SteelWorks Years: Life, Laughs and Chaos Inside a British Steelworks

Behind the gates of a steelworks was a world most people would never see.

The heat. The noise. The molten steel. Twelve-hour shifts. Questionable health and safety. Management bullshit. And, above all else, some absolutely unforgettable characters.

This is the story of my years working in the steel industry - starting out knowing virtually nothing and eventually learning to work around machines capable of turning molten steel into slabs and billets.

There were dangerous jobs, ridiculous jobs, endless cleaning, night shifts that seemed to last forever, practical jokes, arguments, near misses and moments that could only ever happen inside a steelworks.

But this isn't really a book about machinery.

It's about the people.

The grafters. The piss-takers. The sleepers. The characters with nicknames that made more sense than their real names. The men who could make a twelve-hour shift bearable simply by being there - and the ones who could make it feel twice as long.

As the years passed, though, the place began to change. New owners arrived. Uncertainty grew. COVID hit. Casting became less frequent, the bullshit jobs became more common, and eventually walking through those gates became something I genuinely dreaded.

After years of thinking I'd probably be there forever, I finally decided I wanted something different.

The SteelWorks Years is an honest, funny and sometimes brutal account of working inside an industry that gave me a living, gave me stories I'll probably be telling for the rest of my life - and eventually taught me when it was time to walk away.

The names might have changed. The stories haven't.