As a Lancashire native, scion of a family of textile workers, I have a general interest in the history of British manufacturing and a particular passion for the cotton industry. We were, after all, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. In one of those serendipitous coincidences, I've just recently come across two things evoking the business history of British textiles.

One was a marvellous BBC 4 programme, All Our Working Lives Revisited (still available on iPlayer for a few days for UK readers, people overseas will have to wait a bit longer for the iPlayer). It's a documentary from the 80s followed by a coda bringing the story up to date. The programme interviews people of my parents' generation who spent their lives in the industry, and tries to explain its decline: an unsurprising tale of relative labour costs in the UK and India, combined with underinvestment by small British companies so relative technological decline and lack of innovation.

Anyway, Courtaulds popped up as a temporary saviour of the Lancashire mills. By chance I then met Sir Geoffrey Owen for coffee. A distinguished business historian (author of From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Manufacturing Since the Second World War), he told me that his new book is also about Courtaulds and British textiles. It's called The Rise and Fall of Great Companies: Courtaulds and the Reshaping of the Manmade Fibres Industry I can't wait to read it given my textiles-obsession, but meanwhile, there's a review in the FT (subscription may be needed). Reviewer David Kynaston says: “It is … a timely study, given the new conventional wisdom that the UK
must seek to rebalance its economy and rebuild its manufacturing base.”

As the BBC4 programme reminded me, bits of British industry have been in decline for as long as anyone can remember. We're rather good at ignoring the other bits that are thriving. It's the Proustian smell of hot grease and cotton fibre that makes nostalgic romantics of us.