The factory in a garden

A history of corporate landscapes from the industrial to the digital age

Helena Chance

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526112989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

When we think about Victorian factories, 'Dark Satanic Mills' might spring to mind - images of blackened buildings and exhausted, exploited workers struggling in unhealthy and ungodly conditions. But for some employees this image was far from the truth, and this is the subject of 'The Factory in a Garden' which traces the history of a factory gardens movement from its late-eighteenth century beginnings in Britain to its twenty-first century equivalent in Google's vegetable gardens at their headquarters in California. The book is the first study of its kind examining the development of parks, gardens, and outdoor leisure facilities for factories in Britain and America as a model for the reshaping of the corporate environment in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book to give a comprehensive account of the contribution of gardens, gardening and recreation to the history of responsible capitalism and ethical working practices.

1

‘The pleasant manufactory’

LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS and prints showing early manufactories towering over rivers or nestled into valleys, announce the gradual but momentous shift taking place in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in the USA some fifty years later, from agrarian to industrial economies (see Plate 1).

Yet these images are only a small step away from the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, or an early Turner, where the Arcadian or the sublime beauty of nature embraces civilisation and dominates the senses. Images of early manufactories are arresting not only for their aesthetic and symbolic values, but also for what they do not tell us about the reality of life in these early factories – twelve or more hours of wearisome work, for men, women and children, in unventilated and often unsafe spaces. They do remind us, however, that most early factories were built in the countryside or on the edge of towns where operatives might have enjoyed their daily recreation on the walk to work, or in the factory yard at lunchtime on a fine day if the wind blew the smoke away from them. Workers employed and living in one of the model factory villages or towns emerging in England in the late eighteenth century and in the USA in the early nineteenth century, might have enjoyed cleaner air and the opportunity to supplement the family diet with fresh vegetables. These paternalistic self-contained communities, mostly designed with good quality architecture around a landscape plan that included gardens or allotments, offered working and living conditions above and beyond those driven by legislation (Figure 1.1).

As industrial towns grew rapidly in England in the early nineteenth century, factories and housing jostled for space and clean air in green open space became a luxury for urban mill workers. In America, early industrialists attempted initially to avoid the poor conditions of British factories, but as industrialisation accelerated following the end of the Civil War in 1865, little attention was given to architectural or landscape aesthetics in the rapid and ad hoc expansion of industrial sites. This began to change in both nations towards the end of the century, partly aided by the coming of electricity to industry, which made it easier for industrialists to relocate factories from urban centres to the more spacious suburbs and gave more flexibility to design.¹ Companies now had more space for beautifying their factories and the landscaping of new industrial buildings in some areas became essential to the aesthetic coexistence of residential and industrial development or the acceptance of a factory in a rural setting.

1.1 View of Humphreysville (later Seymour), Connecticut, as it was in 1812. This model mill village was named after General David Humphreys who built the first large woollen mill in the United States here in 1806.

By the end of the nineteenth century, paternalistic industrialists not building company towns or villages attempted to provide model conditions in their works for both altruistic and commercial reasons. Many corporate leaders, sociologists, welfare professionals, architects, landscape architects and engineers believed that high quality recreational space contributed to efficient, productive and respectable institutions, well regarded by consumers, where workers would be motivated, and even proud to work. An attractive factory was also thought to attract female workers who were in greater demand and in shorter supply towards the end of the century. In landscaping their factories, entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century were in some respects returning to the more Arcadian landscapes of the early Industrial Revolution, or recreating an imagined domestic ‘idyll’ of an earlier industrial community. Rural factories and model industrial communities provided the foundations on which the twentieth-century ‘Factory Garden Movement’ was established and flourished. But by the new century, factory landscaping was no longer driven by paternalism but by pragmatism.

Landscapes of the early Industrial Revolution

When the first large, mechanised factories were built in England, most had ‘natural advantages’ as they occupied rural landscapes or were built as extensions to farmhouses or sited next to the owner’s country house.² Developers often exploited the aesthetic and dramatic possibilities presented by the necessity for fast-flowing water. Some of the earliest powered water mills, such as the Lombe Brothers’ silk mill, built in the early 1720s along the banks of the River Derwent, near Derby, or the Darbys’ iron mills at Coalbrookdale situated in a deep river gorge, look picturesque, even sublime, in prints and drawings, although those qualities were exploited for artistic and no doubt promotional effect.

Unlike most factory owners of the later nineteenth century, who chose to live at some distance and out of sight from the smoke and labour at their factory, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century entrepreneur often displayed his enterprise proudly as a significant part of his estate.³ The landscape architect Humphry Repton made much of the picturesque qualities of Armley Mill in his re-design of Benjamin Gott’s mill near his county seat, Armley House. Repton flattered Benjamin Gott by featuring his flagship mill in the ‘after’ view in the Red Book of 1810 where the imposing building presented an ‘eye catcher’ backdrop to the water meadows, while up the hill sat Gott’s country seat, Armley House.⁴

Sir Richard Arkwright, in building his second mill, Masson, from 1783, embellished it with Palladian windows and a cupola and shortly afterwards, commissioned a gothic-revival country house just across the river from the mill.⁵ The mill cannot be seen from the house, but it is clear from walking around the gardens today, that views of the manufactory from the river walk were designed to impress on visitors Arkwright’s dual position as country gentleman and entrepreneur.

Earlier industrialists found some more unusual advantages in the close proximity of the factory to their country house. In 1746, the Quaker industrialist William Champion moved his works from the centre of Bristol to Warmley in Gloucestershire and built a zinc-smelting factory next to his Palladian residence. In the gardens he made around Warmley House from 1746 to 1769, Champion recycled by-products of the zinc smelting processes that he had invented and patented, to provide unusual colours, patterns and textures to his summerhouse, garden wall and grotto.⁶ The whole complex is an ‘industrial utopia’ for the plan clearly indicates that his house, the factory and the pleasure gardens are integrated, while the lake performs the dual functions of ornamenting the garden and supplying water to the works. Originally the water was circulated from the factory back to the lake via the grotto, forming a cascade, an allusion to Italianate landscape gardens with their sensory water features, to which the landowning elite aspired in this period. The startling statue of Neptune, also partly constructed from clinker waste from the factory, towers over the lake and provides the essential, if somewhat crude statement of classical mythology to the garden (Figure 1.2). It seems likely that Champion made his garden features to impress clients as well as family and friends, as the house, factory and garden are so clearly unified, functionally and aesthetically.

We know little about the experiences and feelings of employees at these early factories, but as most of the workforce came from rural areas in the early history of factory production it is unlikely that the physical setting had much influence on their choice of workplace (where they had a choice). However, the buildings in their sheer scale must have been impressive, or indeed oppressive. Precedents for factory buildings ranged from the austerity of prisons and orphanages, often similar in terms of organisation and management,⁷ to the landed estate or royal palace, but all these models communicated a clear message to the workforce that they were establishments that employed strict rules and hierarchies.⁸

1.2 A huge statue of Neptune, partly constructed from waste from William Champion’s factory in the middle of the eighteenth century, still looms over the grounds of his house.

Between 1780 and 1850, when factories in Britain were more commonly built in towns,⁹ landscaping tended to be reserved for the manufacturer’s private house, which was often situated in the countryside far from the overcrowding and pollution of the industrial town. In a study of conditions in Manchester in 1844, the French economist Léon Faucher observed that the merchants and manufacturers lived in detached villas in the midst of gardens and parks in the country. ‘The rich man’, he wrote, ‘spreads his couch amidst the beauties of the surrounding country and abandons the town to the operatives, publicans, mendicants, thieves and prostitutes’.¹⁰ Reformers blamed the loss of rural values and healthy environments for the ill health and misery of the factory workers and the countryside is frequently a metaphor in literature for human happiness and dignity, the place where God resides.¹¹

Factories were not exclusively in the country or the town but were often situated just outside towns, as were the Turton Mills, near Bolton in the mid-1800s, owned by the liberal Quaker brothers Edmund and Henry Ashworth. The journalist William Cooke Taylor’s account of his visit to the mills in 1842, though idealised (he supported factory owners against their critics), suggested that some mill owners were at pains to beautify the factory with planting. Having dismissed the quantity of smoke in the valley as ‘pleasing and picturesque’, he described the mill, built at the bottom of the ravine, just under the owner’s residence:

Fruit trees, unprotected by fence, railing or...