Browse

From the 1880s, a new type of designed green space appeared in the industrial landscape in Britain and the USA, the factory pleasure garden and recreation park, and some companies opened allotment gardens for local children. Initially inspired by the landscapes of industrial villages in the UK, progressive American and British industrialists employed landscape and garden architects to improve the advantages and aesthetic of their factories. In the US, these landscapes were created at a time of the USA’s ascendancy as the world’s leading industrial nation. The factory garden and park movement flourished between the Wars, driven by the belief in the value of gardens and parks to employee welfare and to recruitment and retention. Arguably above all, in an age of burgeoning mass media, factory landscaping represented calculated exercises in public relations, materially contributing to advertising and the development of attractive corporate identities. Following the Second World War the Americans led the way in corporate landscaping as suburban office campuses, estates and parks multiplied. In the twenty-first century a refreshed approach brings designs closer in spirit to pioneering early twentieth century factory landscapes. This book gives the first comprehensive and comparative account of the contribution of gardens, gardening and sports to the history of responsible capitalism and ethical working practices from multiple critical perspectives and draws together the existing literature with key primary material from some of the most innovative and best documented of the corporate landscapes; Cadbury, the National Cash Register Company, Shredded Wheat and Spirella Corsets.

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.