With all its department stores, theatres, cafés, pubs and underground stations, possibly one of the last things you’d ever expect of the great metropolis of London is for it to be teeming with manufacturing. While we might dimly recall that the South Bank, with its repurposed factories and workshops, was once the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, it’s hard to imagine today that much traditional manufacturing goes on in trendy boroughs replete with digital start-ups, innovation spaces and wall-to-wall fintech.
But as the superb ‘Made in London’ (Merrell, £40, ISBN 9781858947020) shows, nothing could be further from the truth. London today is packed with mechanical enterprise from the hand crafting of propellers to the design and manufacture of commuter bicycles. One of those upscale coffee table books that Merrell seems to be so adept at printing, this gorgeously produced tome, subtitled ‘From workshops to factories’, takes us right back to an almost...