Hilary Orange - Reanimating Industrial Spaces: Conducting Memory Work in Post-industrial Societies

REANIMATING INDUSTRIAL SPACES

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REANIMATING INDUSTRIAL SPACES

Conducting Memory Work in Post-industrial Societies

Hilary Orange

Editor

First published 2015 by Left Coast Press, Inc.

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Reanimating industrial spaces: conducting memory work in post-industrial societies/ edited by Hilary Orange.

pages cm. (Publications of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London; 66)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61132-168-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61132-170-8 (institutional eBook) ISBN 978-1-62958-037-1 (consumer eBook)

1. Industrial locationHistory. 2. Industrial archaeology. 3. Collective memory. 4. Social history. I. Orange, Hilary.

HC79.D5R43 2014

609.009dc23

2014021820

ISBN 978-1-61132-168-5 hardback

Contents

Introduction
Hilary Orange

Telephone communications, a jewellery workshop, an iron foundry and a car plant: the industrial spaces which formed the settings of the postwar biographies of my family. The town of Leamington Spa, in Warwickshire, England, is better known for its Victorian spa rather than its light manufacturing. Conversely, Warwickshire is known as Shakespeare country, as the poet was born up the road in Stratford-on-Avon. At family gatherings, however, the focus of conversations rarely turned to Victorians or Elizabethan poets but instead to memories of work; the opportunity to reminisce over what used to be on this or that street, as well as the subsequent fates of former workmates and bosses. My background and time spent living in the East Midlands towards the end of the miners strike has strongly influenced my interest in the archaeology of twentieth-century British industries, my research on the post-closure landscape and communities of Cornish tin and copper mining, and ultimately my decision to edit this volume.

This volume grew out of two symposia: the first Reanimating Industrial Spaces session was held at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) meeting in Durham, England, in December 2009 (co-organised with Sefryn Penrose). The second session was held at the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) meeting in Den Haag, Netherlands, in September 2010 (co-chaired with Emily Glass). The session at TAG explored cross-disciplinary approaches towards memory work (including ethnography) within post-industrial or deindustrialising settings. Despite the session being scheduled for the afternoon of the last day of the conference, and with heavy snow starting to fall, we were delighted to showcase a range of papers from researchers working in archaeology, the arts, geography and anthropology to an enthusiastic audience. The suggestion to consider a publication was muted before everyone rushed off to catch trains and to try to extricate their cars from snowbound car parks.