Opinion: A selection of keynote articles from the TICCIH Bulletin
- ´Does any country have the equivalent to the Historic American Engineering Record?´ Nº 29, Spring 2005
- ´Industrial Archaeology and Industrial Heritage in tertiary education´, Nº 23, Winter 2003
- ´Preserving our Computer Heritage´ , Nº 20, Spring 2003
- ´Restoring historic machinery´, Nº17, Spring 2002
- ´IA: an interdisciplinary seedbed´, Nº 13, Summer 2001
- ´Ways to escape constantly conflicting issues´, Nº8, Spring 2000
- ´Towards 2000´, Nº 7, Winter, 1999
- ´The Industrial Landscape´, Nº3, Winter 1998
- ´Challenges to industrial heritage´ Nº2, Autumn 1998
´Does any country have the equivalent to the Historic American Engineering Record?´ Nº 29, Spring 2005Eric DeLony
Chief (Retired), Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service.
After attending nearly 30 years of TICCIH conferences, I never got the impression that any country had anything quite like the HAER program. While every nation has some form of industrial heritage recording or listing usually with a central repository for information, none follow the model of hiring student architects, landscape architects, engineers, or historians during the summer months to produce drawings, photographs and histories for the national record. HAER has done this consistently for 36 years. This model evolved from employing out-of-work architects during the Depression resulting in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in 1933, HAER?s sister program. In the 1960s, when the HABS program was revived, the model changed to student internship program. HAER followed this precedent when it was established in 1969.
HAER is a program of the National Park Service created to compile a record of drawings, photographs and histories of America?s engineering, industrial and technological heritage. Documentation consisting of measured and interpretive drawings, large-format photographs and written histories is created primarily by student architects, landscape architects, engineers and historians hired to work on field projects during the summer. The documentation becomes part of the national collection at the Library of Congress. Along with the Park Service, which administers the program, and the Library of Congress, where the collection is maintained, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) participated in HAER?s creation and continues as a partner advising the program through its national membership. For the HAER collection at the Library of Congress, see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/.
When I first started work with HAER, I remember thinking that my generation would be the last capable of producing exquisitely executed, ink-on-Mylar, measured and interpretive drawings of industrial, engineering and technological phenomenon. This didn?t happen as subsequent generations of delineators produced drawings equal if not better than anything I created 35 years ago.
There are many wonderful stories to tell about the evolution of HAER documentation over three decades, but this is impossible in an introductory article. So let me highlight one aspect that may have relevance to TICCIH and international industrial heritage. That is what I call the ?ICOMOS connection.? Beginning in the mid-1980s, US/ICOMOS, the National Park Service and other American preservation organizations came up with the idea of an international exchange of young preservation professionals among ICOMOS-member countries. HAER and HABS were perfect partners for this since we already had the infrastructure in place to employ students through our summer internship program. See www.cr.nps.gov/habshaer/ for information on the HABS/HAER program. While foreign students are employed by US/ICOMOS on a contractual basis, many are selected to work on HAER and HABS summer teams.
I was fortunate to have received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in England after graduate school. I knew the value of an international exposure and experience. To me, the ?ICOMOS connection? was a tremendous benefit to HAER. Not only are we able to recruit the best talent from American universities, but we now are able to attract some of the best talent from throughout the world. I tried to place an ICOMOS intern on every HAER summer field team. Not only were project cosponsors excited about having a foreign exchange student in their community, but I thought it was important for our domestic American students to be able to compare notes and exchange experiences and information with their peers from foreign countries. In many instances, it was the first opportunity for foreign students to visit the United States. They gained hand-on experience of American preservation. Many stayed an extra weeks at the end of the summer to explore some exotic location in the US such as Chicago, San Francisco or New York. From the feedback I received over the years, the opportunity to live and work in the US for 12 weeks was mutually rewarding.
Things have changed since initiation of the ICOMOS program in the 1980s, but the tradition continues this summer as four HAER employees will be ICOMOS interns. Cultural and educational exchanges are especially important today since the world has become even more complicated. Perhaps some TICCIH members participated or hosted an American student as part of the ICOMOS summer internship program. For information on the US/ICOMOS intern exchange program, see: http://www.icomos.org/usicomos/
Eric Delony is a consultant on engineering and industrial heritage in Santa Fe, New Mexico Top ´Industrial Archaeology and Industrial Heritage in tertiary education´, Nº 23, Winter 2003Prof. Marilyn Palmer
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, GB
University education in industrial archaeology can be delivered in two different ways. We can either try to ensure that archaeology graduates are aware of the different sources, methods and concepts necessary for the study of post-medieval and industrial archaeology by constructing general courses which reach into the industrial period, or we can produce specialist practitioners by training at either the postgraduate or undergraduate level. The latter might better be called training in industrial heritage management.
There is a difference between the meanings of the terms ´industrial archaeology´ and ´industrial heritage´. Industrial archaeology, like any other form of archaeology, is the understanding of the physical remains of the past to enable us to appreciate the ways in which people lived - and especially in our case, worked - in the past. The discipline involves the study of other sources of evidence, such as documents and images, in conjunction with the physical survivals of the past. Industrial archaeology is not, however, primarily concerned with the conservation and interpretation as heritage sites of these physical survivals from the past: this is the field of industrial heritage management. Obviously, the two aspects come together: it is impossible to interpret industrial monuments unless they are understood through archaeological study: while much of what we teach about the industrial past is through the medium of preserved sites.
The difference between the two meanings of ´industrial archaeology´ does, I think, affect the ways in which it is taught in higher education. I have long been concerned to ensure that ´industrial archaeology´ is perceived as part of mainstream archaeology as taught in archaeology departments throughout the country. This is essential because the trend towards developer-funded archaeology [Payment by the developers for excavating a site before construction starts. Ed.] means that archaeologists now have to be trained in all aspects of archaeology and many contract archaeologists spend much of their time dealing with both industrial sites and industrial buildings. University courses in archaeology need to prepare them for this. I think this is happening, not only at Leicester now, but also at the University of Manchester with the appointment of Eleanor Casella, and also at the University of Bristol where Mark Horton and Dan Hicks include the study of the industrial past in mainstream archaeology teaching. All Leicester archaeology graduates understand what industrial archaeology is, even though they may not have taken the specialised third year option on´ The Archaeology of Industrialisation´. I think industrial archaeology taught this way is essentially part of the undergraduate curriculum.
Rightly, though, training in industrial heritage management is mainly provided at postgraduate level, to people with first degrees in history, geography, conservation science etc. as well as archaeology. It is concerned not just with the study of the industrial past but with the ways in which it is conserved, interpreted and managed in the contemporary world. Foremost among the practitioners of industrial heritage management at this level are the Ironbridge Institute, part of the University of Birmingham, where Roger White and David de Haan are making an increasing success of the MA course in Industrial Heritage Management. Attempts have been made to initiate other courses along the same lines, mostly in conjunction with museums such as Steam at Swindon and the Engineerium in Brighton, but they have not got very far. The problem is the lack of practitioners in the field: most of the graduates in industrial archaeology work for contract units or the statutory bodies such as English heritage, and university departments are still reluctant to appoint even post-medieval archaeologists. Fortunately, the appointments made at Manchester and Bristol are beginning to reverse the trend.
These methods of training are beginning to deliver people with some understanding of both the skills and the concepts of industrial archaeology into the professional archaeological community. There are not yet enough of them, but only their success can convince other teaching institutions that graduates trained in our discipline have good career prospects - probably better than those of Egyptologists! The probably irreversible move towards contract archaeology, with all its drawbacks, has benefited industrial archaeology by providing employment not for specialists in prehistoric or Roman archaeology but for those with sufficient breadth of knowledge to interpret a multi-period site. My own personal goal, to see the study of archaeology thought of as a seamless web from the prehistoric to the industrial periods, may yet be achieved. Top ´Preserving our Computer Heritage´ , Nº 20, Spring 2003Hans B Pufal ACONIT, Grenoble, France
The preservation of computer and information processing heritage has, for the most part, been neglected, and many important artefacts and much information has already been irretrievably lost. This loss will severely hamper any future historical studies. The computer or information processing industry is one of the youngest, with two overlapping eras of approximately 60 years each: the mechanical, punched card era ushered in by Hollerith in the last decade of the 19th century; and the electronic computer era, with its earliest beginnings in the work of Konrad Zuse, amongst others, in the late 1930´s and early 1940´s. The punched card era is, relatively speaking, quite well off in terms of the historical record. Many hundreds and thousands of machines were built and used over many decades, and representative examples exist in many museum and private collections. Further, the mechanical nature of the machines and the media used makes the interpretation of their use fairly apparent once the basic principles have been mastered. The electronic computer industry, despite its relative youth, has lost much more of its heritage. It has passed through multiple technologies in its brief 50 year span: from electronic valves to large scale integrated circuits by way of transistors and small and medium scale integrated circuits. Many different generations of computers have seen their day: mainframes, minis, and micros. Software, the ephemeral component, has also seen a vast change in scale and complexity. The youthfulness and ultra-rapid change in the industry has resulted in many historical artefacts being lost and/or destroyed due to lack of foresight on the part of the participants and their enthusiasm to "move forward". Many of the earliest computers were built as one off special projects and were quickly dismantled when their successors were developed and built. In some cases, successor machines were built, in part, from the components of the previous generation. Even manufactured computers were often built in quantities of only a few tens or at most hundreds per model type; technological advancement made their continued manufacture uneconomic even while customers continued to use them, sometimes for many years. Software was continually upgraded and improved and the older versions discarded like the old rags that they had become. Whereas physical artefacts have been preserved to some extent, the same cannot be said of the software, or programs used to make these machines live. Listings, paper tapes, punched card decks, mag tapes and system manuals are often the first things to be discarded. Disposing of a large mainframe computer is, by comparison, a significant effort. Even where punched cards, tapes, or magnetic media have come down to us we are usually unable to read them, because the machines needed are either no longer available or do not function. But reading the data is not even enough! We must be able to decipher the bits and understand how they were used in their original form. A small but passionate group of technicians are working to partially reverse this trend before it is too late. The Internet has allowed this effort to be loosely coordinated, despite the fact that the participants come from all parts of the world. For the most part, these projects are carried on by private individuals; very little of the preservation work is being done by any of the (few) institutions existing in the field. One group member in California, USA scans thousands of pages of computer manuals he personally acquires, sometimes at great cost, and makes them available over the internet. Another, in Massachusetts uses that information to write emulators for the long gone machines which in turn allows another group member in France to actually restore to working state a 30 year old computer. That working computer now provides the means of recovering magnetic tape media, making possible the restoration of working copies of software thought to be long lost. Files recovered also provide valuable information supplementing the documentation archives. Running the recovered software on the emulator allows correction of discrepancies between the emulator and the real machine, making it a better tool for future research. The network is fluid and fragile, depending on the personal interest of the participants and their generous donation of time, effort and real world resources. Any part can be potentially lost due to the changed circumstances of a participant. Sometimes valuable web sites simply disappear, occasionally to reappear at a later date and different form. What is needed is institutional coordination and support of this effort. This must be provided in such a way as not to suffocate the efforts of the individual but to liberate and magnify them. Much remains to be done, vast areas of the historical record remain to be explored, and all the work must be catalogued and archived to ensure its permanent preservation. A multi-disciplinary team is working on the definition of such an institution. Termed a "conservatoire" of information technology, visit their web site at http://www.citem.org to participate in its development. [See also the web site www.aconit.org/index.htm.] Top ´Restoring historic machinery´, Nº17, Spring 2002Guy Scherrer
I would like to develop some principles for the restoration of historic machinery, based on my own experience as a consultant engineer for historic machinery.
1 - General methodology. The first and most important question to ask is why and with what purpose we want to restore a machine. Is it only for exhibiting, is it for making occasional demonstrations or is it to be used it as it was in the past? A discussion with the conservation department of the museum is always necessary to clarify this purpose. The choice determines the kind of intervention to be made. Then the restorer drafts a restoration proposition, in which the consequences of the restoration choice for the machine are clearly explained. Finally the restoration may be realised. The restoration report is indispensable and the language must be sufficiently "general" so that it can be read and understood 100 or 150 years later: the meaning of over-specialised words can change over time.
2 - Restoration choices. Each machine is a special case. I will explain here the different answers and their consequences to the main question: why and with which purpose do we want to restore a historic machine?
a) Only for exhibiting. The machine stays as a Museum object, like a painting; the machine itself is the most important thing. It is essential here to respect the original materials. It is also a facility when the machine needs several different power sources (electricity, gas, steam, hydraulic, pneumatic, etc.), and when it´s difficult to run. For: no change to the machine. If some parts are lost, it´s possible to complete the machine with parts removed from a similar machine. If this is not possible, it´s better to make nothing than to guess. Against: the machine is dead and the public can´t understand how it was when it was running.
b) Running occasionally for demonstrations. The movement of the parts is more important than the machine itself. Usually some changes are necessary of original materials and parts. The best example of this is a steam engine running on electricity or compressed air. For: the movement and use of the machine are easily understood. Against: in spite of some changes, necessary for running the machine, it has to stay a museum object. All the changes have to be reversible.
c) Using as it was in the past. Here the know-how and the product are important; it is still a living machine. Changes and modifications are possible (there´s no problem changing a bronze bearing for a Teflon or ball bearing). The machine is more repaired than restored. So a hydraulic hammer or a power hammer can be run. For: a good understanding of the production process. Against: maintenance is necessary and all changes are possible; so it is never a typical machine.
3. The following are two alternative examples from the field of textile machinery, one for exhibiting only and the other for running. The Original Jacquard loom. Musée du Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France. A well-known scale model (1/2 to 1/3) that we think was made by a joiner working under Jacquard himself, and that he presented to the French state. This historic loom underwent at least 4 or 5 changes, each time losing some sense. Except for the first restoration report (dated 1852), nothing was written about the other changes and it was impossible to restore the loom to its original state. We decided to restore it to its condition in the oldest known photographs (1907 catalogue). Some parts were already lost in 1907 and it was impossible to weave with the loom. We didn´t reinvent these parts. The choice was " Only for exhibiting". The probably original "necking cords" (small linen ropes that control the threads crossing) were in poor condition, so we replaced them with new linen cords. These cords are operating parts of the loom and it was therefore important to keep the same linen material. For the warp threads, which don´t form part of the machine, polyester was used instead of the original silk because it is more stable to light and lasts longer. The difference is not apparent through a glass case. The punch machine. Manufacture des Flandres, Roubaix, France. This kind of machine was used to punch jacquard cards between 1850 and 1975. Only about 250 examples were built in the world; maybe ten of them are left. The challenge was to conserve the knowledge of the "reading" operation in the textile industry, using the machine to punch cards, or to explain how it worked during the public demonstrations. The restoration choice was "for using as it was in the past". As the machine was too high (6,5 m) for the exhibition space, we reduced it to 5,8 m. All the traditional linen ropes were changed with new polyamide ropes. As the complex arrangement of these ropes contains all the information about the punch machine, the new ropes were installed as the old ones. A more efficient guard was designed and made from traditional iron rails.
4 - Conclusions. The conservation of a machine is in relation to the human memory. There is no sense in conserving and exhibiting a machine if nobody knows how it worked. So the restorer must not forget that his intervention must remain legible and logical over one or two centuries. Top ´IA: an interdisciplinary seedbed´, Nº 13, Summer 2001Dr Patrick Martin, Head of Graduate Studies, Dept of Social Sciences, Michigan Technological University, US
While reading Sir Neil Cossons´ edited ?Perspectives on Industrial Archaeology recently, I was struck by the generally (and sometimes specifically!) negative tone regarding educational programs in IA.
Because this volume is largely an historical view of the development of IA in the UK, it reflects upon the successes and failures of the field in that context, with the early promise of generating an academic discipline falling firmly in the "failure" column. As a person who has devoted much of my professional life in recent years to the establishment of a postgraduate degree program in IA, and to raising or maintaining a high standard of scholarship through the publication of ?IA, The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology,? I find this conclusion somewhat unsettling. However, I have come to much the same conclusion independently; my recent programmatic work is largely a reaction to the observation that IA had not found a solid academic home in North America. But at the same time, I also felt a bit of disagreement with the conclusions in the Cossons volume, for there are signs of improvement that those authors fail to acknowledge, signs that are a positive indication of directions to be followed and opportunities to pursue. As the authors in Cossons´ collection are narrowly focused on the UK, I cannot fault them for not recognising our efforts in North America. But while they discuss the early successes and more recent diminishment of the Ironbridge program, they pay only the slightest attention to the active work at Leicester University. There can be no doubt that the appointment of Dr. Marilyn Palmer to the first UK Professorship in Industrial Archaeology is a significant event; though it is mentioned, it appears in a diminished status, including a footnote. (Perhaps this is because the program is pointedly archaeological, rather than historical?) This opportunity to educate a new generation of students in IA is a potentially critical expansion of the field, and the program has already spawned some talented practitioners. Together with tools such as Palmer and Neaverson´s ?Industrial Archaeology: Principles and Practice?, the future has not looked brighter in years.
Another development that prompts positive, hopeful views of the future are the Seminars entitled "Future´s Past", hosted by Dr. Marie Nisser and a consortium of colleagues and institutions. Sponsored by the EU, this series of meetings and workshops was aimed explicitly at stimulating educational and training missions, in this case tied to co-operative efforts between Baltic and Scandinavian countries. While only a few specific programmatic solutions arose from the conferences, strong linkages were generated and ideas shared. At least two persistent themes arise, from the conclusions of failure in the UK, from the modest successes in North America, and from the ongoing Scandinavian/Baltic discussions. The first is that IA cannot hope to succeed as an independent academic discipline in a traditional sense. The field simply does not carry the momentum of an established discipline, nor has it developed the mature core of concepts and theory to sustain itself. IA must be planted in an interdisciplinary seedbed, melding the roots of history and archaeology, with a solid dose of geography and the emerging technologies of remote sensing, and an outreach via information technology; The generation of sound scholarship is a requirement, and that work must reach an audience that resides in multiple disciplinary homes.
Second, the first fifty years of practice have confirmed the need to maintain substantial links with the real-world issues of preservation and development. Operation as an ivory tower discipline is not feasible. There must be strong ties with the preservation community, including the forces of rehabilitation and reuse, decidedly economic undertakings rather than strictly intellectual ones. The growth of heritage tourism and the increasing realisations of value in the historic industrial landscape cannot be ignored by those responsible for training the practitioners of the future. In the twenty-first century university, partnerships with government and industry are increasingly important. The realisation of connections between the academy and the economy via industrial archaeology/heritage will be vital to the success of our field of interest, and must be introduced in the classroom. Top ´Ways to escape constantly conflicting issues´, Nº8, Spring 2000Professor Michael Mende
After a hundred years of operation, the ´Overseas Harbour´ in Bremen was finally filled in. To prevent any drift of the soil in the meantime, rye has been planted. While it was still growing the last vessel, with 15,000 tons of rye, left the nearby grain elevator for Riga. Both facilities were among the structures once amazing thousands of tourists on their harbour cruise. Near both sites, they could take a look at large shipyards, the cradle of ocean liners like the ´Bremen´, today the icon of German navigation and advances in shipbuilding. Passing the giant grain elevator, only twenty years ago still the biggest in Europe, the visitor enters the basin of the Timber- and Factory Harbour, where oil and grain mills, coffee and cacao processing plants, still document the efforts once made to conquer the global market by promising high quality products through equivalent architecture. How the heyday seems to be over. Not only bulk carriers demand soundings which would imperil the jetty walls. The complete shift to the container requires vast spaces for storage and a direct access to the motorway. The old free-port of Bremen, however, was based on railway traffic and warehouses. In some respects, the city therefore seems to be endangered by the loss of its historic identity, and even worse, of its right to figure as a federal state of its own. On the other hand, both sea and inland navigation still retain many future options. Most cities in Germany are situated on a waterway and if their ports are not to be converted into promenades or marinas, they might play a role in the logistical concepts recently arising with the shift to electronic commerce, in particular by the big firms of the automotive industries. Recently creating an electronic exchange to organise global component supply, they might soon need centres of embarkation, distribution, and even final assembly. As the domestic market continues to be the most important for even the big manufacturer, his plant has to be settled near to the prospective consumers. Ships are cheap but rather slow carriers. Many goods, and in particular those of value and at an advanced stage in manufacture, demand a ´just in time´ distribution. There should be no more vast buffer storage consuming a considerable part of the investment. So most automobile components are going by trucks which, however, are increasingly jamming the roads. Therefore a global controlling system based on the internet, combining shipping with accelerated rail transport facilities centred on seaports, is seen as an escape from the bottlenecks. Such a combination could be a way out of the dilemma many harbour cities now face. In most cases, pleasure grounds, marinas and residential areas are proposed as an escape. However, more and more are threatened with failure because of over-capacities here which have meanwhile emerged. So, remembering their industrial origin might grant harbours the way to enter the new industrial age. In any case, it would allow them to preserve a considerable number of typical structures, acting furthermore as landmarks and securing the identity of the harbour city. As there is constant change in the demand for spatial resources, the task to preserve the industrial heritage will never end. Every time there have to be new efforts to make inventories and to take decisions about what to preserve and how to interpret it by discovering the historical message and thus the cultural meaning. Top ´Towards 2000´, Nº 7, Winter, 1999Eusebi Casanelles, TICCIH Executive President
We are already in 2000, a mythical year that for a long time has symbolised the science fiction future. I won´t enter into the discussion over whether the century changes or not, but what is very clear is that in the future, 2000 will be an emblematic year that will symbolise the change of human era that began a few decades ago. If 1800 symbolises the definitive entrance of Europe into the industrial era through the change of economic production begun in the United Kingdom, the consolidation of science after all the period of the Enlightenment, and the change of political ideas brought about by the French Revolution; and if 1900 represents the triumph of electricity, of the new means of transport driven by the combustion engine, and of the introduction of new forms of production and of the research into the nucleus of the atom, among other things, 2000 will surely be the symbol of the entrance of the information society, of the European union, of the globalisation of the economy, the development of biotechnology, and of a change of culture and mentality of the citizens of the world.
This new era will have left behind as history the forms of production, the society, the objects and buildings that characterised industrialisation. If in the 1960s the change was evident all around, and in the 1980s one could still find some companies that worked with machinery from the beginnings of the century, now, at the opening of the third millennium, these last traces are disappearing completely from the productive world of the industrialised countries or are already part of a museum.
This is the reason why the movement to study and safeguard industrial heritage, represented globally by TICCIH, has more reason than ever to exist, and I would dare to say that those of us who form part of this organisation have the duty to strengthen it and promote it so that it has a specific weight at the level of international cultural institutions. 2000 has to mean the re-launch and the consolidation of this committee because we have to make people and institutions aware of the importance of industrial archaeology. One must stress that its conservation should not be on aesthetic grounds, which are the most important reasons for preserving heritage, nor because it is very old: its value is that it is testimony to a social and economic revolution that changed the world, that it will never happen again, and that it is a legacy which we have to leave to our children.
The TICCIH2000 conference has to represent the end of a stage in which we have managed to make the world aware of the existence of industrial heritage, a stage in which the basis has been laid for a more important action in the future: TICCIH has been made itself into a legal charitable trust of international character, has published a Bulletin, a Directory, and has begun to organise itself into sections. Now that we have a tool to hand, it depends on all of us to use it. Finally, I go back to asking all of you, if you are not members, to join, and if you are that you try and get new members for TICCIH. A great part of the importance of an institution depends on the number of members it has: you will find the membership form on the web page. Top ´The Industrial Landscape´, Nº3, Winter 1998Dr Peter Wakelin
The concept of the ´industrial landscape´ has interested archaeologists, geographers and historians for years. Some wide ranging landscape surveys and area conservation schemes have shown the potential for this approach. But protection legislation in most countries deals with monuments in isolation, while national parks cover such large areas that fine detail in the landscape can seldom be considered. Industrial archaeologists still seem bound by a monument-based mind-set, and often have blind-spots when examining the total fabric of the environment. A truly holistic approach should encompass every aspect of a landscape´s surfaces, boundaries, watercourses, vegetation, buildings, routeways.
New approaches to industrial landscapes continue to be developed. One important initiative has been the publication of the Register of Landscapes of Outstanding Historic Interest in Wales , the first document of its kind in the world. This was produced in 1998 by Cadw as the national heritage agency for Wales, with the Countryside Council for Wales and ICOMOS UK. The Register defines 14 landscapes of industrial interest, including the iron town of Merthyr Tydfil, the Blaenau Ffestiniog slate quarrying area, and the Parys Mountain copper mines. Although registration does not involve additional legal powers, it develops appreciation of the historic qualities of landscapes and is a material consideration for local authorities in preparing development policies.
In many cases the Register is being followed by further projects to record, study, conserve and interpret. The Blaenavon Industrial Landscape is included as one of the finest examples in the world of a landscape created by coal-mining and iron-making in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The exposed upland of Blaenavon was virtually unsettled until a major ironworks was created there in 1788. Unlike almost all previous ironworks, it was built with three coke blast furnaces and was operated entirely with steam power. It became immediately one of the largest in the world. An associated landscape extends for 30 km 2 , all controlled historically by the iron company - consisting of iron ore patches, coal mines, limestone quarries, iron forges, brickworks, pathways, tramroads with their tunnels and inclines, reservoirs, leats, scattered workers´ housing, and a grid-plan company town around the church, chapels, works school and ironmaster´s mansion. These remains, when seen as an integrated landscape, reflect many of the key dynamics of the Industrial Revolution. A visit is on the programme of the TICCIH 2000 conference.
Understanding and management of the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape are being advanced through a partnership of local councils, government agencies and others. The main local authority, Torfaen, has commissioned a study to examine ways of managing the landscape and regenerating the area, and its official development plan now incorporates a statement that no proposals will be permitted which would prejudice the landscape´s historical integrity. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales is undertaking an aerial mapping survey, using digital techniques to plot the entire topography of the area. Further Landscape Characterisation studies will identify feature types, and define their management. The most important individual assets - Big Pit historic mine and the outstanding remains of Blaenavon Ironworks itself -are conserved and open to the public. Legal protection has been given to a range of features, through Conservation Areas, the Listing of 100 individual buildings, and the designation of 15 Scheduled Ancient Monuments, the highest level of protection for archaeological sites in the UK. These include extensive earthworks of former scouring, mining and tipping, one of which covers 40 ha. Further areas of geological and ecological value have been designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Nearly all of the landscape is publicly accessible, and interpretation is being developed through guided walks, site panels, publications and a CD-ROM.
Projects like those for the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape are challenging, but they show the potential through partnerships for the holistic evaluation and care of some of our most important historic industrial areas. At last, we are able not just to talk about industrial landscapes, but actively to study and conserve them. Top ´Challenges to industrial heritage´ Nº2, Autumn 1998Professor Louis Bergeron, Honary President of TICCIH
The main challenges these years to the industrial heritage no doubt are the result of the massive closures which, for a number of reasons and over the two or three last decades, have hit the big mining sites and iron- or steelworks all over the old industrialised countries. The bigger that kind of heritage is, the more endangered it is. Its values, which are often technological rather than architectural, in most cases, make it hardly intelligible except to the crowds of workers and to the teams of engineers who formerly used to work there - and who will by and by disappear, not in all cases bearing an interest besides to the context of their past professional careers. Big industrial heritage sites are always at odds with their environment because of the consequences of the pollution. They are the kind of physical remains which are exposed to quick and radical decisions of demolition because of the kind of landscape they generated - which seems to be a symbol of a natural distress or of an historical failure.
The national associations for the conservation of industrial heritage are expressing a deep concern about that situation. The American Society for Industrial Archaeology held its annual conference in 1997 in the very heart of the Upper Michigan copper and iron mining district which is, more or less, a field of ruins. The Russian TICCIH section is strongly supporting plans for the preservation of various industrial remains all around the Middle Urals area, which was the cradle of the modern metal industry in that country. TICCIH Board is associated with the Hungarian committee in preparing a 1999 intermediate conference focussing on the destiny of the huge complexes inherited from the communist era in northern Hungary. In France the fight remains a permanent one in Lorraine in favour of the preservation and reuse of the last prominent and productive coal mines and of some testimonies of the 20th century iron and steel industry. Even in Germany, a country which won World Heritage List distinction in 1994 for the blast furnaces in Völklingen, Saarland, there is trouble today about the completion of an adequate programme of re-use and cultural enhancement.
It is TICCIH´s duty and will to support, through scientific meetings and also by means of its international journal, which should appear in a few months, any attempts to a correct selection of the most significant sites, the search for a new agreement between industrial heritage and the environment, and for a means of reinserting such industrial monuments into the urban or regional planning and into the culture and the memory of the inhabitants over several generations. Top |
