STEM Workshops in Gloucester

Gloucester sits where the tidal River Severn meets the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, opened in 1827 and once the broadest and deepest canal in the world, making Gloucester Britain's most inland port. Gloucester Docks, opened in 1812, grew fourteen Victorian grain warehouses between 1827 and 1873. The city also grew an engineering base: Fielding and Platt, founded in Gloucester in 1866, made hydraulic presses and riveting machinery exported worldwide, and in 1902 built the first vacuum cleaner, designed by Hubert Cecil Booth. At Hucclecote and Brockworth, on the edge of the city, the Gloster Aircraft Company, formed in 1917, built the Gloster Meteor, the Allies' first operational jet fighter, which entered combat in 1944.

Sir Charles Wheatstone was born in Gloucester in 1802. He became a pioneer of telegraphy, helping run some of the first working electric telegraph lines in the 1830s, gave his name to the Wheatstone bridge, a method for measuring electrical resistance he presented to the Royal Society in 1843, and invented the concertina. Sir Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, worked with the Gloster Aircraft Company and taxi-tested Britain's first jet aircraft, the Gloster E.28/39, on the company's Brockworth airfield, near Hucclecote, in 1941.

Safran Landing Systems, whose Gloucester site was founded in 1937, employs around 1,200 people designing and building landing and braking systems, including for the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Global Combat Air Programme, and opened new engineering and support facilities on site in 2025. TBS Engineering, headquartered in Gloucester, designs and builds battery assembly and plate manufacturing machinery for customers worldwide and employs more than 200 people. The University of Gloucestershire opened an £18 million building for its School of Business and Technology at its Oxstalls campus in Gloucester in 2018.

Gloucestershire College's Gloucester campus teaches mechanical engineering in workshops holding manual lathes and milling machines, a coordinate measuring machine, five CNC machines and CAD suites for 2D drawing, 3D visualisation and 3D printing. Safran Landing Systems has around 100 apprentices, international business volunteers and interns alongside its 1,200-strong Gloucester workforce, and TBS Engineering, headquartered in the city, recruits engineers and technicians for its battery manufacturing equipment business.