Do we need an Industrial Archaeology?

Alun Life, The Past 1 Comment , , , , ,

Cromford Canal

Crom­ford Canal. Click for lar­ger image.

It’s easy to take a World Her­it­age Site for gran­ted when it’s on your door­step. I had thought of shoot­ing a short port­fo­lio of Crom­ford for a com­pet­i­tion. They required ten pho­tos. After look­ing into the pro­ject I’ve decided that the com­pet­i­tion isn’t going to hap­pen for me, but a short photo essay on Crom­ford, or pos­sibly the Derwent Val­ley Mills, remains an inter­est­ing idea.

Indus­trial Archae­ology can get short shrift from other archae­olo­gists. Often there’s writ­ten records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archae­ology neces­sary? Mark Hen­shaw, the Archae­ology Dude, makes a good argu­ment that Archae­ology can draw mul­tiple lines of evid­ence to inform his­tor­ies of the past. I wouldn’t dis­count that, and I think his point, Archae­ology isn’t just about dig­ging, is very import­ant from an Amer­ican per­spect­ive because there Archae­ology is seen as a branch of Anthro­po­logy. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archae­ology paired with His­tory or Clas­sics. So do we really need Indus­trial Archae­olo­gists when there so many Early Mod­ern Historians.

I think another factor Archae­ology brings is spa­tial think­ing. Look­ing at the early days of the pro­fes­sion­al­isa­tion of Archae­ology in Bri­tain, one of the fea­tures is an attempt to dis­tin­guish Archae­ology from His­tory by tak­ing on ideas of Geo­graphy. People like OGS Craw­ford were keen to emphas­ise that Archae­ology stud­ied human activ­it­ies in space as well as time. Again, in the UK, when Pro­ces­su­al­ism was tak­ing off in the USA, the Brit­ish aca­dem­ics took inspir­a­tion from it, but also from the ‘New’ Geo­graphy.

The Manager's House, Cromford.

The Manager’s House, Cromford.

Apply­ing this prac­tic­ally, it’s easy to say what the pos­i­tion­ing of the Fact­ory Manager’s house, oppos­ite the main gate of Arkwright’s Mill at Crom­ford, means by its loc­a­tion. There are other more subtle ques­tions though. What did draw­ing a second water chan­nel through the Derwent Val­ley mean for land use and access­ib­il­ity? Why was Willers­ley Castle, a grand house that Ark­wright built for him­self, placed where it was? How did it relate to the church he built? If you want to know why a mill owner would want to build a church for his work­ers then, as Mark Hen­shaw says, you have to look at his­tor­ical records too.

You can write a his­tory purely from his­tor­ical records and archives, but if you want to exam­ine the human exper­i­ence, espe­cially of humans that weren’t writ­ing much, then an Indus­trial Archae­ology can yield a richer, more four-dimensional exper­i­ence, than Anthro­po­logy or His­tory alone.

Derby Silk Mill

Alun Life, The Past 1 Comment , , , , , ,

silkmill
Derby Silk Mill, now Derby Indus­trial Museum.

This is my entry for the Your Nearest Site car­ni­val. Derby Silk Mill is argu­ably the world’s old­est fact­ory. The Derwent Val­ley Mills con­sor­tium cer­tainly argued that it was and as a res­ult the site, along with 867 build­ings along the Derwent Val­ley, were added to the UNESCO World Her­it­age List. The reason for adding these build­ings to the lists is that they are part of the dawn of the Indus­trial Revolution.

In the sev­en­teenth cen­tury the eco­nomy of Derby­shire was agri­cul­tural. In the eight­eenth cen­tury this began to change. The Silk Mill was built on the banks of the Derwent in Derby. A giant water wheel drove a shaft which in turn drove the looms. Wiki­pe­dia has a col­our­ful story which I missed at the museum. One of the design­ers of the mill, John Lombe, is said to have copied the design for the spin­ning wheels from Italian silk weavers. Lombe died in 1722 in mys­ter­i­ous cir­cum­stances. The design was copied for use else­where in the North, other factor­ies in the Derwent Val­ley Mills site were build for man­u­fac­tur­ing cot­ton. Along the banks of the Derwent the pat­tern of set­tle­ment changed. Now people were needed to man the factor­ies as well as to tend the land. The increased pop­u­la­tion drew in fur­ther people to provide for the grow­ing mar­ket. This pat­tern would be copied around the world.

silkmill
A silk loom in the museum.

The cur­rent state of the mill is a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment. The interior was gut­ted by a fire in 1910 and the build­ing was then bought by a chem­ist. Remod­el­ling of the inside means little sur­vives today. In the grounds around the mill there are found­a­tions which reveal more about the lay­out of the fact­ory. In the absence of any­thing from the ori­ginal build­ing there are gen­eral exhib­its on the theme of industry. The upper floor has a room with small exhibit on the ori­ginal fact­ory, with a loom like one that could have been used in the fact­ory. The remainder of the upper floor is divided between exhib­its on industry in Derby­shire in gen­eral, like lead min­ing, and the rail­way engin­eer­ing which is still part of Derby’s cur­rent indus­trial base.

The lower floor was part his­toric photo exhib­i­tion and part dis­play of vari­ous Rolls-Royce aero-engines. The com­pany is another major employer in the city. None of this is bad, but they’re exhib­its which could be placed with equal rel­ev­ance in any other build­ing in the city. It seems a shame given the import­ance of the site that so little of the place has any of the machinery which trans­formed the economy.