STEM Workshops in Cheshire & Warrington

Cheshire holds one of British science's defining landmarks. At Jodrell Bank, near Goostrey in the east Cheshire countryside, the 76-metre Lovell Telescope was completed in 1957 as the largest steerable radio telescope in the world, and the observatory was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019 for its pioneering role in radio astronomy. The county's engineering story runs just as deep. Crewe Works opened in 1843 under the Grand Junction Railway and grew into one of the great locomotive-building centres of the British railway age, while across town at Pyms Lane a factory built for Rolls-Royce in 1938 has produced Bentley motor cars since 1946. To the north and west, the salt fields around Northwich and Runcorn gave rise to the modern chemical industry, with Brunner Mond founded at Winnington in 1873 and merging into Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1926.

Sir Bernard Lovell, the physicist and radio astronomer, founded Jodrell Bank and served as its first director from 1945 to 1980, building the giant telescope that now carries his name; he made his home at Swettenham in Cheshire, where he died in 2012. Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was born at Daresbury in 1832 and worked as a mathematician and logician at Oxford. Sir Joseph Whitworth, born at Stockport in 1803, was the engineer who devised the British Standard Whitworth screw thread in 1841, giving British manufacturing its first national standard for precision components.

The Sci-Tech Daresbury campus near Warrington is now a major science and innovation hub in the North West, home to the STFC Daresbury Laboratory and to more than 150 high-tech companies. Daresbury hosts the Cockcroft Institute for accelerator science, run jointly with the universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster and Strathclyde, and the STFC Hartree Centre, a national facility for supercomputing, data science, artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In Crewe, Bentley Motors designs and hand-builds its cars at its Pyms Lane headquarters, employing around 3,500 people, while Alstom continues rail engineering on part of the historic works site.

Daresbury, Bentley and the wider advanced-manufacturing and chemicals base offer apprenticeships and graduate routes into accelerator science, software and AI, automotive engineering and process engineering. These are tangible, local destinations that pupils can aim for from primary school onwards.