I’ve been trying to eat, wear and use goods that were produced in the UK. Marmite hits the spot, but I’m not so sure about the flat cap
I’ve always wished we made more stuff in the UK. I trace this back to reading a little poem typed out on a scrap of paper pinned to the wall of a pub in Pensnett in the Black Country in 1985.
I was on a pub crawl for a mate’s 18th birthday. At the time there was much excitement about the development nearby of one of Britain’s first shopping malls, the Merry Hill Centre. This was built on the site of the Round Oak steelworks, which had closed in 1982 after 125 years. The poem was about workers leaving Round Oak for the last time. The line that transfixed me went something like: “Blokes who’d worked there for years and years, walked away crying their tears.”
