THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN BRITISH STEEL INDUSTRY. By B. S. Keeling and A. E. G. Wright. London: Longmans, 1965. 8? x 5^inches: 210 pages; graphs, charts, plates. z$s Tn the past thirty years the British Steel industry has recovered from the depressed and semi-obsolete condition to which it had been reduced in the 1920's, into the modern and technically efficient state which it enjoys today' (p. 198). This book, which is really a successor to Carr and Taplin's History of the British Steel Industry published in 1962, is the story of the remarkable transformation of a great industry; a transformation which is geographically interesting because it has been effected with relatively few changes in location. All the traditional iron and steel making districts of Great Britain retain their vitality because of inherent economic advantages; the coastal or near-coastal centres retain and indeed increase their importance because of their ready access to coking coal and more particularly to imported ores; Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire retain the advantage of local, albeit low-grade iron ore; whilst the older coal-field centres such as the Black Country and Sheffield continue to enjoy the benefits of local scrap supplies and local markets. Of the major completely new plants, Margam is on the site of pre-existing works, Ravenscraig is in the heart of a great steel-making district near Motherwell, and Newport, whilst a virgin site, is simply the latest expression of a tendency in South Wales for coastal locations to replace the 'heads of the valleys' centres. Corby, despite the impression given on pps. 13-14, was not a 'green-field' site, for an iron works had existed there since 1908. The only really big casualty has been the hand-mill tinplate industry of South Wales, but this has been effectively replaced by the strip-mills of Ebbw Vale, Margam and Newport, all in the same general area. Other features of geographical interest are the changes in the use of steel, recorded in Table 19. Shipbuilding, railways and coal-mining have all declined as steel-users, whilst the motor industry, engineering and constructional uses have increased, and the generally increased efficiency of the steel-using industries has enabled them to achieve equal output and value with less steel. The changed relative position of home and imported ores, too, is a matter of considerable geographical significance; home produced Jurassic ironstone is of low grade, so needing greater coke consumption, and is tending to get dearer as the quarries become deeper, whilst imported ores are twice as rich, and have become cheaper in recent years with the opening up of many new fields (e.g. in West Africa, Canada and South America) and with the reduced transport costs that huge ore-carrying ships can achieve. It is an interesting story, well and succinctly told?though of course it is concerned mainly with technical and commercial organization and with political relationships. The only map is cartographically poor, and it is unfortunate that on the folding frontispiece 'thousand tons' should appear instead of 'million tons.' S. H. Beaver