The Heritage of the Textile Industry, A Thematic Study for TICCIH, The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage

In its half-century of activity (this year marks the 50th anniversary of its foundation in Ironbridge in 1973), TICCIH has consistently worked to increase the presence of industrial heritage on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The appointment of TICCIH, in 2000, as special adviser on behalf of ICOMOS for the evaluation of nominations of industrial sites to the WHL, and the publication of a series of guideline documents for the drafting of nomination dossiers to the WHL, bear witness to this commitment. These ‘thematic studies’ can be downloaded from the TICCIH or ICOMOS websites and cover different sectors of industrial heritage such as company towns, canals, railways, bridges and coal mines. The commitment to elaborate these thematic studies was reconfirmed through the Memorandum of Understanding between ICOMOS and TICCIH regarding a ‘Framework for Collaboration on the Conservation of Industrial Heritage’ signed on 10 November 2014 in Florence. It is an exhortation that has not fallen on deaf ears, if we think of the new studies published in recent years, those on the water industry (2019), on the oil industry (2020) and, finally, the last one in order of time, that on the Heritage of the Textile Industry, edited by Heike Oevermann, Bartosz Walczak and Mark Watson (2022). The three authors, due to their academic training, their scientific work and their roles in important institutions dedicated to the preservation of historical heritage, were certainly the most suitable persons to carry out a thorough survey of the heritage qualities of such a strategic sector of the modern industrial system as the textile industry. The articulate overview of its historical development on a global scale proves it: as the study claims, the textile industry, the leading sector of the industrial revolution, ‘was also the first to use new forms of power generation, finance, labour, and industrial organisation’. The structure of the book has the merit of being immediately functional for the work that requires new application files. As can easily be seen from Table 1 showing the ‘Textile sites on the World Heritage list’ (Summary and Conclusions, ch. 9, p. 183), the criteria most frequently adopted to justify their Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) are criteria (ii) and (iv). The various chapters of which the research is composed cleverly develop the issues that support the use of these two criteria. Chapter 6 — ‘International Interchange’ — offers an extremely valuable and accurate map of the ‘know-how and technology transfer’ from the ‘first-comer’ countries in the development of the textile industry to the countries that have promoted their own production through the construction of plants designed by foreign architects, engineers and investors. The merit of this survey is to show that the diffusion had many epicentres: the major role played by British expatriates in the diffusion abroad of the main technological innovations developed at home ‘especially during the earlier stages of industrial revolution’ is undoubtedly unquestionable; however, it cannot be denied that the international technological transfer is also attributable to the initiatives of German, Swiss, French and Austrian ‘agents of change’. The geography of textile know-how exports that the three authors have skilfully reconstructed represents a first-rate tool to support future nominations justified by criterion (ii): ‘to exhibit an important interchange of human values... on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design’. No less important are Chapter 4, ‘Building Types’, and chapter 5, ‘Mills and Urban Development’. Chapter 4 demonstrates, through an impressive gallery of examples found in the most diverse countries, how the typologies of the ‘multi-storey building’ and the ‘single-storey building’, both developed as solutions to the complex organisational problems posed by the development of the textile industry (‘the optimal arrangement of the machines and the interconnection of individual production departments’), are the archetypes that underlie all modern industrial architecture. Chapter 5, on the other hand, sheds light on the formative processes of the industrial city through the examination of ‘how industrial production volumes were integrated in urban spatial patterns’ and how ‘the start of dynamic growth in the textile industry’ is responsible for the formation of an unprecedented industrial landscape. Both chapters, due to their extreme wealth of references, are fully capable of providing an extensive arsenal of arguments in support of criterion (iv): ‘to be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble or landscape’. At the conclusion of their research, the three authors put together an extensive ‘Inventory of Textile Industrial Sites’ (ch. 8). Bearing in mind that Table 1 shows that there are only eight textile sites on the World Heritage List, of which only two are located outside Europe, it is easy to foresee that this inventory will have to be drawn upon for new entries, whether or not it is considered that a more ‘representative, balanced and credible’ presence of the textile industry on the World Heritage List is to be undertaken as soon as possible.