He taught Robert Stephenson his trade, judged the Rainhill Trials, and wrote the first proper book on railways, the one that engineers across the world actually used. Not all of us can be gallivanting around [more…]
You may be surprised to learn that a working time machine has already been invented in County Durham. It exists because one man refused to let the region throw its own history into the skip. [more…]
This is a warts an’ all musing upon the particular medical state I find myself in as I approach my 86th Birthday. As a soi-disant shortarse (I have lost c. 3 inches in height over [more…]
HS2 is one project. What happens everywhere else, across the hundreds of councils and public bodies that spend the rest of the £1.23 trillion, is in many ways worse. In the financial year 2022–23, 467 [more…]
George Stephenson gets the statues. But a plain-dressing Quaker wool merchant from Darlington put up the money, drove the Act through Parliament, and hired Stephenson in the first place. He helped found the world’s first [more…]
DIP’s nuclear element The vast expense of the nuclear element of the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) – by far its largest commitment – has drawn our focus in two previous articles upon the following: Dreadnought [more…]
In July 2017, four joint ventures were awarded HS2 civil contracts worth a combined £6.6 billion. The original structure was a target-cost contract with a pain/gain share, meaning that if costs overran, the contractor would [more…]
He started working life down a pit age six, ran half the coalfield by his thirties, and built an entire harbour to spite his rivals. They called him the King of the Coal Trade, and [more…]
For generations, the phrase “grim up north” has lingered in the national imagination — conjuring images of soot-stained skylines, struggling towns, and industries long past their prime. It is a shorthand that flattens the region [more…]
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