STEM Workshops in Hinckley

Hinckley's engineering story starts with a single machine. In 1640 William Iliffe set up a stocking frame in the town, reputedly paying £60 for it, making Hinckley one of the earliest framework-knitting centres in England. Hosiery dominated the town for three centuries, and you can still stand in front of a Georgian-era knitting frame at Hinckley & District Museum, housed in seventeenth-century framework knitters' cottages on Lower Bond Street. The borough's heritage even carries a scientific twist: the true site of the Battle of Bosworth was pinpointed only in 2009, when a systematic metal-detecting survey near Fenn Lane turned up lead cannon shot and a silver-gilt boar badge.

Joseph Hansom gives Hinckley a genuine claim in transport history. Working in the town as an architect, he developed and tested his Patent Safety Cab here, registering the design in December 1834; the first Hansom cab ran along Hinckley's Coventry Road in 1835, and the low-slung, stable design became a fixture of Victorian streets from London to New York. More recently, builder John Bloor bought the Triumph name after the original company collapsed in 1983, funded a brand-new factory in Hinckley in 1988 and launched the first Hinckley-built Triumphs in 1991, reviving one of Britain's most famous engineering marques on the town's doorstep.

Today Hinckley is best known as the global headquarters of Triumph Motorcycles, which has built bikes in the town since 1991 and passed its millionth Hinckley-made machine in December 2021; its Factory Visitor Experience on Normandy Way opened in 2017 and runs behind-the-scenes factory tours. Logistics is the other giant: DPD's £150m Hinckley Park hub, one of the largest fully automated parcel hubs in Europe, can sort 72,000 parcels an hour, joining the firm's earlier sites at Sketchley. Family-run Paynes Garages has traded since 1907, Caterpillar assembles construction machines at nearby Desford, and the HORIBA MIRA vehicle-testing campus sits on the borough's edge along the A5.

Local routes into STEM are unusually visible here. North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College opened its Hinckley campus on Lower Bond Street in 2011 and runs its Harrowbrook Campus in the town, with creative and digital courses in Hinckley and its engineering programmes taught at the Nuneaton campus and the MIRA Technology Institute nearby. Caterpillar's Desford plant employs well over a thousand people, including apprentices, building backhoe loaders and telehandlers. DPD's Hinckley Park hub brought 750 new jobs, and Triumph's headquarters brings design, manufacturing and test careers to the town itself. For pupils in Hinckley schools, the journey from classroom project to skilled local employment is short and easy to picture.