A town that built the world's first tracked vehicle
Somewhere in the lineage of every Caterpillar bulldozer, crawler crane, and tracked excavator working on a construction site today, there is a factory in Grantham. In 1905, Richard Hornsby & Sons produced what is recognised as the world's first tracked vehicle at its Spittlegate works — and then, having proved the concept, sold the caterpillar-track patents to Holt Manufacturing in America. Holt's business eventually became Caterpillar Inc. Grantham handed the world one of its most consequential engineering ideas and largely moved on.
That transaction sits inside a much longer record. Founded in 1828, Hornsby spent the better part of a century making things that did not yet exist. The Hornsby-Akroyd compression-ignition oil engine, developed at Spittlegate in 1891–92, preceded Rudolf Diesel's commercially available engine by roughly eight years; more than 32,000 were built in Grantham. The firm followed that with the world's first commercial oil-engine tractor in 1896. At its peak, the works employed around 2,000 people — a substantial fraction of the town's entire population at the time.
The point is not that Grantham was once great and has since declined. It is that the town's engineering identity is specific and documented: named engines, patent sale dates, production figures. Innovation was, for nearly a century, Grantham's primary export — and the question worth asking now is what that precedent means for the skills the town is building next.
What Hornsby & Sons actually made — and why it still matters
The range of what came out of Spittlegate is as telling as any single invention. Hornsby's output spanned agricultural implements, stationary oil engines for industrial and domestic use, and precision-engineered components — a breadth that made the works adaptable well beyond its peacetime purpose. When the First World War began, the Admiralty commandeered the Grantham factory for military production: Sopwith Camel fighter aircraft were assembled on site, alongside submarine engines, demonstrating that a workforce built around agricultural engineering could pivot to high-specification defence contracts without rebuilding from scratch.
That adaptability — across agri-tech, precision engineering, and energy systems — was not incidental to Hornsby's success. It reflected both the range of skills embedded in the Spittlegate workforce and the practical demands of a rapidly industrialising economy. The firm did not specialise narrowly; it moved between sectors as markets and crises required.
The observation worth making here is a structural one: the industrial categories Hornsby straddled — agricultural machinery, energy technology, and precision engineering for defence — correspond closely to the sectors the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology consortium now formally targets. LIoT's stated specialisms are agri-tech and food manufacturing, energy and engineering, and digital technologies applied across all three. That overlap is not a manufactured parallel. It reflects the durable shape of the regional economy, and the kinds of technical capability Lincolnshire has needed — in different forms — across more than a century.
The Institute of Technology hub at Grantham College
Stonebridge House, a Grade II-listed building on Grantham's edge, has had several lives: family home, school, police station. Since May 2022 it has been the Grantham campus of the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology, refurbished at a cost of £2.6 million and opened by MP Gareth Davies alongside South Kesteven's council leader. The building's layered history turns out to be appropriate for what it now does.
Inside, the facilities are specific rather than generic. The hub offers IT design studios, engineering robotics equipment, and digital technology suites — practical spaces intended to bridge the gap between Level 3 college courses and degree-level study. Qualifications on offer range accordingly: HNCs in Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical/Electronic Engineering sit alongside digital pathways in cyber security, data analytics, and cloud computing, and shorter AI bootcamps for those looking to upskill without committing to a full programme.
The Grantham hub operates as one node in a wider structure. The Lincolnshire Institute of Technology is a nine-institution consortium founded in 2019 and led by the University of Lincoln, whose stated focus areas — agri-tech and food manufacturing, energy, and engineering with a digital thread running through all three — have already been described in the context of Hornsby's industrial range. That the consortium's director, Mick Lochran, frames its mission as tackling Greater Lincolnshire's 'long-term productivity gap' is practical language; that Grantham College's principal described the hub as 'a beacon of innovation' is the kind of phrase any ambitious institution might reach for, though it lands with particular resonance in this postcode.
The green skills pivot and what it means in practice
Funding shapes what an institution can actually teach. In March 2024, the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology drew down an additional £2.5 million from the Higher Technical Education Skills Injection Fund — following an initial £500,000 — split between two distinct purposes: £1.5 million for new equipment and £1 million for upskilling the staff who deliver the courses. Both lines are operationally necessary: new robotics rigs and digital labs are useful only if the tutors running them hold current industry knowledge, not just the hardware.
The policy direction running alongside this investment comes from two separate sources. South Kesteven District Council's Economic Development Strategy 2024–2028 contains an explicit commitment — Action 2.3 — to support businesses in reskilling, with green skills named specifically and UK Shared Prosperity Fund money earmarked to back it. Environmental technologies are listed as a priority sector alongside engineering and construction. Independently, LIoT's curriculum already centres on energy, agri-tech, and food manufacturing — sectors with a direct environmental dimension, even when the phrase 'green skills' does not appear on every course title.
Two separate institutions — a nationally funded training consortium and a district council — have arrived at overlapping conclusions about what South Kesteven's workforce needs next. In this context, 'green skills' is not a catch-all phrase: locally it points to low-carbon energy systems, precision agri-tech, and the environmental compliance demands now built into food manufacturing and construction supply chains. The infrastructure investment and the formal policy commitment are both, as of 2024, in place.
The skills gap that makes all this urgent
Behind the investment announcements and curriculum frameworks sits a straightforward problem: South Kesteven's advanced manufacturing base is short of the people it needs. The causes are familiar nationally — an ageing workforce, rapid technology change, and vacancy rates that have persisted above comfortable levels — but the local version is sharper because the sector is proportionally larger here than in more economically mixed towns.
Make UK's 2025 Industrial Strategy Skills Commission Report puts the national scale of the problem at 55,000 unfilled long-term manufacturing vacancies, costing an estimated £6 billion a year in lost output. South Kesteven is a small slice of that figure, but the pressures are not abstract. SKDC's own strategy acknowledges the gap directly and backs practical responses: Business Growth Grants of up to £15,000 are available to local SMEs specifically for staff training and technology adoption, and the council works alongside the Greater Lincolnshire LEP on careers pathways.
The most locally grounded signal is the Skills Summit held at Grantham College in February 2025 — hundreds of 16 to 21-year-olds attended, alongside employers including Bakkavor and the University of Lincoln, coordinated by SKDC and The Careers Hub. That kind of sustained pipeline work reflects an acknowledgement that equipment and funding alone do not close a skills gap; the people entering the sector need deliberate courting, and they need it early.
What the next Grantham worker actually finds at the door
The door at Stonebridge House opens onto something more substantive than a prospectus suggests. Level 3 courses in engineering and digital technology require no prior degree, and the ladder runs to Level 6 — HNCs in manufacturing, electrical and electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, and digital routes covering cyber security, data analytics, and cloud computing, with shorter AI bootcamps available for people already in work. That range matters in a town where most manufacturing careers have traditionally begun on a shop floor rather than at a university.
Whether those courses translate into green-sector employment at scale depends on choices that local employers have not yet made publicly. The training infrastructure exists; the hiring intentions are not yet on record.
The Hornsby parallel earns its place here not as prophecy but as precedent with limits. Grantham turned a Victorian oil-engine works into a production site for Sopwith Camels and submarine engines; the company that built the world's first tracked vehicle sold its patents to an American firm whose successor now operates on every large construction site on the planet. Those transitions happened because technology changed and organisations made decisions to absorb it. The infrastructure, again, is in place. The decisions belong to employers and institutions who have yet to make them.
- [1] Richard Hornsby & Sons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hornsby_%26_Sons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hornsby_%26_Sons