Description

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This fascinating book explores how some of Britain’s leading companies failed, through a variety or mechanisms, against the backdrop of a declining national economy. IICI was for decades Britain’s biggest manufacturer and exporter; GEC was Britain’s biggest employer; and over half of the cars in the UK were once made by Morris Motors. Courtaulds dominated global cloth production and produced the first manmade fibres; BSA was the world’s biggest producer of motorbikes; and de Havilland produced the first jet-engined fighter and passenger plane. But from the 1960s through to the 1990s, these and other illustrious British companies collapsed, taking with them nearly 200 years of industrial pre-eminence, as if Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Toyota, VW and Samsung all buckled overnight. Why? The answers might surprise you. It’s not because of the Chinese industrial revolution. Nor did Britain fall from the number one spot; it lost that over 120 years ago. This book explains what happened, and reflects on Britain’s wider industrial legacy.

About the Author

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Richard Morris is a lecturer at Brighton University on engineering and management. Prior to this, he worked in industry, including for corporate giant GEC. He has written over 40 papers, two books on product design, and contributed to five other publications, has collaborated with Brighton’s historic Engineerium among other projects, and also acts as an institutional accreditor for the Institution of Engineering Designers. He lives in Sussex.