK. In 2013, ASOS.com and Topshop both announced they would be increasing the number of British factories they use to produce their clothes, while Marks and Spencer launched a new ‘Best of British’ range of men’s and women’s wear, featuring cloths from Yorkshire and Cheshire, outerwear from Manchester and footwear made in Northamptonshire.

The patron saint of re-shoring is surely Mary Portas whose TV series, Mary’s Bottom Line, followed her personal investment in the Headen & Quarmby textiles factory in Middleton to produce a new line of Kinky Knickers. Mary’s frilly undies now sell in all the major department stores in the UK and, at £15 a pair, prove that even in lean times, consumers are willing to push the boat out for brands they want to be associated with. Patriotism plays a useful PR role in the marketing of British-made products but, at the end of the day, companies who choose to manufacture at home are doing so for business reasons. More and more of them insist that there’s an assurance of quality, a degree of flexibility and an overall level of control in the supply chain that simply can’t be matched when goods are made overseas.

When it comes to the global financial picture of British exports, cashmere jumpers and kinky knickers are only a minor part of the story. Where the ‘Made in Britain’ tag has real economic clout is in high-tech manufacturing, specifically in the pharmaceuticals, aerospace, automotive, oil and gas and defense industries. When

Britain’s reputation for high quality goods extends well beyond sausages and mattresses though. Luxury fashion brands such as Pringle and Barbour regularly catch the eye of the international jet set and the UK exports nearly £4billion of clothing and footwear a year. British Wool is enjoying a particular renaissance, with celebrity fashion designers including Vivienne Westwood and Paul Smith insisting on Harris Tweed or Yorkshire yarn to create their high-end wares. competition is less about cost and more about expertise, Britain comes into its own. Take the Nissan car factory in Sunderland, where computer-controlled robots, maintained and controlled by

However, with cars, as with clothes, it’s the luxury end of the market on which British manufacturing depends. In Autumn 2013, only a month after Jaguar Land Rover announced 1700 new jobs in

The trend for re-shoring can be seen across the high street. John Lewis launched a ‘Made in Britain’ product identification sticker in 2011, and last year further increased its commitment to domestic manufacturing by returning all of its textile production to the UK. teams of highly specialist engineers, make hundreds of thousands of the world’s most efficient and eco-friendly new vehicles every year. Nissan UK is the wunderkind of British car manufacturing, producing and exporting more cars per person than any other car factory in Europe. Nissan recently announced it would be expanding its UK workforce to allow round-the-clock production for the first time in its history and would be choosing Sunderland as the European production base for its luxury Infiniti range and all-electric LEAF cars. The levels of skill and productivity found at Nissan UK, as at Jaguar Land Rover, Honda, Toyota and several other British car factories, are hard to match elsewhere and with strong domestic and European markets for their products, as well as surging demand from China, Russia and other newer markets, the automobile industry is one sector where the ‘march of the makers’ seems evident.

Solihull to support the production of an innovative aluminum chassis for its sports saloon cars, Ford announced the closure of its Transit van factory in Southampton, saying it would be switching production to Turkey to save costs. It is clear that Britain cannot compete with countries whose labour costs are so much lower and it seems unlikely that we will ever return to being a mass producer of low or even mid-cost goods. What is less clear is how confident we can be of a secure manufacturing future creating luxury goods with high economic margins.

The world’s emerging economies are powering ahead and Britain has no monopoly on innovation.

hen it comes to the global financial picture W of British exports, cashmere jumpers and kinky knickers are only a minor part of the story. Where the ‘Made in Britain’ tag has real economic clout is in high-tech manufacturing, specifically in the pharmaceuticals, aerospace, automotive, oil and gas and defense industries.

When competition is less about cost and more about expertise, Britain comes into its own.

Exhibition Tour Venue

Address

Dates

Website

National Media Museum, Bradford

Bradford, West Yorkshire BD1 1NQ

31 Jan – 5 May 2014

nationalmediamuseum.org.uk

MACH 2014

Halls 4 &5, NEC, Birmingham B40 1NT

7 – 11 April 2014

machexhibition.com

National Railway Museum, York

Leeman Road, York YO26 4XJ

16 May – 7 Sept 2014

nrm.org.uk

Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester

Liverpool Road, Castlefield, Manchester M3 4FP

23 May – 3 Aug 2014

mosi.org.uk

Science Museum, London

Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD

22 Aug – 2 Nov 2014

sciencemuseum.org.uk

University of South Wales, Newport

Lodge Road, Caerleon, Newport NP18 3QT

21 Nov – 2 Jan 2015

newport.ac.uk

Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Plymouth

Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AJ

16 Jan – 12 Mar 2015

plymouth.gov.uk/museumpcmag

MShed, Bristol

Princes Wharf, Wapping Road, Bristol BS1 4RN

20 Mar – 21 June 2015

mshed.org

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

Trongate 103, Glasgow G1 5HD

3 July – 6 Sept 2015

streetlevelphotoworks.org

www.openforbusiness.uk.com

Sports cars cooking sauces bicycle saddles cakes medical devices pipes and tubes columns and beams sugar wave machines artificial limbs jewellery luxury leather goods giant cookies pannier bags tyres drive technology esotoeric measuring probes planes & trains hogs pudding writing inks soup rims & spokes precision machining aerospace systems cycling accessories door handles rice pudding bikes submarine networks real ale door and window furniture pork scratchings seat fabrics golden syrup luxury yachts stop-motion clay animation headboards billiard cloth socks hats theatre sets crisps cash protection systems bespoke bikes sausages pens Wallace and Gromit bell pulls & cranks wind turbines metal components submarines electric cars tidal power cabin hooks mussette bag stage sets cashmere socks electric cars set top boxes variable speed drives wave power 3D animation tennis ball cloth bed springs electrical control systems cable harnesses real ales crisps woollen fabrics & apparel wool yarn electrical goods bicycle baskets hot air balloons Sports cars cooking sauces bicycle saddles cakes medical devices pipes and tubes columns and beams sugar wave machines artificial limbs jewellery luxury leather goods giant cookies pannier bags tyres drive technology esotoeric measuring probes planes & trains hogs pudding writing inks soup rims & spokes precision machining aerospace systems cycling accessories door handles rice pudding bikes submarine networks real ale door and window furniture pork scratchings seat fabrics golden syrup luxury yachts stop-motion clay animation headboards billiard cloth socks hats theatre sets crisps cash protection systems bespoke bikes sausages pens Wallace and Gromit bell pulls & cranks wind turbines metal components submarines electric cars tidal power cabin hooks mussette bag stage sets cashmere socks electric cars set top boxes variable speed drives wave power 3D animation tennis ball cloth bed springs electrical control systems cable harnesses real ales crisps woollen fabrics & apparel wool yarn electrical goods bicycle baskets hot air balloons Sports cars cooking sauces bicycle saddles cakes medical devices pipes and tubes columns and beams sugar wave machines artificial limbs jewellery luxury leather goods giant cookies pannier bags tyres drive technology esotoeric measuring probes planes & trains hogs pudding writing inks soup rims & spokes precision machining aerospace systems cycling accessories door handles rice pudding bikes submarine networks real ale door and window furniture pork scratchings seat fabrics golden syrup luxury yachts stopmotion clay animation headboards billiard cloth socks hats theatre sets crisps cash protection systems bespoke bikes sausages pens Wallace and Gromit bell pulls & cranks wind turbines metal components submarines electric cars tidal power cabin hooks mussette bag stage sets cashmere socks electric cars set top boxes variable speed drives wave power 3D animation tennis ball cloth bed springs electrical control systems cable harnesses real ales crisps woollen fabrics & apparel wool yarn electrical goods bicycle baskets hot air balloons Sports cars cooking sauces bicycle saddles cakes medical devices pipes and tubes columns and beams sugar wave machines artificial limbs jewellery luxury leather goods giant cookies pannier bags tyres drive technology esotoeric measuring probes planes & trains hogs pudding writing inks soup rims & spokes precision machining aerospace systems cycling accessories door handles rice pudding bikes submarine networks real ale door and window furniture pork scratchings seat fabrics golden syrup luxury yachts stop-motion clay animation headboards billiard cloth socks hats theatre sets crisps cash protection systems bespoke bikes sausages pens Wallace and Gromit bell pulls & cranks wind turbines metal components submarines electric cars tidal power cabin hooks mussette bag stage sets cashmere socks electric cars set top boxes variable speed drives wave power 3D animation tennis ball cloth bed springs electrical control systems cable harnesses

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

OFB

OPEN FOR BUSINESS is a collaboration between Multistory and Magnum Photos, funded by Arts Council England and the following UK cultural institutions: National Media Museum, Bradford; Museum of Science & Industry, Manchester; National Railway Museum, York; Science Museum, London; University of South Wales, Newport; Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery; MShed Bristol; and Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow.

The result is an ambitious, national exhibition touring throughout 2014 and 2015. The programme also includes a comprehensive website, a series of newspapers and a bespoke education programme.

www.openforbusiness.uk.com www.multistory.org.uk www.magnumphotos.com .......................................................................

Production Partner: Metro Imaging Media Partner: FT Magazine Essay texts: Sophie Howarth Design: surely.uk.com