Industrial and engineering heritage in Europe, 50 winners of the European Heritage Awards/Europa Nostra Awards

Abstract

societies. Subsequent chapters document this continued growth through to the 1960s, with the CWS moving into financial and other services and needing ever-larger offices, warehouses and factories, and the retail societies expanding into department stores and, later, supermarkets. The CWS also set up its own chains of shops, under what was to become Co-operative Retail Services (CRS) to enable it to expand into areas of the country where there were no local societies. The buildings constructed by CWS were often of the highest quality, but, due to the independence of the local societies, in widely disparate architectural styles, which included some fine examples of art deco, moderne and modernist architecture and decoration. From the mid-1960s, however, the Co-operative model, with ‘brand loyalty’ founded on membership and dividends, began to lose ground to the expanding supermarket chains, whose less bureaucratic and more centralised management and distribution allowed them to operate with lower margins. Local societies closed or consolidated, and many were absorbed into the CWS, whose manufacturing enterprises largely closed, or by CRS. The number of larger shops declined and the emphasis switched to convenience stores, to the extent that, to the customer, the Co-op today appears little different from other retailers, with little hint of its ideologically driven past. Lynn Pearson does not attempt to describe the entire history of the Co-operative movement through its built heritage, but rather to demonstrate how it presented its values through its architecture. She describes in detail the growth of the CWS architectural team, as well as the contributions of other architects. In addition to the aesthetics, we learn something of the construction techniques their architects favoured, particularly the pioneering adoption of Hennebique ferro-concrete structural systems in the early 20th century. However, this focus on the public-facing architecture means we learn little about the Cooperative movement’s farms or the housing it built for its workers. We receive tantalising glimpses of the internal organisation of their stores (including those fascinating systems for moving money around), but not of their warehouses and factories. I suspect some readers of this journal might wish to learn more about how these buildings operated, and whether this was in any way different from those of businesses founded on less idealistic principles, but this is an architectural history, as proclaimed in the book’s title, not an archaeological study. It might also have been valuable to understand a little more about the role of the early Co-ops in the educational and social lives of their communities, alongside, for example, Mechanics’ Institutes, but that must wait for another book, perhaps. Liverpool University Press are to be congratulated in seeking to maintain the high standard of production to which we grew accustomed from Historic England. It is true that this volume is smaller in format than the A4-sized volumes that Historic England published to great acclaim, so the illustrations (and their captions) are reduced accordingly. However, the photographs, including many historic images from the author’s personal collection, combine with the well-researched text to create a fantastic resource for social as well as architectural history.