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Tube Age

Modern life is tubular! Newsreader Frank Phillips celebrates the countless uses for steel tubing.

Documentary 1946 31 mins

Overview

Modern life is tubular! BBC newsreader Frank Phillips here celebrates the endless variety of steel tubing for industrial and domestic markets. There's tubing for electricity, gas and water supply. There are pipes, poles and pylons, and tubes for trains, trams, trolleybuses and all manner of transport. Steel tubing powers manufacturing and agriculture, and builds homes, offices, factories, children's playgrounds and sports stadiums. If a young Mike Oldfield ever stumbled upon this film, it might have given him an idea or two...

At the time this film was made, Stewarts & Lloyds were the largest tube makers in Great Britain, and it's not hard to see why. In an age when much of Britain was rebuilding, the versatility of the steel tube proved a huge asset: as the film shows, to a great extent, steel - much of it tubular - built modern Britain.