Growing Interest In Industrial Archaeology In Britian

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32005, 4 June 1969, Page 17

Growing Interest In Industrial Archaeology In Britian

(Reprinted from the by arrangement)

Ten thousand people turned out in Birmingham on a Sunday in May for a rally of steam traction engines, and the Museum of Science and Industry which organised it was packed. On bank holiday Monday, thousands more rode on old trams at the Crich Tramways Museum, near Derby, and old trains at Festinoig. And much more besides.

There will be vintage car gatherings, canal excursions, and visits to water-mills, windmills and steam-driven mills. These have always had their enthusiasts, but recently the enthusiasm has spilled on to the other left-overs of the industrial revolution. Nostalgia for past glories and the tangible remnants of the Victorian great leap forward? In Whitehall, industrial archaeology is just ceasing to be regarded as a hobby for harmless lunatics: the Treasury has been contributing all of an annual £2OOO for a survey of industrial monuments which can then, if they are worth it, come under official protection provided always the survey manages to find and list them before the demolishers do. And there’s the rub. The evidence disappears fast. It was chance that when Mr Tregoning Hooper, the librarian at Falmouth, was walking along the Cornish cliffs he saw some magnificent beam engines being scrapped. He was able to save them and subsequently to start the Cornish Engines Preservation Society to find and preserve other ones. The society was taken over by the National Trust in 1967. WHEN There is the continual gnawing worry that outstanding industrial monuments and machinery are being destroyed without record because their importance is not appreciated by their owners or by demolishes and redevelopers. Ignorance is the chief enemy; since the monuments are in declining or forgotten industries, the natural processes of all replacement and modernisation inevitably take their toll. So do natural decay and vandalism, especially in out of the way sites and on canals. Havoc In Cities In city centres, urban redevelopers wreak havoc but not just out of crass lack of

appreciation of a building’s merits; sometimes it is very difficult to find new uses for a bulky nineteenth century warehouse. Gott’s Mill—the old Bean Ing Mill—in Leeds, perhaps the best known industrial monument in Yorkshire, had to go. However, Leeds corporation is try to compel the owners of St Paul’s House, with its unusual Arabic decoration, to restore the four towers that were ehopped off. But if industrial archaeology is worth serious study, and many university departments are beginning to think it is, should we not be doing something less haphazard about it? Museums are all very well in their way; the Science Museum in South Kensington is typical of science and industrial museums throughout the country, in that if a piece of equipment is movable and important to the collection, it will try to get it. But museums cannot do much about the buildings that housed the machinery, nor the equipment that forms part of the structure, such as forges and kilns, nor the prime movers like steam and water mills. Some museums are full up and make no attempt to set up storage depots.

Museum Displays However municipal and county museum officials, such as Mr John Goodchild, of the Industrial Museum for South Yorkshire at Cusworth Hall, near Doncaster, and Mr Frank Atkinson of the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, take a broader view. Their museums display the machinery alongside the records and documents of the company that owned it and details of the industry it belonged to. They are active in the local industrial archaeological societies, and instigate the detailed recording work which involves a street-by-street footslog to find sites, painstaking measurement and photography, and research into archives. But it is hard going; too much still depends on the enthusiasm of local preservation groups that have come together to save a historical warehouse, a mill or a sewage pumping station. The Government made no attempt to co-ordinate their amateur enthusiasm until six years ago when, after prompting by the Council for British Archaeology, the Ministry of Public Building and Works appointed the remarkable Mr Rex Wailes as a consultant for a national survey of industrial monuments. By this time, one in every four queries coming to the council were about post-industrial revolu-

tion remains. The first idea was that the voluntary organisations and county councils would fill out record cards and from the assembled data some system of priorities for preservation could be established. However, the cards came in very slowly. Mr

Wailes, who is now nearly 70, has done what he can to coordinate a country-wide survey, but the work is very slow. Gaps In Records Meanwhile, the records are being brought together at the National Record of Industrial Monuments, kept at Bath University of Technology. There are enormous gaps; only Somerset, Hertfordshire, Mommouthshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Glamorgan have been anywhere near adequately covered. Altogether there are about 5000 cards, of varying quality and covering sites of vastly different importance. They are in no state to be used as a register for deciding what and what not to preserve. So the decisions are usually taken just by Mr Wailes himself. He submits his list of monuments to a C.B.A. panel, which then makes recommendations to the Government. Once listed, the owners must take reasonable care of them, and local authorities must notify the Government if they give permission for demolition. The listed buildings also qualify for grants, though in the year to March, 1968, when the Government spent £1.2 million on ancient monuments, only £14,570 was appropriated for industrial ones. Government departments try to be helpful but, unless Mr Wailes signals an emergency, are slow. Their trouble is that the traditional criteria for preserving worthy buildings and monuments do not fit comfortably around industrial relics.

No Guarantee Protection under statute helps to prevent wilful destruction—but it is no guarantee of preservation. Preservation is a money question. Exceptionally, where the monument is undoubtedly of national important like Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, in Sheffield, the Government provides some money. Exceptionally again, where the monument's expenses are funded, the National Trust will take it over. If it is still in use—like the Tower Bridge machinery or the beam engines at the Ram Brewery, Wandsworth—there is no problem.

In certain fortunate cases, new uses can be found. The 1840 Egyptian Mill at Leeds provides good facilities for the mail order company using

it. The enormous central warehouse at St Katherine’s Dock is, for the time being at least, providing cheap space for artists within a few hundred yards of the Tower of London. The railway’s remarkable turntable structure, the Round House at Chalk Farm, the designated base of Mr Wesker’s Centre 42, houses concerts and revolutioneering conferences. It is hoped that Liverpool’s solidly built Albert Docks can be put into use for offices and museum space. Cost Problems When a building is wholly unadaptable, even as a boiler house, the problems are greater. A few companies take enough pride in their past to make a feature of it. At Coalbrookdal.e in Shropshire, where Abram Darby I first successfully smelted iron with coke and thus made the mass production of iron possible, the Allied Ironfounders company has an open air museum Pilkingtons has a superb glass museum at St Helens. The Confederation of British Industry once set up a working party to encourage companies to take an interest in their past, but found it sat uncomfortably with the image of a rationalised Britain they were being encouraged to project Too many Victorian industries (shipbuilding, railways, cotton, coal, etc.) seemed intent for too long to do the preservationist job themselves Anyway companies jibbed at the cost of tying up valuable space. Some groups, notably the brewers, are thinking of setting up a joint museum. Changing Attitude The most effective preservationists are still the local societies, which can act as pressure groups on local authorities and local businesses. The growing change in attitudes gives them a greater chance of success. The most recent example is the saving of a sewage pumping station at Cambridge after the city council had refused to buy it. Again in Shropshire, the Iron Bridge made at Darby’s works nearby—has a good chance of being taken over by a museum trust sponsored by the progressive Telford Development Corporation, which sees the amenity value of industrial archaeology. Very few councils do; Staffordshire is unusual in having an archaeologist on the staff of the County Planning Office. Credit should go, too, to such publishers as David and Charles, Ltd, of Newton Abbot, who produce books for the specialist and publish a quarterly journal (circulation about 2000 but growing fast) iand act generally as a clear-

ing house for queries. Also to a 8.8. C. series shown in 1965 which is said to have had a considerable impact. Local Societies There are now about 50 local societies of industrial archaeologists but the Council of British Archaeology, with its full time staff of two officers, can hardly cope effectively with this new interest. The £2OOO industrial archaeology grant it gets from the Treasurey is intended to cover Mr Wailes’s expenses and salary; for a few thousand more, he could have an assistant; and the C.B.A. could have some industrial archaeologists to do some organising and save their dirt archaeologists from going quietly mad. In the United States, where the Department of the Interior has just announced the setting up of the Historic American Engineering Record, preservation is rather more advanced, although not very much so. The high powered Advisory Council on His toric Preservation will use the engineering record and the already established buildings record as a means of checking whether reconstruction projects are interfering with important sites; it is in process of preventing a slum clearance project in Newark from sweeping away the first building ever to house a telephone exchange. U.S. Showpieces The two great industrial showpieces are Edison’s laboratories and the Hopewell Village ironmaking community in Pennsylvania, but an increasing number of textile mills, grist mills, a cast iron truss bridge in Maryland, a nineteenth century oil well in Pennsylvania, du Font’s original powder mill, are being preserved and refurbished.

An interesting test case involves a complete woollen mill and village at Suncook, New Hampshire, the owner of I which is trying to get a gov-! emment grant to help to con-. vert it into old people’s housing. This would be an important advance for the Americans, coming into line with the British attitude that the past is more worth cherishing when it works for its living. But equipment gets obsolete so fast that it is not eighteenth and nineteenth century relics that will soon be lost, but twentieth century ones too. The first jet engines are safe in museums, but what about the first computer-con-trolled machine tools, and the first nuclear plants? Harwell has already mothballed one of its first two nuclear research reactors. Should it be encouraged?