It has to be admitted that an interest in industrial estates is not a widely shared one amongst photographers.
A similar degree of disinterest has been expressed by urban geographers, labour economists and by sociologists of work too – at least in the West. In development studies, the industrial estate remains an area of contention, especially in relation to the perceived economic and social benefits of planned industrialisation. Yet, at one time, the industrial estate was a sufficiently sharp tool in the service of industrial development in the UK to be described as the equivalent of “slum clearance” for factories (Wolton, 1938 p.20) and arose sufficient passion in others to be likened to “suburban industrial concentration camps” (Banham and others, 1969, p. 440).
For me, the answer to ‘Why photograph industrial estates?’ has three strands –
- industrial estates can tell us something about how we think about work and how we value it culturally;
- they say something about the relationship between work and other parts of our lives;
- and they reveal how and in whose interests our urban environment is shaped.
Place of work.
Part of the problem of understanding the industrial estate, either as a social semiotic, a visual resource or as part of the economic infrastructure, is the difficulty of consistent definition, despite its ubiquity and familiarity. Industrial estates go by any number of names; e.g. ‘trading estate’, ‘factory estate’, ‘industrial park’, ‘enterprise park’ and, where the interest is more upmarket and hi-tech, even ‘enterprise campus’.
Bale (1974 a & b) after reviewing the literature, identifies a number of axes around which definitions turn, including size, location, commonality of activity, spatial organisation and origination, before he offers the following definition;
“An industrial estate is a grouping of industrial establishments provided with certain common services and utilities laid down in advance of demand, and established as a result of enterprise and planning by an independent organisation.”
(Bale, 1974a, p. 33)
(Bale’s reference to ‘establishments’ is to include not only manufacturing but also warehousing and distribution activities and ‘independent’ refers to the independence of the planner from the subsequent occupants of the estate.)
This definition points to a critical distinction between the haphazard nature of much industrial development and the planned nature of an industrial estate. In the early industrialising centuries, sites of manufacture and distribution typically developed in areas associated with specific raw materials, natural transport routes or sources of power. Industrial estates, which were developed almost exclusively in the 20th century, are not so constrained. They are explicitly designed ahead of demand (and to some degree, independently of the existing industrial base) and thus speak to issues of intentionality and purpose when it comes to the social arrangement and location of work. This is one of the main reasons for my interest in industrial estates – they speak to how, societally, we intend work to be; how it is planned, organised and hence, culturally expressed.
Work and home.
The second principal reason for my interest in industrial estates is to be found in another, more recent definition. Law (2016) conflates ‘industrial estate’ and ‘trading estate’ to compound, or evade, the challenge of precision and includes retail outlets but, critically, he includes within his definition that “they offer land away from residential areas”.
In the agrarian and feudal past, labour and domestic life were hardly separated at all, spatially. Even after the mass industrialisation of the 19th century, it was in the interests of capitalists and workers to keep home and work no more than a short walk or bicycle ride apart. While this bond gradually weakened, not least through improvements in public and private transport, it was not until the globalisation of labour markets and the failure, in the UK, of much urban regeneration after the Second World War, that the proximal relationship between home and work was effectively broken as homes and workplaces were flung into different orbits around rapidly emptying and disintegrating city centres (‘slum clearance for factories’).
Factories, workshops, warehouses, mills, and mines increasingly stood outside of and distant from the communities whose populations laboured within them. It was during this period (from 1945 to the mid 1970s) that the industrial estate was central to the development of the UK’s economic infrastructure. For example, in 1945, there were no privately developed industrial estates in Wales; by 1975, there were 30, alongside more than 30 local authority developed estates, 19 of which were built between 1965 and 1970 and 7 UK government developed sites, only one of which (Treforest, 1936) predated the War (Bale, 1977).
Industrial estates provided relatively cheap ‘greenfield’ land or converted readily available wartime airfields to help shift employment along arterial roads and motorways to the city periphery, reinforcing the ‘footloose’ attitude amongst capitalists so necessary to globalisation and further weakening employers’ connectedness and commitment to the geographies they occupied (‘suburban industrial concentration camps’).
Marx understood the importance of sequestering the workplace, to which the industrial estate has contributed. In his often-quoted passage at the end of Chapter 6 in the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx requires us to look away from the theoretical ‘marketplace’ and into the actual but much less visible workplace itself where the real work of capitalism, namely the exploitation of labour for profit, is done:
“Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face “No admittance except on business.” Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making.”
Marx, Das Kapital, 1876.
A precarious landscape
From the mid-1970s onwards, the boundaries between the re-design of the economic infrastructure and the development of policies to manage crises in unemployment and regional inequalities became blurred. The deployment of the industrial estate was gradually subsumed within a broader ‘regional development’ rhetoric, especially in the period of the Wilson/ Callaghan Labour government whose neo-classical economic theory led to more interventionist state economic policies (see Broadberry and Leunig, 2013).
Since the election of the Thatcher government in 1979 and the subsequent New Labour government of the first decade of this century, industrial policy in the UK has become more opaque and attenuated as it has moved from sectoral to horizontal, non-selective measures that aim to manage the entrepreneurial climate more broadly (see Bailey and Driffield, 2007). This is reflected, for example, in the current UK Government’s Industrial Strategy White Paper (2017) and the Greater Manchester Industrial Strategy (2019) Both of these ‘strategies’, with their ‘grand challenges’ and ‘5 foundations of productivity’, encode the neoliberal politics of the ‘free market’ and encourage regional competition for scarce resources, leaving all of the responsibilities at local level but few levers in the hands of elected representatives or of organised labour.
This in turn has contributed to lower employment density on industrial estates (e.g. more distribution centres; less manufacture), a higher turnover of occupants and an increasing reliance on an architecture that can easily be adapted to almost any use.
It is here that I find my third area of photographic interest; a built environment that speaks to precarious employment and that reinforces the temporariness of investment in either working conditions or the local community where the drive towards profit maximisation may even drive down local economic advantage. The unidentified, anonymous grey shed, of varying sizes, has become the dominant architectural trope of the contemporary industrial estate far more than the Art Deco entrance to the Slough Trading Estate or the architectural achievement of Park Royal.
In pictures
These strands emerge in photographic terms in a number of visual themes; anonymous/ mysterious buildings housing invisible trades; a utilitarian, often ugly, built environment; neglect, decay and dereliction; ever-present security apparatus and the threat they amplify; inhuman, unnatural, and strictly functional ethos and ambience.
These themes are already finding expression in my early images for this project and they will be the subject of my next blog …
References
Bailey, D. and Driffield, N. (2007), ‘Industrial Policy, FDI and Employment: Still Missing a Strategy’, Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, 7:189-211
Bale J.R. (1974a) ‘Towards a Definition of the Industrial Estate: A Note on a Neglected Aspect of Urban Development’ Geography, Vol. 59, No. 1 (January 1974), pp. 31-34.
Bale J.R. (1974b) ‘Towards a Geography of the Industrial Estate?’ The Professional Geographer, Vol. 26, No. 3 (January 1974), pp. 291-297.
Bale, J.R. (1977) ‘Industrial estate Development and Location in Post-war Britain’, Geography, Vol. 62. No. 2 (April 1977) pp. 87-92
Banham and others (1969) ‘Non-plan; an experiment in freedom’, New Society, Vol. 13, No. 228, p. 440. Cited in Bale J.R. (1974) ‘Towards a Definition of the Industrial Estate: A Note on a Neglected Aspect of Urban Development’ Geography, Vol. 59, No. 1 (January 1974), pp. 31-34.
Broadberry, S. and Leuning, T. (2013) The impact of government policies on UK manufacturing since 1945. Foresight, Government Office for Science, London
Law, J. (2016) A Dictionary of Business and Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Wolton, D.G. (1938) (Ed.) Trading Estates, London. Cited in Bale J.R. (1974) ‘Towards a Definition of the Industrial Estate: A Note on a Neglected Aspect of Urban Development’ Geography, Vol. 59, No. 1 (January 1974), pp. 31-34.
