One site, two centuries of heavy industry
TED and TEDx talks about 'reinventing' post-industrial towns tend to open with a rupture: the old factory closes, and the town becomes something else entirely. Grantham does not fit that arc. On the southern edge of Grantham, a patch of ground known as the Spittlegate Level has been making things without interruption for nearly two hundred years. Richard Hornsby set up his foundry there in 1828. At the company's peak, around 2,000 people worked the site, turning out portable steam engines, oil engines, and — in one of British engineering's more consequential footnotes — a tracked vehicle system whose patent was eventually sold to Holt & Co. in America, laying the groundwork for what became the Caterpillar track.
Hornsby merged into Ruston & Hornsby in 1918, and thirty acres of Spittlegate passed to successor companies. Aveling-Barford moved in and spent decades building road rollers, site dumpers, and articulated dump trucks for markets across the world. When Aveling-Barford eventually closed, Fruehauf took over the same ground. Today it manufactures commercial tipping trailers there.
Site-level continuity of that kind is not common in British industrial history — firms move, sites get cleared, supply chains shift abroad. That the same hectares have hosted heavy fabrication across at least five distinct operating identities invites a practical question, not a sentimental one: does this inherited industrial pattern translate into something real for the firms and workers on those streets now, or is it mainly a compelling backstory?
How Richard Hornsby & Sons built the town's industrial identity
The canal came first. The Grantham Canal, completed in 1797, linked the town to the River Trent at Nottingham, giving early manufacturers a practical route for moving heavy iron goods before roads could bear the weight. When the Great Northern Railway arrived in 1852, it added speed and national reach to what the waterway had already made viable. These two infrastructure decisions — one built by local investors, one by a national company chasing the main line north — together explain why Grantham, rather than dozens of similar Midlands market towns, developed into a serious manufacturing centre.
Hornsby's operation exploited both thoroughly. The portable steam engine business depended on distributing heavy machinery cost-effectively to farms, quarries, and construction sites across Britain and abroad; without rail freight, the economics of volume production at Spittlegate simply would not have held. One account of the period noted that the company had gained 'a virtual monopoly' in portable steam engine manufacture for a time — a market position only achievable with distribution infrastructure to match.
The firm also moved beyond steam. In the 1890s, Hornsby's commercially developed Herbert Akroyd Stuart's oil engine, a compression-ignition design that preceded the wider adoption of the diesel engine and signalled that the Spittlegate works was not merely executing established technology but engaging with what came next. That combination — scale, distribution reach, and incremental technical development — is what built Grantham's manufacturing identity rather than simply reflecting it.
When the 1918 merger transferred the business into Ruston & Hornsby, the site itself did not go quiet. The physical infrastructure of Spittlegate — its thirty acres of works, its proximity to the railway — carried an industrial logic that outlasted any single ownership, and the companies that followed inherited that logic along with the land.
From road rollers to tipping trailers: the succession on one footprint
Aveling-Barford inherited the Spittlegate infrastructure and made it internationally recognisable on its own terms. The company's road rollers, motorgraders, site dumpers, and articulated dump trucks reached construction projects across the world — this was not a regional supplier filling local contracts but a heavy equipment manufacturer competing in export markets. For much of the mid-twentieth century, Aveling-Barford was among Grantham's largest employers, sustaining a skilled-trades workforce shaped by accumulated metalworking traditions on the same ground.
Its eventual closure was not the end of heavy engineering at Spittlegate. Fruehauf now builds commercial tipping trailers on the former Aveling-Barford footprint — and positions itself explicitly in relation to that history. When the company hosted Grantham College engineering graduates for plant tours in June 2025, it framed the visit around the site's manufacturing heritage, not merely its current product line. Continuity, here, is a conscious identity choice as much as a geographical fact.
A separate strand ran on a different site altogether. BMARC — the British Manufacture and Research Company — occupied a 60-acre plant on Springfield Road, designing and producing aircraft cannon and naval anti-aircraft cannon. It had no direct lineage from the Spittlegate chain; it represented engineering Grantham's defence dimension, demonstrating that the town's industrial base was never a single-product district.
The pattern across all three companies is less a smooth relay than a series of distinct choices. Each inherited a place and a workforce tradition, then adapted both to a different market moment. No single company planned the succession; it emerged from separate decisions, in different decades, about what skilled fabrication on existing industrial land could credibly become next.
Who is still making things in Grantham today
Alongside Fruehauf's trailers and within a few miles of the Spittlegate site, a cluster of firms that most Grantham residents will not immediately name are manufacturing things of considerable technical reach.
Grantham Engineering Ltd, established in 1946 and now run by the third generation of the same family from Harlaxton Road, has been operating through the entire post-Hornsby era. Its specialisms — vibratory screening, bulk handling equipment, and industrial motor repairs — serve industries well beyond the local area, and it is the parent company of both Mogensen UK and Grantham Electrical.
BGB Innovation, founded on Dysart Road in 1976, is perhaps the sharpest contemporary example of local-to-global specialist manufacturing. It designs and makes slip-ring and electro-mechanical systems for wind turbines, wave energy installations, nuclear power plants, and electric vehicles — markets defined by the energy transition rather than any particular geography. A Grantham-based firm supplying the infrastructure of clean power is not a story that fits neatly into the town's agricultural-engineering heritage, and that is precisely the point.
Pentangle Engineering Services, on Alma Park Industrial Estate, works in robotics, automation, and laser cutting. Winfield Engineering similarly offers CNC machining, laser cutting, and structural fabrication. Both reflect the sector's broader shift toward digitally enabled precision work.
Granular employment figures for individual firms are not publicly available, so the scale of this activity is difficult to quantify precisely. What the range makes clear — from tipping trailers to nuclear-grade slip rings — is that the sector is neither uniform nor static.
The paradox of full employment
The headline employment figure for South Kesteven reads well: a 75.9% employment rate, the highest across the Greater Lincolnshire region. The SKDC Economic Development Strategy 2024–2028 cites that same figure, however, not as evidence of a solved problem but as a source of structural friction. Full employment and workforce availability are not the same thing, and the distinction matters for every manufacturer in the cluster described above.
Two dynamics compound each other. First, low unemployment compresses the local labour pool: when firms want to expand, there are simply fewer workers nearby to recruit into technical shop-floor roles. Second, the same strategy notes that approximately 23,500 South Kesteven residents already commute out of the district for work — many of them to Peterborough — reducing the available pool further still. The workers are present in the district; they are simply employed elsewhere.
The reskilling challenge compounds this. Those most exposed to automation and digitalisation pressures — people already on the shop floor, often at modest wages — are largely invisible to reskilling programmes built around the assumption of unemployment. Schemes calibrated to joblessness do not naturally reach someone who is employed, underpaid, and whose role may change significantly within five years.
Grantham College's developing partnership with Fruehauf — work placements, training schemes, and direct employment pathways discussed after its June 2025 campus visit — represents a partial attempt to bridge that gap. But college provision aimed at recent graduates addresses only one end of the pipeline. The broader challenge, acknowledged rather than resolved by the strategy, is how to bring adult in-work reskilling into a sector that cannot easily pause to retrain the people already running it.
What GLEAM-SK changes — and what TED talks never do
Seven firms from the GLEAM-SK area — among them BGB, Grantham Engineering, and Pentangle — participated in Make UK's National Manufacturing Day open-house initiative under the banner of the Greater Lincolnshire Engineering and Manufacturing Network, coordinated by the LEP's Manufacturing Board. That framing matters. For most of the Spittlegate era, the firms described in this article operated in effective isolation from one another. GLEAM-SK gives them a shared identity and a formal channel into regional economic policy — a different kind of infrastructure from a canal or a railway line, but infrastructure of a kind nonetheless.
What it cannot do is resolve the paradox laid out in the previous section. Networking does not conjure a larger labour pool or retrain workers who are already employed elsewhere. The value of a Manufacturing Board lies in raising the sector's visibility to planners and investors; it does not determine whether individual firms grow, contract, or adapt to automation. TED talks about manufacturing and the future of work operate on the same logic: raising a subject's profile among planners and policymakers is not the same as changing what happens on the shop floor. Historically, that durability has come from product decisions and investment choices made within firms, not from collective planning.
The Gonerby Moor employment land proposal near Grantham is sometimes cited as a significant expansion opportunity, and the SKDC strategy does position local manufacturers to benefit. Its outcomes, however, remain speculative — a potential, not a plan with confirmed delivery.
What is solid: the firms, the heritage, and the network now connecting them. What remains unresolved: labour supply, in-work reskilling, and whether the next expansion of the Spittlegate cluster happens on this side of the district or not at all.
- [1] Richard Hornsby & Sons. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=3054919 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=3054919
- [2] Aveling-Barford. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4983662 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=4983662
- [3] BMARC. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=2376722 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=2376722