This paper will discuss the activities of the engineering company Siemens in the north of England during the interwar period. Historiographical approaches to industry in interwar Britain consider the global depression, industrial rationalisation, the decline of heavy industry in the north, and the establishment of lighter industries in the south. While Siemens was impacted by problems in the wider economy and also merged with other businesses as a means of addressing these problems, its move away from heavy engineering and into electronics in fact led to a move into the north, to a large, well-established site of heavy industry at Preston.

In discussing industry during the interwar period, historians, while acknowledging geographical shifts in manufacturing, have paid little attention to the changing industrial make-up of the north, the resulting impacts upon the companies operating there and the changing identities of both the region and the companies themselves. This paper aims to tackle these issues by exploring the reasons for Siemens’ move into lighter electronics and into the north.

These issues require an approach which scrutinises not just economics and politics but also the identities and meanings of the industrial north, incorporating ideas of place and power. The paper will draw upon a diverse range of sources, from company minute books to policy documentation, trade literature and local newspapers. It will include discussions of geography, policy, regional culture, and identity to show that, by the end of the inter-war period, Siemens and representatives of the town of Preston and its surrounding region reciprocally used each other to promote their own interests. This has interesting implications for our knowledge of the place of Siemens in the changing landscape of the industrial north and the networking of the whole country for electrical power.