Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology

249 Pages·2000·71.17 MB·English

by  Michael Stratton

Twentieth Century
Industrial Archaeology
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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
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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