Editorial

Abstract

At the time this editorial is being written, the world is still grappling with the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic which swept the world around 12 months earlier. In the early stages of this, the editors of this journal were pleased to receive a flood of articles for consideration, as authors suddenly found themselves with time to complete work that had been in progress for a while. That stream of material has now diminished markedly; many libraries, archives and archaeological sites around the world have remained closed as a result of the pandemic, leaving many projects unfinished. The authors of the five articles presented here are therefore to be congratulated in bringing their work to completion in these difficult times. The textile mills of 18th-century Britain are generally held up as providing the models from which the modern factory developed and, at least in terms of organisation, this has largely been the case. The significance of textile mills as structures in the archaeology of industry is demonstrated by the large number of articles that have been devoted to them in this journal over the years. However, three articles in this issue can be seen to place the British textile mill into a broader continuum of the development of manufacturing spaces. Historically, this starts with the work of Nana Palinić and Adriana Bjelanović, describing the evolution of a number of different industrial buildings in the town of Rijeka, Croatia, from the first half of the 18th century. These owe much of their design and construction to the buildings of the dockyards of the Venetian empire, but with obvious parallels to textile mills in Britain and elsewhere. Given that Britain’s first recognised factory, Lombe’s silk mill in Derby was founded on technology stolen from Italy; perhaps there are more precursors to the modern factory to be found around the Adriatic. It is known that the early industrialists in New England took inspiration from the textile industries in ‘Old England’ but the availability of water power on a scale that could scarcely be imagined in Britain drove the development of textile-manufacturing towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts, in a distinctive direction. Lowell has been studied in detail by many authors, but Kevin Coffee here takes this into new territory by examining the impact that the creation of textile mills of such size had on the environment of a whole region of the US. In particular, he analyses the amount of timber consumed, not just in the construction of the mills and other buildings, but in the smelting of the iron and construction of the railways that served these growing communities. One of Coffee’s discoveries that may surprise those of us better acquainted with British textile mills is that the manufacturers of Massachusetts found buildings with timber structural components to be more fire-resistant than those that used cast iron. Former textile mills have been adapted for use for numerous new uses, including the embryonic motor industry. As Ian Miller and Lewis Stitt explain in their article, the introduction of production-line tracks for car assembly generally encouraged manufacturers away from multi-storey buildings to large single-storey spaces, although there were some notable exceptions to this. Back in 1993, Collins and Stratton produced a hugely important overview of the buildings of the British motor industry but few, if any, individual car factories have been studied in detail so this record of the 1907 Vulcan Works in Southport, Merseyside, is particularly valuable. It is regrettable that such a project was only possible because the buildings were being demolished to facilitate redevelopment of the site. A manufacturing space influenced by different architectural and cultural traditions is analysed by Yoav Arbel in his article on an olive-oil soap factory in Jaffa, Israel. This neatly complements the work of Özge Bozgeyik and Neslihan Dalkılıç on a soap factory in Turkey, published in issue 40.1 of this journal, and assists in the development of a typology for what may be a common building type, particularly in the Middle East. Our final offering moves us away from factories to transport, and the important Soviet-era Russian city of Magnitogorsk. Marina Potemkina, Mikhail Gryaznov and Tatiana Pashkovskaya provide a compelling description of its 1930s tram system, much original infrastructure of which is still in use today, and show how this influenced the development of this industrial community.