Understanding the Workplace

The author reviews the achievements and failures of industrial archaeology over the previous forty years.

The paper discusses the potential for broader collaboration and the sharing of data both at a national and international level, with the aim of providing a more strategic view from which new priorities for a research framework in industrial archaeology might be defined.

Employing a framework of production and consumption, the paper sets out to identify weaknesses within industrial archaeology and to point towards [a] research agenda. Some 340 publications in the Journal of Industrial Archaeology, Industrial Archaeology and Industrial Archaeology Review are compared with the Standard Industrial Classification, revealing a skewed pattern in favour of four out of the nineteen industrial groups - metallic mining and processing, non-metallic mining and processing, textiles, and food and drink. Ten industrial groups attracting the most publications were selected for analysis, which indicates that the discipline is weak on twentieth-century industries with large plants, and on industries employing modern, sophisticated technology. It is demonstrated that when consumption is disaggregated into its four components, industrial archaeology is strong on intermediate manufacturing and distributive markets, and it is argued that weaknesses in wholesaling, retailing, and final domestic and service markets are more apparent than real.

The author offers some personal thoughts on the recording of industrial archaeology in the urban historic environment, with consideration given to the new types of workplace and new forms of domestic settlement created to facilitate the growth of manufacturing activity, and the new types of housing built to accommodate workers and their families as the nineteenth century progressed.

The Alderley Sandhills Project was designed to illuminate the transformative roles of industrialisation and de-industrialisation on working-class rural England. Drawing on preliminary results, the paper explores the nature and operation of class mobility within the social world of Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

The paper considers the physical remains of technological innovations which have survived at English country houses and their estates because of the lack of subsequent modernisation, and their potential in helping to understand social change and development because of the major role played by such estates in rural society until the First World War. The author suggests some research questions that a study of country house technology could illuminate, including the social use of space and changing interactions between the social groups who inhabited that space. It is suggested that understanding the technological inertia displayed on many estates might help to explain the motivations of those who were at the forefront of innovation.

Following a review of the nature of research on historic farm buildings during the past third of a century, it is suggested that buildings can be a source of primary historical evidence which complements material derived from written sources, rather than merely illustrating it, and that some of the greatest advances in understanding may arise from inter-disciplinary studies. Links between the development of agrarian and industrial production and society are explored, partly by means of a case study of farming in the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland.

The paper outlines the ways in which the 'Manchester methodology' used to study the landscape archaeology of industrialisation in the Tameside region has been applied to other areas, particularly the Vale of Ffestiniog in northwest Wales, and suggests ways in which the methodology might be developed.

Drawing on surveys undertaken by the author of two early cinemas in West Yorkshire and outlining recent work by others in related fields, the paper seeks to demonstrate how such buildings might be considered and to suggest how such consideration could contribute towards a research agenda for an 'archaeology of entertainment'.

The paper identifies a number of possible directions for academic research into the study of graveyards and memorial monuments in Britain in the early modern and modern periods, clustering around the three areas of demographic, family and social structure; the production and expression of identity; and changing beliefs about the living and the dead. It is suggested that the full potential of graveyard studies has not yet been exploited for a variety of reasons -- the essentially local remit and interest of most projects, which has not encouraged orientation toward ambitious historical questions; the absence of any standardised way of recording graveyards, and of any way of monitoring the work that has been done; and the failure to develop many extensive or imaginative research programmes.