9 - Historical archaeology and industrialisation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Britain was the first industrial nation. The impact of this early phase of industrialisation was far reaching and laid the foundations for the emergence of modern consumer society. Although recent scholarship has suggested that the origins of many modern industrial processes may lie in the medieval or early post-medieval period, the clustering of technological innovations that occurred in Britain between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries is still widely upheld as evidence of a remarkable ‘Industrial Revolution’ (Symonds 2003).

Industrialisation transformed the towns and countryside of Britain and has left wide-ranging material legacies in the form of workshops, factories, warehouses, canals, railways, roads, mines, quarries, dockyards, and purpose-built workers' houses, to name but a few of the more visible classes of industrial sites. It has been estimated that 70 per cent of the built environment of modern Britain dates from the period of the Industrial Revolution (Cossons 1987: 12) and Britain's role as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution has recently been recognised by the UK Government as its sole unique contribution to World Heritage. For this reason no fewer than 10 of the 25 sites presented to UNESCO as tentative world-heritage sites in 1999 were industrial (DCMS 1999). These ranged from mining and iron-working industrial landscapes at Blaenavo in inWales, to the cotton mills of the Derwent Valley in Derbyshire, to elements of the ‘world's first industrial city’ – Manchester – and the waterfront area of Liverpool, a leading nineteenth-century mercantile city (Cooper 2005: 156).

Given the wealth and significance of material remains that exist from this period in Britain, it is perhaps not surprising that it was here that the phrase industrial archaeology was first coined. Although it is unclear when the term first appeared in print (R. Buchanan 2000: 20) it gained widespread usage following the publication of a seminal article in the Amateur Historian by Michael Rix, a lecturer in English Literature in the Department of Extramural Studies at the University of Birmingham (Rix 1955).