Industrial Heritage Re-tooled

The TICCIH Guide to Industrial Heritage Conservation

James Douet, James Douet

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315426518
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Arqueología

This volume comprises the authoritative work from the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage – the international group dedicated to industrial archaeology and heritage – detailing the latest approaches to the conservation of the global industrial heritage. With contributions from over thirty specialists in archaeology and industrial heritage, Industrial Heritage Re-tooled establishes the first set of comprehensive best practices for the management, conservation, and interpretation of historical industrial sites. This book: -defines the meaning and scope of industrial heritage within an international context;-addresses the identification and conservation of the material remains of industry;-covers subjects as diverse as documentation and recording of industrial heritage, industrial tourism, and the teaching of industrial heritage in museums, schools, and universities.

Part I
Values and meanings

1
Why preserve the industrial heritage?

Neil Cossons

The world order is changing. Inexorably, the economic centre of gravity is moving east. That progression is driven in the main by the industrial revolution taking place in China. For some three centuries industrialisation has been the crucial prime mover of global economic and social change as one country after another has lifted itself from agrarian dependency to some new form of prosperity. Only industrialisation enables nations to make that transition. The effects have been wide-ranging and profound. For some, industrialisation has become the central engine of their economies. For others, moving successively from primary commodity producers to adding value through processing has enabled them to achieve increased economic self-determination.

Historically, the effects of industrialisation have been challenging and far-reaching. The legacy is prolific and overwhelming. In most industrial countries urbanisation has been one of the more significant of the social and economic consequences. Today, for the first time in human history, more people live in towns and cities than in rural environments. Far-reaching improvements in the standard of living and per-capit GDP, and advances in national power and enhanced global status, are all qualities reserved for industrial nations. Capitalism as we know it is also a product of nineteenth-century industrialisation; so too are socialism and communism. And, although globalisation has its roots well before the age of industry, it has been the development of the extraordinary commercial and trading empires of the industrial world that has given real meaning to the term. Out of this has grown the most fundamental change in the human condition and the human habitat.

Today, flourishing trade and industrial investment among emerging countries represents a further dramatic shift in how the world economy has worked for over two hundred years, replacing the traditional flow of natural resources into the industrial West, which in return exported textiles and other factory-made goods to the developing world. The United States is no longer India’s largest trading partner; China has assumed that position. And India and Brazil both export more manufactured goods to fellow emerging markets than to the developed world. China is the largest foreign investor in Brazil, challenging the historical dominance of the United States in South America; and, Russia’s Rusal, the world’s largest aluminium producer, launched its first public offering not in London or New York but on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

There is abundant evidence too that existing industrial nations that neglect their manufacturing capability, and the technological innovation that underscores it, and that fail to adapt to these seismic global transmutations, will fall back in terms of national and per-capita GDP and long-term economic sustainability. As new nations industrialise so older ones have to consider their position in the changing world order. Where does their future lie? And what, if anything, do they do with their past?

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the early stirrings of what by the 1840s had come to be called the ‘Industrial Revolution’ could be found, first in Great Britain and increasingly across Western Europe; new technologies, new methods of organising labour, new means of applying the power of water or steam to manufacture, in new forms of buildings that we now call mills or factories and, crucially, new models of settlement. And in these new industrial communities grew up a new industrial culture with patterns and conditions of work that were novel, replacing the thousand-year traditions of seasonality and uncertainty that had characterised pre-industrial agricultural economies. The industrial heritage is a complex amalgam of places and people, processes and practices, which continues to defy explanation of its origins and astounds in the effects of its subsequent development and decay.

Values

Ditherington Flax Mill, Shrewsbury, England, built in 1796/97, is the world’s first iron-framed building. It was converted to a maltings in the 1880s. This c.1970 photograph shows one of the malt floors shortly before closure. Now empty, it is in the ownership of English Heritage but its future remains uncertain. Too precious to lose, too fragile to use, the flax mill illustrates the dilemma of buildings of high evidential value but low utility. (Brian Bracegirdle/Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust)

All this raises the question of whether, given the overwhelming magnitude of three hundred-year-old industrial experience, it has a history and heritage that matters and, if so, why and to whom? It is only in the last fifty years or so that industrial heritage – recognition and valuing of the material evidence of industrialisation – has begun to figure in our consciousness. There are several reasons for this. Most of the initial interest in what is today called heritage grew out of curiosity about and study of the history and archaeology of the medieval age and earlier. Indeed, in Europe the desire to preserve the past was in some senses a consequence of industrialisation and its cataclysmic effects on pre-industrial communities and landscapes.

So, when we contemplate the values attaching to the industrial heritage we need to understand that, despite the overwhelming impact of industrialisation on the lives of us all – and in part because of it – the public’s perceptions of heritage derive from roots, sentiments and attitudes that lie elsewhere, in an earlier age and a different aesthetic. Industrial heritage is a new, novel and challenging arrival in the heritage arena. Defining why it matters is important not just for the public at large but for many heritage organisations and professionals. For these reasons it is crucial to understand what we mean by value and importance and, at the same time, recognise that the techniques of preservation and conservation built up over many years in the wider historic environment sector do not necessarily meet the demands of industrial heritage. Just as industrialisation has been a new and unique economic and social phenomenon, so too the challenges posed by the conservation of its remains require innovative new approaches. Often, legislation defined for one purpose may not fit the new demands posed by the industrial heritage. All these factors impact on the approach to determining value. Indeed, having a clear understanding of value is the more important in an environment where levels of understanding and acceptability may be low. The context – social, economic, environmental and political – all need to be taken into account. So too do the skills and predilections of those who have a stake in the future, as public or practitioners, developers or heritage professionals. Industrial heritage is, arguably, a unique cultural discourse; it brings challenges found nowhere else in the heritage sector and requires new answers, for there are few precedents. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Dramatic as the arrival of industrialisation may have been, as the most significant engine of change in human history, the effects of its decline have often been equally cataclysmic, reflected in decay, dereliction and despair. Here again, the heritage of the post-industrial poses unique challenges; to find a future for industrial places in the context of economic fragility and the social issues that so frequently stem from it. To advocate preservation of a redundant industrial site, basing the arguments on traditional heritage values, does not always look attractive to a community afflicted by economic collapse or high levels of unemployment. Or, alternatively, while the community may find the notion appealing, offering as it might the chance of capturing something of their former spirit and pride, harsh economic circumstances make realisation by conventional means an impossibility. It is in these contexts that one might legitimately ask, 'why preserve the industrial heritage?’ Finding answers often poses challenges beyond the ordinary.

Consider some of the basic principles. First, the material heritage has intrinsic value as evidence of a past. This evidential value may derive from its archaeology; the remains are the means of our understanding a past and a people. In this respect industrial remains enjoy common currency with other archaeological verification. Often, documentary evidence, unavailable to those who study earlier periods of history, can provide additional – and sometimes the most substantive – information. But it is rare that documentary sources can wholly replace the physical. Increasingly, as industrial studies have matured over recent years, the real contribution that material evidence can make to understanding has become apparent. This evidential value reflects activities that had and continue to have profound historical consequences, and the motives for protecting the industrial heritage are based on the universal value of this evidence.

But evidential importance in the archaeological sense is not the only value attaching to industrial sites and landscapes, nor is it necessarily the most significant. The industrial heritage is of wider social and cultural significance as part of the record of people's lives, and as such provides an important sense of history and identity. That may relate to an industry, a specific company, an industrial community, or a particular trade or skill. Or, the industrial heritage may have technological and scientific value in the history of manufacturing, engineering and construction, or have aesthetic qualities deriving from its architecture, design or planning. These values are intrinsic to the site itself, its fabric, components, machinery and setting in the industrial landscape, in written documentation, and also in the intangible records of industry contained in human memories, traditions and customs. Industrial heritage may offer identity for a community or provide the signature for a place, recognised externally.

Evidential value can extend further, to embrace places where significant innovations took place. Care needs to be exercised here as technological innovation, even more than pioneering entrepreneurial enterprise, can rarely be ascribed to one place or person. ‘World firsts’ are temptingly attractive but often raise more questions than they answer. But taking a less deterministic view there are undoubtedly places that for legitimate historical reasons have taken on a primary significance in terms of scholarly acceptance and public perception that justifies their veneration – for the purposes of history. Some are World Heritage Sites and, as such, they have had to meet UNESCO’s criteria of Outstanding Universal Value.

The Ironbridge Gorge in England was one of the first, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1987. Here was a landscape rich in the remains of early industry, ranging from icons such as the Old Furnace where in 1709 iron was first smelted with coke instead of charcoal, to the 1779 Iron Bridge across the River Severn, and set in a river valley that both defined context and offered prolific evidence of an evolving community, from pre-industrial roots to post-industrial decay. Significant in realising the intrinsic heritage value of the Ironbridge Gorge was the impact of prolonged economic decline. This had two effects; first, to slow the rate of change, as new investment was largely absent. This is the ossification factor so frequently encountered in areas of industrial relapse; survival through benign decay. Second, conditions had become bad enough to prompt outside intervention in the form of a government-funded regeneration agency – Telford Development Corporation – with a remit to revive the economic and social fortunes of the wider East Shropshire coalfield area. The Corporation saw Ironbridge as an asset and an opportunity, with history and conservation as the keys to reviving its fortunes. Out of this grew a not-for-profit management body, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, which since 1968 has managed the key sites.

In ascribing value to historic industrial environments it is easy to forget that these were places of work. Empty mills once contained manufacturing machinery and the prime movers that powered it. Almost invariably both will have disappeared soon after closure. Most of the industrial buildings that feature in the heritage debate on value, and subsequent discussions on their future, are thus empty husks, devoid of the life and activity that went on in them and which were the reasons for their existence. The consequence is that the perpetuation of machinery in situ, and especially in working condition, is a rare attribute that can confer exceptional value simply by virtue of the accident of survival.

Queen Street Mill, Burnley, England. This once-typical weaving shed from 1894, its looms powered by a Lancashire steam mill engine through line-shafting and belt-wheels, is now unique and preserved as a working cotton mill. The accident of survival has made this a site of outstanding importance. (Neil Cossons)

In 1900 there were some 100,000 looms in and around Burnley in Lancashire, England. The town was the world’s largest single manufacturer of cotton cloth; the industry is today extinct there. But one mill survives substantially intact, Queen Street Mill, Harle Syke, opened in 1894 for the manufacture of grey cloth, cotton fabric that was bleached and dyed elsewhere (see illustration). The co-operative multiple-ownership financial structure of the company inhibited change, and when the mill closed in 1982 the original looms and steam engine were still in place and in use. It was at this point that its extraordinary importance was recognised, and it reopened in 1986 as a working museum where cotton fabric is still woven on some of the 308 remaining looms. Sale of the cloth makes a modest contribution towards running costs. Here is an example of something typical and commonplace that by virtue of serendipity survived into an era where its extraordinary rarity gave it a value beyond the ordinary. Today, it is thought to be the only steam-powered weaving shed in the world.

Queen Street Mill epitomises the issues faced when ascribing value to industrial sites and landscapes. Value may be sensed and articulated at a very local level, often by people who have no background in heritage or understanding of the methods of protest or advocacy. These are often people with passion but no voice, and time and again the industrial heritage is the subject of their concerns. These are the people directly affected by industrial change. Their arguments may be easily dismissed as emotional attachment to jobs lost or communities destroyed, or simply as fear of the future, whatever that might hold. Here can be found industrial strength dedication combined with an innocence of how to campaign for a different future.

Not far from Burnley, also in Pennine Lancashire, is the Whitefield area of Nelson, another former cotton town where the mills had closed. Demolition of the terraced houses of the former industrial community, still occupied and generally in sound condition, was seen by the local authority as an opportunity for the regeneration of Whitefield’s economic fortunes. But the people of Whitefield did not want to move. Nor did they know how to protest. They appealed to the outside world. Help came from English Heritage and other agencies to support them in their cause and today their houses and their futures in them are secure. The lesson here is that national agencies need to be aware of local priorities and be prepared to step in to support them.

The case of Nelson highlights another of the issues presented by the industrial heritage. When the mill has closed or the seam runs out and the mine shuts down, it is communities that survive. Industrial housing represents in many cases the most prolific evidence of former industrialisation. These are the houses that litter the rust-belt landscapes of old industrial regions and that are often all that is left when the rest has gone. But the people are still there, with their memories, their friendships, and what is left of their pride. Time and again the claim is made that these are the people who want to see the back of old industrial plant and the hardship and anguish that attended it. Almost invariably the opposite is the case; some of the greatest commitment to supporting the cause of industrial heritage comes from communities whose history it was. In terms of values, these are some of the most difficult to capture but most powerfully expressed.

An example is the abandoned Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was purchased in 1938 by the United States government and placed under the care of the National Park Service to be restored as a recreation area. As a result the lower 35 kilometres (22 miles) of the full 292-kilometre length (182 miles) were repaired and re-watered. After the war the idea of turning the remaining route over to automobiles was vigorously opposed by numerou...