Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology PDF
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Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology This page intentionally left blank Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology Michael Stratton and Barrie Trinder First published 2000 by E & FN Spon This edition published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2000 Michael Stratton and Barrie Trinder The right of Michael Stratton and Barrie Trinder to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Designed and typeset in 9.3 / 12.5pt Palatino by Gavin Ward Design Associates All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-419-24680-0 Contents Page vii Foreword by Sir Neil Cossons ix Preface and acknowledgements xi Abbreviations Chapter one 1 Introduction Chapter two 7 A new material culture Chapter three 19 Industrial revolutions: energy Chapter four 43 The international transfer of technology: the case of the food industries Chapter five 61 Cars, ships and aircraft Chapter six 79 The age of science Chapter seven 93 The century of total war Chapter eight 121 The great rebuildings Chapter nine 245 Changing horizons: the archaeology of transport Chapter ten 177 Expanding services Chapter eleven 199 Reaching conclusions 211 Appendix 217 Further reading 221 Index of names 226 Index of places 234 Subject indexes This page intentionally left blank Foreword by Sir Neil Cossons The world came of age in the twentieth century. It was a century endowed at its outset with immense industrial power, widespread prosperity, and emerging technologies that were to affect the lives of every person on the planet. But that same inheritance held the seeds of tragedy, in unresolved issues of influence and position in Europe, and in a capacity for annihilation made possible by the very industrial pre-eminence that had brought such wealth. It was to take three world wars, two of unimaginable carnage and horror and a third - the Cold War - that threatened imminent global extinction, to exorcise the ghosts of that nineteenth century legacy. By the twentieth century's end, the transformation in political, economic and social structures had been so universal that the American historian Francis Fukuyama could contemplate it as 'the end of history'. Those changes were felt in Britain as keenly as anywhere. At the dawn of the twentieth century Britain was the leading world power, her influence and authority rooted in industrial, mercantile and imperial supremacy. By its end, the empire on which the sun never set had evaporated and she had become a less than enthusiastic partner in a European consortium of nations which history had taught her to view with circumspection. What had been the first industrial nation in the eighteenth century and 'workshop of the world' in the nineteenth was by the end of the twentieth a more democratic place, pluralistic and prosperous, but a place in which industry played a diminishing part in building the wealth of the nation. But changes in the landscape of twentieth century Britain, urban and rural, were no less dramatic than they had been in the great age of industrialisation, on the contrary. New industries and the urban diaspora, the arrival of the motor car and the diesel lorry, of air travel and the aviation industry, of new building technologies based on reinforced concrete and prefabrication, of the filling station, the cinema and the out-of-town shopping centre all combined to alter the face of the nation irrevocably and irreversibly. Such was the impact of these seismic shifts in the social geography of Britain that by the 1990s regeneration of those urban landscapes that had suffered progressive decay as they were denuded of people and industries had become a national priority. So called 'brown field' areas, mostly in and around the old industrial heartlands of the Midlands and the North, were to be the places where people would live and work in the future, taking pressure off the countryside and reviving the fortunes of urban life. A key part of this new approach to planning and investment is 'regeneration through heritage', the recognition that many of the buildings on which urban and industrial living had been built a century and more ago themselves afforded opportunities not simply for re-use but as keys to reviving and maintaining the social fabric of communities. Foreword ν i i The industrial archaeology of the twentieth century is the archaeology of paradox, signalled by the arrival of the cult of 'recency' in our understanding of history the realisation that the past is being created around us day-by-day and that we can all be active players in ensuring that yesterday can be used to benefit and fashion tomorrow. The recent past is, in a very real sense, the context within which we play out our lives. These are themes Michael Stratton well understood. They are reflected in much of the work of English Heritage of which in April I had the privilege to become Chairman. And it is a particular pleasure to see English Heritage, through the National Monuments Record, be so closely associated with this book. In his Preface, Barrie Trinder accords Michael Stratton the distinction of having conceived the idea of Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology. Michael died of myeloma, shortly before his forty-sixth birthday, at the end of April 1999. He was in every sense a twentieth century man. He grew up in north London alongside the Great Northern main line. He studied at the universities of Durham, Sheffield and Leicester before moving to Ironbridge as a research student of the University of Aston in the late 1970s. He saw, in the buildings and landscapes around him, what none of the rest of us could see. And, his interests and enthusiasms, his profound knowledge and scholarship, equipped him as nobody else to commentate with authority on the twentieth century world. His research and publication on terra cotta, on the archaeology of the British car factory, on the aviation and electricity generation industries, were just a few of the more tangible reflections of his insatiable curiosity and his appetite for revealing the invisible, the obscure or just the unknown to wider audiences. But above all it was Michael's perception of the aesthetics of his contemporary surroundings and the masterly way in which he could stand outside conventional wisdom in order to confer value upon the recent past at a time when fashion dictated otherwise that will for me be the most abiding memory of his contribution to industrial archaeology. As a colleague at Ironbridge in the late seventies and thereafter as someone whose friendship I valued and intellect I admired Michael has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of the world in which we live. Neil Cossons April 2000 ν i i i Foreword Preface and acknowledgements The idea for this book was Michael Stratton's. The outline was sketched while awaiting a train at Kettering Station in June 1996. It was Michael who sought a publisher and convinced the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (now merged with English Heritage) to support the venture. Michael and I jointly taught postgraduate programmes in industrial archaeology at the Ironbridge Institute between 1982 and the end of 1994 when Michael left to take up a post at the University of York. We soon realised that the archaeology of the twentieth century needed a different approach from that of the Industrial Revolution, and developed such an approach when from 1986 the course was divided into modules. Michael ceased to teach specifically twentieth-century topics after he moved to York, although he continued to research certain aspects, which he did with alacrity. After moving to University College Northampton in 1996 I was able to continue specific programmes on the subject, both at that institution and in the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Birmingham. I am grateful to the numerous students who have stimulated the thinking that has gone into the book. We spent much of 1998 working on the book, and planned most of the illustrations during a two-day spell at the National Monuments Record Centre, Swindon, in mid-December of that year. Within a month Michael was stricken with the illness from which he died on 29 April 1999. He was determined that the project should continue, and had written some parts of the book and approved others before he died. The book has been completed during the summer and autumn of 1999 in the hope of achieving its objective of publication during the conference of the International Congress on the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) in August 2000. Rather too much of 1999 has been spent at the word processor and not enough, as we had planned, in fieldwork. The book does nevertheless reflect a great deal of fieldwork undertaken during the past twenty years. Michael was stimulating company in any landscape, and I particularly cherish his delight in the bizarre environment of the former Royal Ordnance Factory at Thorp Arch on a November afternoon in 1998. We would doubtless have argued about many points in the text, and the book will be the poorer for the lack of those debates. I trust nevertheless that Michael would have approved of the book in its final form, and that it will be a worthy part of the splendid legacy that he has bequeathed to scholarship. I would like to record my gratitude, first, to Annabel Stratton, both for her composure and for her gentle encouragement of the project. The book draws on the work of many of our former students at the Ironbridge Institute, particularly that of Jane Bennett, Bob Brooks, Alan Bryant, Richard Butterfield, David Cant, Paul Collins, Tony Crosby, Preface and acknowledgements i χ
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