7th January 2021 10:20 am
Thales UK CEO and Chairman Alex Cresswell believes that current and future challenges will provide opportunities for engineers that are too good to miss. Jason Ford reports.
Thales’ presence in the UK can be traced to Glasgow in the late 1880s when an engineer and a physicist responded to a tender from industry after the poor performance of artillery rangefinders during the Boer War.
The tender asked for improved equipment that could be operated by soldiers of ‘average intelligence’ and the two academics – who went onto form Barr & Stroud – cemented a relationship with the UK’s armed forces that continues to this day. Barr & Stroud’s range-finding technology was deployed on the Royal Navy’s first submarine and Thales has since gone on to provide periscopes, then optronic masts, to every single submarine in the Royal Navy.
Laura Newby at her Belle Bloom stall in York s Coppergate Shopping Centre A FLORISTRY student is celebrating the success of her fledgling business after she branched out to launch a new flower stall in York city centre. Laura Newby set up Belle Blooms from her York home in November 2019, providing arrangements for events, weddings and funerals. The 25-year-old then set up a stall in York’s Coppergate Shopping Centre this autumn despite the pandemic, and was delighted to see her profits exceed her targets. Laura, a current student on Askham Bryan College’s Level 3 Floristry course, who has relaunched her flower cart and delivery service post-lockdown, said: “I didn’t have a business background so the thought of starting from scratch was intimidating.