STEM Workshops in Swadlincote & Ashby

This catchment straddles the Leicestershire and South Derbyshire coalfield. At Moira, the Earl of Moira built a blast furnace in 1804 to smelt local iron ore with coke and limestone; brought into blast in 1806, it ran only intermittently until 1811, and survives today, preserved since 1981, as one of the few blast furnaces to survive from that era. In Swadlincote, Thomas Sharpe founded a pottery in 1821 that grew into a maker of sanitary ware, using clay from one of only a handful of British deposits of high-alumina fireclay; family member Edmund Sharpe patented an improved flushing rim for water closets in 1855, and the works, believed to be Britain's oldest surviving sanitary pottery, ran until 1968. The Ashby Canal, opened in 1804, and later railways carried coal and lime out of the district, where the merged Donisthorpe and Rawdon colliery closed in 1990.

William Stenson (died 1861), from nearby Coleorton, sank colliery shafts at Whitwick in the 1820s that grew into the town of Coalville; he went on to start the Leicester and Swannington Railway with the advice of George and Robert Stephenson, one of the world's earliest railways, built to move coal to Leicester. More than a century later, brothers Tim and Chris Stamper founded Ultimate Play the Game in a small terraced house in Ashby-de-la-Zouch in 1982, writing early hit titles such as Jetpac and Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum. They went on to found Rare, which created GoldenEye 007 and Donkey Kong Country before Microsoft bought it in 2002.

East Midlands Airport, north of Ashby at Castle Donington, is described by its operator as the UK's largest dedicated air cargo hub; DHL, UPS and FedEx anchor its cargo operation, and it handled 413,664 tonnes of freight in the 2025/26 financial year, up 12.5 percent on the year before. In Moira, Conkers discovery centre sits on land that was once Rawdon Colliery's mineshafts and spoil heaps, and now offers a tree top walk and environmental learning.

Stephenson Campus in Coalville, founded in 1924 as Coalville Technical College and now part of Loughborough College Group, trains engineers, motor vehicle technicians and construction apprentices, with named employer partners including Toyota Material Handling UK, Kion and Linde; its apprenticeship partnership with Barratt Developments won Construction Apprenticeship Provider of the Year in 2022. East Midlands Airport's cargo operation, anchored by DHL, UPS and FedEx, adds logistics and aviation careers close by.