In Orgreave, hope rises from the fields where miners fought and lost

The final years of Orgreave colliery were a brutal footnote in Britain's postwar industrial history. One of many economic casualties that litter the south Yorkshire coal belt, it will be remembered most for a pitched battle between thousands of police and picketing miners in 1984, when it was a British Steel coking plant that converted coal into industrial fuel. In scenes that smacked of a medieval military engagement, one side kitted out with helmets and shields fought to let trucks out, and the other, in incongruously everyday jeans and jackets, was driven back by baton charges as it scrambled to keep them in. It remains a defining moment in an epochal industrial dispute, and was even restaged in a civil-war-style recreation by the artist Jeremy Deller, featuring former participants from both sides. So it is hard to credit that those scenes unfolded outside what is now the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), built on the former site of the Orgreave and Waverley colliery complex. If you strain your neck, from the top floor of the AMRC you can glimpse where the confrontations took place, but the surrounding hi-tech buildings, and the industrial future that they promise, obscure the view. Jamie McGourlay, who works at the AMRC as a representative of Rolls-Royce, one of the companies that funds the centre, points out the expanse of a colliery site that once stretched "as far as the eye can see". After the site shut down in the 1990s, he says, "this was the cemetery of the Sheffield steel and mining industry". But on the ground floor a new industrial cycle is starting from the cradle, not the grave. Work is taking place that belies the overalls-and-spanners image that industrialists and politicians say is still hampering manufacturing's appeal to new generations. The AMRC is a sophisticated manufacturing laboratory, run by the University of Sheffield and backed by major private sector players, led by Boeing. Rolls-Royce and BAE are also on board as backers. It is developing breakthroughs in machining technology – in basic terms, taking a lump of metal and turning it into a high-quality product through drilling, cutting and grinding. For instance, machining is vital for Rolls-Royce. The turbine blades for its aircraft engines operate to approximately 10 microns of tolerance, or a fraction of the width of a human hair. This cavernous 6,400 sq metre facility has no production lines churning out cars, tools or TVs. Instead, groups of academics, apprentices and Rolls-Royce, Boeing and BAE employees develop techniques, hopefully sowing the seeds for breakthroughs that will sustain British industry for years to come. McGourlay points to engine casings and fan blades, describing these objects as "one step" away from being factory-finished items. If the new techniques being honed here are approved, they will then become part of the production process for products such as these casings and fan blades. According to Sir James Dyson, the billionaire inventor, Britain's hopes for maintaining a foothold in global manufacturing lie in research and development – generating new ideas. The AMRC is attempting to bridge a gap that many frustrated industrialists feel is a chasm: the disconnection between cutting-edge university research and companies. McGourlay says that before these centres sprang up, universities were making breakthroughs that had no commercial home, while companies could not justify the cost and time of imaginative research and development. At Orgreave, the problems are reconciled. The university runs the centres, and the industrial groups provide materials, expertise and funding. The government also provides a third of the funding through grants and its Technology Strategy Board (TSB). McGourlay says a "fundamental flaw" in new manufacturing technology is getting ideas from the lab to the market. He adds: "Colleagues in America refer to this middle ground as the valley of death. We found that what was needed to fill the gap was a new link between universities and the private sector." He and his colleagues are not trying to emulate Dyson and produce a next-generation vacuum cleaner. Instead, they hope that their breakthroughs will make a difference at an earlier stage, in the manufacturing process, by giving British businesses the edge over competitors. If a company can make an engine turbine blade better and more efficiently than a rival product from China, Brazil or India, then it has a chance of cancelling out the competitive advantage that emerging companies enjoy from cheaper labour costs. "If we want to remain competitive in manufacturing in the UK and offset labour costs, we need to make step-changes of 50%, 70% in things like efficiency, capability and quality in order to compete with the likes of China," says McGourlay. "Too often we produce black boxes where we just turn a handle and something comes out. This lets us know how the black box actually works – and that intelligence is the competitive edge." The AMRC has galvanised the local economy. Two miles down the road on the edge of Sheffield, a steel product company called Tinsley Bridge is using the AMRC's composite facilities to research making a new, lighter stabiliser bar for trucks. Mark Webber, the company's managing director, says having a "world-class facility" on your doorstep draws in big hitters who create smaller supply chain companies in their wake. "It is attracting leading-edge companies into the city, like Rolls-Royce, and these companies in turn will procure components locally, while demanding world-class standards. So it will improve the capability of the entire supply chain in the area. For us, as an SME and a global, exporting business, having access to the AMRC reassures our customers that we can compete in the modern world." Richard Wright, executive director of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce, says the centre has unlocked potential. "It was a long-term investment at a time when manufacturing was not really the in thing in the UK, in 2002-03 when there was a different impression of manufacturing. If you take a long-term view of things you can build something special. Because we have invested in that area we are now seeing the benefits in terms of a buoyant advanced manufacturing centre in the region. Rolls-Royce has decided to open two factories here. It has allowed the region to up itself by more than one gear." At a gathering of car industry executives in London's Docklands, a senior figure at the government body behind the AMRC initiative says the programme has been important in portraying the UK as a fleet-footed manufacturing base, able to come up with new ideas and put them to commercial use. Under the TSB's "catapult" programme, the Sheffield AMRC is one of seven high-value manufacturing centres, with the University of Strathclyde, University of Bristol and University of Warwick also establishing sites. Andrew Everett, head of transport at the TSB, says the body has helped encourage foreign car companies to expand in the UK. Referring to Britain's largest car plant, the Nissan site in Sunderland, he says: "Nissan are putting the Leaf [electric car] and the battery manufacturing plant there. The culture that we have developed in the UK through our activities has helped Nissan see the UK as a place that does innovation." Projects like the Sheffield AMRC, he says, give academic entrepreneurs and business a space to co-operate – something the private sector cannot do on its own. "We de-risk the funding for that level of expertise," says Everett. In other words, the government is acknowledging that there are areas of Britain's manufacturing base where the state needs to play a permanent role. As a setting for the interview, Docklands, is appropriate: the heartland of Britain's financial services industry. For all the car industry's success in recent years, it still needs to unlock investment from the financial community, which will in turn spur the creation of more small and medium sized businesses in the supply chain. At Orgreave, at least, a new industrial ecology is being nurtured. The AMRC is just one part of an advanced manufacturing park that includes a nuclear facility, run by Sheffield and Manchester universities, dedicated to testing machine tools for nuclear components. Rolls-Royce is building a facility that will specialise in advance casting, or producing the basic metal shapes that are then cut and ground into products – one manufacturing step behind the work being carried out at the machining facility. In another breakthrough, partners in the AMRC are working on a training facility that will generate 200 fully fledged industrial apprentices per year. As McGourlay says: "They are not just creating new technologies, they are creating the next generation of engineers." In 2006, Guardian readers nominated the battle of Orgreave as one of the most neglected events in Britain's radical past. Yet as the efforts of Deller show, its impact lingers. In David Peace's novel about the miners' strike, GB84 , the importance of the confrontation is emphasised by one of the protagonists. "Everything was Orgreave now. Everything had to be done to close Orgreave." For a new generation of professionals it has, in its own way, reopened.