The Construction Index: Funding secured for Irish navvy archive. “The archive will include an array of documents and recordings of the many Irish emigrants who became known as the generation that built Britain. It will be digitised from records and interviews already gathered by Irish historian Ultan Cowley for a book who wrote more than 20 years ago, chronicling the tales of those who crossed the Irish Sea to work in UK construction. Irish construction workers at the time were widely labelled as ‘navvies’, the pejorative term used for the manual labourers who dug the canal network (the navigators) in the 18th and 19th centuries.”