The same question, asked twice
On 8 July 1892, the first commercial heavy oil engine to go into production anywhere in the world rolled out of the Spittlegate Ironworks on the southern edge of Grantham. Richard Hornsby & Sons had spent the previous year building the machine under licence from inventor Herbert Akroyd Stuart, and the town — already known for agricultural machinery and steam engines — found itself making the energy technology of its moment.
One hundred and thirty years later, in March 2022, Grantham College opened a £2.46 million Engineering and Construction Energy Centre in what had previously been its engineering and link-block spaces. The new facility was set up to train people to install air source heat pumps, solar panels, and smart meters: the energy technologies of this moment.
The dates are far apart. The industries are entirely different. But the underlying question is the same: who teaches the workers who actually make a new energy system run? In 1892 that question was answered by the ironworks itself, recruiting and training craft apprentices on the job. In 2022 it fell to a further education college, equipped with industry-standard rigs and backed by the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership.
What is worth examining is not that Grantham has a proud engineering past — many market towns do — but that the same structural logic keeps reasserting itself: a shift in energy technology creates a local skills gap, and someone in the town decides to close it.
What Hornsby built on Spittlegate Road
The Spittlegate Ironworks had been running for more than six decades before the oil engine arrived. Richard Hornsby & Sons was founded in 1828 making ploughs and seed drills for local farms, moved into steam engine manufacture in the 1840s, and had already won recognition at the 1851 Great Exhibition well before the first oil engine left the works. A Gold Medal at the 1873 Moscow Exhibition confirmed an international reach: this was not a regional curiosity but an established engineering firm selling into export markets.
The oil engine's consequences spread further than the engine itself. By 1896, Hornsby-Akroyd technology was powering what engineering histories document as the first oil-engined tractor and the first oil locomotive. The company also developed an early tracked vehicle system — a means of moving heavy machinery across soft or uneven ground — whose patent was sold to Holt & Co. in America, a firm that later became Caterpillar. These milestones appear in secondary engineering sources rather than primary archives, but the record is consistent.
The firm ran for ninety years before merging with Rustons of Lincoln in 1918 to form Ruston & Hornsby. Several original workshop buildings survive on the Spittlegate site and feature on the Lincolnshire Industrial Heritage Trail — the physical footprint of the enterprise is still visible rather than purely archival.
What that scale meant locally was a sustained demand for skilled workers: fitters, founders, pattern-makers, engine mechanics. The town's economy grew around the ironworks over generations, and when Kesteven County Council came to consider what a new college should teach in the late 1940s, that demand was the obvious starting point.
Why the college was built when it was
Kesteven County Council's decision to spend £33,000 on purpose-built engineering and gas-fitting workshops in 1949 was not a speculative gesture toward a hoped-for future. Ruston & Hornsby was still operating in the town. The occupational families the ironworks had relied upon — fitters, founders, craft apprentices — remained in active demand, and the supply of trained workers could no longer be left entirely to on-the-job recruitment.
The engineering block that opened on 14 September 1951 was designed to produce exactly those workers: not generalist technical students but people equipped for the specific trades that heavy industry in Grantham still required. Gas fitting appeared alongside engineering from the outset, which is itself an indicator of where the Council saw local employer need.
The thread connecting Hornsby's workshop culture to the college is therefore institutional rather than metaphorical. Public money followed industrial demand, and the college inherited the occupational scope of the ironworks that preceded it. The same pattern — skills investment responding to an energy-sector transition — repeats in 2022, though the energy involved is no longer heavy oil.
The Energy Centre and what changed in 2022
Seventy-one years after the engineering block opened, the same spaces were gutted and rebuilt again. The Engineering and Construction Energy Centre opened in March 2022 following a £2.46 million investment, funded primarily through the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership, which had identified manufacturing and the low-carbon economy as regional priorities. Rather than a new building, the project converted the existing engineering and link-block areas into a cross-disciplinary hub — a deliberate reuse that mirrors the logic of 1951, where available institutional space was redirected toward the skills an energy transition required.
What the centre actually teaches covers several overlapping trades: electrical engineering, plumbing, gas fitting, and renewable technologies including solar panels, wind systems, and air source heat pumps. Apprenticeships run at levels 1 to 3 in plumbing and domestic heating and in engineering fitting. Alongside those programmes, shorter green skills boot camps offer training in heat pump installation, solar panel setup, and smart metering — flexible enough for workers already in employment who need to update their qualifications rather than train from scratch.
Principal Paul Dean described the investment in direct terms at the opening: 'skills urgently needed if we are to transition to net zero'. Vice Principal Steven Peacock framed the combination of construction and energy disciplines as 'looking towards the future in terms of energies'. Employer partner Bakkavor's apprenticeship manager noted that demand for electrical and engineering skills in food manufacturing was already growing and would accelerate with automation and renewable energy adoption.
The college also houses the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology in the grade II-listed Stonebridge House on the same site, extending the technical offer to higher levels in engineering and digital — a further storey, as it were, added to the same institutional structure.
Who the apprenticeships are actually for
The Bakkavor case points to something the apprenticeship labels do not immediately suggest. Heat pump engineers and solar technicians are typically associated with residential work — draught-proofing older homes, fitting panels on suburban roofs — but food manufacturing is converging with renewable energy and automation in ways that create parallel industrial demand. Low-carbon skills, in other words, do not stop at the front door.
The more direct destination for most retrofit-focused apprentices remains the housing stock. South Lincolnshire's mix of older rural properties and pre-insulation suburban housing represents real local demand as the national retrofit programme — gradual as its progress has been — works through exactly this kind of building stock.
The two-year low-carbon heating apprenticeship combines workplace experience with specialist training in environmental technologies. Two years means genuine occupational depth rather than a short update course: enough time to become usable in the sector rather than merely certificated.
Scale is harder to assess: detailed completion and employment data for the Energy Centre's cohorts have not been published, reflecting how recently the programme launched. What the retrofit sector itself makes clear is that the underlying need is real — workforce availability alongside upfront cost is consistently cited as one of the main constraints on heat pump adoption across the UK. Grantham's provision, whatever its current volume, addresses a gap that is not in dispute.
What Grantham's engineering thread actually tells us
The pattern across 1892, 1951, and 2022 is not unique to Grantham, but it is consistent enough to be worth naming: public and institutional investment in trade skills tends to follow an energy shift rather than precede it. The heavy oil engine existed commercially before trained operators were widely available; Hornsby had to build that knowledge in-house. The post-war engineering workshops arrived when the industry requiring them was already running. The Energy Centre opened as retrofit demand was building, not in anticipation of it.
For a reader in Grantham, the practical implication is narrow: the centre exists because local demand is real and growing — particularly in the retrofit sector — not because an abstract national target required a symbolic gesture.
The genuinely unresolved question sits in the gap between supply and uptake. Heat pump installations across the UK have grown more slowly than government projections suggested, and both installer availability and training capacity are regularly cited as part of that constraint. Whether Grantham's investment arrives early enough to help shift that dynamic, or whether it scales alongside demand that proves slower to build than hoped, remains unclear.
What the Hornsby thread does offer — without sentiment — is evidence that this town has absorbed and transmitted technical change through institutional means before. That is a modest but specific thing to have on record.
- [1] Richard Hornsby & Sons. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=3054919 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=3054919