Walking to Work

The town of Reading has been turned down for city status four times and remains stuck with the unwanted distinction of being Britain’s largest town by population. For many years it was home to the largest biscuit factory in the world, Huntley & Palmer, and a source of enduring fascination to the producers of picture postcards.  Something about the spectacle of working men and women flooding the streets on their way to and from the factory was held to have significant customer appeal.  Although for many holidaymakers it was a painful reminder of the world from which they had been temporarily released.  The men make their way home with an air of grim determination, while the women appear more relaxed, though a few show signs of high spirits.  For the historian they offer evidence of changing fashions and a measure of workforce morale.  Since their introduction into the marketplace, biscuits have always been an optional purchase and Huntley & Palmer played a major part in developing ever more elaborate recipes in beautifully designed and often luxurious packaging to expand their appeal.  The business followed a traditional path - decades of expansion under private ownership were followed by absorption by multinational competitors and a loss of identity in a vast portfolio of brands.  Manufacturing in Reading ended in 1976 after which the brand had no links with the town.  After further changes in control the brand was sold off in 2006 to new owners who have operated on a much smaller scale with a modest range of sweet and savoury products.  The factory buildings have been gradually replaced with offices and apartments and the last surviving portion is being converted into living spaces.  For an earlier post from 2010 on Huntley & Palmer, please follow this link.

 

Noisiel Revisited in Postcards

Twelve years ago I visited Noisiel to see the unique Chocolat Menier factory complex designed by Jules Saulnier on the banks of the River Marne, east of Paris.  The factory was in production from 1871 to 1993 and in 1997 was remodelled to serve as the headquarters of Nestlé France. Le Moulin Saulnier is the landmark building - behind the chromatic brilliance of its ceramic cladding lies an interior in which iron box girders and arched roof trusses create uninterrupted floor space for machinery.  Since 2010 I’ve acquired some vintage postcards of Noisiel that can be seen below, what they confirm is how well everything appears to have been conserved. A recent acquisition is this corporate prospectus of the Noisiel factory published by Menier in the 1930s to mark more than a century of progress. On the cover is a familiar school girl figure in use in Menier publicity since 1892, as airbrushed and updated 50 years later for the 1930s. There’s a double page spread of photos illustrating the major buildings and the manufacturing process at the Usine de Noisiel.  Alongside a chance to win a Peugeot 302 “luxe”, more photos can be seen on the back, including views of the internal railway that ran through the premises.  

In 2020 Nestlé France moved out of Noisiel to new premises in Issy-les-Moulineaux and disposed of the entire site to a developer, leaving the buildings to face an uncertain future.  Much wrangling is now going on between developers, local authorities and nearby residents - developers want to maximise the residential potential while locals are looking for community and cultural facilities.  The buildings have some protection as National Monuments but many spectacular interiors could be lost whichever way the argument is settled. Some reports say that the developers intend to permit a number of community enterprises to operate within the site on a temporary basis until 2024, the date set for launching the redevelopment.  This is unlikely to offer any public access to the site. More Chocolat Menier posts can be seen here and here.

 

Cornish Mining in the St. Just District

In the 1890s the Great Western Railway operated a weekly train to Southampton calling at Redruth and Camborne to collect Cornish miners on the first stage of their journey to the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.  Cornish mining technology was among the most advanced in the world and Cornish mining engineers were in demand throughout the 19th. century.  In the same period, unemployed Cornish miners were recruited to work in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, United States and Canada, in step with fluctuations in the local labour market.  Copper and tin had been mined in Cornwall for centuries before the invention of steam power made it possible to access deposits via vertical shafts rather than by digging into hill sides.  Ancillary industries - steam engine building, pump and rock drill manufacturers, compressor and boiler producers flourished - mostly located in the Camborne and Redruth area where the major mines were concentrated.

When the great Cornish land owning families, the Bassets, Rashleighs, Boscawens, Treffrys, et al  invested in mineral extraction, the last thing on their minds was landscape value - they had quite enough of that on their secluded country estates.  While the majority of mines were to be found inland there were two clusters of mines along the north Cornish coast around St. Just and St. Agnes. The environmental damage inflicted on the landscape in a county widely celebrated for the rugged beauty of its dramatic coastline must have seemed especially egregious to the anti-industrial segment of Victorian opinion typified by John Ruskin. The legacy of all this can be seen today in the ruins of engine houses, chimney stacks and industrial buildings that cling to the granite cliff tops between St. Just and Zennor on the north facing coast of West Penwith where these photos were taken. 

Curiously, in accordance with another strand in Ruskin’s thinking - the need to conserve the past - these ruins have acquired new significance as powerful enhancements to the landscape. With the passage of time a new narrative has emerged and these sites have acquired a beauty of their own as well as bearing witness to past experience and endeavour.  They form a lens through which we can examine the working lives and culture of mining communities and the economic forces that brought the mines into existence. These photos are a record of the industrial relics that follow the coastline between Geevor Mine and Levant Mine.  Geevor was one of the very last Cornish mines to maintain production and continued investment in the 1980s but global economic conditions forced it to close in 1990.  Some of the associated infrastructure remains in place and forms the core of a museum exhibit under the broader umbrella of the UNESCO designated Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape. 

 

Postcard of the Day No. 106, Larkin Factories, Buffalo

This is a conventional promotional postcard - an invitation to admire the inordinate scale of the Larkin Factories activity and the vast extent of its premises in a hand drawn aerial perspective view. The Larkin business was in mail order supplies. As the American settler population infiltrated the most remote regions of the territory in search of unclaimed land, more and more consumers came to depend on the US Mail to keep their rural homesteads supplied with goods. Companies like Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck in Chicago expanded phenomenally by catering to this market and mailed compendious catalogues from shore to shining shore.  Within a decade of its foundation as a manufacturer of soap in 1875, the Larkin Company had expanded its product range and sales volume and relaunched as a mail order operation selling direct to the public.  Savings made by dispensing with a sales force enabled them to offer discounts and undercut conventional retailers.  

 By 1903 the company offices were dispersed across a sprawling industrial complex and John D Larkin commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design an Administration Building to consolidate all office functions under a single roof. A grainy image of Wright’s building, completed in 1906, occupies the lower right portion of the postcard and it’s immediately apparent it looks unlike every other building on the site. At first glance its slab sided form has the air of an industrial building - a turbine factory or a power station.  Harsh rectilinear elevations and cliff faces of unbroken masonry are a product of Wright’s fascination with the manipulation of cuboid volumes and convey a sense of permanence, ironically considering the building’s ultimate fate.  The severity of the building’s profile is offset by decorative subtleties designed by Wright’s Oak Park collaborator, Richard Bock and the sensation of upward momentum implied by the strong vertical forms*.  

Wright’s vision was responsive to practicalities such as the provision of air conditioning, a glazed roof that illuminated a deep light court or atrium enclosed by balconies, specially designed office furniture (where comfort was sacrificed for appearance), and universal fire-proofing.  When complete, Wright’s radical reinvention of the modern office block drew criticism for its lack of surface differentiation and an absence of colour and decorative moulding. It was left to European Modernists, ever an object of suspicion to Wright, to find positive things to say, notably Erich Mendelsohn who visited in 1924 and wrote effusively about what he saw and Mies van der Rohe who openly recognised its pioneering qualities.  Wright himself would translate much of the basic geometry of the Larkin project to the design of his next building, Unity Temple in Oak Park, where his vocabulary of horizontal and vertical forms would be infused with colour in the service of the spiritual qualities that were always closer to his heart.

The family run Larkin Company was not especially nimble in its response to changes in the market and was in serious decline by 1939 when bankruptcy was narrowly avoided.  At the same time Wright’s building was subjected to a series of unsympathetic alterations including the installation of new windows that destroyed the unity of the architect’s vision. After fruitlessly throwing money at a variety of diversification projects, the business finally closed in 1942.  Wright’s building was sold to a developer whose plans came to naught - when demolition took place in 1950 the vacant site became a car park.  Wright was unexpectedly sanguine - perhaps he lost interest as the Larkin family repeatedly compromised the integrity of his building.  It all makes for a fascinating saga and the undisputed authority on the subject is Jack Quinan, whose book, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building, Myth and Fact (MIT Press, 1987) is indispensable.

*  Quinan drew attention to the extraordinary ensemble of grain elevators to be seen in Buffalo and reminds us that Wright would have seen them every time his train to or from Chicago passed by them.  Wright expressed his admiration for their functionality and uncompromising dominance in the landscape. Quinan speculates that something of their presence might have filtered into the formal geometry of the Larkin building - we can’t know for certain but it’s not wildly implausible.

Fear and Loathing on Teesside

It is strange how those who would die in a ditch to defend a statue of a slave trader have no hesitation in erasing the industrial legacy that is such a vital source of local pride in places like Middlesborough and Redcar that have been ravaged in the era of post-industrialisation.  Within 4 hours of taking up her post as Culture Secretary, Ms Nadine Dorries was contacted by Mr Ben Houchen, Tees Valley Mayor, and reversed Historic England’s temporary listing of the Dorman Long coal storage tower at Redcar.  Much to the delight of Mr Houchen, it was demolished in the early hours of Sunday September 19 at 1.55 am.  Not so much a case of levelling up as levelling down. Ms Dorries is described as a best selling novelist and was commended by Ben Wallace, Minister of Defence as ideal for her new post because her second career shows she is in touch with what ordinary people think. Hilary Mantel is a best selling novelist but I can’t imagine Mr Wallace having much good to say about her.  Back to Ms Dorries, she is certainly an accomplished gobshite and avowed opponent of left-wing snowflakes, political correctness, gay marriage and easy access to abortion.  So she comes fully armed into the present government’s inspirational ‘war on woke’.

The real villain of this piece is the Mayor of Tees Valley who fought tooth and nail to successfully oppose the local campaign to preserve the redundant blast furnace at Redcar as a significant part of the regional industrial heritage. Demolition of the Redcar steelworks took place in August and the depressing saga of the Mayor’s intrigues and u-turns that made it happen is well told by local blogger, Scott Hunter.  Mr Houchen has a Taliban-like enthusiasm for destroying the symbols of the past that sustain a sense of local identity. Replacing them with retail parks, big box fulfilment centres, a freeport for tax evasion and a handful of affordable jerry-built dog-kennels is designed to prepare the locals for a bright shiny future of low-wage, long hours and insecure employment where the profits will be whipped offshore in the blink of an eye. The images of Houchen’s victims come from Google Earth, the industrial panorama (in which the Dorman Long tower can be seen on the skyline in the centre) was photographed by myself from the top of the Transporter Bridge in  April 2016.

 

Der Pott, Industriekultur im Ruhrgebiet

A massive block of a book - 640 pages of colour photographs of heavy industry in the Ruhr, mostly relics of the past but a few from the present.  Deindustrialisation wiped out an enormous amount of industrial structures in the region. Some of the more viable plant was exported to China but much of what remained was repurposed as spectacular heritage visitor attractions. More than 70 sites have been combined into a 400 kilometre heritage trail that reaches from Duisburg in the east to Hamm in the west.  Co-ordinating the scheme depended on a level of regional organisation that seems to be impossible in Britain where such sites are numerous but rarely work together.  Another factor that is less common in Germany is the British tendency to eliminate all traces of defunct industrial activity at the earliest opportunity. In part this reflects the shortage of development land in Britain and a pattern of land ownership that is always looking to extract maximum value from land assets. The same forces are at work in Germany but they are subject to stronger regulation in terms of public interest.

There’s long been a sense in Britain that industrial relics are intrinsically unsightly and unworthy of preservation and often the best examples get swept away with the worst.  In the north-east of England an enormous amount of industrial heritage was lost after the deindustrialisation of the region in the 60s and 70s as the ship yards, coal mines and steel works disappeared - it was left to Beamish Museum to salvage what it could but a regionally planned scheme would have been much more comprehensive.  It sometimes felt as if a Ground Zero policy was unofficially sanctioned as if removing the visual evidence of past industry would smooth the transition to a post-industrial future of low-wage insecure employment by breaking the links with lost occupations and the cultural traditions that sustained them.  It’s a process that still goes on - the Mayor of Tees Valley recently posed with indecent pride in front of the closed steelworks at Redcar and proudly announced its total demolition, having rejected all proposals for preservation as a visitor attraction.  The need for regeneration land is held to be paramount despite the vast amount that already exists.

Back to the book - each section has a map or plan, some historic images and explanatory text in English (as well as German and French). Stylistically the photography is primarily intended to record but without the studied neutrality of tone and compositional uniformity found in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.  There’s a sense of frontality emphasised by rigorous perspective correction. An interesting comparison is with the photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch who recorded several of these sites soon after construction in pristine condition before the stresses of intensive operation and the ravages of fire, water, steam and oxidisation brought them to their present state.  Photographs make clear the tension that exists between the architecture of industrial buildings (admin blocks, pit-head enclosures, turbine halls) and the anti-architecture of industrial structures (blast furnaces, smelters, coke ovens, gas tanks, overhead conveyors, cooling towers).  While the buildings are often sensitively proportioned and detailed to incorporate contemporary idioms (Jugendstil, Gründerzeit, Brick Gothic), the industrial plant, despite being meticulously planned in terms of operational requirements, often has an improvisational, bricolage-like appearance, as if random forms have been welded together, as much in hope as expectation.  Functionality is the only consideration whereas architects like to set their sights on higher things in the pursuit of artistic expression. 

So what’s the appeal of the industrial landscape - why is it endlessly fascinating for some while others respond with indifference or outright hostility? Mine is the last generation to be born and raised in a world where the industrial landscape was commonplace, especially so in the north-east where I lived.  Every journey to and from school would pass collieries, shipyards and factories - an unceasing spectacle where welding torches flashed in smoke filled gloom while overhead cranes and hoists propelled massive components in a display of perpetual motion. Pit-head winding gear could be seen spinning at speed, hauling cage-loads of coal to the surface where it was washed, graded and tipped into railway wagons around the clock.  All this industrial activity was so deeply embedded into the locality that to the eyes of a child it seemed it would continue unchanged, for ever.  This is the power of the industrial sublime - to induce nostalgia for jobs that were massively physically demanding and ruinous to health in an environment where water courses were lethally polluted, where the sea was stained charcoal grey from colliery waste and the air quality was laden with toxic fumes. Despite this, displaced industrial workers can often be heard waxing lyrical on the lost camaraderie of the workplace where unions enjoyed 100% support and stood together to resist management’s unreasonable demands. They often recall taking pride in the finished article as the embodiment of their skills and expertise. The continuing appeal of the industrial landscape has cultural, social and aesthetic elements of which the last may prove the most enduring - there’s nothing else in the man-made environment that’s left behind so many extraordinary physical structures enhanced by the patina of ageing and replete with formal repetition wrapped in complex networks of contrasting forms (tubes, cones, pipes, cylinders, grids, filters) on such a vast scale.

See also:

Gelsenkirchen 1914

Past and Present No. 10: Henrichenburg Schiffshebewerk

Ruhrgebiet in Close-up

Margaretenhöhe - refuge from dystopia

Essen Zollverein

 

Paper - Material of a Thousand Uses

This guide to the uses of paper is a typical mid-century publication aimed at schools, offering free learning materials in return for a chance to advance the cause of business to a new generation.  For a modest financial outlay, businesses could present a human face and claim to be agents of corporate responsibility.  The illustrations will be immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the artwork in Ladybird Books - formal, descriptive, slightly heightened in colour and unemotional.  Two themes dominate, the first being to impress the young reader with a sense of the mammoth scale of the enterprise - vast machines operated by a workforce of heroes. The second theme is best described as a thousand things you never knew about paper from tabloids to tissues. It shows us an orderly society where the working man wore a flat cap and foremen wore brown coats - a lost world of stoic deference selectively recalled by an older generation desperate to see it revived before they exit the stage.

 

Essen Zollverein

One of the star attractions of the Route der Industriekultur (Industrial Heritage Trail) in the Ruhr is the Zeche Zollverein in Essen - a carefully preserved colliery and coking works designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. Coal mining on this site goes back to 1851 but the principal shaft and associated buildings date from 1932 and were designed by industrial architects Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer in a style that’s often described as Bauhaus, although the term Industrial Rationalism may be more accurate. In its rectilinear brick built forms and its symmetry it seems to have more in common with the functionality of Albert Kahn’s work in Detroit than with the formal purity of Mies van der Rohe although there is some affinity with the Fagus factory design of Walter Gropius. The massive forms of the pit head buildings with its trestle shaped winding gear and coal washery are handled with great confidence and contrasted with the angular presence of enclosed conveyor belts that criss cross the site. Highlights of the coking works include the skeletal remains of cooling towers and spectacular reflections of the coke ovens in the vast cooling reservoir.

In 1937 just under 7,000 workers were employed in the mine and coking works. Almost undamaged by the war, the Zollverein was Germany’s most productive coal mine in the 1950s, yet by the end of 1986 it was closed. Six years later the coking plant closed down after many decades converting waste gases into such delights as ammonia, tar and benzine. Local pride in the region’s industrial past inspired the city of Essen to acquire the site and transform it into a visitor attraction without compromising the ravages of industry - making it accessible while preserving its industrial character. Architects OMA with Rem Koolhaas delivered the masterplan which took a decade to implement, finally concluded in 2010. Included in the plan were museums of local industry and industrial design. It’s an extensive site and a thorough exploration could easily take all day for those with an appetite for the strange and wonderful forms of industrial processes. Those with deep pockets can assemble a scale model of the complex on a table top at home by shopping online at Minitrix and purchasing all 3 components.