From Trains to Engineering

Today engineering accounts for a mere 4% of employment in the city. Yet for most of the twentieth century Brighton was an industrial town with important industrial estates around its periphery. Unfortunately the city neglects its industrial past, as the episode around the closure of its only industrial museum shows (click here).

When the railway came to Brighton in 1841, the London Brighton and South Coast Railway bought in its locomotives, but within a few years it was building its own and continued to build them, even after nationalisation by the post-war Labour Government.

Railway engineering provided the foundation for a more general light engineering industry. This section will deal with the city's engineering history.