The book · out now
Cars, trains, bikes, toys — entire industries built over generations, gone within a single lifetime. This is the full story: the factories, the people who built them, and the decisions that let it all go.
Over a million people have watched the METTLE films. This book is where the whole record is written down.
Inside
From the introduction
The cranes came for the machines in 1983.
To get the big die-casting machines out of the Matchbox works in Hackney, the new owners punched a hole in the factory roof and lifted them out through it — the heavy, custom-built machines that British engineers had designed to make British toys, swinging on a cable above the street, on their way to a ship bound for Macau. For three decades that factory had employed six thousand people and turned out two and a half million die-cast components a day.
Now the machinery itself was going east, over the rooftops, in full view of the road — as literal a picture as you could want of what happened to British manufacturing. The industrial weight of the country, lifted out and carried away.
Enter your email and the full opening chapter is yours to read straight away — a ten-minute read on where the machines went, and why. After that, one or two letters a week from METTLE. Leave any time.
The book · complete edition
Fourteen stories, told the way the films are told, but with the room a film never has. The workshops — Airfix, Matchbox, Hornby. The road — the MGB, the E-Type, the British motorcycle, Raleigh. The furnaces — cotton, steel, coal. The engines — the Napier Deltic and the RB211. Every chapter names the people: the ones who built these places, and the ones who, in rooms far from the factory floor, decided to let them go.
If it isn't the book you hoped it was, reply to your receipt within 30 days and you'll have a full refund. No questions, no forms. You keep the files.
From the first readers
"Your book was very much appreciated… The image of the crane lifting the presses through the roof of the Matchbox factory was especially poignant — metaphorical for the wholesale gutting of British industry."
— Jon, Washington, USA
"Your book and videos are so important to make people aware of the engineering skills that made Britain the greatest industrial nation on earth… it will resonate with so many people."
— Bill, New Zealand · his family has been in engineering since 1905
The book and EPUB download the moment you order. The Factory Index is being finished now and lands free in every buyer's inbox the day it's ready — you pay nothing more.
Instant download. Yours on any phone, tablet or computer — and made to print, if you'd rather hold paper.
The audience
Me, 62 years old, grown up in Switzerland, I assembled so many Airfix models. It was a very important part of my childhood. Thank you for telling this story!
Mike, 62 on the Airfix videoI worked for GKN in Birmingham in 1974, such a shame to see how the Midlands success was sabotaged. It's all gone now.
Dino on the Birmingham videoHow many younger people know that, as recently as 1960, Britain was the second-largest producer of motor vehicles in the world? Long live MG!
R. Bailey on the British car-industry videoThe channel
METTLE tells the story of British industry — one factory, one marque, one padlocked gate at a time. The films are where this began. The book is where it's written down.
Coming soon
A hardback edition is coming.
Buyers hear first. Order the book today and you're on the list.
“Somewhere in your house, most likely, there is a small metal object that has outlived the factory that made it. Pick it up. Feel the weight of it. Somebody made that — and this is the story of where they went.”