A town that still calls itself an engineering town
Walk along Dysart Road or past the old Spittlegate works and Grantham announces itself, quietly but persistently, as an engineering town. The name Hornsby appears on heritage boards; the civic memory of the firm that once employed 2,000 people here — and built one of the world's first commercial oil diesel engines — sits close to the surface of the town's sense of itself. Aveling-Barford's road-making machinery reached construction sites on several continents. The identity is not manufactured nostalgia; it was earned over generations.
The job listings tell a different story. At any given moment, around 58 engineering roles appear in Grantham on specialist boards — of which 39 are part-time and 19 temporary. That is not the labour market of an engineering town. It is the thin, casualised residue of one.
The gap between what a place believes itself to be and what its economy actually provides for working people is rarely comfortable to examine. What does it mean when a town's industrial identity outlives the industrial employment that created it — and is that identity an asset, a distraction, or something more complicated still?
What made Grantham an engineering town
The Great Northern Railway reached Grantham in 1852, and its significance was less romantic than practical: it placed a landlocked Lincolnshire market town within reach of national supply chains and export routes that made large-scale manufacturing commercially viable. Hornsby's and, later, Aveling-Barford were not cottage industries that grew gradually outward — they were heavy operations anchored to ironwork, foundry casting, and precision machining that required a constant throughput of skilled labour.
That labour reproduced itself through apprenticeships. The Spittlegate industrial heartland generated multi-generational training pipelines: a craftsman taught his trade to an apprentice who in turn became a craftsman teaching another. The mechanism was structural rather than sentimental. Grantham's technical workforce stayed in Grantham because the work was there, the skills transferred within the local economy, and the employment was permanent and full-time. This is what sustained an engineering identity — not because engineering was celebrated, but because it was the dominant form of work, and the town organised around it accordingly.
Aveling-Barford extended this employment base well into the mid-20th century, adding export-facing product lines — road rollers, motorgraders, dump trucks — that connected Spittlegate output to construction projects far beyond Britain. What both firms shared, beyond geography, was the quality of what they made: precision and foundry work that built durable, specialist expertise across the local labour pool. That kind of expertise takes generations to assemble, which is precisely why its dismantling, when it came, proved so difficult to reverse.
How the industrial model broke down
Three distinct pressures dismantled that self-sustaining system, and none of them operated in isolation.
Corporate consolidation came first. As ownership of Grantham's anchor firms passed to conglomerates with interests well beyond Lincolnshire, the decisions that shaped investment, workforce scale, and product lines moved away from the town. Rationalisation followed logically — not out of malice but out of indifference to local consequence. A boardroom in Birmingham or London has little reason to weigh the Spittlegate apprenticeship pipeline when cutting capacity.
Global competition then exposed what consolidation had left vulnerable. Capital-heavy foundry operations that had not modernised faced price pressure from overseas manufacturers with substantially lower cost bases. By the 1970s, Grantham's heavy engineering was caught between owners with limited local commitment and markets that no longer protected domestic production.
The deindustrialisation waves of the 1970s and 1990s sharpened the damage. The policy environment under Margaret Thatcher — herself born on North Parade in Grantham — accelerated manufacturing's contraction, though the pressures driving that contraction were already well established before 1979 and continued long after 1990. What mattered most, structurally, was not any single administration's choices but the breaking of the apprenticeship pipeline. Once multi-generational technical training stopped, the expertise it produced stopped accumulating. Jobs could theoretically be replaced; a skills base dismantled over two decades cannot be rebuilt in one.
What filled the space on industrial estates such as Alma Park was work of a different character: light manufacturing, distribution, packaging, food processing. Employment, certainly — but not the kind that rebuilds a precision skills base or matches the wages that foundry and heavy engineering work once commanded.
What the current job market actually looks like
The composition of those vacancies matters as much as their number. A market skewing so heavily toward part-time and temporary contracts is not a quirk of timing or a snapshot distortion — it reflects a casualised structure that would be unrecognisable to anyone who worked at Hornsby's or Aveling-Barford. Permanent, full-time engineering employment sustained multi-generational households; fixed-term plant maintenance cover does not reproduce that stability.
The most prominent local engineering employer is now BGB Engineering on Dysart Road, established in 1976 and currently employing approximately 100 to 125 people. BGB manufactures slip rings and fibre optic rotary joints — precision rotary transmission products used in global wind energy and specialist industrial applications. It holds the Queen's Award for Enterprise and, by any reasonable measure, is a genuinely capable precision manufacturer. What it is not is a structural replacement for the employment density of earlier anchor firms: 100–125 people against Hornsby's historical peak of 2,000 illustrates, without further comment, the scale of contraction.
Salary data for the active specialist market reinforces the scarcity reading. Maintenance and multi-skilled engineer roles attract £40,000–£60,000 per year; controls and design engineers £45,000–£60,000; field service engineers £35,000–£50,000 and above. These are competitive figures — but they reflect restricted supply rather than a thriving market. When qualified candidates are thin on the ground, the few available specialist roles command higher rates by default. That premium is a symptom of thinness, not evidence of engineering vitality.
The forces making the gap harder to close
Two structural dynamics are actively widening the gap rather than closing it, and they operate through quite different mechanisms.
The first is a straightforward deterioration in the employment base. ONS data shows South Kesteven's employment rate falling from 72.4% (year ending December 2022) to 66.2% (year ending December 2023) — well below the East Midlands regional rate of 75.5%. Around 2,700 residents aged 16 and over were unemployed, a 4.4% rate. The ONS figures dismantle any assumption that Grantham holds a latent pool of workers ready to fill engineering roles as they appear. Unemployment and underemployment are genuinely elevated; redirecting surplus labour into technical roles is not a simple policy lever to pull.
The second force runs in the opposite direction. Grantham's position on the East Coast Main Line — London King's Cross approximately 65 to 70 minutes away — makes the town an attractive residential base for people whose working lives are elsewhere. Skilled residents and technically trained graduates commute to higher-paying roles in Peterborough, Nottingham, and London rather than accepting what the local market can offer. The result is a continuous structural drain on the technically capable end of the local workforce: the very people that advanced engineering employers need most are the ones with the strongest incentive to leave every morning.
The two forces compound each other in ways that are difficult to interrupt. One extracts skilled workers outward; the other leaves those who remain in a market that does not rebuild their technical capacity. South Kesteven's GVA per job sits approximately 20% below the national average, and economic assessments of the district point to a negligible higher-level skills base — the foundation that any expansion of advanced manufacturing would require. That is the double bind: a falling employment rate that cannot absorb displaced workers, and a commuter dynamic that removes precisely the skilled people local engineering most needs.
Small-scale responses to a decades-long deficit
The institutional responses to this deficit are real and, in the local context, they matter. BGB Engineering's partnership with Grantham College and West Grantham Academy — producing apprentices and T-Level placements, and earning BGB a College Employer of the Year award — represents exactly the kind of employer-led pipeline investment that regional strategy documents typically call for. Across Lincolnshire more broadly, Lincoln UTC's combined work-and-study engineering programme, the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology's employer-partnership model, and the CATCH process manufacturing hub each address specific technical gaps in the regional supply of qualified candidates.
None of this is token effort. These programmes create visible pathways into technical work where, for much of the past three decades, none existed in any organised form.
The problem is one of proportion. A structural deficit assembled across several decades of deindustrialisation, corporate consolidation, and apprenticeship pipeline collapse cannot be closed by a T-Level cohort or a handful of completions per year, however well-designed those schemes are. Grantham's engineering identity continues to shape how the town thinks about itself — its history, its streets, its civic self-description. But the labour market that identity implies does not yet exist in the form the heritage suggests: it is thin, casualised, and constrained in ways that incremental training provision, however necessary, cannot independently reverse.
For residents navigating education or employment decisions, and for anyone involved in local policy, that distinction is the more useful starting point: not what Grantham once was, but an accurate reading of what the market currently is.
- [1] Aveling-Barford. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4983662 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4983662