British industrial architecture

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  British industrial architecture took shape from around 1700, when Abraham Darby I made Coalbrookdale the focus of the Industrial Revolution. Casting goods from iron, his works helped set Britain on a path no country had previously followed. His descendant Abraham Darby III assembled the sections of The Iron Bridge across the Coalbrookdale Gorge. That bridge was the first of many large cast iron structures and influenced engineers and architects around the world. Philip de Loutherbourg depicted the company's Bedlam Furnaces in his 1801 painting Coalbrookdale by Night. The gorge is now a World Heritage site.

  What spread outward from Coalbrookdale was not just industry but a new kind of built environment. Factories, covered dockyard slipways, canal aqueducts, railway stations, pumping houses, gasholders: each building type was new. Architects answered the challenge in wildly different ways. Some buildings wore their industrial purpose plainly on the outside. Others clothed themselves in historical styles drawn from distant times and places. Murrays' Mills, begun in Manchester in 1798, formed the longest mill range in the world. It was conveniently placed on the Rochdale Canal, giving direct access to the 18th-century industrial transport network.

  1161819

• 2. Shaped by Function

  ›

  Chatham Dockyard on the River Medway in Kent constructed and equipped ships of the Royal Navy for more than 400 years. Its origins reach back to the time of Henry VIII. That continuity of use drove steady innovation in building design. The dockyard's No. 3 covered slip provided a roof over a shipbuilding slipway, keeping the timbers of the vessel under construction dry. Its wooden roof trusses were built in 1838. No. 7 covered slip was built in 1852. It is one of the earliest metal trussed roofs in Britain.

  The glass cones of glassworks were shaped entirely by the glassmaking process within. The bottle ovens of the Staffordshire Potteries and the Royal Worcester porcelain works carried a distinctive silhouette visible for miles. The tapering roofs of oast houses dried the hops of Kent's hop orchards. The pagoda-like ventilators above Scotch whisky distilleries served the same purpose-driven logic. In each case, the industrial process dictated the exterior form.

  Multi-storey corn mills appeared around 1800 as war raised grain prices, showing how quickly economic pressure could reshape building types across the whole country.

  2141618

• 3. A Nation Connected

  ›

  The 1794 Glamorganshire Canal linked the Welsh ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil to the harbour at Cardiff. It spurred the rapid industrialisation of the South Wales Valleys. Thomas Telford undertook some of the most ambitious canal works of the era. Between 1795 and 1805, he built the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, which carries the Llangollen Canal 126 feet above the River Dee in Wales. Between 1803 and 1822, he oversaw the Caledonian Canal, which linked a chain of freshwater lochs across Scotland. Its Neptune's Staircase is a series of eight large locks. Each is 180 ft long by 40 ft wide. Together they lift barges 64 feet.

  Sheffield's steelmaking districts and the cotton mills of Lancashire both expanded as the railways reshaped Britain's distribution network. Steam engines could now be powered by coal brought from distant coalfields. Cotton mills were freed from fast-flowing rivers. Iron foundries and blast furnaces grew greatly in size.

  The Ribblehead Viaduct was built by the Midland Railway to a design by John Sydney Crossley. It opened in 1876, carrying the Settle-Carlisle line across the Ribble Valley in North Yorkshire. Faced with limestone and with almost semicircular red brick arches, it stretches 440 yd and stands 104 ft high. It is now a Grade II*-listed structure.

  161819

• 4. Cathedrals of Progress

  ›

  The French poet Théophile Gautier described Britain's new railway stations as "cathedrals of the new humanity." That phrase pointed to a genuinely ambitious approach to a building type that had never existed before. Newcastle railway station was given a fully-covered roof in 1850. It remains the earliest surviving example of such a roof in the country, achieved despite the station's curved platforms. Bristol Temple Meads has a cathedral-like exterior with Gothic arches and a pinnacled tower. The 1841 old station there had a hammerbeam roof said to have been modelled on Westminster Hall's timbers. The Great Western Railway's engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel described his Bristol station as "a cathedral to the iron horse." Paddington station was also designed by Brunel, inspired by Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace and the München Hauptbahnhof.

  Gas for domestic heating, produced from coal, was stored in enormous cylindrical gasholders. Their iron cage frames now survive in places around the country as memorials to long-vanished industries. Among the best-known survivors are the Bromley-by-Bow and Oval gasholders.

  Benjamin Disraeli had in 1838 described Britain as "the workshop of the world." As that wealth accumulated, the question for architects became how to make industrial buildings express something of that confidence.

  178155

• 5. Borrowed Grandeur

  ›

  Joseph Bonomi designed the Temple Works flax mill offices in Holbeck, Leeds, between 1836 and 1840. He modelled them directly on the Mammisi of the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt. Egyptian Revival as a style had arisen in response to Napoleon's conquest of Egypt, which was accompanied by a scientific expedition. A flax mill in Leeds choosing to resemble an Egyptian temple was, at the time, fashionable rather than eccentric.

  The Metropolitan Water Board constructed its engine house at Stoke Newington to resemble a medieval castle, with towers and crenellation. The pumping station at Ryhope, Sunderland, built in 1869, took a Jacobean route instead: curving Dutch gables and an octagonal brick chimney. The architectural historian Hubert Pragnell calls it a "cathedral of pistons and brass set within a fine shell of Victorian brickwork with no expense spared."

  The Bliss Tweed Mill at Chipping Norton was designed in 1872 by George Woodhouse, a Lancashire mill architect. Built of local limestone and rising five storeys, it was modelled to resemble a Charles Barry-type English country house. Its dominant chimney stack was described as "a sophisticated aesthetic solution to a functional requirement." The chimney and a curved stairwell tower are offset from the building's centre, while the corners are balustraded and topped with urns.

  The Templeton Carpet Factory in Glasgow, built in 1892 by William Leiper for James Templeton and Son, has been called "the most remarkable display of polychromatic brickwork in Britain." Leiper modelled it in Venetian Gothic on the Doge's Palace in Venice. Within those walls the factory wove Axminster carpets.

  Eccles Shorrock's India Mill at Darwen would take this appetite for spectacle to greater heights, commissioning a chimney that rose 300 ft above Lancashire's cotton country.

  1816197

• 6. Scale and Spectacle

  ›

  Eccles Shorrock, a cotton magnate, commissioned Ernest Bates to create a showy design for his India Mill at Darwen, Lancashire. The campanile-style chimney was built in red, white, and black brick, topped with cornices of stone. An ornamental urn stood at each corner. An ornate cresting, consisting of more than 300 individual pieces of cast iron, ran along the top.

  The Power House at Chiswick was designed by William Curtis Green and J. Clifton Robinson in 1901. It served the London United Electrical Tramway Company as an electricity generating station. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described it as a "monumental free Baroque brick and stone composition." He placed it in the "early, heroic era of generating stations," noting its enormous stone voussoirs. Above the entrance stood a pair of large stone figures. One represented "Electricity," her foot on a globe, her hand emitting lightning flashes beside the rotor of a generator. The other represented "Locomotion," her foot on an electric tram and her hand on a winged wheel.

  The arrival of the "daylight factory" concept at Trafford Park soon shifted the whole visual language of British industrial building in a new direction.

  181619

• 7. Daylight and Deco

  ›

  The "daylight factory" concept was brought in from America, making its British debut at Trafford Park. Buildings in this style were long and sleek, with large windows and attractively grassed surroundings. They were placed conspicuously along major roads out of London, such as the Great West Road in Brentford, West London. This placement earned them the name "by-pass modern." The best-known exemplar is the Hoover Building, constructed between 1932 and 1935 by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners in the Art Deco style. At the time it was derided for "its overtly commercial character." It is now Grade II-listed. The architectural historian Hubert Pragnell has described it as "the cathedral of modernism" and "an icon of 1930s design."

  A distinctively different interwar building stands at Mornington Crescent, Camden. The Carreras Cigarette Factory was built between 1926 and 1928, designed by M. E. Collins, O. H. Collins, and A. G. Porri. Its style combines Art Deco and Egyptian Revival, recalling the excitement that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. The factory has a frontage of 550 feet under a continuous cornice, with flute lines painted red and blue. Its construction is modern, making it a pioneer of pre-stressed concrete, but its decoration evokes ancient Egypt throughout. The company chose a black cat based on the Egyptian cat god Bastet to symbolise its brand. A pair of large cat effigies stands beside the entrance stairs, and smaller cat roundels appear across the building.

  Charles Holden's 1933 Arnos Grove tube station had a brightly-lit circular ticket hall in brick. Its flat concrete roof made no reference to historical architecture at all.

  181916

• 8. Concrete, Steel, and Scale

  ›

  Arthur Sanderson & Sons' wallpaper printing works in Chiswick was designed by the modernist architect Charles Voysey in 1902 and carries a Grade II* listing. This was his only industrial building. It is faced in white glazed brick, with Staffordshire blue bricks forming horizontal bands. The plinth, door and window surrounds, and dressings are all in Portland stone. It is considered an important Arts and Crafts factory building. Across a narrow street stands the company's 1893 red brick factory, which those who recorded the Voysey building described as more conventional by comparison.

  William T. Walker's Clement-Talbot car factory on Barlby Road, Ladbroke Grove, was built between 1903 and 1904. Its street frontage was a William and Mary-style facade in red brick. The details included stone pilasters, a cornice, the Talbot family crest, and a porte-cochere. Inside, a vaulted marble-floored entrance hall served as a car showroom. The main factory building behind it was an early reinforced concrete structure.

  The Tees Transporter Bridge carried the use of new materials to a different scale. Its concrete foundations were poured in shafts dug using caissons down to bedrock, below the high tide mark. The structure above is of steel, carried on granite piers.

  The Grade II* British Gas Engineering Research Station at Killingworth was built in 1967 to a design by Ryder and Yates. Historic England calls it "a tour de force of post-war architecture." The citation notes deliberate references to continental examples in the transformation of service elements into sculptural forms. CZWG's Aztec West in the Bristol West Business Park uses horizontal stripes of brickwork interrupted by tall narrow windows. White concrete bevels add a pilaster effect, and the buildings' symmetrical concave fronts echo Art Deco.

  Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 opened in 2008. At 1299 feet long, 577 feet wide, and 130 feet tall, it is the largest free-standing building in Britain. The architects were Richard Rogers Partnership, assisted by aviation specialists Pascall+Watson. The roof is supported on exposed hinged trusses. Arup engineered the above-ground structure, while Mott MacDonald handled what lies below.

  912111814