STEM Workshops in Lichfield & Tamworth

This corner of Staffordshire was the heart of Anglo-Saxon Mercia. In July 2009 a metal detectorist in a field at Hammerwich, south-west of Lichfield, uncovered the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found, and while the core collection is held in Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent, pieces from it are displayed at Tamworth Castle and Lichfield Cathedral on the Mercian Trail. The cathedral is itself a feat of medieval engineering, the only medieval cathedral in England with three spires. Tamworth's modern engineering story belongs to Reliant, built vehicles at its Watling Street works on the edge of Tamworth from 1935 until the late 1990s, championing glass-fibre bodywork in the three-wheeled Robin and the Scimitar GTE, before completing its final car at a new Burntwood factory in 2001.

Erasmus Darwin, physician and natural philosopher, ran his medical practice and his experiments from a house on Beacon Street in Lichfield from 1758 to 1781. A founding member of the Lunar Society and grandfather of Charles Darwin, he explored ideas about evolution a lifetime before his grandson, declined an invitation to become personal physician to King George III, and welcomed visitors including Benjamin Franklin. His home is now the Erasmus Darwin House museum. A century earlier, Gregory King, born in Lichfield in 1648, produced pioneering estimates of England's population and wealth and is remembered as the country's first great economic statistician.

Fradley Park, developed across the former RAF Lichfield airfield, is now an industrial estate home to a mix of manufacturing and distribution businesses. In Tamworth, Amphenol Invotec makes complex printed circuit boards for aerospace, defence and space customers at its Hedging Lane site. A short run up the A38 at Barton-under-Needwood, Alstom's Central Rivers depot maintains the entire CrossCountry Voyager fleet under an eight-year contract extension agreed in 2023, running to 2031. And Tamworth's SnowDome, opened in May 1994 as the UK's first full-size real-snow indoor slope, keeps a 170-metre slope of real snow frozen all year round.

Local routes into STEM are close at hand. South Staffordshire College teaches from its Lichfield campus, with the college's dedicated engineering and digital hub nearby in Cannock, while Landau Forte Academy Tamworth Sixth Form offers post-16 study in the town. Straight down the A5, the MIRA Technology Institute at HORIBA MIRA's technology park runs automotive engineering apprenticeships from intermediate through to degree level with partners including Coventry University and Loughborough University. Alstom's Central Rivers depot puts rail engineering careers on the doorstep, and Birmingham's universities are an easy commute on the Cross City line from Lichfield.