Foundations

How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain

Sam Wetherell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691208558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politics Foundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. Sam Wetherell shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a midcentury developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980.From the mid-twentieth century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the midcentury built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade.Taking readers to almost every major British city as well as to places in the United States and Britain's empire, Foundations highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

1

The Industrial Estate

WRITING IN THE early nineteenth century, Scottish physician Andrew Ure described factories as being analogous to the human body. The factory, he wrote, “involves the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs … subordinated to a self-regulating force” with “mechanical fingers and arms” that are “regularly impelled with great velocity by some indefatigable physical power.”¹ His account was based on his observations of the mechanized textile factories in Lancashire and Cheshire, many of which he visited during the course of the 1830s. The industrial estate, an urban form that emerged in early twentieth-century Britain, marked the antithesis of Ure’s conception of the factory.² Industrial estates are spaces created in advance for industrial production, where multiple factories and workshops cluster together under the supervision and management of a single authority. This authority provides these factories with energy, infrastructure, access to labor markets, and sometimes even buildings and machinery. By the mid-twentieth century, many industrial estates resembled mini towns, with stores, railway networks, canteens, hotels, playing fields, and football teams. Here, business owners were reconceived of as tenants, fleeting consumers of systems of infrastructure that would long outlive their presence. If 1830s textile factories were like mechanized human beings—individuated and self-sufficient—then the factories on mid-twentieth-century industrial estates were like bees in a hive, existentially dependent on and existing in service to a bigger endeavor.³

This chapter is about the emergence and spread of the industrial estate as a new type of twentieth-century space. The history of this space begins on the outskirts of Manchester in the 1890s, when an ancient aristocratic family sold its land to a shady property speculator. The result was the creation of a monumental planned industrial complex called Trafford Park. As Trafford Park developed in the early twentieth century, hosting Henry Ford’s first British-based car-making plant along with hundreds of other enterprises, it was joined by a handful of similar, smaller developments built in southern suburban towns such as Slough and Welwyn Garden City. It took the interwar economic crisis, however, to realize the potential of the industrial estate as a new urban form. As the restructuring of Britain’s economy in the 1920s and Depression in the 1930s decimated the workforces of significant regions of the country, the British government built its own industrial estates, modeled on places such as Trafford Park and Slough, as a means of incentivizing factories to move into areas of high unemployment. In the late 1930s, three government-financed industrial estates in areas of high unemployment—Team Valley in Gateshead, Treforest in South Wales, and Hillington on the outskirts of Glasgow—were employing tens of thousands of people. Following the example of these spaces, this new urban form spread rapidly after the Second World War. By 1960, there were upward of eighty industrial estates in Britain, employing more than a quarter million, mostly in new towns or regions of the country that were deemed to be in economic distress.⁴ The workers in these estates often included women as well as men, particularly in those factories specializing in electric assembly-line production. With government-financed industrial estates offering an easy place for the settlement of Jewish business owners fleeing central Europe in the 1930s, it was frequently the case that the tenants of early industrial estates were German-speaking émigrés. After the war, industrial estates became an international phenomenon, seized on by colonial administrators and economists as a means of catalyzing industrial development across the world. None of this was ever really supposed to happen. The setting aside of small amounts of money by the government to build and service industrial estates in 1936 was an emergency measure—a last resort that came about only after the government had failed to persuade private developers to shoulder the burden.

My aim here is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate how industrial estates came to be promoted by a new kind of developmental state in the twentieth century and offered the possibility of remaking both Britain’s workers and its economy. The government-financed industrial estate was forged in the service of a state-sanctioned historical geography—an idea that Britain’s economy could be spatially altered in ways that were conducive to full employment, national economic development, and the closure of regional disparities of wealth.⁵ These spaces were organized around a particular type of industrial subject: a worker whose health and productivity could be maximized by elaborate fitness centers and canteens serving scientifically balanced meals.

Second, I want to show how industrial estates had a radical logic, one unforeseen by its creators and even many of its early promoters. The success and portability of this new type of space was infectious, and within a few years after the opening of the first government-financed estates, they were pulling politicians, planners, colonial administrators, and international development agencies behind them in their slipstream. In less than a generation, the state had become the landlord for hundreds of factory owners across the country, and, in many instances, was locked in heated disputes with capitalists who were banding together to contest the conditions of their leases, threatening, in some cases, to withhold their rent. What’s more, they allowed some planners to indulge in more radical fantasies about the future relationship between the state and industry—fantasies that were ultimately unfulfilled. Some planners believed that these new urban forms would solve some of the problems that British capitalism faced after the Depression, imagining future worlds in which all industry of a certain type would be housed on nationalized industrial estates. Others believed that industrial estates would help rapidly industrialize parts of Britain’s empire. In this sense, these spaces had a demonstrative significance that went beyond their contribution to midcentury industrial policy in both the metropole and the empire. They were showcases for an emergent future of town planning and a new type of capitalism tamed by the state, spaces that were visited by government ministers, monarchs, and international delegations.

Like the other urban forms in the first three chapters of this book, then, industrial estates did certain kinds of political and economic work, and in doing so opened up new and more radical futures. However, many of the extreme, almost-utopian fantasies about the kind of economy that industrial estates might allow were never realized.

Trafford Park

As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the de Trafford family could almost see the city of Manchester coming over the horizon to meet them. Their ancestral home, a large manor house surrounded by hundreds of acres of parks and gardens, had belonged to the family for eight centuries, supposedly without a break in the male line of succession. Now it found itself encircled by the enormous, soot-drenched city that was creeping ever closer. In 1887, construction began on the Manchester Ship Canal, a project to link the city with the Irish Sea thirty-six miles to the west, bypassing Liverpool and turning the city into a self-sufficient port. When it was clear that the canal would pass immediately to the north of their estate, the family decided that the game was up. Anticipating the sale, the Manchester Corporation made the de Trafford family an offer of £260,000, intending to turn the country estate into a gigantic public park modeled on London’s Hyde Park. At the last minute, however, the city was outbid by a self-made businessman named Ernest Terah Hooley.⁶

Hooley was a notorious speculator with an extravagant and shady business portfolio. In the 1890s, he made a fortune buying patents from small companies, using his charm to promote the company and then reselling the patents at a profit. His ventures included a Spanish copper mine and the promotion of a new bicycle chain, which he claimed would enable “a mere novice … to ride from 40 to 60 miles an hour with only ordinary exertion.”⁷ By his death in 1947, Hooley had been jailed three times for fraud and was on his fourth bankruptcy.⁸ His involvement in Trafford Park, and the subsequent development of the world’s first industrial estate, came about as the result of a clerical error. In 1896, Hooley learned of de Trafford’s intention to sell the estate when a letter meant for de Trafford’s steward was delivered to Hooley’s secretary by mistake. At the time, the two men (both named Ellis) happened to be staying at the same hotel. He moved quickly, purchasing the estate for £100,000 more than the Manchester Corporation had offered and thwarting the city’s dream of a park.⁹

FIGURE 1.1. Sketch of Trafford Hall on the de Trafford family estate at the end of the nineteenth century.

Hooley had no experience as a landlord. His early ideas for the land included an amusement park and a residential complex consisting of five hundred expensive villas surrounded by a woodland.¹⁰ The decision to transform the land into an industrial estate was inspired by the shipping magnate Marshall Stevens, the former general manager of the Manchester Ship Canal. Stevens was concerned that despite the new canal manufacturers were reluctant to move to Manchester rather than Liverpool. He hoped that a new development, with access to energy and infrastructure networks, would act as a kind of subsidy, a logical extension of the canal’s developmental aims. Lacking ideas, Hooley gratefully accepted Stevens’s plans, and in 1897 Stevens was appointed general manager of Trafford Park Estates Ltd. The two men were about to become some of the most unusual landlords in the country.

Trafford Park was ideally situated for industrial development. The land occupied what was effectively an island, bounded on all sides by canals and perched on the edge of Manchester. Over the next ten years, Trafford Park Estates set about overlaying the land with a grid of infrastructure. Companies were invited to purchase a plot of land from the estate, after which they would pay for access to various services. These included gas and water as well as access to the Ship Canal via the new Manchester Docks, which were contiguous with the estate. An oil company established depots to be used by other factories. After an eight-year battle, Stevens succeeded in winning permission from parliament to build a small railroad network throughout the estate, thus connecting tenants with both the docks and national network. Tenants were also offered subsidized access to electricity via a small on-site power station—a rarity at that time.¹¹ Aside from a handful of speculatively built industrial developments, which the company named “hives,” tenants were expected to plan and build their own factories.¹²

By providing electricity, Hooley and Stevens ensured that Trafford Park was at the vanguard of a new type of mass production organized around electrically powered assembly lines. Henry Ford, perhaps the estate’s most famous tenant, built his first British factory in Trafford Park in 1911 and was an early pioneer of such methods.¹³ Another of the estate’s earliest and most significant tenants was George Westinghouse, the US electrical supplies magnate who had played a vital role in developing commercially available electricity in the United States. Westinghouse transferred a cadre of US managers from Pittsburgh to work in the plant. British visitors were reportedly shocked b...