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The Men Who Built Britain
A History of the Irish Navvy
Ultan Cowley

“Since the late eighteenth century the Irish have played a major role in the expansion of British industry and of the country’s canal, road and rail network. The success of the British construction industry owes a great deal to Irish skills in excavation and construction, and their contribution to the development of the industry has been immeasurable.”
- Sir William McAlpine

“The Scottish make the best supervisors, the Irish the best workers and England the best country to work in.”
- Sir William McAlpine

In the popular mind the archetypal navvy is a raggedy, shovel bearing Irishman, a foot soldier in McAlpine’s Fusiliers who laboured on the motorways, and construction sites of Britain. By 1960 when the term ‘navvy’ was dropped from official British statistical data it had become a term of derision and abuse, shorthand for the useless drunken Irishman routinely portrayed in the media of the day.

However the term navvy was not always a racist appendage. Two centuries earlier it was a byword for a labouring elite without which the British industrial revolution could not have been sustained. The word is derived from ‘Navigators’, a description of the men who excavated the canals of Britain but came to represent the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who laboured all over the UK, building the canals, roads, railroads, and factories, the infrastructure of modern Britain.

This book is a history of and a tribute to an entire underclass of people who left Ireland from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century to help build the infrastructure of a country that was booming on the back of colonial riches.

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