Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation 9781789202915

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K Constructing Industrial Pasts L

MAKING SENSE OF HISTORY Studies in Historical Cultures General Editor: Stefan Berger Founding Editor: Jörn Rüsen Bridging the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory, this series crosses the boundaries between both academic disciplines and cultural, social, political and historical contexts. In an age of rapid globalization, which tends to manifest itself on an economic and political level, locating the cultural practices involved in generating its underlying historical sense is an increasingly urgent task. Recent volumes: Volume 38 Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation Edited by Stefan Berger Volume 37 The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession Edited by Stefan Berger Volume 36 Contemplating Historical Consciousness: Notes from the Field Edited by Anna Clark and Carla L. Peck Volume 35 Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education Tyson Retz Volume 34 The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility Edited by Stefan Helgesson and Jayne Svenungsson Volume 33 History and Belonging: Representations of the Past in Contemporary European Politics Edited by Stefan Berger and Caner Tekin Volume 32 Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850–1970 Edited by Pertti Haapala, Marja Jalava, and Simon Larsson Volume 31 Contesting Deregulation: Debates, Practices and Developments in the West since the 1970s Edited by Knud Andresen and Stefan Müller Volume 30 Cultural Borders of Europe: Narratives, Concepts and Practices in the Present and the Past Edited by Mats Andrén, Thomas Lindkvist, Ingmar Söhrman, and Katharina Vajta Volume 29 The Mirror of the Medieval: An Anthropology of the Western Historical Imagination K. Patrick Fazioli For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/making-sense-of-history

CONSTRUCTING INDUSTRIAL PASTS Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation

Edited by Stefan Berger

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Stefan Berger All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2019026287

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-290-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-291-5 ebook

Contents

List of Figures, Maps and Tables

vii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction. Preconditions for the Making of an Industrial Past: Comparative Perspectives Stefan Berger

1

Chapter 1. ‘Sooty Manchester’: (Re)Presenting an Urban-Industrial Landscape Paul Pickering

27

Chapter 2. Where Is ‘Red Clydeside’? Industrial Heritage, Working-Class Culture and Memory in the Glasgow Region Arthur McIvor

47

Chapter 3. Industrial Heritage as Place Making: The Case of Wales Bella Dicks

68

Chapter 4. The Steel Industry in Welsh History and Heritage Louise Miskell

91

Chapter 5. Cornish Mining Heritage and Cornish Identity: Images, Representations and Narratives Hilary Orange

107

Chapter 6. Industrial Heritage and the Remaking of Class Identity: Are We All Middle Class Now? Laurajane Smith

128

vi

Contents

Chapter 7. The Agents of Industrial Heritage in the Midst of Structural Transformation of the Latrobe Valley, Australia Erik Eklund Chapter 8. ‘Hardly a Cause for Tears’: Job Insecurity and Occupational Psychology Culture in Italy – Oral Narratives from the Falck Steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni, Milan Roberta Garruccio

146

160

Chapter 9. Between Dream and Nightmare: Political Conventions of the Industrial Past in the North of France Marion Fontaine

184

Chapter 10. Memory Culture and Identity Constructions in the Ruhr Valley in Germany Stefan Berger and Jana Golombek

199

Chapter 11. Sounds of Decline: Industrial Echoes in Asturian Music Rubén Vega García

216

Chapter 12. The Coal-Environment Nexus: How Nostalgic Identity Burdens Heritage in Romania’s Jiu Valley David A. Kideckel

228

Chapter 13. A Special Kind of Cultural Heritage: The Remembrance of Workers’ Life in Contemporary Hungary – Case Study of Ózd Tibor Valuch

242

Chapter 14. Ruins for Politics: Selling Industrial Heritage in Postsocialist China’s Rust Belt Tong Lam

251

Chapter 15. The Heritage of the Chinese Eastern Railway: Symbol of Colonization and International Cooperation Zhao Xin and Qu Xiaofan

270

Conclusion. Narrativizations of an Industrial Past: Labour, the Environment and the Construction of Space in Comparative Perspective Stefan Berger Index

288 306

Figures, Maps and Tables

Figures 5.1 The mining landscape viewed from Carn Brea during the event ‘Smoking Chimneys’, June 2008

108

5.2 Wheal Coates, St Agnes

114

5.3 Mural on facade of Co-op supermarket in Barras Street, Liskeard

115

5.4 Cornish Tin Miner memorial by David Annand, Redruth

117

5.5 The Cornish Mining Man Engine, Geevor Mine, Cornwall

118

5.6 The St Just Miner’s Statue by Colin Caffell, Pendeen

121

13.1 Population of Ózd between 1920 and 2014

244

13.2 Development of the headcount in the forge in Ózd between 1930 and 1998

245

14.1 Exhibitions of the Liupanshui Third Front Construction Museum

259

14.2 An old worker walking past a construction hoarding that advertises the soon-to-be-completed Third Front theme park

260

14.3 A model showing a housing development inside the Liupanshui Urban Planning Exhibition Center

261

14.4 Workers frantically trying to finish the construction of a Third Front theme park

261

viii

Figures, Maps and Tables

14.5 Workers from a defunct Third Front shipping building plant in Panzhihua showing a redevelopment blueprint to potential investors

266

14.6 Shao Zeyun continues to stay in a derelict dormitory of his former company after his retirement

267

15.1 A train is running on the Binzhou Line

271

15.2 The connecting point of Chinese Eastern Railway and The Great Siberia Railway in Manchouli

277

15.3 A hundred-year engine garage in Beketu Town, Yakeshi City, along the CER

281

15.4 A whole moved station of Anda

282

Maps 2.1 Map of Glasgow: Major industrial sites, c. 1950 15.1 Map of Chinese Eastern Railway

52 274

Tables 2.1 Employment in main industries on Clydeside, 1951

53

4.1 Numbers employed at selected Welsh steel plants, 1974/1975–1979/1980

97

6.1 Heritage sites, museums and exhibitions of labour and working-class heritage and dates interviews were undertaken

132

6.2 Demographics of the interview population at industrial and working-class heritage sites compared to the demographics of the overall study

134

15.1 Important railway heritage sites along the Binzhou Line

283

Abbreviations

ABC

Administration Bureau of the CER

AfD

Alternative für Deutschland

AHD

‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’

APM

Australian Paper Mills

CBDC

Cardiff Bay Development Corporation

CDF

Charbonnages de France

CER

Chinese Eastern Railway

CGT

Confédération générale du travail

EC

European Commission

EU

European Union

GARDS

Gippsland Asbestos-Related Diseases Support Inc.

HBNPC

Houillères nationales du bassin Nord-pas-de-Calais

IBA

International Building Exhibition

ITC

International Tin Council

NGO

Non-governmental organizations

PCF

Parti Communiste Français

PMR

Romanian Workers’ Party

SECV

State Electricity Commission of Victoria

SOHC

Scottish Oral History Centre

SOVROM Soviet-Romanian ventures SPSS

Statistical Package for the Social Sciences

x

Abbreviations

TICCIH

The International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage

UN

United Nations

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WAZ

Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung

WDR

Westdeutscher Rundfunk

WIMM

Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum

INTRODUCTIO N

Preconditions for the Making of an Industrial Past Comparative Perspectives Stefan Berger

Introduction Industrial heritage, historical culture and regional identity are deeply interconnected in all regions/cities undergoing structural transformation from an industrial past to a post-industrial future. To what extent the past was useful in this process of reinvention and how it was used has differed widely across a range of different regions around the globe.1 This volume sheds further light on how the memorialization of industrial pasts has contributed to processes of reinventing cities and regions once closely identified with industry. The contributions assembled here ask who has been doing the memorizing and to what end things have been memorialized. As we shall see, memory agents can be grass-roots initiatives but also states, regional and local governments as well as businesses or trade unions and many others more. The very complexity of the web of memory activists around issues of industrial heritage makes for a great deal of contestation when it comes to particular narratives that link the past with the present and the future.2 As Paul A. Shackel and Matthew Palus have argued, narratives of labour and of the working class are particularly in danger of being silenced and downplayed in official heritage discourses.3 This is a claim widely echoed in the literature coming from critical heritage studies.4 Another prominent claim in the litNotes for this section begin on page 23.

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erature is that commercial interests related to the touristification of industrial pasts loom large in considerations to develop heritage sites and overshadow all other considerations.5 These economic motives can create great tensions with more community-oriented attempts to retain a sense of home for communities often devastated by processes of deindustralization.6 Region or city branding is not the same as providing a place where people feel at home, yet it may, again in complex ways, contribute towards it. More recently, scholars have paid quite a bit of attention to the relationship between feelings of nostalgia for a particular place and the imagination of its future. There seems to be a growing consensus that nostalgia should not exclusively be seen as a reactionary, backward-looking sentiment. Instead, the powerful emotion of nostalgia can also mobilize resources in order to help protect values and life forms that remain valuable in the present but are threatened with extinction by economic and cultural change. Deindustrialization has threatened, in particular, working-class communities with poverty, marginalization and a sense of being thrown onto the garbage heap of history. Developing a sense of nostalgia around industrial heritage might empower those communities to retain a sense of pride in the past. It allows them to rescue values and ideas into the present, where they can be used to defend different ideas surrounding economic order, politics, social life and cultural representations to the dominant ones in often neoliberal post-industrial settings – at least in the Western world.7 Sherry Lee Linkon’s analysis of American poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, film and drama similarly comes to the conclusion that representations of deindustralization are a powerful resource strengthening American workers facing massive economic restructuring.8 The chapters in this volume take up many of these themes prominent in the current research on deindustrialization. In fact, many of the contributors are historians rather than heritage scholars per se, which is why heritage on subsequent pages tends to be discussed within the context of post-industrial history. As such, though, the volume is also testimony of an increased interest in heritage among public, economic, cultural and social historians. This introduction will compare the economic, political and cultural preconditions for the emergence of memorial cultures of industrial pasts in different parts of the world. It will, first, review to what extent the diverse regions that are being discussed here have undergone economic changes that have put them onto the path of a new post-industrial future. As we shall see, success or failure in achieving such economic transformation has had a considerable impact on the memorial landscape of the industrial past of those regions. In the second section of this introduction, we will add to this an argument, also emerging from the contributions to this volume. It attaches great importance to the politics of economic transformation. The way in which political sup-

Introduction

3

port was mobilized for particular visions of the industrial past underpinning post-industrial futures was key to the successful implementation of industrial memory narratives. In the third and final section of the introduction, we shift our attention from politics to culture, asking to what extent the contributions to this volume highlight the importance of cultural institutions and actors for the development of particular memory narratives about the industrial past. Overall, we intend to demonstrate in this introduction the intricate interconnection of economic, political and cultural factors in the making of industrial heritage and memory discourses on industrial pasts.

Economic Changes in Post-industrializing Landscapes Manchester in England has been to many the most iconic place of the industrial revolution. So much so that most other countries that industrialized after England have dubbed one of its cities that was among the early industrializers ‘its’ Manchester – thus Tampere is the Finnish Manchester, Chemnitz is the German Manchester etc., etc. The original Manchester, as Paul Pickering recalls in his chapter, was the world centre of the cotton industry in the nineteenth century, its production peaking just before the outbreak of World War I. From then on, it went into decline and, from the 1960s, into economic freefall, when a cotton mill a week was closing in and around Manchester. When I first visited Manchester in 1987, I had not seen urban decay in Europe on a similar scale. The centre of the city seemed destroyed: the roofs of warehouses had collapsed; trees were growing out of them; the signs of unbridled deindustrialization were all around the city. Regeneration started in the 1990s, but city developers have not been paying too much attention to its rich industrial heritage. Where it could be integrated into the new commercial and housing developments, it was – usually without much reference to the past. Where it could not, it was simply erased. The muchcommented on ‘Manchester miracle’ in the 2000s brought a burst of new jobs and a new lease of life to the city, but this economic boom remained completely unrelated to the past, which seemed to many in the city an embarrassment rather than an inspiration. Some of the property developers in the Manchester area have discovered the language of history as a means of generating a hefty profit from re-purposing old mills and turning them into expensive and sought-after office space or flats. Such commercialization of industrial heritage basks in the aesthetic glow of yesterday without encouraging any deeper understanding of the historical development of a place and its values and identities – not only in Manchester.9 Glasgow’s industrial experience, as recalled in Arthur McIvor’s chapter, was more diverse than that of Manchester. It was built on textiles but also

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on coal mining, iron and steel, engineering, shipbuilding, the dockyards and chemical manufacturing. It was the foremost industrial city of Scotland and one of the key industrial hubs in Britain throughout much of the long nineteenth century. Deindustrialization hit the city hard. By 1991, industrial jobs in the city were only 19 per cent of the total; forty years earlier it had been 50 per cent. In Glasgow, like in Manchester, there has been an astonishing economic revival of the city since the 1990s onwards. Yet, as McIvor argues in his chapter, the industrial past of the city and the wider region (Clydeside) has been completely marginalized by the economic rebranding of the city as a temple of consumption that is home to great architecture and nightlife. Like in Manchester, the significant time lag between the demise of industrial Glasgow and the rise of the new post-industrial city would appear to have a lot to do with the silencing of industrial heritage in the process of economic regeneration.10 Britain is now an increasingly multinational state, and therefore the industrial and national museums of Scotland and Wales treat the industrial revolution primarily as a Scottish and Welsh phenomenon. Bella Dicks, in her chapter on Wales, recalls the importance of early industrial development in Wales, which today justifies the claim that Wales rather than England should be regarded as the mother country of the Industrial Revolution.11 Copper, iron and coal in the south, but also slate in the north and wool in the west, were the pillars on which Wales’s industrial success came to rest. If Wales was an early industrializer, there are, today, hardly any industries left. The wool and slate industries in the west and north have gone; coal went in the aftermath of the disastrous miners’ strike of 1984/5; and of the once proud steel industry only one plant, Port Talbot, remains open and is battling to survive. Deindustrialization has been comprehensive, and attempts at structural economic change have not been very successful. In fact, as Dicks points out, Wales today belongs to one of the poorest regions of Europe with about one fourth of the Welsh population living in poverty. Like elsewhere in Britain, the regeneration of former industrial areas in Wales from the 1990s onwards was taking place within a neoliberal framework that valued the participation of private entrepreneurs and an orientation of institutions towards the market and profitability. Those who took charge often had no interest in the industrial past and its multiple layers of meaning, especially if that past ran counter to the neoliberal present. Thus, Dicks recalls the lack of interest in the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation in the Industrial and Maritime Museum located there. For the people in charge, it was an embarrassment – a reminder of a grimy past that was everything that the new bay area was supposed not to be. We see here the typical distancing from the past that seems so characteristic of areas where the economic transformation from industrial to post-industrial landscapes could not be presented as a success story.

Introduction

5

The net result was often the silencing of that past, or at least of aspects of that past that could not be presented in triumphalist colours. In her contribution to this volume, Louise Miskell reflects on the silence surrounding the heritage of steel making in Wales. In comparison to coal, copper, tinplate, and even slate and wool, it is hardly represented in the memorial landscape of industrial heritage in Wales. According to Miskell, this may well have something to do with timing: whereas the high points of many of the other Welsh industries already came in the Victorian and Edwardian periods and declined from then on, the high point of steel production in Wales is post-1945. It was brief, because by the 1970s the steel industry in Wales, as elsewhere in the Western world, was in deep crisis. Massive deindustralization in Britain, during the 1980s and 1990s, by now a familiar story, had no place for industrial heritage. The usual pattern was to get rid of the remnants of industry as quickly and comprehensively as possible and to replace it with something shiny and new – from new shopping centres to leisure centres to industrial parks. Miskell also notes that exceptions to the rule mainly occurred in areas remote from the urban centres, where opportunities for the commercial redevelopment of sites were more difficult to realize. Whether it is heritage sites like the Llechwedd Slate Caverns in North Wales, or Big Pit in Blaenavon or the Rhondda Heritage Park in the Rhondda Valley, they all succeeded for lack of alternatives of what to do with the sites after they had closed. The contributions on the different national components of Britain concludes with Hilary Orange’s look at the tin and copper mines of Cornwall, which had their heydays in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. By the mid nineteenth century, Cornish copper dominated world production, and every third employed Cornishman was a miner. Thereafter, the industry declined until it came to an effective end by the late nineteenth century. After World War I, only about twenty mines survived, many of them in poor conditions, and after World War II, only three mines had any significant production going in Cornwall. The last mine closed in 1998. Given that they were often located in rural areas, there was little pressure on redevelopment once they had become derelict. Quite the contrary, the increasing touristification of Cornwall from the nineteenth century onwards transformed these mining sites into picturesque eyecatchers on the spectacular Cornish coastlines. It made a lot of sense economically to maintain and preserve those monuments of early industrial heritage and use them as attractions to the millions of visitors flocking to Cornwall every year. Yet, for many years this is not what happened, largely because cultural institutions reimagining Cornwall found no space for mining in its conceptualizations of Cornwall.12 Moving away from Britain but staying within the Anglo-world, we are confronted with a different time frame for deindustrialization in Erik Eklund’s chapter on the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia. If the chapters

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on Britain have dealt with cases such as Manchester, Glasgow, Cornwall and Wales, where deindustrialization already started in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, and if many other chapters dealing with the Western world start deindustrialization from the 1960s onwards, we have here a case where deindustrialization is a contemporary process. The state-owned open-pit coal mines and power stations in the Latrobe Valley still produce two thirds of Victoria’s energy supply, but the future of both industries is uncertain in the face of strong environmental concerns. One major power station, Hazelwood, closed in 2017. Hence the beginning deindustrialization of the Latrobe Valley is also raising the spectre of what to do with the industrial heritage in the region. Yet, as Eklund explains, once again timing is crucial: as long as all eyes are on the economic situation and how to facilitate economic change in the region, it is very difficult for industrial heritage to get any attention. Eklund’s chapter seems to confirm that industrial heritage is like the owl of Minerva – it only flies out at dusk, when the sun has set and the fate of industry is sealed. And yet, as we have also seen in our British examples, it should not be sealed for too long, and its sunset should not be connected with shameful or problematical sequence of events, if the owl is to fly rather than to crash. The time frame is also slightly different in the deindustrialization story that is at the heart of Rubén Vega García’s account of Asturias. Under Franco’s dictatorship and even in the early years of the transition to democracy, many Asturian industries, especially its state-owned mining, were protected by the state. Hence it is only really during the 1980s and 1990s that we see massive deindustrialization hit the region. It is not yet complete but rather ongoing, although the end, as far as coal is concerned, happened, like in Germany, in 2018. Yet, overall, the economic change is more recent than in Germany, France or Italy. And structural economic change also is far less successful than in Germany and France and perhaps on a par with Italy, where it is also unclear what will replace those industries in years to come.13 In the Latrobe Valley and in Asturias, then, only time will tell to what extent the ongoing economic restructuring of the region will find a place for its industrial heritage. With Roberta Garruccio’s chapter on Sesto San Giovanni, we are back on more familiar territory with regard to the timeline of deindustrialization. Sesto went from being the fifth most important industrial site in Italy in the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s to an almost entirely deindustrialized place in the 1990s – with the last of the major Falck factories closing in 1994. Since then, the economic restructuring of the city has not been very successful, and the transition from a foremost place of industry to a post-industrial future is still somewhat uncertain. The former places of industry remain – as wastelands and empty spaces.

Introduction

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Marion Fontaine’s chapter on the Nord-Pas-de-Calais also recalls the familiar story of deindustrialization, which saw the first mines close in the 1960s with the last mine gone in the 1990s (and in the whole of France by 2004). The state-owned mining company set up a historical mining centre in Douai in 1984, partly to have a place to house its records and partly to celebrate the technical and entrepreneurial achievements of the French mining industry, as seen by its bosses. Whilst industrial heritage had a key institutional voice and found state support in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the promises of economic restructuring reiterated from the national governments from the 1980s onwards began to rang increasingly hollow as the region became more and more impoverished; the young had little choice but to move away, whilst those stranded in the region began to turn to the political right. It is surely no coincidence that the one place where, comparatively speaking, economic restructuring was most successful (albeit not without its own problems), i.e. in the Ruhr region of Germany, industrial heritage has been blossoming, as detailed in the chapter by Berger and Golombek. The strong corporatist management of the demise of heavy industry in the Ruhr from the 1960s onwards could not prevent the transformation of the Ruhr from industrial powerhouse of Germany to one of the country’s key economic problem areas. Over a period of almost sixty years, the region’s population shrank from six and a half million to just under five and a half million. Yet despite the manifold social problems that went alongside deindustrialization, major social hardship of those losing their jobs was, by and large, avoided, and new industries were attracted to the region. An upbeat assessment of the region’s industrial past, underlined by an impressive array of industrial heritage initiatives, was the foil against which to develop upbeat ideas in the present about the future development of the region along postindustrial lines. With David Kideckel’s chapter on the Jiu Valley in Romania, we are entering the section that deals with post-communist scenarios of deindustrialization. The Jiu Valley as foremost coal-producing area of Romania has a long history going back to the early twentieth century. Yet it was with the post-1945 communist era in Romanian history that the miner became an iconic figure associated with being the archetypal proletarian.14 In the post-communist period, therefore, mining was still very much associated with communism and a communist past now widely discredited.15 When mining under the liberal market regime of post-communist Romania and the EU was condemned to the dustbin of history, miners had little choice in the matter. Economic restructuring took place to some extent, with foreign Austrian investment into logging the forests of the Jiu Valley. There is also the growth of tourism to the Valley – with restaurants opening up to cater for the growing demand. Given that all this provided far less employment than

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mining, it still left many former miners with a very uncertain future. Tibor Valuch paints an even bleaker picture of deindustrialization, in the city of Ózd in Hungary, which is a former steelworks town devastated by the closure of the steel mill in the mid 1990s. With no strategy of economic revival of the town, one third of the population left, with much of the remainder being long-term unemployed with no future prospects. Unsuccessful economic restructuring in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism together with the post-communist identification of heavy industry with the communist past have not provided any favourable background for the development of industrial memorial landscapes in post-communist Eastern Europe. The final two contributions of the volume are dedicated to China. Tong Lam recalls the fate of the ‘Third Front’ industrialization: when China felt threatened by both the USA and the USSR in the 1960s, the Communist Party under Chairman Mao decided to shift many of the key industries from the coastal areas and plains of central China to the more difficult and mountainous hinterland of southern China. Whole factories were dismantled and rebuilt or completely built from scratch in areas that had previously seen little industrialization. This came with a massive population shift into these areas of both engineers and workers. The success of these ‘Third Front’ policies were mixed at best. Many of the projected factories never worked properly, and some were still not finished when the plan was ultimately given up in the 1980s. With the opening up of China to liberal market economics after 1978, the economic centres re-established themselves in the coastal areas and central plains of China, whilst the empty shells of the ‘Third Front’ industries often languished in great economic difficulties. Whilst the economic preconditions for industrial heritage initiatives were therefore also rather poor, as we shall see in the next section, the entirely different political context (in comparison to post-communist Eastern Europe) made all the difference in China. Zhao Xin and Qu Xiaofan, in their chapter on the North-East of China, are dealing with another economic problem area of contemporary China. Having been one of its industrial powerhouses from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1970s, its state-run industries, including coal and steel, found it difficult to compete in the new turbo-capitalism that was unleashed by the Communist Party in the last two decades of the twentieth century.16 Whilst it remains unclear in China’s North-East to what extent the memorial landscape of its industrial past can play a role in ongoing efforts at economic restructuring, Zhao’s and Qu’s chapter highlights the added difficulty of squaring memorial narratives of industrialization with an imperialist non-Chinese past, as both Russia and Japan played an important role in the industrialization of China’s North-East.17 All contributions to this volume point to the enormous impact of the specifics of economic change on the shaping of historical and memory cul-

Introduction

9

tures surrounding the industrial past of former industrial regions. Where this economic change could be presented as having been at least partially successful, such as in the Ruhr region of Germany, it was much easier to develop rich historical cultures around industrial heritage sites than in regions, where deindustrialization only left desolation and destruction, such as in the US and parts of the UK, or in post-communist Eastern Europe.

The Politics of Economic Change and Industrial Heritage Yet economics alone does not sufficiently explain the success or failure of industrial heritage initiatives. In many parts of the world, politics was also vital in determining the success and shape of industrial heritage initiatives. In Manchester, political support for industrial heritage seems, on the surface of things, high. The mayor of the city and key city officials are cited by Paul Pickering in his chapter as being enthusiastic supporters of industrial heritage, and the wider public is overwhelmingly in favour of preserving it. But all of these statements are of more recent vintage. In a reasonably successful post-industrial Manchester, politicians and the people are rediscovering industrial heritage as a source of local pride and an inspiration for future generations of Mancunians to shape the city as successfully as their nineteenth-century predecessors had done. However, between the 1970s and the 2000s, before the ‘Manchester miracle’, a very different gaze onto industrial heritage dominated the scene. The mills were the icons of a dark and satanic past that had to be overcome, got rid of, purged, and that is why so many of them fell victim to demolition and cannot now be brought back in a different political climate. Arthur McIvor in his chapter points to the political difficulties that a neoliberal Labour Party in Glasgow had with the legacy of ‘Red Clydeside’, one of Europe’s foremost socialist strongholds in the interwar period.18 For a party that was, in the 1990s, desperately trying to shed the socialist elements of its past, this heritage of Glasgow’s working classes had become an embarrassment to be forgotten, and not to be celebrated. Hence, city politics militated against a strong memorial culture surrounding workers’ lives, workplaces and struggles that ultimately produced Glasgow’s socialism and a vision of society far removed from the Labour Party’s ‘third way’ and its ‘stakeholder society’ idea of the 1990s. The memory of Red Clydeside, as McIvor recalls, had also underpinned many of Glasgow’s working classes’ epic industrial struggles against deindustrialization from the 1960s to the 1980s – it was thus associated with a politics of industrial militancy that New Labour wanted to overcome. The silencing of industrial heritage in Glasgow was thus steeped in politics.

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The political scene in Wales has long been divided: whereas in the coalfields and port cities of the south the Labour Party was the dominant party of local government, in the more Welsh-speaking and more rural western and northern parts of Wales, the nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, had its stronghold. The once powerful Liberal Party was not influential anymore in Wales after 1945, and the Conservative Party, for long stretches so dominant in national British politics, never played an important role in Wales. For the politics of industrial heritage making, this meant that a labourist agenda, powerfully underwritten by a group of left-wing social historians, came to dominate the scene. The working-class heritage of South Wales, in particular the heritage of the coalfields, was prioritized. At loggerheads with the national British Conservative governments, the labourist political framework of South Wales, often dominant locally, developed its own culture of industrial heritage as a political counter-project to the neoliberalization of British politics pursued at the centre by the governments of Margaret Thatcher.19 Whereas the Conservatives at national level were not keen to preserve remnants of an industrial past that it wanted to condemn to the dustbin of history, in South Wales there was considerable political resistance to this strategy. Hence, whatever remained of the memory of the industrial past in South Wales is rooted in local and regional rather than in national strategies for the preservation of industrial heritage. This is true for the South Wales coalfields but also for some of South Wales’ major cities, including its capital, Cardiff. Louise Miskell gives the example of Cardiff City Council’s decision to redevelop the city as a major maritime hub in the 1980s, thereby prioritizing the city’s maritime history over its many other histories, including that of steel making. When the East Moors steelworks in the vicinity of the Bay area of Cardiff closed, it was simply demolished to make way for new housing and office developments. Although the steelworks had been of major importance for the development of the city after 1945, no memorial landscape to it remains today. The prioritization of some parts of industrial history over others thus has had vital consequences for the memorial landscape of industrialization in the Welsh capital. Whilst local initiatives in contradistinction to the absence of national British ones were often important for industrial heritage in the context of massive deindustrialization in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, another key factor for the prominence of industrial heritage in Wales (and partly also in Scotland) was the rise of national consciousness on the Celtic periphery of Britain. Since the 1980s, the consciousness of Britain as a multinational state has grown, which is why independent national stories have been developing in Scotland and Wales.20 Rather than referring to Britain as first industrial nation, there is now a strong discourse of referring to Scotland and Wales

Introduction

11

respectively as ‘first industrial nations’ thereby rivalling England’s claim (and, by and large, ignoring the existence of England just as England/Britain ignored the existence of Scotland and Wales for centuries).21 The strong connections of industrial heritage initiatives in Wales and Scotland to nationalizing tendencies and narratives is mirrored in Cornwall, as explicated in Hilary Orange’s contribution to this volume. The revival of diverse nationalist movements and ideas in Cornwall has been making good use of tropes such as ‘the Cornish miner’, ‘Cousin Jack’ and ‘the industrial Celt’. The emergence of ethnic and cultural nationalism in Wales was partly a response to mass tourism and massive immigration from English retirees and wealthy second homeowners from the 1960s onwards. Similar developments have spawned anti-English sentiments in Cornwall. The nationalist political imagination was important in producing new industrial heritage narratives in Cornwall. It was also responsible for effectively nationalizing the world heritage ‘Cornwall and West Devon mining landscape’ that came into being in 2006 as a result of a number of local authorities in Cornwall and Devon joining forces with seventy other organizations to apply successfully for World Heritage status. In Cornwall, the ‘West Devon’ bit of that application was subsequently often conveniently overlooked, as a transnational heritage landscape did not easily fit into a nationalizing political agenda. For Britain then, we can say that nationalism in the Celtic fringe was a fertile ground for industrial heritage that could be related to nationalizing agendas. Neoliberal political frameworks, by contrast, with their deindustrializing agendas, opened up few spaces for industrial heritage in Britain. We can observe the latter negative connection also in Australia. Deindustrialization in the Latrobe Valley is directly connected to a neoliberal politics of privatization of the previously state-owned mines and power companies, which resulted in massive job losses in the 1990s. Closures of pits and power stations began in 2014 and will probably be ongoing in future years. Given the rawness of the process of economic restructuring, the politics in the region is not focusing on industrial heritage, but rather on how to stabilize the economic prospects of the region. The new private owners of the mines and power stations have little commitment to history or heritage, instead focusing on community relations and on emphasizing their allegedly good environmental credentials. In continental Western Europe, the more highly developed corporatist arrangements produced a more conducive political framework for industrial heritage initiatives.22 Nowhere was this more the case than in Germany, where the massive heritagization of the Ruhr started out as a Social Democratic project for cementing their political hegemony over the region. Eventually, an all-party consensus underpinned industrial heritage initiatives that were also supported by business and trade union representatives as well as

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social movements from below. The homogeneity of the ‘mindscape’23 that has been produced by that heritage is an ongoing problem for the region, as is argued in Berger’s and Golombek’s chapter below, but there can be no doubt that the depth and breadth of industrial heritage initiatives in the Ruhr would not have been possible without such broad political support. Political initiatives in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, as explained by Marion Fontaine, often in conjunction with business interests, have also been vital in promoting a range of heritage initiatives. They invariably had a dual purpose: first, to strengthen the local pride and identification of the people with their mining heritage and, secondly, to provide the infrastructure in terms of museums and tourist attractions that could contribute to a post-industrial economic revival of the region. When the crisis hit in the 1960s, the stateowned company that owned the mines and many of the working-class settlements closed mine after mine, demolished them, sold off the land and handed over the housing assets to the local councils. The councils reacted in different ways to this situation – depending on which left-wing party dominated. Where the communists were the force majeure, they sought to defend the miners, their communities and their legacies. Their direct rivals, the socialists, adopted the language of modernization, seeking to attract new industries and, by and large, to eradicate the past and fill it with things that were to signal the future: shopping malls, leisure complexes and public parks. Hence it was the more communist-oriented councils and mayors in the region who, during the 1990s, started local initiatives, together with former workers, to preserve the heritage of mining in the region. Things began to change in the late 1990s, when the regional political council discovered industrial heritage in a major way and made it into the key strategy for reviving the economic fortunes of the region. As in Germany, albeit in different ways, politics was crucial to the emergence of industrial memorial landscapes. Roberta Garruccio’s chapter does not focus on the politics of deindustrialization of Sesto San Giovanni, but it becomes clear that corporatist arrangements were also influential here in planning the closure of major companies and providing transitional regimes for workers and managers alike. These corporatist structures, however, have not resulted in major heritage initiatives, arguably because the past is more difficult to connect to ideas regarding the bright future of Sesto. In Asturias, the process of deindustrialization was managed in conjunction with a strong union movement and a strong political left, especially in the coalfield area. This brought benefits to industrial workers and miners, who often enjoyed generous redundancy packages, early retirement and good pensions. However, the jobs lost were not replaced, which leaves in particular the young facing a tough future. As Rubén Vega García explains in his chapter, such disillusionment also led to feelings of betrayal, which

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posits the radical fighting tradition of the left in Asturias in strong contrast to the conciliatory mood of their present-day descendants, who are often seen as selling out the traditions and values of the left. The politics in the coalfields of Asturias is thus divided between the official labour movement, justifying their part in closing the coalfield, and the young radicals, yearning for the militancy of yesteryear. Both are keen advocates for maintaining the industrial heritage of the region, but they have to face tough political opposition from outside of the industrial heartlands of Asturias, where the ancient kingdom, pre-Romanesque churches and the beauty of the landscape all are powerful contenders for money for any industrial heritage initiative. In post-communist countries, in stark contrast to the Western European situation, industrial heritage often struggles to win any significant political support.24 David Kideckel’s chapter outlines how politically isolated the miners in the Romanian Jiu Valley have been, especially as they have been very much associated with the much maligned communism of yesteryear. Furthermore, the politically powerful have aligned with the economic interests of foreign investors and largely ignore both the mining past and its physical as well as human remains. Miners therefore feel largely betrayed by postcommunist politics. This feeling is also very prominent in the Hungarian city of Ózd, which is examined in Tibor Valuch’s chapter. The memory of former steelworkers here is one of deep nostalgia for a lost way of life, and it is largely post-communist politicians who are blamed for this loss. However, it is interesting to reflect on the fact that neither in Hungary nor in Romania does the deep disillusionment with politics lead to any direct politicization of workers. It rather leads to hopelessness and despair, partly because there does not seem to be a political movement to which workers can turn, and they themselves also seem unable to form such a political movement. In many deindustrializing regions, such a politics of despair has contributed to the rise of the populist right in recent decades. Workers, many of whom had previously lent their support to the political left, are turning to the populist right, as they seem to be the only ones promising representation and positive change, however illusory this might be.25 Things look a little different in China, a country at least as post-communist in its economics as Eastern Europe. Here the Communist Party has been at the helm of the post-communist transition. In Tong Lam’s chapter on the ‘Third Front’ developments in China, it is very clear that the key political and economic actor is the party state of Communist China. It was responsible for initiating the ‘Third Front’ in the 1960s and for ending it in the 1980s. And it also started the heritage drive in the 1990s and 2000s, which ultimately was to extend to the ‘Third Front’ heritage. The party led various attempts to get World Heritage Sites officially recognized by UNESCO, and it was so successful that by 2005 China was third in the list of countries with

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the most recognized UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Initially, the party state concentrated on getting ancient Chinese historical sites listed – in an attempt to promote the value and worth of what many in the party now advocated as the oldest nation state on the globe. Heritage became a key component of underpinning Chinese nationalism. Initially, the party state was careful to avoid communist heritage, for it feared that it would bring up too many problematical and painful memories that were still part and parcel of the communicative memory in Chinese society.26 However, as Lam highlights, in the 2010s the party state was confident enough to include some ‘red heritage’ into the party-state driven canon of heritage, attempting to link the heritage of the Communist Party with the prestige of the nation. The Chinese nation and the Chinese Communist Party should be thought of as one and the same through heritage making. Politics also feature prominently in Zhao Xin’s and Qu Xiaofan’s chapter on the railway heritage of North-East China. The development of this heritage has been hindered by political reservations about the imperialist connotations, which are seen as shameful by many representatives of the party state at local, regional and national level. As the communist rulers of China have been promoting strong doses of nationalism, they are finding it difficult to integrate such dark heritage into their story of an upbeat nationalist development of China in the twentieth century. However, as the authors argue, only an honest assessment of the Janus-faced character of that heritage will allow for a productive use of it, both in the sense of allowing the population in the region some kind of identification with their problematical past, celebrating past achievements of modernization, urbanization, industrialization and internationalization, and in promoting reconciliation, first and foremost between Russia and China, and Japan and China. At present, we are, however, a long way away from such a memory politics. Instead, antagonistic memory frameworks dominate. In the North-East of China, this can be seen both at the Aihui museum dedicated to the Russian imperialism that robbed China of much territory and that committed several atrocities against the Chinese population.27 When I visited the museum in 2017, my Chinese companions told me that Russians are not actually allowed to visit the museum. The narrative that is being told here is clearly anti-Russian and meant to underpin an anti-Russian Chinese nationalism. Similarly, the museums in the North-East dedicated to the history of Manchukuo and Japanese imperialism are also extremely antagonistic. Rather than historicizing the atrocious actions of the Japanese in the context of their imperialist expansion into China as the basis of achieving both better understanding and an open-ended dialogue about this meaning that would include Japan, it serves to mobilize the past in maintaining political frictions and tensions between China and Japan today.28 Under these difficult political circumstances,

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the political prospects for the railway heritage of the North-East of China must look reasonably bleak. All contributions to this volume demonstrate that political institutions, arrangements and cultures have been key to understanding the shape of industrial heritage in post-industrial regions and cities. Where there is a political will to help steer economic change, we often also find a desire to make use of industrial heritage in order to underpin a sense of self-worth and pride, which is seen as an important resource for successful economic transformation. Some of this comes under the rubric of place-branding, for the politics of deindustrialization is attempting to present deindustrializing places as attractive places that were once famous and buoyant. The past becomes an asset in attracting those who are supposed to shape the future. Social movements, in particular movements for urban regeneration, have been influential in fighting for industrial heritage in a range of places.29 Political ideologies have also been key explanatory factors in accounting for the development of industrial heritage. Left-wing, social democratic and communist traditions have arguably been most conducive to allowing industrial heritage to develop, as the Left often felt a sense of responsibility for the working-class communities most affected by deindustrialization and the accompanying social change. In some places, such as the Ruhr, this leftwing project of heritage making became, over time, depoliticized, as it was underwritten by an all-party consensus. Interestingly, the post-communist scenarios in Eastern Europe have been, on balance, unhelpful for attempts to establish forms of industrial heritage. Where communism was replaced by anti-communism and neoliberalism, such as in large parts of Eastern Europe, there emerged a hostility to discourses of class and to the preservation of industrial heritage, which seemed indelibly connected to the communist past. The fact that the communists, in their propaganda, had often idolized the archetypal proletarians and their places of work and celebrated languages of class (at least in abstract terms) was enough to ensure that anti-communist reflexes in post-communist societies did not want anything to do with industrial heritage and memories of industrial pasts. In China, where communists are still in power, overseeing the emergence of a post-communist economic system, the political will to use industrial heritage in order to forge a strong link between nationalism and the Chinese Communist Party ensures generous support for an industrial heritage initiative, with the exception of those cases where that industrial heritage is linked to foreign imperialist powers, as is the case in the provinces of the Chinese North-East. In Western countries, the strong influence of neoliberalism, say in the UK, the US and Australia, at times also militated against the implementation of programmes conducive to the preservation of industrial heritage. Therefore, in those countries, heritage initiatives often came from below, from within the working-class neigh-

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bourhoods most affected by industrial change. They were oppositional initiatives to the ruling political discourse of neoliberalism. Deprived of access to state resources, these initiatives often struggled financially. It sometimes helped that city or regional political bodies were following different political ideologies from that of national governments. Thus, for example, Labourrun councils in the UK often supported industrial heritage initiatives where the national government was rather keen to demolish everything as quickly and radically as possible. Overall, many of the chapters in this volume point to the simple fact that the politics of heritagization has much to do with current priorities of power elites and states. Their often hegemonic position in the making of heritage is frequently challenged by grass-roots initiatives that put forward alternative discourses and practices of heritage making. The tensions produced by such agonistic perspectives have the power to politicize heritage and make it into a resource for social movements from below, challenging states and traditional power elites.30

The Culture of Economic Change and Industrial Heritage Next to economic processes and political constellations, cultural institutions and actors have been vital in many deindustrializing areas in ensuring the emergence of specific cultural landscapes of deindustrialization. Museums, theatres, music cultures, literature and a whole plethora of popular culture initiatives have been shaping industrial heritage discourses in deindustrializing regions and cities. Paul Pickering, in his chapter on Manchester, introduces us to the Museum of Science and Industry, one of the most successful museums in England. It has become a proud promoter of Manchester’s past as industrial workshop of the world and mother city of the first industrial revolution. Arthur McIvor’s story of Glasgow echoes Pickering, as many of the city’s new and shining museums, such as the Riverside Museum, opened in 2011, portray the technological achievements, exhibit the impressive hardware, excel in presenting locally produced goods and take pride in Glasgow having been at the heart of industrialization for a considerable time, but they are, by and large, quiet about the suffering and the struggles of ordinary working people. McIvor, in fact, shows how those in political power in Glasgow, ironically the Labour Party, have been doing everything to remove Elspeth King, the director of the People’s Palace museum, from her post, in order to stop her long-term commitment to depicting the histories and struggles of working-class Glasgow that do not fit into the new city branding pursued by Glasgow’s leading politicians. We have here a clear case of political institutions and cultural institutions being at loggerheads with each other. In this case, the political won out over the cultural, although, as McIvor also

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underlines, there are still pockets of resistance in the cultural institutions of the city, not least in the universities, including McIvor’s own centre for oral history. Historically the ‘Workers’ City Group’ is also a good example of how the ongoing silencing of working-class legacies remains contested in the city. Nevertheless, without much official support, such resistance becomes difficult. Museums in which the working-class experience was present, such as the Springburn museum and the Clydebuilt museum, had to close down in 2008 and 2018 respectively, and the Gallacher Memorial Library, another site for the memory of the working class of the city, followed suit in 2015. If there was some success of cultural groups and institutions to preserve aspects of working-class experience in Glasgow, it was largely due to the Manpower Services Commission (in the 1980s) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (thereafter) – two institutions that have been sponsoring many industrial heritage initiatives across Britain. Bella Dicks’s chapter in this volume focuses directly on a key cultural institution in Wales – the National Museum of Wales, founded in 1912, at the tail end of an era that saw massive nation-building attempts (but little state-building) in Wales.31 Five of its seven sites are dedicated to industrial heritage – signalling the importance of that heritage to the cultural representations of Wales. Even under conditions of neoliberalism, the Museum affirmed its desire to place an emphasis on the industrial heritage of the nation – most prominently in 2001, when it rescued Big Pit, the only mine in South Wales that had been turned into a museum and where you can still go underground. The comprehensive industrial- and community-oriented approach to heritage was in line with the dominant labourist sentiments of the region. Labour in South Wales had not gone down the neoliberal pathway to the same degree that it had done in Glasgow. As Louise Miskell’s chapter makes clear, the one industrial area where the National Museum, at least so far, has failed to pull its weight has been the steel sector. There is, to date, no initiative from the foremost cultural institution of Wales. Nascent attempts to preserve at least something of what is still left (and that is not much) of the former Welsh steel industry rely almost entirely on volunteers and community groups, in which former steelworkers often play a prominent role. Historians, who have begun to research the history of the steel industry in South Wales (also a black hole until recently), might well be able to contribute in generating more interest from key Welsh institutions in the heritage of steel making. It is, after all, a heritage that can be integrated into the prominent theme of industrialization that forms such a strong pillar of heritagization policies in Wales. The National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, in its ‘Metals’ gallery is giving some attention to steel making in Wales, although it is doing so from a very technological and innovation-oriented perspective, keen to subsume it under the rubric of

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proud Welsh achievements.32 The visitors learn little of the working people and their lives that are connected to steel making. Such a focus on products and processes is common also in other representations of Welsh steel, as Miskell can show. If museums were clearly important in establishing the mindscape of industrial heritage in Wales, the World Heritage Sites in Cornwall, as analysed in Hilary Orange’s chapter, have been an important motor in making mining a key anchor point in the national and regional imaginary of Cornwall since they came into being in 2006. The museums that are part and parcel of the World Heritage Site are now telling the story of Cornish mining and its global repercussions to a world audience of global tourists. Heritage sites and museums, in Cornwall and elsewhere, often have two kinds of audiences. On the one hand they cater for tourists, national and international, who have an outsider’s gaze onto industrial heritage and need familiarizations with an industrial world, now largely in the past. On the other hand, they also care for the local people in industrial cities and regions, many of whom have past experience in industry or have parents and grandparents who worked in those industries. They have an insider’s perspective on industrial heritage, which to them is part and parcel of their own personal and family identity. Laurajane Smith’s chapter in this collection points to the importance of involving local neighbourhood groups with the memory work at sites of industrial heritage, as it is those groups who often value and champion narratives of community and of class, which may get lost if heritage sites only cater for the outsider’s perceptions. In other parts of the Anglo-world, namely in Australia, heritage institutions have also been key in promoting forms of industrial heritage. Eklund, in his chapter, emphasizes that the Victorian Heritage Register, a state institution, has been keen to put industrial monuments and industrial heritage onto the register, thereby legitimizing a beginning discourse of the importance of industrial heritage to the history of Victoria. Looking, more specifically, at the official heritage discourse of the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Eklund comes to the conclusion that industrial heritage plays some role, but it struggles culturally against the much larger presence of a heritage that dates back further in time, namely the heritage related to gold mining in the town of Walhalla. Nevertheless, in 2017 the Morwell power station was added to the list of industrial monuments after a concerted campaign of preservationists, historians and local activists. Another council-led initiative let to the setting up of the ‘Power Drive Route 98’, which connects several of the mine sites with the power stations of the region. While there are heritage elements included in this, as Eklund says in his chapter, the main focus is energy education. Local museums, staffed mainly by volunteers from the communities, also play a role in preserving the memory of mining and power stations

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in the region, where the emphasis is, at least partly, on the communities that were sustained by those industries. Eklund also recalls a very interesting movement to keep the memory of Yallourn alive – a town that became a victim to opencast mining but that lives on in the many informal and often digital attempts to keep it alive. Without institutionalization, however, it is likely that these efforts – which live from an existing communicative memory – will fade in the future. In Western Europe, the Ruhr region of Germany has undoubtedly got the highest density of cultural institutions promoting industrial heritage anywhere in the world. The sheer number of industrial, regional and art museums dealing with industrial heritage plus the range of foundations and city-run heritage sites, from mines, steelworks, coaltips, historical housing estates and many other features belonging to the previous industrial landscape is impressive, and much public money, mainly coming from the cities, municipalities and the federal Land North Rhine Westphalia, has gone into the preservation of industrial heritage. It is a marked contrast to the northern Italian town of Sesto, where, apart from oral history initiatives like the ones initiated by Roberta Garruccio, there seems to be a dearth of cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the memory of industry in this town. The Nord-Pas-de-Calais in France has seen the establishment of many more cultural institutions promoting industrial heritage. When its mining landscape was awarded UNESCO World Heritage status in 2012, it served as a major boost to older attempts to link cultural institutions of the heritage industry and promote a region-wide notion of industrial heritage that was also, like in the Ruhr, connected to visions of economically restructuring the region.33 Whilst Asturias has also seen the establishment of key cultural institutions, including museums dedicated to the region’s industrial development and heritage, they have not been as successful as in the Ruhr or in NordPas-de-Calais in promoting a sense of regional identity based on industrial heritage. They also seem a little unclear in their exhibition concepts as to how to portray that heritage in the light of the overall development of the region.34 Of course, part of the problem is that we have, in Asturias, a historical region that has much other heritage to offer, including world-famous pre-Romanesque churches and other sites connected to the medieval history of Asturias. Rubén Vega García’s chapter deals with cultural attempts to make sense of deindustrialization processes. In particular, he focuses on music – non-commercial, independent music of a younger generation of Asturians. They do not have the power to instigate major changes in the development of industrial heritage, and they also have not been able to ally themselves with other powerful political or social players in the region. But they formulate a grass-roots, bottom-up unease with the erasure of particular

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working-class traditions and memories that are connected to the deindustrialization processes, which are ongoing in contemporary Asturias. In Eastern European post-communist countries, in so far as there are any cultural institutions underpinning industrial heritage efforts at all, they tend to be very much bottom-up movements without much institutional support. Thus, in the Jiu Valley in Romania, as detailed in David Kideckel’s chapter, it has been a motley assembly of intellectuals, artists (largely from outside the area), preservationists, youth groups, some foreign observers, some entrepreneurs from the region and some local miners who have led attempts to preserve something of the Valley’s mining heritage. Without much power of their own and without powerful allies in politics and economics, these attempts face an unsure future. In Tibor Valuch’s case study of the former steel town of Ózd, we do not encounter any attempts to preserve the industrial heritage of the town. If anything, one could see in Valuch’s own oral history research such an attempt to preserve the memory of a place that is fast disappearing.35 The party state in post-communist China has vast resources to put into industrial heritage if it chooses to do so. In Tong Lam’s chapter, we encounter cultural institutions such as museums in former ‘Third Front’ cities that are dealing with the heritage of the ‘Third Front’. Encouraged by the turn to ‘red heritage’ that came from within the centre of the party state, city, regional and provincial Communist Party leaders began to discover and recover the heritage of the ‘Third Front’. An impressive new museum in the city of Panzhihua tells the story of the ‘Third Front’ in an entirely heroic mode. Under the wise leadership of the party, a heroic transformation of industry is narrated as a success story – to the greater glory of the party and the region in which these changes took place. The focus is on technological achievements, economic success and the modernization of China. Hence, the emphasis of this museum as of others discussed in Lam’s chapter is on the regional and national party leadership implementing the ‘Third Front’ policies. Many artefacts and much text are dedicated to them. By contrast, everyday objects referring to workers and narratives about ordinary people are hardly present in the exhibitions. The working class of China is disappearing behind the nationalist celebration of the achievements of the party in the industrialization and modernization of China. Preservationists and heritage activists in China are most successful in developing industrial heritage where the regions are economically backward and there is little pressure on sites for redevelopment. Here the idea is to bring tourism to the region and attract investors. Tong Lam argues that in Liupanshui efforts to re-create the atmosphere of the ‘Third Front’ are taken to such extremes that the entire city resembles an open-air museum. The idea of developing tourism around the railway heritage of the North-East

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of China is also present in Zhao Xin’s and Qu Xiaofan’s chapter. By and large, this is at present only an idea, as there is no large-scale tourism industry operative there as yet. Although the authors do not explicitly discuss cultural institutions promoting the heritage in the region, there are a number of museums in the region trying to support the heritagization process connected with the railways, but, for the political reasons discussed above, they face an uphill battle.36 If those cultural institutions, like museums, could be developed into anchor points of a tourist heritage route, the prospects for developing tourism would be good, especially as the landscape of the region is extremely attractive. But unlike in Liupanshui, all of this is at best in its early stages. In light of this, the authors suggest the mobilization of collective memory by the local population, which, in their view, could serve as the basis of greater involvement of ordinary people in attempts to preserve that heritage. This would amount to the mobilization of civil society initiatives in favour of railway heritage, but it must remain doubtful to what extent the ruling Communist Party would not seek to control those civil society initiatives. The party state has to be wary of unleashing the activism of civil society outside of party control. Furthermore, such mobilization of collective memory would necessarily also include the opening up of the darker parts of that heritage, as it is unlikely that local memories would only focus on the positive sides of urbanization, industrialization, intercultural understanding and modernization. Imperialism, colonialism, racism and exclusions will also be a part of that memory that would be in need of being properly historicized and contextualized. All of the chapters in this volume highlight the importance of cultural institutions for the promotion of industrial heritage. The more institutions there are and the better endowed they are, the more it will support the maintenance of a public memory of an industrial past. Such public memories can be contested within cultural institutions and between them. If there is a chasm between civil society discourses on the industrial past and official state narratives or within civil society discourses, we see considerable debate surrounding the meaning of memories of that past. Such debate can be extremely fruitful, as it allows for the representation of multiple memories and the discussion of manifold meanings of that past for different parts of the population. Introducing agonistic perspectives into industrial heritage discourses politicizes this discourse and allows for a democratic competition over memories of the past that prepare the building of different futures in the present.37 Where there is strong political guidance, such as in China or, in completely different ways, in the Ruhr, these cultural institutions produce a relatively homogeneous mindscape that leaves little room for contestation. Where the public memory is associated negatively with a period of time and with a place that is tainted in public memory, as is the case with communism

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in post-communist Eastern European societies, there cultural institutions struggle to establish themselves and become meaningful.

Conclusion In this introduction, we have traced economic, political and cultural preconditions for the emergence of industrial heritage and memory discourses centred on an industrial past. Drawing comparisons between the chapters assembled in this volume and augmenting this with a reading of related and relevant literature, it has been shown that the economics, the politics and the culture of an industrial past are all extremely important when assessing the size, scope and direction of memory discourses in deindustrializing regions. On balance, the more successful the economic transformation, the easier and likelier it is that positive memory discourses about the industrial past are actualized in diverse forms of industrial heritage. However, as we have seen, economic success is not a sufficient explanation for the emergence of positive memory cultures surrounding industrial pasts. What is needed is the political will to produce such industrial memory cultures around tangible and intangible forms of heritage. That political will can come from an official heritage discourse by those who wield political power or it can come from an oppositional heritage discourse of those who are opposed to the official discourse. As democratic structures allow for contestation over politics, a multitude of heritage discourses and struggles over their meaning are normal in democratic polities and should be regarded as a healthy sign of a memory politics that seeks to build different futures on diverse interpretations of the past. In more authoritarian political structures, a more streamlined official heritage discourse will not easily allow for contestation, although even here, in sometimes hidden and covert ways, we can at times find such contestation. The political will to memorialize the industrial past will often lead to the institutionalization of cultural institutions, e.g. museums, monuments, associations, which then play an important role in pursuing strategies for the memorialization of industrial pasts. These cultural actors to a large extent frame the stories, invent the traditions and construct the meanings that are given to industrial pasts. Hence, they in turn influence both the politics and the economics of industrial memory discourses. Overall, this introduction has shown how intricately interwoven the economic, political and cultural preconditions for the emergence of industrial memory discourses have been in different parts of the world. We can now turn to the individual cases in greater detail to see how those preconditions have framed particular narratives of industrialization and deindustrialization. In the conclusion to this

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volume, we will try to provide a comparison of those narrativizations of industrial pasts in Western democratic and post-communist East European as well as post-communist Chinese societies. Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum. He is also Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has published widely on the history of deindustrialization, industrial heritage, memory studies, the history of historiography, nationalism and labour movement history. His most recent publications are a special issue, co-edited with Steven High, on deindustrialization by the North American journal Labor 19(1) (2019) as well as a special issue on German labour history by the British journal German History 32(2) (2019).

Notes 1. See also Wicke, Berger and Golombek, Industrial Heritage and Regional Identity, 2018. 2. On the concept of ‘memory activism’, see Gutmann, Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Palestine/Israel, 2017; Wüstenberg, Civil Society and Memory in Post-War Germany, 2017. 3. Shackel and Palus, ‘Remembering an Industrial Landscape’, 49–71. 4. Just one prominent example among many is Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes, 2011. 5. Feifan Xie, Industrial Heritage Tourism, 2015. 6. High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 2003. 7. Smith and Campbell, ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class’, 612–27; Berger, ‘Industrial Heritage and the Ambiguities of Nostalgia for an Industrial Past in the Ruhr Valley in Germany’, 36–64. 8. Linkon, The Half-Life of Deindustralisation: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring, 2018. 9. Grütter, ‘Industriekultur als Geschichte: zu einer visuellen Rhetorik historischer Zeiten’, 376–94. 10. On the erasure of Scotland’s industrial past from memory, compare also Madgin, ‘A Town Without Memory? Inferring the Industrial Past: Clydebank Re-Built 1943–2013’, 283–306. 11. On the representation of Wales, compare also Mason, ‘Representing Wales at the Museum of Welsh Life’, 247–71. 12. Compare Tregidga, Memory, Place and Identity: The Cultural Landscapes of Cornwall, 2012. 13. See also Köhler, ‘Industriekultur und Raumbewusstsein in Asturien/Spanien’, 77– 97. 14. Geary, ‘The Myth of the Radical Miner’, 43–64. 15. Antohi and Tismaneanu, Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and their Aftermath, 2000. 16. Wong and Yongnian, The Nanxun Legacy and China’s Development in the Post-Deng Era, 2001.

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17. Wang et al., Old Industrial Cities Seeking New Road of Industrialization: Models of Revitalizing North-East China, 2014. 18. MacKenzie, ‘“The Second City of the Empire”: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’, pp. 215ff. 19. Croll, ‘“People’s Remembrancers” in a Post-Modern Age: Contemplating the NonCrisis of Welsh Labour History’‚ 5–17. 20. Lloyd-Jones and Scull, Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis) United Kingdom?, 2018. 21. The permanent exhibitions at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum and at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh both heavily subscribed to the theme of Wales/ Scotland as first industrial nation when I visited both museums in 2015 and 2016 respectively. 22. For corporatist frameworks in Europe, see Berger and Compston, Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe: Lessons for the 21st Century, 2002. 23. On the concept of mindscape, see Smith, Bevan and the World of South Wales, pp. 92f. 24. There are exceptions to this. In Katowice in Poland, another former mining stronghold, there have been more attempts than in our Romanian and Hungarian examples in this volume to maintain the public memory of mining; see Tomann, Geschichtskultur im Strukturwandel: Öffentliche Geschichte in Katowice nach 1989, 2017. 25. Rydgren, Class Politics and the Radical Right, 2013; Betz, ‘The New Politics of Resentment: Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe’, 338–51. 26. On the concept of ‘communicative memory’, see Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, 109–18. 27. http://www.aihuihistorymuseum.com/EN/ENindex.aspx?type=422 (accessed 31 July 2018). 28. On a visiting professorship at the North East Normal University in Changchun in May 2017, I had the privilege of visiting the Aihui museum in Aihui as well as several museums in Changchung, especially the museum of the last emperor of China, Pu Yi, and the adjacent museum dedicated to World War II in China. The latter remain anti-Japanese and promote strong doses of Chinese nationalism. 29. Wicke, ‘Urban Movements a la Ruhr? The Initiatives for the Preservation of Workers’ Settlements in the 1970s’, 347–71. 30. See many of the excellent contributions in High, MacKinnon and Perchard, The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places, 2017. 31. Evans and Pryce, Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850– 1950, 2014. 32. On the National Waterfront museum, see https://museum.wales/swansea/ (accessed 31 July 2018). 33. http://www.bassinminier-patrimoinemondial.org/ (accessed 31 July 2018). 34. This was at least my impression when visiting many of the cultural institutions in the Asturian coalfield during a week-long study trip to Langreo and other parts of the coalfield in 2016. 35. On the complex relationship between oral history and public memory, see Hamilton and Shopes, Oral History and Public Memories, 2008; from the perspective of deindustrialization, see in particular Daniel Kerr’s contribution in this collection entitled ‘Countering Corporate Narratives from the Streets: The Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project’, 231–252. 36. I am extremely grateful to Professor Zhao for taking me to do an extensive tour around the railway heritage of China’s North-East in May 2017, where we visited many museums and heritage sites. 37. On the relationship between agonism and the construction of a practical past in memorializations of industrial pasts, see Berger, ‘Industrial Heritage and the Ambiguities of Nostalgia for an Industrial Past in the Ruhr Valley in Germany’.

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Bibliography Antohi, S., and V. Tismaneanu (eds). Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and their Aftermath. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000. Assmann, J. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in A. Nünning and A. Erll (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 109–18. Berger, S. ‘Industrial Heritage and the Ambiguities of Nostalgia for an Industrial Past in the Ruhr Valley in Germany’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 16(1) (2019), 36–64. Berger, S., and H. Compston (eds). Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe: Lessons for the 21st Century. Oxford: Berghahn, 2002. Betz, H-G. ‘The New Politics of Resentment: Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe’, in C. Mudde (ed.), The Populist Radical Right: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2017), 338–51. Croll, A. ‘“People’s Remembrancers” in a Post-Modern Age: Contemplating the Non-Crisis of Welsh Labour History’, Llafur 8(1) (2000), 5–17. Evans, N., and H. Pryce (eds). Writing a Small Nation’s Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850–1950. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Feifan Xie, P. Industrial Heritage Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2015. Geary, D. ‘The Myth of the Radical Miner’, in S. Berger, A. Croll and N. LaPorte (eds), Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 43–64. Grütter, H.T. ‘Industriekultur als Geschichte: zu einer visuellen Rhetorik historischer Zeiten’, in J. Rüsen (ed.), Zeit deuten: Perspektiven – Epochen – Paradigmen (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2003), 376–94. Gutmann, Y. Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Palestine/Israel. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2017. Hamilton, P., and L. Shopes (eds). Oral History and Public Memories. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. High, S. Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. High, S., L. MacKinnon and A. Perchard (eds). The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017. Kerr, D. ‘Countering Corporate Narratives from the Streets: The Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project’, in P. Hamilton and L. Shopes (eds), Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 231–52. Köhler, H. ‘Industriekultur und Raumbewusstsein in Asturien/Spanien’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen 39 (2008), 77–97. Linkon, S.L. The Half-Life of Deindustralisation: Working-Class Writing about Economic Restructuring. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Lloyd-Jones, N., and M.M. Scull (eds). Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)United Kingdom? Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. MacKenzie, J.M. ‘“The Second City of the Empire”: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 215–37. Madgin, R. ‘A Town Without Memory? Inferring the Industrial Past: Clydebank Re-Built 1943–2013’, in C. Zimmermann (ed.), Industrial Cities: History and Future (Frankfurt/ Main: Campus, 2013), 283–306. Mason, R. ‘Representing Wales at the Museum of Welsh Life’, in S.J. Knell et al. (eds), National Museums: New Studies from Around the World (London: Routledge, 2011), 247– 71. Rydgren, J. (ed.). Class Politics and the Radical Right. London: Routledge, 2013.

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Shackel, P.A., and M. Palus. ‘Remembering an Industrial Landscape’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10(1) (2006), 49–71. Smith, D. Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993. Smith, L., and G. Campbell. ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 23(7) (2017), 612–27. Smith, L., P. Shackel and G. Campbell (eds). Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes. London: Routledge, 2011. Tomann, J. Geschichtskultur im Strukturwandel: Öffentliche Geschichte in Katowice nach 1989. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Tregidga, G. (ed.). Memory, Place and Identity: The Cultural Landscapes of Cornwall. London: Francis Boutle, 2012. Wang, M., et al. (eds). Old Industrial Cities Seeking New Road of Industrialization: Models of Revitalizing North-East China. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2014. Wicke, C. ‘Urban Movements a la Ruhr? The Initiatives for the Preservation of Workers’ Settlements in the 1970s’, in M. Baumeister, B. Bonomo and D. Schott (eds), Cities Contested: Urban Politics, Heritage and Social Movements in Italy and West Germany in the 1970s (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2017), 347–71. Wicke, C., S. Berger and J. Golombek (eds.). Industrial Heritage and Regional Identity. London: Routledge, 2018. Wong, J., and Z. Yongnian. The Nanxun Legacy and China’s Development in the Post-Deng Era. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2001. Wüstenberg, J. Civil Society and Memory in Post-War Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

CHAPTER

1

‘Sooty Manchester’ (Re)Presenting an Urban-Industrial Landscape PAUL PICKERING

Sooty Manchester is every whit as wonderful, as fearful, unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic city. —Thomas Carlyle, 1843 On every side tall chimneys were thrusting themselves into the sky, puffing out huge volumes of black smoke, and for miles the same horrible view met you – smoke, smoke, smoke; trees, roads, the very ground, horses, beasts, and men were black and miserable to behold. Every step towards Manchester intensified all these horrors. The suddenness of the transition doubtless added to the sensation of oppression and misery. —J.A. Roebuck MP, 1841 Manufactures . . . may be said to constitute the very soul of Manchester, and the factories its body. —Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales, 1851 In this city science and technology met and the modern world began. —Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, 2017 Notes for this section begin on page 42.

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Founded in 1931, Progress Publishers of Moscow provided generations of financially challenged students of history and political science with inexpensive editions of books and compendiums of articles penned by key figures in the pantheon of Marxist-Leninism. My shelves still strain under the weight of numerous volumes, including a three-volume edition of Marx’s Capital and thirty-one volumes of the Collected Works of Lenin. I can’t claim to have read all thirty-one tomes of Comrade Lenin’s wisdom from cover to cover, but one Progress book that I have poured over line by line many times is a treasured copy of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (Moscow 1973). First published in 1845 in German, the book was, somewhat oddly, not translated into English until 1885, by an American, Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, herself a committed advocate of numerous progressive causes, and published in New York in 1887. A British imprint did not appear until 1891, nearly half a century after Engels had trudged through the streets of the shock city of the industrial revolution.1 Engels’ masterpiece of social observation has gone through numerous editions, before and after the Progress version of the early 1970s. Unlike their latter-day commercial rivals however, the Soviet editors reproduced Engels’ original sketches and a map.2 Readers of Progress Publishers’ books were invited to write to their headquarters in Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow, with comments and suggestions for future publications. I always meant to write to thank them for their cartographic perspicuity, clarifying what had hitherto been a flawed ‘mental map’ (to borrow Peter Gould and Rodney White’s famous conception),3 which I had constructed from reading descriptions of Manchester as they appeared flat on the page. With a map, albeit crudely drawn, we can see Engels’ footsteps. Moreover, mindful of R.H. Tawney’s injunction that an historian requires a stout pair of boots, the peregrinations of an angry young man encouraged me to traipse through the streets of Manchester. Of course, the dangers of ‘foot-stepping’ (to borrow Richard Holmes’ term) are manifold, although less clear to me then than now. Many of the names of streets Engels walked in 1844 survive, as do some of the buildings he would have passed. But how connected is the affective experience of, and response to, the infrastructure of the factory system as Engels observed it to the way we encounter it today, a time when it has passed beyond the realms of living memory? Surely Manchester in 1844 and 2017 are discrete realities connected only by a fine gossamer thread of time and GPS coordinates. In other words, has Manchester’s urban-industrial past been either lost or irretrievably compromised? Some participants in the urbanindustrial heritage industry – from enthusiastic antiquarians and museum curators to environment conscious developers and theme park proprietors – claim, explicitly or implicitly, that they can build bridges across time. So, to my provocation: no matter how many buildings are preserved, restored or

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re-purposed or how many museums we open, this claim is either naive, disingenuous or intellectually lazy. ‘How did a city in decline’, asked the New Statesman in 2016, ‘become the poster child for urban regeneration?’4 The answer, at least in part, is that the horror of the dark satanic mills has had to be sanitized, ignored, muffled by a cacophony of enthusiasm or all the above. Nothing too bad happened there; one miracle has risen from the ashes of another. But perhaps all is not lost for students of industrial heritage. Perhaps the contours of Engels’ map of Manchester can provide a baseline for an exploration of difference over time, which, in turn, has the potential throw a shard of light onto what the celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has called ‘experience near’, both then and now. In short, for those of us interested in the industrial past and present, this is an opportunity to ponder the implications of transformation and absence. To do so, we must begin with Engels as he put his boots on. Engels’ starting point for his walk into Manchester was Kersal Moor, a natural amphitheatre located approximately three miles north-west of the city. He noted that the site was the people’s ‘Mons Sacer’ – a reference to the sacred mountain overlooking ancient Rome – a view he shared with many of the city’s radical activists, who regularly used it as a venue for mass protest rallies. For those approaching Manchester, the Moor provided a vantage point for a scene that was at one and the same time novel, bewildering and horrific. ‘I well remember the effect produced on me by my earliest view of Manchester’, wrote Irish-born journalist and liberal publicist William Cooke Taylor in 1842, when I looked upon the town . . . and saw the forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of stream and smoke, forming an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the entire place. I felt as if I was in the presence of those two mighty and mysterious agencies, fire and water, proverbially the best of servants and the worst of masters.5

As we have noted, for Radical MP James Arthur Roebuck, the sight of a ‘forest’ of factory chimneys ‘thrusting themselves into the sky, puffing out huge volumes of black smoke’ also presented a ghastly vista.6 Given the proliferation of towering chimneys on the horizon, the use of a natural metaphor for those approaching the city was, in one sense, simply convenient, but it also captured the harsh incongruity between the sublimity of nature to hand and the scarification of the landscape in prospect. The spikes of bricks and mortar, which punctuated the horizon, were the antithesis of trees.7 This stark discordance was captured in a painting – well known today – by William Wylde, composed from a vantage point as if he was standing alongside Engels on the Moor looking towards Manchester. The painting features a luminous foreground reminiscent of the popular romanticized renditions of the Italian countryside, replete with rural labourers tending their

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goats as the River Irwell wends its way towards the massive conurbation, connecting nature to the industrial architecture in the distance.8 Completed in 1852, the painting had been commissioned by Queen Victoria following her visit to Manchester in October the previous year. As it was destined for her personal scrapbook however, the painting would not have been seen by many, until an engraving of it by Edward Goodall was published in 1857 in the London Art Journal, bringing it to a much wider audience. Although the starkly contrasted subject matter was still evident in the engraving, when rendered in black and white even the natural foreground appeared harsher, making Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ seem more ominous. In fact, Blake might also have been standing alongside Engels when he coined the ubiquitous words in Jerusalem: And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Set to inspiriting-cum-triumphalist music by Hubert Parry in 1916, generations of Britons have since missed the point of the verse, but it would not have been lost on Engels or those Manchester radicals whose commitment to extensive political change he knew well. As James Leach, a powerloom weaver and Secretary of the National Charter Association (regarded by Marx as Britain’s first working class party), put it in 1840, ‘the bitterest curse’ was the ‘hissing, whizzing, jumping, thumping, rattling, steaming and stinking factory’.9 Engels followed his reference to Kersal Moor by offering an overall assessment of Manchester’s social topography, a view he translated into his map as a series of concentric circles. At its core was a hub, approximately one mile across, devoted to commerce and administration and comprising warehouses, offices and buildings dedicated to the governmental, educational and cultural life of the city. These included the town hall (1822); chamber of commerce and manufactures (1822); the portico library and reading room (1806); royal institution (1823); athenaeum (1836); natural history society hall (1821), theatre royal (1806) and concert hall (1829).10 Radiating from this kernel were several major thoroughfares lined by ‘brilliant shops’ and during the day packed with commuter traffic, providing the city’s commercial and industrial elites with easy access to suburban housing: the ‘middle bourgeoisie’ living in ‘regularly laid out streets’ and the ‘upper bourgeoi-

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sie’ residing in remoter villas in ‘free, wholesome country air’ protected by prevailing winds from what was, even by this stage, known as the ‘smoke menace’. Sandwiched between the dormitory suburbs and the commercial core on Engels’ map was a girdle of working-class housing clustered around the factories and mills that dominated the skyline.11 This band was home to approximately 350,000 people living at the extraordinary density of 100,000 per square mile.12 To enter Manchester, Engels would have followed the course of the River Irwell to its confluence with the River Irk into what was known as Old Manchester. The meaning of the Irk’s ancient name bore no relationship to its condition at the time, but it easily might have. ‘The Irk’, wrote James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth in a widely circulated pamphlet published in 1832, is ‘black with the refuse of Dye-works erected on its banks, receives excrementitious matters in this portion of the town – the drainage from the gas-works, and filth of the most pernicious character from bone-works, tanneries, size manufacturers, &c’.13 For Engels, it was a ‘narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream full of debris and refuse’. ‘In dry weather ‘, he continued, ‘a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable’.14 Hugh Miller, visiting Manchester for the first time in 1844, was more economical with his words: the Irk was ‘considerably less a river than a flow of liquid manure . . .’.15 In this district 20,000–30,000 people lived and worked. ‘Immediately beneath Ducie-Bridge, in a deep hollow between two high banks,’ Kay noted, the Irk ‘sweeps round a large cluster of some of the most wretched and dilapidated buildings of the town’.16 Engels later took up the story at exactly the same spot (known as colloquially as ‘Gibraltar’): ‘The south bank of the Irk is here very steep and between fifteen and thirty feet high. On this declivitous hillside there are planted three rows of houses’. To expose the full horror of the labyrinth of overcrowded lanes and garrets – a ‘plannless, knotted, chaos’ – in this area, Engels took up his pencil to draw a detailed map of an area bounded by Long Millgate, Todd Street and Fennel Street. In this triangle, he wrote, a ‘multitude of covered passages lead from the main street into numerous courts’ awash with ‘filth and disgusting grime’.17 At a time when statistical surveys and eyewitness chronicles were increasingly popular with both government and an alarmed reading public, the living conditions endured by masses of working women and men in the ‘great cities’ of industrial Britain were becoming the scandal of the age. A leading radical summed up the situation when he visited Manchester in 1841: the people were ‘halfburied ghosts, who are suffering living death by thousands’.18 Reflecting on his account of his peregrinations in Old Manchester, Engels was insistent:

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on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health . . .19

Engels’ account continued for many thousands of words and consumed copious quantities of ink, describing the remainder of the massive agglomeration from Ancoats to Little Ireland. The story was much the same, a conclusion vindicated by the most alarming statistic of all: the relative chances of life or death. In testimony before Edwin Chadwick’s groundbreaking Parliamentary Commission into the health of towns in 1842, one witness reported the average age of death in Manchester for ‘Professional persons and gentry, and their families’ was 38, it plummeted to 20 for ‘tradesmen and their families’ and 17 for ‘mechanics, labourers and their families’.20 The first mill appeared in Manchester as late as 1780; by 1832 the number had grown to just under 100 and by the time a Parliamentary Gazetteer was published in 1851, it reported that well over 200 mills were in operation.21 However, the frequent use of the colloquialism ‘Cottonopolis’ to capture Manchester’s global pre-eminence as the centre for the cotton production obscures the diversity of the city’s industrial base. The Gazetteer also listed bleaching, calico printing, glazing, dyeing, the making of machinery itself, encompassing steam engines, water and other wheels, mill gearing, locomotive engines as well as ‘iron and brass foundries, smithies, and engineering establishments in great number and of immense magnitude’.22 To more closely examine the mills and factories that dotted through working-class Manchester, we do not need to wander far from Old Manchester: by this time, it was estimated that there were more mills on the banks of the Irk than any other water course in the kingdom.23 Sensitive to the dreadful reputation of the factory system, Benjamin Love, author of a well-known guidebook, urged visitors to suspend judgement: To get his mind thoroughly impressed with the magnitude of the manufactures of Manchester, the visitor should take a walk among the mills; and whatever his notions may be respecting their smoke and steam, and dust, he will be compelled to indulge in feelings of wonder at their stupendous appearance.24

‘Many of these mills are immense buildings,’ he continued, ‘raised to the height of six, seven, and eight stories, erected at an expense of many thousands of pounds, and are filled with machinery, costing as many more’.25 A correspondent to the North of England Magazine was less interested in investment as a measure of significance than in the search for positive comparators: Should you enter Manchester in the evening during the winter months, the appearance of the factories is very striking. Immense piles of building, seven or eight stories high, containing several hundred windows brilliantly lighted with gas, not as isolated structures but in groups, or spreading out through long

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streets, have rather the appearance of illuminated palaces, the consequence of some holiday fête, than the ‘prison houses’ of ceaseless labour.26

Andrew Ure, well known as an enthusiastic defender of the factory system, went further, enlisting the ancient past to press the point: factories were ‘magnificent edifices’, he wrote, ‘. . . surpassing far in number, value and usefulness and ingenuity of construction, the boasted monuments of Asiatic, Egyptian and Roman despotism’.27 Ure’s casual reference to factories as the product of ‘despotism’ was surely not lost on many of those who lived in their shadow and toiled in them day in, day out. The fact that mills and factories were ever present in the everyday existence of the urban poor inspired a plethora of chilling exposés, victims’ testimonials and harsh descriptions. A metaphor to capture the appearance of what was an alien phenomenon was readily available from the recent past; the euphemism ‘cotton bastilles’ became an often-used part of the lexicon of working people.28 The main site of conflict, however, was the nature of the experience of working in a ‘dark satanic mill’. James Leach, as we have seen, used a string of adjectives to paint an affective picture of the factory: ‘hissing, whizzing, jumping, thumping, rattling, steaming and stinking’.29 Another Manchester working man, John Rogerson, used poetry to depict life in the factory as the harshest form of slavery: Clamorous confusion stuns the deafen’d ear, The man-made monsters urge their ceaseless round, Startling strange eyes with wild amaze and fear; And here amidst the tumult and dim, His daily toil pursues the pallid slave, Taxing his youthful strength and will to win For food and labour and an early grave: To many a haggard wretch the clanging bell, That call’d him forth at morn, hath been a knell.30

A comment by Adam Rushton in his memoir, published in 1909, said it all. Although ‘only eight years of age’, he had been ‘sent to work at some silk mill’. Invoking Dante’s Inferno, he recalled: ‘if I had read over the entrance door the words “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, I could not have felt a more intense despair.’31 Robert Southey – writing in 1808 in the guise of a visitor from Spain – also reached for a copy of Dante. ‘I thought that if Dante has peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him new images of torment.’32 Advocates and apologists for the system, however, rejected the notion that life in the factories was akin to experiencing hell on earth. The challenge was typically mounted in terms of affect. The ‘noise and whirl of machinery’, wrote Edward Baines in 1835, ‘which are unpleasant and confusing to a spectator unaccustomed to the scene, produce not the slightest effect on the

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operatives habituated to it’.33 ‘A visit to one of the largest mills,’ Love enthused in 1839, ‘is a gratifying treat. The rooms are kept in the most perfect state of cleanliness, and the strictest order and regularity prevail’. ‘After the mills,’ he continued in a what he would nowadays call a tourist pitch, ‘the foundries and machine-making, and steam-engine establishments, present attractions of the highest interest to strangers’.34 Some of this wonderment was presented to an eager reading public by Benjamin Disraeli, the future Prime Minister, in his novel Coningsby, published in 1844: ‘. . . rightly understood’, he wrote, ‘Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens’. ‘It is the philosopher alone who can conceive the grandeur of Manchester, and the immensity of its future.’35 Moreover, for many, support for the factory system reflected a growing sense of pride in its success and not without reason: between 1849 and 1851 Britain exported cotton goods worth £45.9 million (£30.2 million value-added), most of it manufactured in south-east Lancashire. A surfeit of evidence and opinion – for and against – was recorded during the ‘hungry forties’ and beyond, sufficient to keep the fires of polemic burning for decades.36 But debate did little to hamper expansion. Indeed, cotton production continued to grow, reaching an apotheosis in 1912 when an estimated 18 billion yards of cloth was manufactured, again most of it in south- east Lancashire. Hereafter, however, the industry went into inexorable decline; by 1959 Britain had become a net importer of manufactured cotton and during the 1960s and 1970s mills were closing at the rate of one per week – the last in Manchester during the 1980s. By 2014, less than 4 per cent of the workforce in Greater Manchester was engaged in textiles. In sum, in less than 250 years since Manchester’s first mill opened, the industrial wheel had turned a full circle and, of course, the urban-industrial cityscape was transformed along with it. Let’s revisit Manchester today to see what remains of the horrors of Engels’ day. Let’s begin in Old Manchester, near the confluence of the Irwell and the Irk. On the eastern side of Long Millgate proceeding south, a cluster of buildings, which stand today, would have met his eye: the Collegiate Church (renamed Manchester Cathedral in 1840); the Manchester Grammar School and Chetham’s Library. These structures provided physical links to a distant past: building of the Church commenced in 1421, the Grammar School in 1515 and the library in 1653. Engels marked the ‘Old Church’ on his map, using it as a geographical point of reference but did not otherwise notice it in his account. He did not mention either the school or library. It is not difficult to understand why. For those radicals he had befriended, the Cathedral was nothing more than a symbol of the ‘old corruption’ of Church and State under which they continued to labour, and when they entered the Church it was to disrupt the services as acts of defiance and protest.37 Certainly, Engels

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knew more of Chetham’s Library than he let on – he later conducted research there with Marx in 184538– but again he had every reason to overlook it in his account. A report in a local liberal-radical newspaper in 1851, for example, began by describing it as a building ‘bearing the stamp of age’ with its door ‘invitingly open’. Indeed, the correspondent celebrated the fact this was the oldest public library in England open to all comers: It matters not who the man may be who comes wanting to read a book. He may have a shabby coat on his back, and no cash in his pocket; he may be a cotton spinner, from Manchester, or a foreigner scarcely able to speak English.39

However, the writer ended by pointing a finger of rebuke: the library ‘is never open after four in winter, and five in summer’. Therefore, he continued, it is of ‘little practical use: it is not open at a time when the people of Manchester can use it . . .’.40 Three other buildings in the area where Engels ‘foot-stepped’ – all of which stand today – are worthy of notice (notwithstanding the fact that he didn’t). First, Engels would have passed the Old Wellington Inn. Built in 1554, it became a public house in 1830 (as it remains today). He can be forgiven for passing it by unnoticed; at that time Manchester was estimated to have approximately 1,500 pubs, dram shops and licensed victuallers in operation. This was one among many.41 He would have also passed the Victoria Railway Station, at the terminus of the Manchester-Leeds and ManchesterBolton lines, which was opened in January 1844. Described as a ‘handsome building in Grecian Doric style’, it was replete with refreshment lounges for first, second and third class passengers, the latter where ‘such refreshments may be obtained as are suited to passengers of that class of life’.42 What these were is unclear. The new station was undoubtedly a symbol of ‘progress’, but for working people it was a deeply contentious site, reflecting their ambivalent relationship to their environment. In 1839, construction of the station, under the supervision of those they regarded as a company comprising directors of a ‘mammon loving disposition’, necessitated the disinterment of five to six thousand bodies from the paupers’ burial ground, which sparked a campaign against it.43 The fact that the burial ground was adjacent to the loathed Workhouse – Engels called it the Poor Law Bastille overshadowing the area as a spectre of despair – served only to accentuate the degree of ambivalence.44 The final building of note that Engels would have passed, which still stands today, is the Manchester Corn Exchange. Opened in 1837, this was an imposing building, adapted, enthused one local commentator, ‘from the temple of Ceres, on the river Ilyssus’. ‘It is a pedimented frontispiece, of the Ionic order: six columns, the bases of which are seven feet above the pavement, and the pillars, twenty-one feet in height, support the pediment,’ he continued.45 The choice of an architectural style favoured by the ancients

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reflected the pretensions to grandeur of those who built, owned, operated and patronized it: an elite comprising wealthy merchants, manufacturers and mill owners. The building served as a bustling market place for trade in produce and included a massive auditorium – with a capacity of 2,500 – which served as a venue for meetings, notably the campaign for free trade. Consequently, it became a site of increasingly violent ‘class’ conflict, which very likely Engels witnessed on more than one occasion.46 The presence of these buildings today is, however, deceptive. First, it is crucial to note that the area around them has been almost totally transformed. Indeed, the problem for students of urban-industrial heritage in Manchester is absences. Nothing is left of the miasma of squalid Old Manchester as Engels mapped it; there is no labyrinthine dystopia on the ‘verge of uninhabitableness’; mills no longer spew inky carcinogens into air; there is no way to cross what Norbert Elias famously called ‘the threshold of repugnance’.47 Admittedly, some of the fringes of the district are shabby – cracked pavements, roads in need of repair and boarded-up buildings awaiting demolition. But that is the point: these rough edges are rapidly being absorbed into of what is now referred to as the Millennium Quarter. The fate of the Ducie Bridge Inn and three adjoining buildings – two abandoned shops and a derelict four-story warehouse – is a case in point. Located on Corporation Street, opposite Victoria Station, the Inn was opened in 1892 and ceased trading in 2015. Despite a local campaign to ‘stop the constant destruction of Manchester heritage’, the site will be incorporated into a 250,000 square foot development of ‘offices, homes, shops, leisure amenities and public squares’. At a cost of £800m, the project will connect the ‘central shopping district with Manchester Arena, the Northern Quarter and the newly-revamped railway station’.48 The reference to the makeover of Victoria Station is worth lingering over. From the lavish praise when it first opened in 1844, by 2009 Victoria was voted the worst station in Britain, following which it has undergone a £44 million renovation connecting it to the adjacent Manchester Arena, itself a major addition to the local infrastructure.49 With a capacity of 21,000, the Arena is the second largest venue in Europe; it was opened in 1995 at a cost of £52 million.50 The impetus for redevelopment in this area was not Victoria station’s tarnished reputation; for some commentators it was the detonation of a 3300lb bomb in 1996 by the Irish Republican Army, which caused £700 million worth of destruction.51 Much of the area discussed here was extensively damaged, including the Corn Exchange, Chetham’s School and Manchester Cathedral, necessitating major rebuilding. However, it is important to note that the Cathedral had already been extensively renovated during the nineteenth century and all but destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, the restoration taking twenty years to complete. In other words, the

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IRA bomb caused ‘massive damage’ to a structure already changed from that which had met Engels’ eye. Since 1996, a shop and a visitor centre have been added, and in 2013 the surrounds were extensively remodelled to include grassed areas, seats and chalets as part of a ‘Manchester Garden City Scheme’.52 Similarly, the Corn Exchange, as it stood in Engels’ day, had been demolished in 1897 and replaced by the current building. Manchester’s ‘temple of Ceres’ had long since disappeared when the IRA inflicted £8 million worth of damage on its successor. It is now a shopping mall replete with high-end fashion boutiques. The Wellington Inn was sheltered by surrounding buildings from serious damage at the hands of the IRA, but as part of the reconstruction to create the Millennium district, it was uprooted and moved several hundred feet from its original site. It now sits on church land in front of the Cathedral.53 Overlaying Engels’ map with a recent pocket map produced by ‘Manchester Marketing’, a company ‘charged with promoting Greater Manchester on the national and international stage’, provides a revealing index of the extent of change throughout the city more generally.54 Gone is the girdle of working-class districts where people lived ankle deep in excrement; instead, the map details a patchwork of zones such as the Central Retail District (‘featuring the biggest names in fashion, including high street favourites’); the Northern Quarter (‘Manchester’s creative, urban heart with independent fashion stores, record shops and cafés’); The Gay Village (‘Unique atmosphere with restaurants, bars and clubs . . .’); and Castlefield ‘The place to escape from the hustle and bustle of city life with waterside pubs and bars’). Moreover, in what was once ‘Cottonopolis’, ‘the workshop of the world’, the ‘shock city of the industrial revolution’, traces of the factory system as it was in 1844 are chimeric. Some of Manchester’s important nineteenthcentury buildings did survive World War II and the systematic vandalism of the urban environment of later years, including a number of warehouses and mills. At its peak in the 1830s, there were approximately 1,800 warehouses in Manchester, and a great many have been demolished. In 2002, English Heritage, a government authority established under the Heritage Act 1983, recorded fifty surviving buildings on a map, which is again usefully overlaid on Engels’. It shows a heavy concentration in an area bounded by Portland Street, Princes Street, Aytoun Street and Whitworth Street (dissected by the River Medlock and the Rochdale Canal).55 Almost invariably these are imposing structures, built in a hotchpotch of architectural styles. Perhaps the most famous in terms of eclecticism, and undoubtedly the most grandiose, is Watts’ Warehouse on Portland Street (built in 1856), which is a Venetian Palazzo with five storeys, each decorated in a different style: Italian and French Renaissance, Elizabethan, Flemish and Gothic.56 Indeed, what the Mancunian warehouses had in common in the nineteenth century

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was ostentation and pretention to grandeur reflective of the growing wealth and power of their owners; what they have in common today is their repurposing for new owners who are the beneficiaries of the rapidly expanding post-industrial economy often referred to as the ‘Manchester Miracle’. Unsurprisingly, during the 2000s Manchester was the second fastest growing city centre of all British cities and had a 24 per cent growth in jobs between 1991 and 2013, including 77,000 in private sector ‘knowledge-intensive service industries’.57 While some remaining warehouses, particularly those outside the commercial core, are still languishing in various states of decay or – like the one adjacent to Ducie Bridge Inn – slated for demolition, most of those in central Manchester have been transformed into offices, hotels, luxury flats, shops, restaurants, cafes and bars. For example, in 1982 Watts’ warehouse – which was narrowly saved from demolition in the early 1970s – was converted into the exclusive Britannia Hotel. The treatment of Carver’s Warehouse in Dale Street is a more recent case of what is now known as conservation-led regeneration in a post-industrial city. Built in 1806, Carver’s is the oldest surviving canal warehouse in Manchester. It was Grade II Heritage listed in 1972, but official recognition of its value did little to arrest its decline, and by the turn of the century it was described as ‘sadly neglected’.58 However, it was renovated and extended in 2006–7. An architectural design thesis by Robert Hebblethwaite, completed in 2013, is fulsome in its praise of what was achieved: managed change such as that that took place at Carver’s involved ‘clarifying significance, editing this significance through design intervention, and ensuring that historic value is passed to future generations’.59 What has been the fate of the ‘dark satanic mills’ themselves? Kersal Moor is now hemmed in by dormitory suburbs – Lower Kersal, Rainsough, Hilton Park, Higher Broughton – and a shabby commercial estate in Prestwich.60 Thanks to Google Earth, we can return to the exact spot where nineteenth-century visitors stood as they approached Manchester. We can see immediately that because of suburban sprawl, the foreground offers a far less compelling vista of the sublimity of nature than that recorded in Wylde’s painting. Most importantly, the horizon is no longer dominated by a forest of factory chimneys. As noted, the last mill in Manchester ceased production in the 1980s and, according to recent studies by Historic England (formerly English Heritage) and the University of Salford, since that time nearly 50 per cent of the disused mills in the county of Greater Manchester have been lost to fire, neglect or demolition.61 In Manchester itself, the percentage is higher. The few that remain, however, almost invariably do so as the result of re-purposing, a process that continues apace. At the time of writing, there are at least four conservation-led renovations to create shops, offices and

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apartments at various stages of development in central Manchester: Brownsfield Mill (1825), Phoenix Mill (c.1849) and Crusader Mill (c.1850) in Ancoats and Talbot Mill in Castlefield (1830).62 Apart from a commitment to the prevailing orthodoxy that ensuring economic sustainability is achieved by identifying ‘future heritage’, these developments all lay claim to being among the last opportunities to buy up ‘swanky’ flats and offices in converted mills before the supply is exhausted. The hyperbole is hard to winnow out, but the end of the supply (in respect of warehouses too) is undoubtedly nigh. At a rhetorical level, some property developers, at least, are interested in social values. Tim Heatly, a spokesperson for Capital and Centric, the company renovating Talbot Mill, told the Manchester Evening News: ‘The essence of a building is in its original features. Our first priority is to keep what we can. It’s an essential part of honouring the stories of the thousands of people who have passed through Talbot’s doors across the decades.’63 To this extent, Heatly’s comments echo Laurajane Smith’s understanding of heritage as a ‘process’ in which ‘cultural and social values are rewritten and redefined for the needs of the present’. Smith, of course, argues that heritage is not about the built environment per se. Rather, its role is to record the experiences (and to seek to understand the values) of those who lived and worked in it – and those who continue to interact with it today. Property developers are surely ultimately interested in connecting the patina of age and the ring of the cash register. Heatly’s business partner, Adam Higgins, states ‘Talbot’s restoration will create a modern community in a historic setting, with unique architectural touches and high quality finishes. It’ll mean residents can say they live in one of Manchester’s largest surviving textile mills, without scrimping on style and homes comfort’.64 Public support for preserving and re-using mills is high: a survey conducted in November 2017 for Historic England, for example, recorded that 90 per cent of English adults believe that mills are an ‘important part of the country’s heritage, story and character’; 85 per cent are opposed to their demolition and 75 per cent believe that ‘they should be considered for new housing, offices and public amenities before constructing new buildings’.65 According to Andy Burnham, Manchester’s Mayor, ‘These buildings are an important part of our industrial legacy – the original Northern Powerhouse.’ But, he continued, ‘equally they are an important part of our future, whether that’s creating new jobs for local people by investing in the industries of the future, providing much-needed affordable housing, or transforming these unique spaces into cultural destinations’.66 Similarly, the Planning Director of Historic England, Catherine Dewar, enthused: With their ability to accommodate wonderful homes, workplaces and cultural spaces, our historic mill buildings deserve a future and should not be destroyed.

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They helped make us who we are in the north of England and have a profound impact on the physical and cultural landscape. Mills have so much to offer in terms of space, character and identity. By shining a light on successful regeneration projects, we hope to inspire others to recognise the potential of our former industrial buildings and start a conversation about their future.67

But timing is everything; there has been a profound shift in the way that the industrial past is regarded. For example, Hebblethwaite interviewed numerous people involved in the re-purposing of Carver’s Warehouse including Norman Redhead, Director of the Greater Manchester Archaeological Advisory Service. Tellingly, Redhead noted: ‘When he started his career in the 1980s industrial warehouses were still likened to dark satanic mills that should be removed as symbols of oppression’.68 Things have changed. The publicity surrounding the release of Historic England’s report quotes Redhead’s ebullient response to the findings: The historic textile mill is the iconic symbol of the region’s rich industrial heritage. It epitomises the successful introduction of the factory-based system for the production of textile goods, which from the late eighteenth century transformed the Greater Manchester area into one of the world’s leading manufacturing centres.69

This enthusiasm for the ‘engines of prosperity’ is promulgated in one of Manchester’s premier museums, the Museum of Science and Industry. Opened in 1969, the museum has developed into one of the nation’s most successful, attracting over 830,000 visitors per year.70 Today it is housed in a cluster of renovated heritage buildings, including the former Liverpool Road Station (1830) in the Castlefield district. The Museum’s mission is unequivocal: ‘The Museum of Science and Industry is devoted to inspiring our visitors through ideas that change the world, from the Industrial Revolution to today and beyond.’71 In the ‘Revolution Manchester’ gallery, the message is even clearer: ‘In this city science and technology met and the modern world began.’72 The Museum also promises affective experiences reaching across time. The ‘Manchester Mills Demonstration’ will allow visitors to ‘Go back in time to the working mills of 150 years ago, experience the deafening sounds of machinery and find out what life was like for thousands of mill workers’; the ‘Power Hall’ gallery offers visitors an opportunity to ‘Experience the sights, sounds and smells of real working steam engines’.73 Notably, throughout the museum there is almost no reference to the dark side of the dark satanic mills. On the contrary, there are only a couple of flecks, easily missed: ‘Men and boys did hard, heavy work loading arms full of cotton into the hopper feeder’; ‘Despite miserable conditions, people flooded to Manchester looking for work and the population quadrupled’.74 Moreover, as Stefan Berger and the present author have noted recently, affect is a spu-

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rious assertion: a cotton spinning machine – no matter how thunderously cacophonous – cannot stand in for the ‘boom of an Atlantic tide’ produced by ‘ten thousand times ten thousand spools and spindles all set humming’ (to borrow Carlyle’s words penned in 1840).75 With the best intentions no doubt, the Museum’s claim to offer experiential learning is actually an illformed palimpsest of iron and steel in need of significant qualification in the advertising blurbs. In fact, the mills and warehouses (and machines) that survived the linearity of time (as architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas puts it76) until the 1980s have not been frozen in time by re-purposing; their transformation has produced a caesura with the past. In this way, the effect of time appears to have been pulled in the opposite direction – the scandal of the age was cleaned up, razed to the ground or allowed to crumble into rubble, and that which survives has been repurposed with an eye to sustainability. All this ends in absence. What were once ‘hissing, whizzing, jumping, thumping, rattling, steaming and stinking’ factories are now ‘beautiful, design-led homes in prime city locations’.77 Flows of ‘liquid manure’ are now, contributors to TripAdvisor tell us, ‘so interesting and calming, [it’s] great to sit and watch the barges on the canal, great bars around as well’.78 If direct, visceral experience of the factory system has long since passed beyond living memory and we have no way to access it affectively (even if we wanted to), is it time to throw our hands in the air and move on? Or, perhaps we should restrict the debates over the preservation of industrial heritage to sites that operated this side of the horizon of lived experience to give all parties a seat at the table? And, consequently, must we leave our engagement with the ‘reality’ that shocked an angry young man as he trudged through excrement in 1844 to a debate among historians? Or, without slipping into egregious credulity, can we usefully interrogate the discontinuities between ‘hell on earth’ and the miraculous present as part of a broader conversation about then and now. Paul Pickering is Director of both the Research School of Humanities and the Arts (2013–) and the Australian Studies Institute (2017–) at the Australian National University. He has published extensively on Australian, British and Irish social, political and cultural history as well as biography, public memory and commemoration, industrial heritage and the study of re-enactment as an historical method. A paperback edition of his most recent book (with Kate Bowan): Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in the Anglophone World, 1790-1914 was published in March 2019 (Manchester University Press). His current book project, From ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ to the ‘Manchester Miracle’: The Politics of Urban-Industrial Heritage in Britain, will be published by Routledge in 2020.

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Notes 1. An 1892 edition contained a new preface by the author, which offered perfunctory reflections by the aging communist warrior designed to bring the import of his commentary up to date. 2. A Panther edition, introduced by Eric Hobsbawm, first published in 1969, reproduced Engels’ sketches but no map; an Oxford University Press edition published in 1971 reproduced neither. 3. Gould and White, Mental Maps. 4. New Statesman, 12 September 2016. 5. Cooke-Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, 1–2. 6. A Parliamentary Gazetteer published in 1851 recorded that there were over 250 mills in operation in Manchester. 7. Ironically, among the forest was the Victoria Mill in Salford (built in 1837), owned by Erman and Engels where Engels worked as an apprentice to the family business. See Whitfield, ‘Frederick Engels in Manchester’. 8. https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/920223/manchester-from-kersalmoor. Some of the detail in my reading is drawn from the online caption in the Royal Collection; other parts contain corrections to it. 9. Northern Star, 11 July 1840. 10. Love, Manchester As It Is: or Notices of the Institutions, Manufactures, Commerce, Railways, Etc., of the Metropolis of Manufactures (1839); Butterworth, A Statistical Sketch of the County Palatine of Lancaster, 78. 11. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 77–78. 12. Faucher, Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects (1844), 65n. The additional notes were written by J.P. Culverwell, a member of the Manchester Athenaeum. 13. Kay-Shuttleworth, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Engaged in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 38. 14. Engels, Condition, 81. 15. Miller, First Impressions of England and Its People, 35–36. 16. Kay, Moral and Physical Condition, 38, 41. 17. Engels, Condition, 80, 85. 18. Northern Star, 2 October 1841. 19. Engels, Condition, 84. 20. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 223. See also Johns, ‘Report on the Working of the Registration and Marriage Acts, During the Two Years 1837–8 and 1838–9, in the Registration District of Manchester’, 195–205. 21. Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales, 357. 22. Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales, 357–58. 23. Aiken, A Description of the County from Thirty to Forty Miles Round Manchester, 192; Engels, Condition, 85. See also The Autobiography of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, 7. 24. Love, Manchester As It Is, 201. 25. Ibid. 26. Hartwell, ‘The Characteristics of Manchester in a Series of Letters to the Editor, No. 6’, 345. 27. Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures or an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain, 18. See also Faucher, Manchester in 1844, 92. 28. See Northern Star, 16 May 1840, 8; Poor Man’s Advocate, 21 April 1832, 105; Poor Man’s Guardian, 21 January 1832, 255–56; Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, 39–40. 29. Northern Star, 11 July 1840.

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30. Reprinted in W.E.A. Axon, ‘Poems of Lancashire Places’, 212–13; Manchester Central Reference Library, Local History Library, Newspaper Cuttings: Ben Brierley’s Journal, March 1872; Maratha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse, 159–60. 31. Rushton, My Life as a Farmers’ Boy, Factory Lad, Teacher and Preacher, 28, 31–32; Alighieri, Dante’s Inferno, 22. 32. Southey, Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, Letter XXXVIII, 208. 33. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), 345. 34. Love, Manchester As It Is, 201–2. 35. Disraeli, Coningsby; or, the New Generation, book 4, 143. 36. As Asa Briggs famously put it, it was difficult to be neutral about Manchester. See Briggs, Victorian Cities, chapter 2. 37. See Northern Star, 10 August 1839. For the Cathedral, see Aston, A Picture of Manchester, 33–68. 38. Stedman Jones, Marx: Greatness and Illusion, 169. 39. Manchester Times, 2 April 1851. 40. Ibid. 41. See Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, 125–29. Elsewhere in his account, Engels was, in keeping with the vast majority of social commentators at that time, highly critical of the effect of drink on the working classes. 42. Manchester Times, 30 December 1843. 43. See Manchester Times, 11 May 1839. 44. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, chapter 1. 45. Love, Manchester As It Is, 193. 46. See for example, Northern Star, 30 March 1839. 47. Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1. 48. Britton, ‘Ducie Bridge Pub Will be Demolished – Despite Petition to Save It’. 49. Hill, ‘Is Victoria UK’s Worst Station?’. 50. http://www.manchester-arena.com/about-us/. Tragically, the Arena came to worldwide notice as the site of a terrorist attack in May 2017 that killed 22 people and injured 250 others. 51. Jahangir, ‘Manchester IRA Bomb: Terror Blast Remembered 20 Years On’. 52. See Manchester Cathedral, ‘History’; Anglican Communion News Service, ‘England: Manchester Cathedral Damaged by Bomb’; BBC News, ‘Work Begins on Manchester Cathedral’s Temporary Church’. 53. See Williams, ‘How the Medieval Shambles Pubs were Moved – Piece by Piece’. 54. See Marketing Manchester, ‘Who We Are’. 55. Taylor, Cooper and Barry, Manchester: The Warehouse Legacy, 55. 56. Historic England, ‘Britannia Hotel’. 57. See Swinney and Thomas, ‘A Century of Cities: Urban Economic Chance Since 1911’; Paxton, ‘“The Manchester Miracle”: How Did a City in Decline become the Poster Child for Regeneration?’ 58. British Listed Buildings, ‘Dale Warehouse’. 59. Hebblethwaite, ‘“New Lease of Life with Minimal Intervention”: Carver’s Warehouse: A Multi-scaled Analysis of Conservation-led Renovation’, 8. 60. https://opencorpdata.com/uk/09921886. 61. Historic England and University of Salford, ‘Historic Textile Mills of Greater Manchester: Survey Review and Heritage Audit’; Historic England, ‘Engines of Prosperity: New Uses for Old Mills (North West)’. 62. See https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/business/property/urban-splashannounces-plans-northern-11718064; Creative Tourist, ‘Brownsfield Mill’. 63. Manchester Evening News, 26 September 2017.

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64. Smith, The Uses of Heritage; Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Class; Manchester Evening News, 26 September 2017. 65. Historic England, ‘Overwhelming Public Support for Saving England’s Mills Revealed’ and ‘Engines of Prosperity: New Uses for Old Mills’. 66. Historic England, ‘Overwhelming Public Support for Saving England’s Mills Revealed’. 67. Ibid. 68. Hebblethwaite, ‘New Lease of Life’, 11. 69. Historic England, ‘Overwhelming Public Support for Saving England’s Mills Revealed’. 70. Museum of Science Industry, ‘From Volunteering to Corporate Sponsorship, Find Out How You Can Get Involved and Support the Museum’. 71. Museum of Science Industry, ‘The Museum of Science and Industry is Devoted to Inspiring our Visitors through Ideas that Change the World, from the Industrial Revolution to Today and Beyond’. See also Hills, ‘The North Western Museum of Science and Industry: Some Reminiscences’. 72. Fieldwork notes and photographic record taken by author, January 2017. 73. https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/. 74. Fieldwork notes and photographic record taken by author, January 2017. A Souvenir Guide, which can be purchased in museum store, is a little more forthcoming although the language is nowhere near as graphic as contemporary critics. See 6, 15, 23–24. 75. Berger and Pickering, ‘Regions of Heavy Industry and their Heritage – Between Identity Politics and “Touristification”: Where to Next?’, 215; Carlyle, Chartism, 83. 76. Koolhaas and Mau, S, M, L, XL. 77. Northern Star, 11 July 1840; Manchester Evening News, 26 September 2017. 78. Miller, First Impressions, 35–36; TripAdvisor, ‘Love it Here’. Admittedly, as recently as 2015, some Manchester canals were still in need of a significant clean-up. See https://www .theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/01/manchester-canal-serial-killer-property-reputation.

Bibliography Aiken, J. A Description of the County from Thirty to Forty Miles Round Manchester (1795). New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. Alighieri, D. Dante’s Inferno, Canto III. (Modern Library Edition). New York: n.p., 1950. Anglican Communion News Service. ‘England: Manchester Cathedral Damaged by Bomb’, 2 July 1996. http://www.anglicannews.org/news/1996/07/england-manchester-cathe dral-damaged-by-bomb.aspx. Aston, J. A Picture of Manchester (1816). Didsbury: E.J. Moreton, 1969. Axon, W.E.A. ‘Poems of Lancashire Places’, in W.E.A Axon (ed.), Bygone Lancashire. Manchester: n.p., 1892, 212–13. Baines, E. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: n.p., 1835. BBC News. ‘Work Begins on Manchester Cathedral’s Temporary Church’, 11 February 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-21401038. Berger, S., and P. Pickering. ‘Regions of Heavy Industry and their Heritage – Between Identity Politics and “Touristification”: Where to Next?’, in S. Berger and P. Pickering (eds), Industrial Heritage and Regional Identities. London: Routledge, 2018. Briggs, A. Victorian Cities. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. British Listed Buildings. ‘Dale Warehouse’. https://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101200 845-dale-warehouse-city-centre-ward#.Wl5klCNL3Uo.

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Britton, P. ‘Ducie Bridge Pub Will be Demolished – Despite Petition to Save It’. http://www .manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/ducie-bridge-pub-dem olished-despite-13757267. Butterworth, E. A Statistical Sketch of the County Palatine of Lancaster. London: Longmans, 1841. Carlyle, T. Chartism. London: John Fraser, 1840. ———. Past and Present. London, n.p., 1843. Cooke-Taylor, W. Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire; In a Series of Letters to His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin. Second Edition; With Two Additional Letters on the Recent Disturbances. London: Duncan and Malcolm, 1842. Chadwick, E. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), W. Flinn (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965. Creative Tourist. ‘Brownsfield Mill’, 19 December 2017. http://www.creativetourist.com/ venue/brownsfield-mill/. Disraeli, B. Coningsby; or, the New Generation. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1844. Elias, N. The Civilizing Process (1939). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Faucher, L. Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects Translated from the French with Copious Notes Appended by a Member of the Manchester Athenaeum (1844). London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969. Gould, P., and R. White. Mental Maps. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Hartwell, H. ‘The Characteristics of Manchester in a Series of Letters to the Editor, No. 6.’, North of England Magazine (July 1842): 345. Hebblethwaite, R. ‘“New Lease of Life with Minimal Intervention”: Carver’s Warehouse: A Multi-scaled Analysis of Conservation-led Renovation’, unpublished MA (Hons) thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. Hill, J. ‘Is Victoria UK’s Worst Station?’, BBC News, 17 November 2009. http://news.bbc .co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8364000/8364598.stm. Hills, R. The North Western Museum of Science and Industry: Some Reminiscences. Manchester: Chetham’s Library, 2012. Historic England. ‘Britannia Hotel’, https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/ 1246952. Historic England. ‘Engines of Prosperity: New Uses for Old Mills (North West)’, n.p., 2017. Historic England. ‘Overwhelming Public Support for Saving England’s Mills Revealed’, 20 November 2017. https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/OverwhelmingPublic-Support-for-Saving-Englands-Mills. Historic England and University of Salford. ‘Historic Textile Mills of Greater Manchester: Survey Review and Heritage Audit’, n.p., 2017. Jahangir, R. ‘Manchester IRA Bomb: Terror Blast Remembered 20 Years On’, BBC News, 15 June 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-36474535. Johns, W. ‘Report on the Working of the Registration and Marriage Acts, During the Two Years 1837–8 and 1838–9, in the Registration District of Manchester’. Journal of the Statistical Society 3 ( July 1840), 195–205. Kay-Shuttleworth, J. The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Engaged in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832). Manchester: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970. ———. The Autobiography of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, Barry Cambray (ed.). London: Bloomfield, 1964. Koolhaas, R., and B. Mau. S, M, L, XL. New York: Monacheli Press, 1995. Leader, R.E. Life and Letters of John Arthur Roebuck. London: Edward Arnold, 1897. Love, B. Manchester As It Is: or Notices of the Institutions, Manufactures, Commerce, Railways, Etc., of the Metropolis of Manufactures. Manchester: Love and Barton, 1839. Manchester Arena. ‘About Us’. http://www.manchester-arena.com/about-us/. Manchester Cathedral. ‘History’. http://www.manchestercathedral.org/history.

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Marcus, S. Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. New York: Random House, 1974. Marketing Manchester. ‘Who We Are’, http://www.marketingmanchester.com/who-we-are/. Miller, H. First Impressions of England and Its People. Edinburgh: John Johnstone, 1874. Museum of Science Industry. ‘From Volunteering to Corporate Sponsorship, Find Out How You Can Get Involved and Support the Museum’, http://www.mosi.org.uk/support-us. Museum of Science Industry. ‘The Museum of Science and Industry is Devoted to Inspiring our Visitors through Ideas that Change the World, from the Industrial Revolution to Today and Beyond’, https://www.msimanchester.org.uk/about-us. Parliamentary Gazetteer of England and Wales. Edinburgh: Fullerton & Co, 1851. Paxton, F. ‘“The Manchester Miracle”: How Did a City in Decline become the Poster Child for Regeneration?’, New Statesman, 12 September 2016. Pickering, P.A. Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995. ———. ‘Conserving the People’s History: Lessons from Manchester and Salford’. Humanities Research 8(1) (2001), 51–57. Rushton, A. My Life as a Farmers’ Boy, Factory Lad, Teacher and Preacher. Manchester: S. Clark, 1909. Smith, L. The Uses of Heritage. Oxon: Routledge, 2006. Smith, L., P.A. Shackel, and G. Campbell. Heritage, Labour and the Working Class. Oxon: Routledge, 2011. Southey R. (ed.). Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella. London: Longman,1808. Stedman Jones, G. Marx: Greatness and Illusion. London: Allen Lane, 2016. Swinney, P., and E. Thomas. ‘A Century of Cities: Urban Economic Chance since 1911’. http://www.centreforcities.org/reader/a-century-of-cities/3-are-cities-bound-by-the se-pathways/. Taylor, S., M. Cooper, and P.S. Barry. Manchester: The Warehouse Legacy: An Introduction and Guide. Historic England Publishing, 2002. Ure, A. The Philosophy of Manufactures or an Exposition of the Scientific, Moral and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain. London: Charles Knight, 1835. Whitfield, R. Frederick Engels in Manchester: The Search for a Shadow. Salford: Working Class Movement Library, 1988. Williams, J. ‘How the Medieval Shambles Pubs were Moved – Piece by Piece’, 15 June 2016. http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/shamblesmoved-manchester-pictures-bomb-11440936.

CHAPTER

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Where Is ‘Red Clydeside’? Industrial Heritage, Working-Class Culture and Memory in the Glasgow Region Arthur McIvor

Glasgow and Clydeside’s industrial past, working-class culture and heritage have been the focus of struggle and contestation. Urban renewal and associated image rebranding from the 1980s has projected a sense of the city as a prospering, safe, welcoming, stylish place of hedonistic consumption, great architecture (McIntosh and Art Nouveau) and with a vibrant nightlife. In this rebranding, working-class culture and social life, industrial heritage, the ravages of deindustrialization and the struggles of ‘Red Clydeside’ have been marginalized. If Glasgow’s museums act as theatres of heritage, it is creative, artistic, technological, religious, scientific and industrial achievements and developments that now take centre stage. This chapter explores regional identity and representation in public history, critically examining the ways that museums, archives and the heritage industry have engaged with the history of work, working-class culture and radical politics of the industrial conurbation of Clydeside – the 40 miles or so centred on Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city – since 1980. My analysis is influenced by and framed within the seminal work on the theory of heritage of Laurajane Smith, who has argued in Uses of Heritage (2006): At one level heritage is about the promotion of a consensus version of history by state-sanctioned cultural institutions and elites to regulate cultural and social tensions in the present. On the other hand heritage may also be a resource that is used to challenge and redefine received values and identities by a range of subaltern groups.1 Notes for this section begin on page 64.

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This chapter explores within the context of Glasgow and Clydeside Smith’s concept of a hegemonic ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) versus alternative, subordinate discourse and practices. The argument draws upon ongoing research by a cluster of scholars in Scotland that is shedding valuable new insights into aspects of working-class culture, protest, deindustrialization, heritage and memory, and upon the extensive intangible heritage work being undertaken in the country, especially in relation to oral history.2 In the latter, the Scottish Oral History Centre based at the University of Strathclyde has played an important role.3 The first section contextualizes the argument with an outline of Glasgow’s socio-economic and industrial history. The second part will examine how the struggle over representing Glasgow’s industrial and radical past – encapsulated in the notion of ‘Red Clydeside’ – was played out in the city’s industrial heritage and museums. The argument here is that neoliberal politics in the city in the 1980s/1990s prompted an assault on some elements of working-class culture that marked a paradigm shift that facilitated attempts to reconfigure and erase ‘Red Clydeside’. Section three traces the parallel failure to preserve tangible industrial heritage (in marked contrast, for example, to the Ruhr) that celebrates in the preservation of work-site buildings the meaning of blue collar working lives and mourns their loss as deindustrialization intensified. These contests over memory, heritage and how historical places and cultures are preserved, memorialized and represented are traced through examination of the political struggles within the city over who controlled the museums in the mid to late 1980s and 1990s between socialist-feminists, such as the curator of the People’s Palace (Glasgow’s social history museum) Elspeth King and her assistant Michael Donnelly, and liberal-labourist ‘revisionists’, led by Pat Lally, Julian Spalding and Mark O’Neill. The victory of the latter was entangled with an image rebranding period for the city (with the slogan ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’) and a clear investment strategy thereafter, which sidelined the People’s Palace (and working-class culture) and favoured shiny new (and rather sterile) museums where the focus was on technological achievement, on physical artefacts, on art and celebration of the ‘Clydebuilt’ industrial products (like ships and locomotives). Scotland’s pioneering place in industrialization became the dominant motif. The new ‘Riverside Museum’ (opened 2011), which has many admirable qualities, epitomizes this and is perhaps the best example of Smith’s AHD in practice. Certainly, working-class lives, work, culture, protest and resistance are marginalized within Zaha Hadid’s wonderfully designed and sensuously sculpted space. The final section of the chapter will examine how this neoliberal ‘authorized heritage discourse’ has been and continues to be challenged in an

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ongoing struggle over how the past is represented in the city through ‘grassroots’ radical history groups, creative collectives, community heritage, ‘unofficial’ memorializing and oral history. Nor is there one single discourse within and across the multiple Corporation-controlled museums (currently eleven) within the city – rather a range of contending curatorial views and practices. Alternative discourses reviving traditions of ‘Red Clydeside’, reconstructing exploitative class relationships, radical protest movements or challenging the erasure of women from official representations have almost always existed and have re-emerged and proliferated in the recent past. People’s sense of honesty, injustice and authenticity drove these alternative history-making exercises along. Examples drawn upon here are the ‘Workers’ City’ movement (1988–92), the Glasgow Women’s Library, the memorializing of occupational disease deaths (Clydebank Asbestos Monument) and radical campaigners (e.g. Mary Barbour in Govan), and the ‘Red Clydeside’ websites, audio trails (as in Govan), virtual museums and archives (including the Willie Gallacher Library). The deployment of oral history in many of these heritage initiatives marks a clear effort to develop an alternative narrative – a people’s voice that records and preserves the rich mosaic of working-class life and culture in a classic heavy-industry dominated city and industrial conurbation with a rich tradition of political protest and resistance to injustice. I argue here that oral history has played (and should continue to play) a key role in this reconstruction, reconfiguration and problematizing of the past, exposing the multiple narratives and reconstructing identities and the complexity of culture and plurality of politics in a modern industrial city.

Context: Clydeside’s Industrial and Radical Past Historically, this region was at the heart of Scotland’s industrialization in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the local economy based on textile manufacturing, coal mining, iron and steel, engineering, shipbuilding, the docks and heavy chemical manufacture. The working environment, exploitative social relations, proletarianization and grim overcrowded living conditions (based on the tenement housing structure) germinated a powerful sense of working-class consciousness by the late nineteenth /early twentieth centuries, manifested in the rise of socialist politics, radical trade unionism and the concept of ‘Red Clydeside’. It has been argued that militancy, protest and radical workplace cultures were evident in the pre-World War I strike wave across Clydeside and that this was in large part a reaction to the authoritarian management style of the region’s industrial magnates.4 Other

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manifestations of ‘Red Clydeside’ include the first UK wage strikes in World War I, the community rent strikes of 1915, anti-war demonstrations, vociferous demands for workers’ control and a powerful socialist-led shop stewards movement (coordinated by the ‘soviet’ Clyde Workers’ Committee). Most notably, perhaps, the seismic shift in politics from a Liberal dominated city was evidenced in the ‘landslide’ victory for socialist ILP candidates in the 1922 general election.5 A decade later in 1933, socialists in the local government (Glasgow Council) gained a majority – a position they retained (with the occasional exception) right through to the end of the twentieth century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, therefore, Glasgow was transformed into one of Europe’s foremost socialist cities. This narrative has not gone uncontested and has been the subject of vigorous academic debate. Notably, the concept of ‘Red Clydeside’ was challenged by politically charged liberal revisionism that accompanied Thatcherism in the 1980s. Iain Maclean’s seminal monograph published in 1983 symbolized this rewriting of Glasgow’s past, though there were others who subscribed to the view that the idea of a revolutionary city was a myth and the stuff of legend.6 This research made a major contribution towards putting some of the hyperbole associated with communist polemics and journalism and the narrative arc of the ‘forward march of labour’ and a victorious, united proletariat into perspective and began the process of reenvisioning the city’s social and political movements in more complex and multilayered ways. Glasgow was a city riven by class, occupational, gender, spatial, ethnic and religious divisions with multiple social and political identities. Further research subsequently rehabilitated the idea of ‘Red Clydeside’ within this new framing and in a more nuanced form.7 The most recent PhD thesis (2015) on the topic argues for ‘a more ambiguous labour politics’ and ‘a plurality of labour practices and experiences’ whilst strongly supporting the ‘relevance’ of Red Clydeside.8 This synthesizes several decades of research and attention to the city’s labour history, adapting to, revising but ultimately adding some credence to the interpretation of Marxist historians such as John Foster and Terry Brotherstone in the 1980s and 1990s.9 And the radical past of the city had deep significance, as one commentator noted in 1990, referring to the socialist artist Ken Currie’s work: ‘At a cultural level, however, a popular socialist history and, particularly in Currie’s work, the iconography of Scottish working-class history and, especially, the mythology of the so-called “Red Clydeside”, have been recuperated to have a specific symbolic interest’.10 That the past has relevance and meaning in the present is illustrated in the ways that activists have drawn upon the discourse of Red Clydeside in campaigns since World War II. This has been evident in the Upper Clyde

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Shipbuilders’ work-in in 1971, through the anti-Poll Tax campaign of 1988–89 to the Scottish Referendum campaign of 2014 and the bedroom tax protest in 2016.11 And Clydeside workers themselves, notably in shipbuilding and in mining, continued to associate with radical left politics – at least until towards the end of the twentieth century (when a left-wing Scottish nationalist resurgence challenged traditional loyalties to socialism). In a recent (2016) oral interview, Govan shipbuilder Danny Houston reflected: Very rarely was someone a Conservative in here [Fairfield shipyard]. If you were a Conservative, you’d likely get battered! A lot a [of] Labour, but there were a lot of lefties in here; Trotskyists, Leninists. A lot of communism in here.12

Meanwhile, the economy and employment profile of the city and the Clydeside region was changing. The map on the following page identifies some of the major industrial enterprises in the city in 1950. By the end of the century, only five of the 37 industrial workplaces identified here were still in operation.13 The decennial census data for Glasgow for 1951 give a clear sense of the occupational profile of the city and the dominance of industrial jobs, as well as the gendered nature of the labour market. In 1951, industrial jobs accounted for 50 per cent of the total in Glasgow. By 1991, this was down to just 19 per cent. In the hinterland of the city, coal mines closed with increasing velocity in Lanarkshire and Ayrshire from the 1950s on. Employment in coal mines in Scotland fell from 89,000 in 1951 to 34,000 in 1971 and 25,000 in 1981 before the political attack of Thatcher that left these communities decimated.14 Whilst little compensated for the blighted lives of middle-aged and older industrial workers, others adapted and there were widening job opportunities in the service sector, office and creative work in the post-industrial city. Widening access to higher education for the generation of working-class youths from the 1960s also enabled access for some to less dangerous and sometimes more intrinsically rewarding professional and creative jobs. But the legacies of ill health associated with industrial work, redundancy and impoverished working-class communities cast a long shadow, contributing to a crisis in public health in the city. This ‘Glasgow Effect’ generated a considerable volume of research, led by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. The best of this work framed Clydeside’s experience in comparison to other industrial and deindustrializing regions across Europe, and Glasgow’s story in contrast to similar UK cities, such as Liverpool and Manchester.15 Some recent research has gone further, persuasively linking the neoliberal ‘political attack’ and the intensification of deindustrialization under Thatcher in the 1980s with worsening levels of joblessness, deprivation, inequality and ill health in Glasgow and the Clydeside area.16 Undeniably, the data shows that Glasgow experienced a

Map 2.1 Map of Glasgow: Major industrial sites, c. 1950. Created by the author.

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Table 2.1 Employment in main industries on Clydeside, 1951. Clydeside total (000s)

Male employment (000s and as a % age of total employment)

Female employment (000s)

Mining

37.5

36.9

98.4

0.6

Shipbuilding

58.2

55.5

95.4

2.7

Construction

71.8

68.4

95.3

3.2

Metals

44.2

41.6

94.1

2.6

Vehicles

29.4

27.3

92.9

2.1

Mechanical engineering

81.7

69.1

84.6

12.6

Transport & Communications

94.5

78.4

83.0

16.1

Public administration

53.6

44.1

82.2

9.5

Timber

18.4

14.7

79.9

3.7

Metals

19.3

15.0

77.7

4.3

Chemicals

21.1

15.4

73.0

5.7

Instrument engineering

6.6

4.1

62.1

2.5

Electrical engineering

11.4

6.7

58.8

4.7

Paper

21.8

12.6

57.8

9.2

Food/drink

47.1

26.4

56.1

20.7

Textiles

55.7

18.9

33.9

36.8

Clothing

30.9

6.7

21.7

24.2

0.8

0.5

Not classified

0.3

Source: Census of Scotland, 1951.

higher proportion of communities in poverty and with lower life expectancy than any other city in the UK. Whilst deindustrialization, closures and lay-offs were intensifying and economic transformation deepening, the industrial city of smog, dirt, poverty, ill health, crime, sectarianism, militancy and radical politics continued to dominate the discourse and representation of the city through the second half of the twentieth century – as Mike Pacione has shown in his carefully calibrated social-spatial study of Glasgow.17 These motifs were deeply engrained into popular consciousness. This reputation and these features of an industrial, proletarian city were influential in attracting me, as a young early career labour historian, to move to and settle in the city in 1984.

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Reshaping a City’s Identity: Politics, Public History and the Erasure of ‘Red Clydeside’ So much for the convoluted academic discourse on Clydeside’s workingclass culture and politics. How then have working lives, working-class culture and politics and the idea and tradition of ‘Red Clydeside’ been represented in public heritage discourse in museums in the city? Surveying the position now, it appears that the people’s story is in the background rather than the foreground, obscured by shiny new and extensively refurbished museums that focus on religion, on transport and on art and that fetishize machines, artefacts and technologies. Style has been prioritized over substance and working-class social history. In public history, it is tempting to trace the exorcism of ‘Red Clydeside’ – the narrative of working-class poverty, mobilization and politicization – to a conscious attempt to rebrand the city and attract tourists and investment in the Thatcher era of the 1980s. In 1985, a private-public consortium Glasgow Action was established after the Scottish Development Agency, using external consultants, advised a complete image overhaul as a prerequisite for a city redevelopment plan (the five year plan 1985–1990). These years saw the adoption of the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ logo, the naming of the east central city area ‘Merchant City’, the Garden Festival docklands development and culminated in Glasgow’s designation as European City of Culture in 1990.18 The 1980s/90s redevelopment transformed the city centre and docklands areas without significantly affecting the key areas of deprivation and poverty – the blighted peripheral housing estates (Easterhouse, Drumchapel, Pollok and Castlemilk). The outcome was a marked widening of inequalities across neighbourhoods within the city.19 Ian Spring described this ‘New Glasgow’ as ‘particularly reactionary and puritanical’.20 The new neoliberal direction of the Labour Party-controlled City Council under its leader Pat Lally was manifest in the struggle over heritage; on how to represent the industrial and radical past of Clydeside in the city’s museums and especially at the city’s ‘flagship’ social history museum, the People’s Palace. This led to the controversial snubbing of the socialist feminist curator of the People’s Palace, Elspeth King, in 1990–1991 and the sacking of her assistant Michael Donnelly for speaking out about the local authorities (Pat Lally) and the appointment of an ‘outsider’, an Englishman, Julian Spalding, as Director of Museums in the city. As curator of the People’s Palace museum from 1977, King had created a wonderful, vibrant museum, which focused on the gritty reality of Glaswegians’ working lives: the poverty, ill health and crime, their radical politics and struggles and vibrant popular culture. Forty-one major exhibitions over more than a decade

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reflected and celebrated the richness of working-class heritage in the city. And the quality and innovative nature of King’s work at the museum was recognized internationally. The People’s Palace in this era in the 1980s won an award for the best museum in Europe and the best museum in the UK. Amongst King’s initiatives was to appoint Alistair Gray as artist in residence, to stimulate the collection of oral history recordings (which I’ll return to later) and to commission the artist Ken Currie to paint eight massive murals celebrating ‘Red Clydeside’, which were then hung around the dome inside the museum. These were the largest mural commissions in the city for almost 100 years since the building of the City Chambers and stood in marked contrast to the marble splendour and elite ‘high art’ of the town hall built in the 1880s and designed to represent the stature of the city then as the ‘second city of the Empire’. What happened? When the local authorities announced a reorganization of museum services and the creation of two new jobs as Director of Museums Services for the city and Keeper of Social History, King was widely tipped to get promoted. She applied and failed to get either post. The appointment to the first of an Englishman and the second of an Irishman (and King’s subordinate, who had been selected by King to run a small local community library in Springburn) was met with shock and disbelief. There followed a petition of more than 5,000 signatures against the appointments and a protest outside the town hall in George Square of more than 1,000 supporters of King, but to no avail. Elspeth King resigned in 1991 and left the city for good, taking up a post at the Smith Library and Museum in Stirling (where she was reunited with her sacked assistant, Michael Donnelly).21 This episode also galvanized a grass-roots protest movement that had emerged over the designation of Glasgow as the European City of Culture. An amorphous group of radical working-class writers, artists, sculptors and others (including James Kelman, Alistair Gray, Francis McLay and Wilma Eaton) under the banner of the ‘Workers’ City Group’ developed a biting critique of the amount of money being wasted in promoting the City of Culture at a time of accelerating deindustrialization, mass unemployment, deprivation and ill health in the city. Their publication, The Glasgow Keelie (1989–92), together with two other Workers’ City books provided a scathing critique of yuppy culture, corruption in the Council, the obscenity of commissioning the ad firm Saatchi and Saatchi to rebrand the city’s image and logo – ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ – and the attempted erasure of the darker side of working-class lived experience and working-class protest and identity.22 As Ian Spring argued in 1990, this rebranding process involved ‘a disassociation of nostalgia with “melancholia” or disease, and a clear reassociation with the concept of pleasure’.23

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The Elspeth King affair and the ‘Workers’ City Group’ are significant because they demonstrate the contestation in Glasgow and Clydeside over regional identity and representation. It shows how the municipal authorities mobilized in the late 1980s and 1990s to reconstruct Glasgow’s identity, to rebrand the city as a cultural centre and an attractive, stylish and safe place to visit. This was a clash of politics and cultures; of neoliberalism vs socialism. In this process, Glasgow projected itself to the outside world as a city of style and culture, of museums, beautiful architecture and art galleries whilst airbrushing out the city’s links with slavery, sectarianism, radical workingclass culture, strikes and workplace occupations and revolutionary politics. Working-class lives and the concept of a ‘socialist city’ became poorly represented in public history, at least in the major city museums. Investment from the 1980s was directed to the refurbishment of the main city museum and art gallery at Kelvingrove and to the creation of shiny new museums of religion (St Mungos) and transport (the Riverside Museum), where people’s history was poorly represented – and machines, ‘high’ art and technologies dominated. Meanwhile, the People’s Palace experienced two decades of stagnation and lack of investment. Significantly, whereas in England new initiatives were taking place with the relocation of the national labour history museum to Manchester, no such Scottish labour history museum was established. Some local community museums also atrophied, including the innovative Springburn Museum (located in a deprived working-class area of the city) – which focused on working-class lives and had integrated oral history and the voice within its small exhibition space – which closed in 2008. The ‘Clydebuilt’ museum in Braehead – which celebrated the ‘glory’ of shipbuilding and its workers – also closed recently in 2010 as did an important radical library in Glasgow with communist antecedents (the Gallacher Memorial Library – named after the Marxist William Gallacher) which closed in 2015, due ostensibly to public spending cuts. The potential of oral history to facilitate a refocused story around lived experience, marginalized communities and emotions – a key vehicle recognized by feminist and socialist historians in the 1970s and 1980s (such as Elizabeth Roberts, Paul Thompson and Ian MacDougall) was also not taken up as extensively or as imaginatively by the city’s museums, in marked contrast to elsewhere (for example the Museum of London and Edinburgh Museums). I’ll come back to explore the role of oral history in heritage in a little more depth in the final section. The point to highlight here is that whilst Glasgow has many wonderful museums (eleven in total), working lives, working-class culture and struggle and protest has not been as well represented within them as it potentially could have been.

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Industrial Heritage: Demolish and be Damned What about the places in which these workers were employed? How much of the physical heritage of Glasgow and Clydeside’s industrial past has survived, and what value has been placed on preservation? Concurrently, opportunities to create industrial heritage centres and preserve industrial sites (as happened in the Ruhr) were eschewed as the bulldozer flattened factories, shipyards and tenements and infilled docks to create spaces for speculative investment in new housing along the Clyde river, a motorway (M8) that dissected the city, and entertainment, conferencing and retail parks such as the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre and the cinema complex on the opposite side of the river (‘The Quay’). Big industrial sites gave way to retail and small business complexes, such as the construction of ‘The Forge’ retail park on the site of the Beardmore’s steel and engineering plant in Parkhead. Others were just demolished leaving massive gap sites, such as Dixons steelworks in Govanhill, Glasgow and the North British Locomotive works in Springburn. The haunting Cranhill Arts video production (in which Ken Currie was involved) Clyde Film (1984) captured this orgy of destruction. This was the product of short-sighted local authority regeneration policies in the 1980s and ineffectual political pressure (prior to the creation of a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999) to preserve and re-use industrial sites and tenements. The first knee-jerk response was to demolish and make way for redevelopment. Sites for consumption thus replaced sites for production. This mirrored developments outside the city in the wider Clydeside industrial conurbation; for example, Singer’s massive site in Clydebank was demolished almost without a trace following closure in 1980, and the iconic Ravenscraig steelworks was bulldozed in 1996. The latter has recently been captured in a moving piece of filmmaking by Illona Kacieja, drawing on original footage showing shots of ex-Ravenscraig workers clearly traumatized and moved to tears by the dramatic demolition (by explosives) of the works.24 This demonstrates the meaning of industrial work to these men and the level of emotional attachment they had to their sites of employment, a recurring theme in the deindustrialization literature.25 Strangleman has argued persuasively that the impacts of job loss were mediated through interlocking networks of family, class, work and space and that loss of industrial work was intimately associated with the physical spaces they occupied through their working lives.26 There were some exceptions to the erasure of industrial heritage that characterized the Clydeside story. Templeton’s iconic carpet factory in Bridgeton has survived and become reused as offices and a small independent brewery. Two giant cranes have also been preserved on the Clyde and

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have become emblematic of the city’s port and industrial heritage.27 And the derelict A-listed Fairfield shipyard offices have recently been renovated and converted into a heritage centre.28 The most notable exception, however, is the UNESCO World Heritage Site at New Lanark (late eighteenth and early nineteenth century mill buildings and village associated with the communitarian visionary Robert Owen). This owed much to the pioneering role of industrial archaeologists – notably John Hume – and the Scottish Ancient Monuments Board. Nonetheless, here there was a tendency to ‘Disneyfication’ and uncritical nostalgia, with the site signally failing to represent the more recent history of the iconic factory complex, which closed in the 1960s. Nor is downsizing and deindustrialization explored in the interpretation, and New Lanark only superficially embraces possibilities to incorporate the people’s story, the complexities of working-class life and the ways the work impacted adversely upon workers’ bodies. There is only limited use of autobiographical and personal accounts and no use of oral testimonies in the interpretation of this famous heritage site. The focus is on industrialization and innovation in production (in this case, the welfarist social engineering of the early factory system) and the contribution of Scots pioneers (David Dale and Robert Owen). This emphasis on invention and achievement is repeated in other industrial heritage sites such as the new ‘Riverside Museum’ of transport, which gives short shrift to labour history and has the underlying motif of ‘Clydebuilt’. Of UNESCO sites, it has been noted by Smith, Shackel and Campbell that ‘the focus on industrial heritage is often void of people and class struggle’.29 This is certainly true of New Lanark and the flagship Riverside Museum, in Glasgow. Industrial heritage on Clydeside has tended to be erased rather than conserved, and there is a significant difference in this respect compared to what has happened, for example, in the Ruhr. German historian Lutz Raphael commented in relation to the UK: ‘In public debate, deindustrialization was generally seen as an irreversible trend delegitimizing the defence of industrial sites and jobs and consigning industrial work to history.’30 The latest available statistics suggest that of the 8,191 Scheduled Monuments in Scotland, only 532 (6%) are industry or transport related. Additionally, only 6,380 (13%) of Scotland’s 47,674 listed buildings are classed as industrial or transport.31 The Industrial Heritage Strategy for Scotland Report (2015) commented: The default position has often therefore been one of destruction, new build and collective amnesia. Understandably, recently-closed industrial premises are what local communities have wanted to forget, the assumption being that they can move on into a bright new future with a clean break, severing links with difficult memories of decay and decline.32

An interesting presumption is being made here about the desire of communities to forget, to erase and disassociate from ‘difficult memories’. Some

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oral history interview evidence contradicts this and suggests a much more complex relationship between workers, industrial communities and their places of work.33 There is strong evidence of intimate attachment to workplaces and a sense of ownership and of mourning when jobs are lost and the physical spaces are bulldozed. Grass-roots campaigns to create community museums (for example, at Springburn locomotive works and Fairfield shipyard, Govan, successfully, and at Johnnie Walkers (whisky), Kilmarnock, unsuccessfully) might be seen in this light – as lasting memorials of lives spent meaningfully in those spaces where work had significance beyond the wage packet and where relationships were developed and class (and other) identities were forged. That said, there have been some success stories in industrial heritage in Glasgow – and not all of Clydeside’s industrial heritage has been lost. Examples would include Weir’s, Templeton’s and the East End textile and leather works. There have also been some really innovative attempts to recreate and preserve the industrial past in the face of modernization – such as the M74 (motorway) Archaeology project that my SOHC colleague David Walker was involved with. This included an oral history project that revealed much about the meaning of working lives and working-class community in a south side multiracial working-class neighbourhood (Govanhill).34

Challenge, Protest and Struggle: Community and ‘Unofficial’, Alternative Memorializing and Heritage Building These erasures, nation-building exercises, class-omitted and sanitized interpretations of the past were, however, challenged and contested. It is important not to represent the heritage industry in Glasgow and Clydeside as a unidimensional thing, rather a hundred flowers blossomed and a vibrant counterculture coexisted that ran against the tide of the AHD. This can be seen in the proliferation of community and activist-based projects to preserve and memorialize working lives, culture and Red Clydeside. These projects were under-resourced, to be sure, compared to the monolithic Corporation/city museums. Nonetheless, the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) in the 1980s and the Heritage Lottery Fund thereafter were important sources of funding for local and community projects, including oral history-based heritage projects, which formed an important core of ‘alternative’ working-class labour history in the region. In an ironic twist, the MSC, designed to take people off the unemployment register in Thatcher’s Britain, funded many oral history projects that focused on the social and cultural impacts of deindustrialization in ravaged working-class communities, such

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as Greenock and Springburn. Latterly, the Heritage Lottery Fund has supported a plethora of local and community projects that patently challenge the AHD with a focus on labour and women’s history, protest and class conflict. A prime example would be the Govanhill People’s Story, a wonderful oral history-based project focusing on multiracial working-class history in one of the most deprived areas of the city. Other radical and innovative projects, archives and public history and heritage initiatives have continued to represent and develop our understanding of working-class history on Clydeside. For many years prior to its closure, the Gallacher Memorial Library (based at the Communist Party HQ, then at the Scottish Trade Union Congress offices and finally housed within the Archives of Glasgow Caledonian University) provided an alternative archive of working-class and radical history well used by history researchers across the region and beyond. Its closure in 2015 is a national scandal. Similarly, the Glasgow Women’s Library, formed in 1991, has provided a pivotal locus for feminist history, including the contribution made by women to political protest and struggles such as the campaign for the vote and the rent strikes of 1915. This has been important in decentring ‘Red Clydeside’ from its former focus around male activists and remembering the key participation of women such as Mary Barbour, Helen Crawford, Rose Kerrigan, Agnes Maclean and others. Other projects have brought the contribution of women to ‘Red Clydeside’ into sharper focus. An example here is the wonderful interdisciplinary community arts project in Govan led by artist and historian Tara S. Beall, which has reconstructed the contribution of women to working-class history in the area, including the role played by women in the infamous Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in of 1971, which successfully defended jobs, delaying the closure of Clyde shipyards, albeit temporarily. These challenges to the AHD have often and increasingly deployed oral history methodologies. They seek to find and elucidate a different heritage, drawing where possible on the authentic and unadulterated voices of the people in eyewitness testimonies reconstructing and reinterpreting the past. These have often been powerful and emotive. In this refocused history, the Scottish Working People’s History Trust played an important and pioneering role, with the doyen of oral history in Scotland, Ian MacDougall, heading a drive to record, archive and preserve memories of working lives (from coal miners and dockers to librarians and journalists) and episodes of class struggle and community protest, such as the General Strike of 1926, the interwar Hunger Marches and the contribution of Scots to the Spanish Civil War. Given the loss of so much of the physical industrial heritage to the bulldozer, the importance of recording memories of what it was like and the meaning of working and living in working-class communities on Clydeside is amplified. The Director of Conservation for Historic Scotland recognized

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this in 2015, stating: ‘We are losing many of the last people with direct connections and experience of our most historic industries, so it is especially important that our understanding of our industrial past is brought to the fore.’35 The radical potential of oral history was recognized by Terry Brotherstone, one of the prominent academic proponents of the ‘Red Clydeside’ thesis: Oral historians, as they make use of evermore sophisticated analytical techniques must not lose sight of the bigger picture, the way in which personal life stories can challenge orthodoxy and demand the construction of alternative critical narratives about the recent past and its significance.36

Glasgow is bespattered by civic statues memorializing the ‘great men’ – the military, civic and business leaders (including James Watt, inventor of the steam engine) who built, represented and forged the ‘second city of the Empire’. Industrialization, pioneering science and technology and Empire are key motifs in Clydeside’s heritage discourse. Statues include some of the city’s worst capitalist exploiters such as Lord Overtoun, who ran a Glasgow chemical business that poisoned generations of workers. Recently, however, alternative memorializing of working-class ‘heroes’ has proliferated, such as the city centre plaque to the Marxist John Maclean, who Lenin appointed as Bolshevik consul for Scotland to the fledgling USSR soon after the Russian Revolution and the memorial statue to the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strike socialist-feminist activist Mary Barbour at Govan Cross. Another strand of working-class memorializing commemorates those killed and disabled by workplace injuries and chronic occupational diseases. The monuments to coal mining disasters (deploying the motif of ‘blood on the coal’) around the Clydeside region are testament to this, as is the recently erected memorial in Clydebank to commemorate those killed and disabled by the asbestos tragedy.37 The message of these heritage sites is clear: the benefits of industrialization were patently unequally distributed, and the darker side of unregulated capitalism killed and maimed individuals and could decimate communities. Industrial injury, disability and death rates from accidents and chronic occupational diseases (like pneumoconiosis and mesothelioma) were particularly high on Clydeside – a factor that, like poor housing and overcrowding, contributed to social discontent and mobilization. Moreover, ‘official’ efforts to represent (and sanitize) the past, writing out of history episodes of working-class protest associated with ‘Red Clydeside’ have been challenged by local community groups and activists, who have developed radical counter-narratives, whilst such sanitization, loss and erasure was mourned in much popular culture. This has been and continues to be a contested terrain. The Spirit of Revolt Archive – gifted by Glasgow anarchists to the Mitchell Library – is an example. The visibility of Red Clydeside may be diminished in mainstream museums in the city,

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but it has an enduring presence online. An example would be the Glasgow Digital Library and their comprehensive Red Clydeside collection.38 These resources continue to provide the potential to develop counter-narratives to the ‘official’ story, to keep Red Clydeside alive. Influential in local and community initiatives to continue and revitalize working-class history has been the availability of funding through the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has led to a proliferation of local projects, many of which have been centred on oral history approaches, tapping into people’s memories to reconstruct the past. Acting as a ‘hub’ between academic and community oral history, the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC: formed in 1995 at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow) has played a significant role here. The first oral-history based PhD in the SOHC by Neil Rafeek explored the neglected role of women in the Scottish Communist Party and working-class protest through the twentieth century.39 A stream of such studies have drilled down and added depth and nuance to Clydeside’s rich proletarian history and culture, through tapping into and critically interrogating workers’ own oral testimonies.40 Some of this work has crossed over into public history, involving schools and community groups.41 The Govanhill People’s History Project (2012–) provides an exemplar, perhaps, of the kind of local grass-roots community project, run by volunteers, that celebrates working-class communities in all their rich diversity, ethnic and religious, as well as their politics, protest and mobilization. With training and support from the Scottish Oral History Centre, such community-led heritage projects, many relying heavily on memory sources, have added new dimensions and understandings to regional identities whilst challenging the sanitization of the past, which has threatened to deny Clydeside’s fractured but rich militant, radical working-class culture. They also make the past more accessible, via outstanding websites and, in the case of Govanhill, an audio trail interspersed with extracts from oral testimonies.42 And some Clydeside museums came, somewhat belatedly, to expand their programmes of oral history collection and integration of the voice to get at ‘lived experience’. The Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life (Coatbridge) provides an example of systemic integration of the voice, whilst Glasgow Museums’ oral history programme has expanded notably in recent years, and the heritage activities of the Glasgow Women’s Library, including oral interviewing, is significant.43

Conclusion The regional identity of Clydeside and the interpretation and preservation of Glasgow’s industrial past, working-class culture and heritage have been

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a focus of struggle and contestation. Image rebranding from the 1980s has projected a sense of the city as a safe, welcoming stylish place of hedonistic consumption, great architecture (McIntosh and Art Nouveau) and with a vibrant nightlife. In this rebranding, working-class culture, industrial heritage, the ravages of deindustrialization and the industrial, political and social struggles of ‘Red Clydeside’ have been marginalized. Instead, in its museums, the postmodern city has projected a sense of an enterprising and creative culture that pioneered industrialization and was a bulwark of Empire, with the motif of ‘Clydebuilt’ at centre stage. This transition and contestation over heritage was evident and epitomized in the Elspeth King controversy over the ‘Keeper of Social History’ position, in the City of Culture designation and in the ‘Workers’ City’ movement in the 1985–92 period. Destruction, erasure and renewal characterized the 1980s and 1990s – evident in the loss of industrial heritage and the investment in sterile modern museums that focused on machines, artefacts and art, rather than on social history and the ‘people’s story’. Recently, the closure (in 2015) of the most important archive collection that relates to ‘Red Clydeside’ – the William Gallacher Memorial Library – as a result of public sector University spending cuts (collections staff were reduced from seven to just one) shows just how ‘Red Clydeside’ in public history continues to face threats and is being further marginalized. But this contest over regional identity, representation and image was (and remains) an ongoing one. Hegemonic narratives are persistently challenged and alternative representations promoted. This assault on community museums, archives and the idea and legacy of ‘Red Clydeside’ clashed with people’s sense of honesty and authenticity and their pride in their independence, autonomy, work ethic, protest and resistance. Concurrently, there were robust efforts to represent the ‘real’ Glasgow – what has been termed ‘an assertive working-class presence’44 and to preserve and celebrate working-class history from grass-roots organizations, communities, artists and academics. And increasingly oral history has played a key role in this reconstruction, reconfiguration and problematizing of the past, resulting in a rich mosaic of projects reflecting the multiple identities and the complexity of culture and plurality of politics in a modern industrial city. In this reflective reconfiguration, the traditions of the past, including ‘Red Clydeside’, are remembered and have resonance, are drawn upon for inspiration and continue to have meaning and significance. Arthur McIvor is Professor of Social History and Director of the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC), which he co-founded in 1995. His research interests lie in the history of work, occupational health and industrial heritage, and he has published widely in these areas. His most recent books are Working Lives (Palgrave 2013) and (with Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb)

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Men in Reserve (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is currently investigating the health impacts of deindustrialization.

Notes 1. Smith, Uses of Heritage, 4. 2. See, for example, Clark, ‘“And the Next Thing the Chairs Barricaded the Door”: The Lee Jeans Factory Occupation, Trade Unionism and Gender in Scotland in the 1980s’, 116– 34; Gibbs, ‘Historical Tradition and Community Mobilisation: Narratives of Red Clydeside in Memories of the Anti-Poll Tax Movement in Scotland, 1988–1990’, 439–62; Conlon, ‘Giants of the Clyde: How Memory and Cultural Identity Can be Embodied in Post-Industrial Landscapes’; Campbell, ‘UCS: Scotland’s Industrial Heritage and Maritime Identity’. And see the several Scottish contributions in High, Mackinnon and Perchard, The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places. 3. The Scottish Oral History Centre was established in 1995, and oral labour history has been a dominant strand in its research and knowledge exchange work over the past two decades or so. See https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofhumanities/history/ scottishoralhistorycentre/. 4. See Kenefick and McIvor, Roots of Red Clydeside; Johnston, Clydeside Capital. 5. Ten out of fifteen Glasgow constituencies returned a socialist (Independent Labour Party) Member of Parliament in the 1922 election. 6. Maclean, The Legend of Red Clydeside. 7. See, for example, Smyth, Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936; Kenefick, Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c.1872 to 1932; Baillie, ‘A New View of Dilution: Women Munition Workers and Red Clydeside’, 1900–50; McKinlay and Morris, The Independent Labour Party on Clydeside. 8. Griffin, ‘The Spatial Politics of Red Clydeside: Historical Labour Geographies and Radical Connections’; Griffin, ‘Labour Struggles and the Formation of Demands: The Spatial Politics of Red Clydeside’, 121–30. 9. Foster, ‘Strike Action and Working-class Politics on Clydeside, 1914–1919’, 33–70; Foster, ‘Red Clyde, Red Scotland’, 106–24; Brotherstone, ‘Does Red Clydeside Really Matter Any More?’, 52–80. 10. Spring, Phantom Village: The Myth of the New Glasgow, 109. Currie has been compared to the Marxist muralist Diego Rivera. Currie’s famous eight paintings depicting scenes of Glasgow’s radical past hang in the People’s Palace Museum in Glasgow. 11. Gibbs, Historical Tradition; Griffin, ‘Spatial Politics’. The Member of Parliament for Maryhill, Glasgow (Maria Fyfe) made reference to the need to conjure up ‘the spirit of Mary Barbour’ in relation to the 2016 ‘bedroom tax’. 12. Danny Houston interviewed by Rory Stride 11 October 2016 (Scottish Oral History Centre Archive). I am grateful to Rory for bringing this to my attention. See Rory Stride, ‘“Proud to be a Clyde Shipbuilder. Clyde Built”: The Changing Work Identity of Govan’s Shipbuilders, c. 1960– Present’ (unpublished BA History honours dissertation, University of Strathclyde, 2017), 34. 13. See also MacInnes, ‘The Deindustrialisation of Glasgow’, 73–95; Lever, ‘Deindustrialisation and the Reality of the Post-industrial City’, 983–99. 14. Phillips, ‘The Moral Economy of Deindustrialization in Post-1945 Scotland’, 315– 17. 15. Walsh, Taulbut and Hanlon, ‘The Aftershock of Deindustrialization’; Walsh et al., ‘It’s Not “Just Deprivation”: Why do Equally Deprived UK Cities Experience Differ-

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ent Health Outcomes?’, 487–95. See also Craig, The Tears that made the Clyde: Well Being in Glasgow. 16. Mackenzie et al., ‘Working-class Discourses of Politics, Policy and Health: “I Don’t Smoke; I Don’t Drink. The Only Thing Wrong with Me is My Health”’. 17. Pacione, Glasgow: The Socio-spatial Development of the City. 18. There were similar rebranding exercises in some of the ‘satellite’ Clydeside industrial towns and regions. For example, in Lanarkshire, after the closure of the iconic steelworks at Ravenscraig, the area was initially rebranded ‘New Lanarkshire’ then renamed later to ‘Super County’. 19. Lever, ‘Deindustrialisation’, 996–97. 20. Spring, Phantom Village, 114. 21. See http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/11948473.Why_Elspeth_King_paid_the _price_of_a_Palace_revolution/. 22. McLay, Workers’ City; McLay, The Reckoning, and for a wider discussion around these issues see Spring, Phantom Village. See also http://www.workerscity.org/ . 23. Spring, Phantom Village, 32. Spring fixed the year of the ‘birth’ of the ‘New Glasgow’ at 1986. 24. Kacieja, ‘Red Dust: Documentary Film Research Project’; Red Dust film (2014) – see an extract on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_9xNJ9ENb0. 25. See, for example, High, Mackinnon and Perchard, Deindustrialized World. 26. Strangleman, ‘Networks, Place and Identities in Post-Industrial Mining Communities, 258–59. See also Wight, Workers not Wasters: Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Employment in Central Scotland, and for a wider discussion of the meaning of job loss see McIvor, Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945, 240–69 and the important new book by Steven High, One Job Town. 27. See Conlon, Giants of the Clyde. 28. See http://www.fairfieldgovan.co.uk/heritage/. 29. Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working-classes, 2. 30. Raphael, ‘Transformations of Industrial Labour in Western Europe: Intergenerational Change of Life Cycles, Occupation and Mobility 1970–2000’, 107. 31. Heritage Scotland, Industrial Heritage Strategy for Scotland, 2015, 12. Consulted at http://www.archaeologists.net/sites/default/files/IH_Strategy (accessed 10 October 2016). 32. Ibid., 19. 33. See, for example, High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984. 34. http://www.headlandarchaeology.com/project/m74-completion-project-glas gow/. The oral history interviews are located at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre. 35. Dr David Mitchell, cited in An Industrial Heritage Strategy for Scotland, 5. 36. Brotherstone and Manson, ‘Voices of Piper Alpha: Enduring Injury in Private Memory, Oral Representation and Labour History’, 71–85. 37. ‘The Known & Unknown’, International Asbestos Memorial, Clydebank, 2015 (West Dunbartonshire Council / Clydebank Asbestos Group); for a wider discussion of these issues see McIvor, ‘Industrial Heritage and the Oral Legacy of Disaster’, 243–50. 38. See http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/. 39. Subsequently published as a book: Rafeek, Communist Women in Scotland. 40. For full references see Bartie and McIvor, ‘Oral History in Scotland’, 108–36; and for a more focused comment on Glasgow see Bartie and McIvor, ‘Oral History’. 41. Clark, ‘Collaborating with Schools: Challenges and Opportunities for Oral Historians’, 107–15. 42. See http://govanhillpeopleshistory.com/. The full interviews from the project are archived at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde.

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43. See, for example, the Glasgow 2000 Lives oral history collection archived at Glasgow Museums and at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde. 44. Griffin, ‘Spatial Politics’, 205.

Bibliography Baillie, M. ‘A New View of Dilution: Women Munition Workers and Red Clydeside’. Scottish Labour History 39 (2004), 14–31. Bartie, A., and A. McIvor. ‘Oral History in Scotland’. Scottish Historical Review 92 (2013), 108–36. ———. ‘Oral History’, in Regional Framework for Local History and Archaeology: Essays on the Local History and Archaeology of West Central Scotland. Glasgow: Glasgow Museums, 2015. Brotherstone, T. ‘Does Red Clydeside Really Matter Any More?’ in R. Duncan and A. McIvor (eds), Militant Workers. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992, 52–80. Brotherstone, T., and H. Manson. ‘Voices of Piper Alpha: Enduring Injury in Private Memory, Oral Representation and Labour History’. Scottish Labour History 46 (2011), 71–85. Campbell, L. ‘UCS: Scotland’s Industrial Heritage and Maritime Identity’. Urban Cultures 23(1) (2014). Clark, A. ‘“And the Next Thing the Chairs Barricaded the Door”: The Lee Jeans Factory Occupation, Trade Unionism and Gender in Scotland in the 1980s’. Scottish Labour History 48 (2013), 116–34. ———. ‘Collaborating with Schools: Challenges and Opportunities for Oral Historians’. Oral History 43 (2015), 107–15. Conlon, M. ‘Giants of the Clyde: How Memory and Cultural Identity Can be Embodied in Post-Industrial Landscapes’. PhD thesis, University of Strathclyde 2019/2020, forthcoming. Craig, C. The Tears that Made the Clyde: Well Being in Glasgow. Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing, 2010. Foster, J. ‘Strike Action and Working-class Politics on Clydeside, 1914–1919’. International Review of Social History 35(1) (1990), 33–70. ———. ‘Red Clyde, Red Scotland’, in I. Donnachie and C. Whatley (eds), The Manufacture of Scottish History. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992, 106–24. Gibbs, E. ‘Historical Tradition and Community Mobilisation: Narratives of Red Clydeside in Memories of the Anti-Poll Tax Movement in Scotland, 1988–1990’. Labor History 57(4) (2016), 439–62. DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2016.1184027. Griffin, P. ‘Labour Struggles and the Formation of Demands: The Spatial Politics of Red Clydeside’. Geoforum 62 (2015), 121–30. ———. ‘The Spatial Politics of Red Clydeside: Historical Labour Geographies and Radical Connections’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015. High, S. Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. ———. One Job Town: Work, Belonging and Betrayal in Northern Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. High, S., L. Mackinnon and A. Perchard (eds). The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017. Johnston, R. Clydeside Capital. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000. Kacieja, I. ‘Red Dust: Documentary Film Research Project’. Unpublished Masters dissertation, Edinburgh School of Art, 2013. Kenefick, W. Red Scotland! The Rise and Fall of the Radical Left, c.1872 to 1932. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Kenefick, W., and A. McIvor (eds), Roots of Red Clydeside. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1996.

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Lever, W.F. ‘Deindustrialisation and the Reality of the Post-industrial City’. Urban Studies 28(6) (1991), 983–99. MacInnes, J. ‘The Deindustrialisation of Glasgow’. Scottish Affairs 11(1) (1995), 73–95. Mackenzie, M., C. Collins, J. Connolly, M. Doyle, and G. McCartney. ‘Working-class Discourses of Politics, Policy and Health: “I Don’t Smoke; I Don’t Drink. The Only Thing Wrong with Me is My Health”’. Policy & Politics (2015). Online ISSN 1470 8442; http:// dx.doi.org/10.1332/030557316X14534640177927. McIvor, A. Working Lives: Work in Britain since 1945. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ———. ‘Industrial Heritage and the Oral Legacy of Disaster’, in I. Convery, G. Corsane and P. Davis (eds), Displaced Heritage: Responses to Disaster, Trauma and Loss (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 234–50. McKinlay, A., and R.J. Morris (eds). The Independent Labour Party on Clydeside. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. McLay, F. Workers’ City. Glasgow: Clydeside Press, 1989. ———. The Reckoning. Glasgow: Clydeside Press, 1991. McLean, I. The Legend of Red Clydeside. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983. Pacione, M. Glasgow: The Socio-spatial Development of the City. London: Routledge, 1995. Phillips, J. ‘The Moral Economy of Deindustrialization in Post-1945 Scotland’, in S. High, L. Mackinnon and A. Perchard (eds), Deindustrialized World. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017, 313–33. Rafeek, N. Communist Women in Scotland. London: I.B. Taurus, 2008. Raphael, L. ‘Transformations of Industrial Labour in Western Europe: Intergenerational Change of Life Cycles, Occupation and Mobility 1970–2000’. German History 30(1) (2012), 100–19. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006. Smith, L., P. Shackel, and G. Campbell (eds), Heritage, Labour and the Working-classes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Smyth, J.J. Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000. Spring, I. Phantom Village: The Myth of the New Glasgow. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990. Strangleman, T. ‘Networks, Place and Identities in Post-Industrial Mining Communities’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25(2) (2001), 253–67. Walsh, D., N. Bendel, R. Jones and P. Hanlon. ‘It’s Not “Just Deprivation”: Why do Equally Deprived UK Cities Experience Different Health Outcomes?’ Public Health 124 (2010), 487–95. Walsh, D., M. Taulbut and P. Hanlon. The Aftershock of Deindustrialization. Glasgow: Glasgow Centre for Population Health, 2008. Wight, D. Workers not Wasters: Masculine Respectability, Consumption and Employment in Central Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

CHAPTER

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Industrial Heritage as Place Making The Case of Wales Bella Dicks

Introduction: Industry, Nation and Place Making in Wales Industrial heritage is a potent material-symbolic resource for producing and reproducing the idea of nation. It can supply various qualities that shore up a nation’s story of itself: for example, the self-sacrifice, endurance, physical strength, collective spirit or solidarity of its workers; the engineering skills, technological innovation, investment power and inventiveness of its capitalists, engineers and entrepreneurs – in short, the nation as economic and cultural ‘industrial powerhouse’. However, in Wales, this narrative does not sit as easily within the national imaginary as it perhaps does elsewhere. This is in spite of the fact that Wales makes a claim to being the ‘world’s first industrial nation’.1 Historical difficulties in the notion of industrial identity as a uniting motif in the story of Wales will be discussed below. It is an evolving story that brings out different visions of ‘nation’ in different moments and places. Over the past two decades, Wales has gained an important degree of political independence from England2 but has long had a complex history of both separation from and interdependence with it. How small nations tell their identity-stories is necessarily conditioned by their relationship with their larger neighbours, particularly where there is a history of economic and political disadvantage relative to them and a need to battle for visibility and resources. In the case of Wales and England, we have two neighbouring countries who together, along with Scotland, pioneered the industrial Notes for this section begin on page 85.

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revolution and whose economic and political histories are completely entwined. England’s small western neighbour provided rich mineral resources that drove Britain’s global power in the industrial age.3 At the height of this power in the late nineteenth century, powerful political movements and influential associations campaigned for greater recognition of Wales’ cultural distinctiveness and difference. This reflected the period of European nationbuilding, when the industrial revolution was in full swing in both countries. This chapter discusses how the industrial heritage of Wales has been defined and set to work in these nation-making processes, taking the National Museum of Wales as its focus. This is not to downplay the importance of local museums dedicated to industrial history in Wales. Rather, the intention is to explore how a national institution with a nation-building remit has responded and contributed to shifting currents regarding the cultural value of industrial heritage and how it should be communicated to the public. The aim is to show how industrial heritage making has developed through particular Welsh inflections of class and community, as well as through regional and metropolitan place making practices. These trouble and often contest the process that Benedict Anderson famously called the ‘imagining’ of nation as community.

Wales: The First Industrial Nation? Blast furnaces and forges, rolling mills, smelting houses, deep coal mines, slate quarries and sprawling industrial townships were changing the landscape, and Wales, on the strength of its reputation as a producer of iron and steel, copper, coal and slate, became one of the principal workshops of the world.4

This is how leading historian of Wales Geraint H. Jenkins sums up the central role that Welsh industry played in the industrial history of modern Britain. A few figures illustrate this importance. By1820, Wales accounted for over 50 per cent of the smelted copper produced in the world. Despite having only a fifth of the British population, it also produced 40 per cent of the UK’s total iron output (1850s); 93 per cent of its slate (1880s) and 20 per cent of its coal (1913). To this should be added the network of mill villages in the west of the country which exported Welsh wool and flannel both to the eastern coalfields and all over the world, coming to be known as the ‘Huddersfield’ and the ‘Leeds’ of Wales in the late nineteenth century. Wales’ industrial profile is often depicted as a triangle of industrial monopolies: slate in the north, wool in the west and iron/coal in the south. Yet the early eighteenthcentury development of copper smelting in Swansea and the Tawe Valley saw the Swansea area producing half of Britain’s entire copper output by 1750, stimulating the subsequent expansion of coal mining. This suggests

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that Wales’ industrial stature rivals that of England’s in kick-starting the very beginning of the industrial revolution. In recognition of this industrial pedigree, in 2005 the National Museum of Wales (now known as Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales) opened a significant new museum of industrial and maritime history, the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea. This brings its stable of museums to seven – five of which deal with industrial heritage. The Waterfront Museum is dedicated to the motif: ‘Wales: the first industrial nation?’ Albeit hedged with a question mark, this claim rests on the census data of 1851 showing that by that year more people in Wales were working in industry than in agriculture, the first time this shift had occurred anywhere in the world. Huw Bowen, professor of History at Swansea University, writes that it was the copper smelting works5 of the south-west Swansea Valleys in the very early eighteenth century, well before the more famous blast furnaces of Merthyr began smelting iron ore in the south-eastern Valleys, to which Wales owes its claim to the title.6 A lack of appropriate recognition for Swansea as the world’s first ‘Copperopolis’ has – unjustly in this view – allowed England to garner fame as the birthplace of industrialization.7 This contention illustrates the struggles of Wales to define its industrial importance relative to England’s, as well as different Welsh regions’ attempts to set out their own distinctive contribution to the imaginary of nation. This regional competitiveness over national history and identity is at the heart of our story. One of Wales’ leading radical historians, Gwyn-Alf Williams, describes how industrial Wales in the nineteenth to twentieth century was characterized by a ‘radically distinct social development’ in its north versus south. In his view, this amounts to a ‘dislocation at its very heart’.8 This north-south divide is due to a number of historical and geographical differences, including the Welsh language (weaker in the south due to the influx of English-speaking mineworkers to feed rapid coal industry expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century), a rural economy in the north separate from the industrial one in the south (with the important exceptions of the north’s globally important though self-contained slate industry in the mid nineteenth century and Flintshire and Denbighshire’s nineteenth to late twentieth-century coal mines), different relationships between industry, labour movements and political organization in the different regions (with a stronger and more politically influential trade union tradition in the south), and the particular role played by the cosmopolitan port cities of Swansea, Cardiff and Newport in the south (lying around 4–5 hours’ drive, across mountainous terrain, from the north of the country). Indeed, the major road and rail connections run east-west between England and Wales, rather than north-south within Wales itself (with the south easily accessible from Bristol, the south-west of England and London, thanks to the ‘M4 corridor’, and the north connected to Chester, Liverpool and Manchester via the A55

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trunk road). Although extremely significant in the global history of modern metalworking, ironmaking and coal production, Welsh industries were highly localized in different areas (north-west, north-east; south-west; southeast) and, in historian Dai Smith’s words, ‘utterly uneven’ – bequeathing distinct political and economic identities to different parts of the country.9 Since 1922 and the collapse of the Liberal vote,10 the Labour Party has held sway over the coalfield areas, whilst Plaid Cymru’s more limited success has depended on rural, Welsh-speaking areas in the north and west (although Ceredigion traditionally votes Liberal). This dislocation has long been recognized;11 it is a fact that its industrial heritage both reproduces and reflects. Heavy industry in Wales has now largely disappeared – the copper industry to the south-west long since vanished, the steel-making plants virtually closed (just two struggle to stay open at Port Talbot and Llanwern), the slate quarries of the north almost gone (a few still operate for a small export market) and no deep coal mine remains in operation. Yet its legacies are still visible, both in Wales’ long trajectory of economic decline as well as in competing narratives of what Welsh identity was and is. Raymond Williams identified ‘two truths’ of Wales – its twin heartlands of rural Welsh-speaking versus industrial Anglophone regions – associated with quite different political and cultural traditions.12Any heritage project aspiring to project the idea of Wales as a unified nation through its industrial heritage starts from this divided landscape. The major player in this picture, Wales’ national museum, has produced over the last century an ever-evolving map of the country that carefully delineates these regional specificities whilst at the same time drawing them closer together into the representational and organizational project of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum of Wales. This has been accompanied by a process of political devolution in the UK, initiated in 1999 with the (extremely close) public vote for a National Assembly in Wales and extending since then with ever-greater powers devolved from London to Cardiff. Tracing these processes reveals how the specificities of Wales’ industrial landscape are set to work in producing an unfolding national story whose roots lie in the political, economic and cultural specifics of Wales as well as in wider museological trends. Current economic realities are key to this story. Decisions made by the main public and commercial stakeholders concerning Wales’ industrial heritage have been closely linked to the ebb and flow of economic regeneration initiatives over the past decades. This is in the context of a national economy still deeply scarred by the historical disadvantages bequeathed by Wales’ uneven industrial geography, which concentrated employment in long-declining sectors, eventually qualifying large areas of the country for European Union Objective 1 and Assisted Area status from the 1990s.13 Since the 1950s, Wales has ‘suffered from entrenched, and in places appar-

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ently intractable, problems of deprivation, poverty and social exclusion’14 and now registers some of the highest rates of economic deprivation in Europe, with a quarter of its population living in poverty due to insufficient jobs, low pay and poor local access to employment, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Industrial heritage, in this context, serves as a means of memorializing once dominant local occupations as well as exhibiting them in the competition amongst places for visitors, consumers and areabased regeneration funds.15

Industrial Heritage in Wales: Making and Remaking Place It is against this backdrop of economic decline that efforts to preserve and commemorate industry have developed in Wales. Heritage making actively reworks existing national stories in material form, reflecting social, political, economic and other interests.16 As a social practice, it reproduces ways of seeing, showing and telling the past that circulate elsewhere.17 Since heritage making operates in places and their social currents and practices (such as nation-building, local politics, economic development, education, regeneration), it has the power to intervene in places and help define them.18 Entangled with other practices, it ‘makes places’.19 In Wales where, as Smith observes, ‘any definition of Welsh experience, native or otherwise, is inseparable from a sense of place’,20 heritage assumes particular importance in national politics. As Gruffudd reminds us, nations are not simply located in geographical space; instead, ‘territory is nationalized by its treatment as a distinctive land’, forging a strong relationship between politics, national identity and territory.21 Heritage as ‘tradition’ becomes a resource in circulating these ‘frames’ of place, which may be latent but can erupt into saliency in particular political moments.22 The opening of the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea in the early 2000s, displaying an industrial and maritime collection originally located in Cardiff, illustrates such a moment well – as we shall see below. History-writing is germane to practices of nation-making and heritage making.23 In Wales in the1980s, two historiographical traditions reflecting the political-economic-social dislocation already mentioned (the Welshspeaking and the Anglophone, the rural and the urban-industrial) had produced what Williams calls a ‘kind of schizophrenia’ in historical writing.24 There appeared to be two ‘Wales’, hostile to each other, each claiming to define what Welshness was and should be in the future. Prior to the 1980s, this schizophrenia remained unarticulated.25It was the new left historians of the industrial unions, the Labour Party and the coalfields, led by Gwyn-Alf Williams, Dai Smith, Dai Francis, Chris Williams, Prys Morgan and others,

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who brought it into existence by positioning the distinctive history of industrial Wales, as opposed to that of the supposed rural ‘heartland’, not only as legitimate to the story of the Welsh nation but at its very core. Practices of industrial heritage-making in Wales developed in dialogue with these debates, and, by erecting material forms of the past, helped to concretize them. Wales’ industrial heritage making began as an offshoot of the nationbuilding project pursued in the rest of the UK in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Unlike industrial cities of England and Scotland, which built locally funded museums to reflect civic pride in their respective industrial histories (e.g. Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham), the principal player in Welsh industrial history has been its National Museum, founded in 1912.26 Established at Cardiff, it eclipsed that city’s own fledgling civic museum. It was the latest of a string of new Welsh institutions established in the late nineteenth century, the product of a nation-building movement pursued by the late Victorian/Edwardian Welsh middle classes. They successfully lobbied the English parliamentarians with demands for Wales’ own national library, university colleges and museum to be distinct from British cultural institutions.27 This immediately introduces a central problem for industrial heritage in Wales. In a museum dedicated to the idea of nation as unifying impulse, different to Britain/England, how would Wales’ varied industries of metals, slate, iron, coal and steel be accommodated, given the differing symbolic and geo-social places they occupied within the tensions and divides of the national imaginary? The early approach avoided these questions by incorporating industry into a culturally neutral, scientific discourse of sediments and rock strata in the new National Museum’s Geology Department.28 After World War II, two distinct approaches emerged, echoing the rural/industrial, Welsh-speaking/ Anglophone ‘shadow-line’ of which Williams writes.29 The first is strongly associated with the image and ‘ideology’ (as he puts it) of the gwerin, a key Welsh cultural term that is difficult to translate into English but has been identified as having two meanings: a classless concept of ‘the people’ and a second idea of the ‘multitude’, the ‘common’ people, ‘exclusive of the upper strata’ and specific to Wales.30 It is most often translated into English as ‘folk’. The gwerin, argues Williams, are often represented as the ‘authentic’ people of Wales, principally working on the land but skilled in those kinds of smallscale industry that qualify as ‘crafts’ and which predate modern urban industrialization. They are the antithesis to the industrial machine age, which was showcased at the new National Museum’s industrial department, opened in 1959. The sense in which this new industrial gallery created an image of industry distinct from the gwerin identity is perhaps illustrated by the support it received from British Petroleum – then a state-owned British company. Its story of engineering and scientific inventiveness integrated Wales into

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a wider UK picture of industrial might rather than highlighting its distinctiveness, as the Department of Folk Culture, from which industry was now separated, sought to do. In this way, the treatment of industry at the National Museum set off in two opposing directions, one of cultural distinctiveness and the other of technological modernizations. Yet they were not as different as they might at first have seemed, and both had come to seem anachronistic by the 1980s. Reflecting the general neglect of industrial social history by historians of Wales prior to the 1980s, neither of these had left room for exhibiting the culture or society that characterized its industrialized areas.

The Gwerin and Industry as ‘Back to the Land’ The narrative of the ‘gwerin’ was steered into the National Museum largely through the efforts of, Iorweth Peate, who was the first, influential curator of a new branch of the National Museum opened in 1948 – the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans. Prior to this, before the War, the Museum had set up a Department of Folk Culture and Industry, of which Peate was curator. For Peate, it was the first term – the ‘folk’ – that defined the second – industry – reflecting what can be thought of as a folk-industrial imagination. This is based on two foundational themes in the gwerin discourse. The first was the legacy of a long-established romantic view of rural Wales and the Welsh as ancient Britain’s ‘first people’. Jenkins observes that mythic narratives of Wales’ Druidic lore deriving from ancient Celtic origins, asserted by romantic writers in the eighteenth century, remained a central part of the cultural experience ‘indoctrinated’ into the increasingly nonconformist, chapel-going Welsh population right up until the end of World War I.31 Adamson and others have documented how Welsh-language nationalism in the nineteenth century – the so-called ‘Welsh Revival’ – was largely driven by intellectuals and elites who had moved outside of Wales, particularly in London, who picked up this Celtic ancestral narrative, looking back at ‘the land of my fathers’ with a romantic eye.32 This cast Wales as the repository of pre-industrial ways of life, captured in the idea of the ‘Celtic Twilight’ and driven by the ‘antiquarian, aesthetic, nationalistic and anti-industrial interests’33 of the time. The second elaboration of the ‘gwerin’ discourse emerged in the interwar years. According to Gruffudd, this well-established nationalist theme of an ancient rural Welsh authenticity encountered a new and particular intellectual and political atmosphere in the 1930s and 40s, reflected in the ‘back to the land’ campaigns that were surging through many European national movements at the time.34 Gruffudd argues that prominent strands of Welsh intellectual discourse saw ‘ancient’ Wales as possessing ‘an organic unity be-

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tween humans and the environment’.35 It contained ‘a refuge of old ways and old types’ due to its topography of mountains that prevented waves of change from sweeping in.36 Iorweth Peate was heavily influenced by these ideas. In relation to industry, he objected to ‘the tendency of modernisation to eradicate local differences’, seeing the gwerin as the sole guardians of the spiritual and moral core of Wales and the only hope of resisting ‘English cultural encroachment’.37 Peate’s ‘Wales in miniature’ at St Fagans aimed to re-create a society founded on principles of rural industrial organization and based on a combination of agriculture, industry and the arts.38 What did Peate mean by ‘industry’? His writings make clear he is not against technological advances per se, nor is he anti-machinery. The word he rejects is ‘industrialism’ or ‘industrialization’. ‘The study of folk life,’ he wrote in 1959, ‘is the study of the way of life of communities and of nations which are comparatively unaffected by a high degree of industrialisation’, so that ‘certain highly industrialized areas [of Wales] and the heavy industries associated with them have to be excluded in part’.39 Industrialization means ‘the new barbarism’ of the ‘machine age’40 and as such is a cultural, rather than technological, development.41 It is a ‘great tide’ ignoring ‘both national and community boundaries’ and threatening traditional Wales with an ‘overlay of “sameness”’. Adopting a weaving metaphor, he argues that beneath the ‘weft’ of industrialism ‘there are still strands in the traditional warp reaching down to our own day’, which is ‘our business to disentangle’.42 The gwerin becomes a dispositif (in Foucault’s terms) that allows class divisions to be swept aside and the people of Wales to see themselves as unified under the banner of common ancestry and attachment to the land. As Peate insists, ‘there is no exclusion of any class within the community’.43 His excision of the industrialized areas, however, effectively erases from his picture of the ‘true nation’ the working-class politics, labour movement and urban ‘mass’ culture of the southern coalfields. In St Fagans, Peate created a reincarnation of the gwerin by reconstructing old rural farmhouses, enterprises and craft workshops into a ‘living village’. For example, a Brecknockshire woollen factory was re-erected there, with original machinery in full working order. He was insistent this should not be an attempt to ‘preserve the dead past under glass but one which uses the past to link up with the present’.44 Rather like the eco-museum movement in France, which also espoused ‘back to the land’, Peate’s vision was to display rural ways as active, relevant and essential to modern times, not as a vanished, nostalgic dreamworld. Industry in the form of crafts such as weaving, spinning, blacksmithing, tanning and wool manufacture were to be practised on-site: they would serve different sections of the populace according to the different relationships these had to the gwerin. To school children, artists and architects, they would be an ‘inspiration’; for rural dwellers, a ‘bridge of

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memories’; for quarrymen and colliers, an opportunity to ‘view anew their wider heritage’; whereas urban dwellers would ‘discover the permanence of Welsh life’.45 The gwerin represents an emotive national image, inciting people of all backgrounds to recover something lost at the core of Welsh life, reuniting them in a common inheritance of land, language and industry.

The Power-Hall of Industry: Prime Movers on Display Where this folk-industrial imaginary admitted only small-scale industry into its realm, such as forges, small mills and looms, the wider popular industrial archaeology movements of the 1950s and 1960s lauded the might of engineering feats and the power machine age – the bigger the better. As many factory and industrial areas were being cleared in the post-war period, new enthusiast groups within and beyond Wales began to campaign for the preservation of Britain’s rapidly disintegrating collection of industrial canals, railways, steam locomotives, bridges and heavy steam-powered machinery. Museums at the time typically interpreted these through a scientific and technical frame, rarely locating them in a community or social context.46 In the National Museum of Wales, in 1977, the now Department of Industry was moved to new premises in the largely derelict Cardiff docks to become the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum, or WIMM. Like the Power Hall in Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, it showcased an impressive collection of large, rescued working engines from collieries, tinplate works, railways, pumping houses, road transport and docklands. If St Fagans celebrated the nation of Wales as a renewed and restored gwerin, in Cardiff’s ruined docklands it became a techno-industrial powerhouse, offsetting the ravages of deindustrialization – particularly on the popular ‘steam days’, when the engines would be fired up and the whole building would vibrate. Labels provided technical specifications and scientific explanations, but as the Museum’s first curator acknowledged, the visitor gained little insight into the role they played in local economy and society.47 To counteract this, plans were already well advanced in the 1980s for a Phase 2 development that would tell a wider and more unified story of shipping, rail and road transport, moving beyond the Power Hall model. A new building, Q-Shed, housed the exhibition ‘Travelling the Waves’, illustrating the new thematic direction to be taken; in another new gallery, a dockland street scene was planned complete with chemists, nautical supplies and a pub. That this new more socially focused effort was halted in its infancy by the emergence of the massive new Cardiff docklands redevelopment – a story told below – is ironic, since WIMM’s increasingly old-fashioned feel did not help it find a home in the developers’ new consumer-oriented vision.

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Industry as Testament to Local Identity Bringing industrial remains to the capital city docklands might have assuaged some of the anxiety about their preservation, but it did little to address place making in the other industrial regions of Wales, reinforcing concerns about Cardiff-centric tendencies within the national imaginary. Conscious of the need to bring these other regional identities into the fold, in the 1970s the National Museum took over two recently closed industrial premises: in the north, the Gilfach Ddu workshops of the Dinorwic slate quarry,48 and in the western county of Carmarthenshire, the Cambrian Woollen Mill.49 The latter was administered by the St Fagans folk museum, whose assistant keeper, J. Geraint Jenkins, had worked under Peate and who now assumed responsibility for the research and curation of the woollen industry interpretation. As he is at pains to make clear in his book, Getting Yesterday Right, the Carmarthenshire village of Dre-fach Felindre was chosen after an in-depth historical survey that confirmed its central role in large-scale wool production processes in Wales.50 This reflects the aspiration of the National Museum to include local industrial cultures in the idea of Nation, without succumbing to the temptation, as Jenkins sees it, to indulge localist passions that do not reflect the national picture. In many ways, the National Wool Museum continued the vision of the St Fagans folk-industrial theme that Peate had inaugurated. It placed emphasis on ‘industrial activity as a living organism’, ‘where the present is as important as the long history of the industry’, not a monument to the ‘dead past’.51 An important element in achieving this was the inclusion of a still-operating woollen mill within the complex, enabling the museum to play its part in continuing efforts to keep the industry going. It still operates to this day, producing wool blankets and other items for tourists and a small export market. Both the woollen and slate industry entries into the National Museum fold marked a new direction in its mission to resurrect and bequeath typically Welsh industries as ‘living legacies’ of, and for, the Welsh nation. St Fagans had brought together dwellings and craft workshops from all over Wales, employing craftworkers (saddlers, coopers, weavers, etc.) to teach and demonstrate these techniques. As such, each building’s story was decontextualized, extracted from its local context and brought into an environment that did not, and could not, exist anywhere in real life. In its very different way, the Industrial and Maritime Museum’s cornucopia of mighty engines echoed this logic. Both sites brought together geographically disparate objects and displayed them in a new central space, depicting the nation as, respectively, techno-arcadian village or industrial powerhouse. Both the Woollen and Slate museums represented a departure from this logic. They enabled the national institution to celebrate the local distinctiveness of its industries, pre-

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serving them in situ, with interpretation that told recognizably local stories. This is no less a national project but a differently oriented one, perhaps more congruent with the 1970s ‘structure of feeling’.52 This was when the idea of local place-identity and, indeed, community development started to find popular voice in the media, a counterforce to elite heritage and established centres of power and wealth. In an era of increasing globalization in the 1980s, stories and images of local life and local vernacular heritage proliferated, offering a human-scale and situated particularism in response to the place-transcending tendencies of global communications – although one that was also, ironically, enabled by them.53

Competitive Market-Led Regeneration and the Consumer-Visitor The next part of the story occurs in the 1990s–2000s, when Wales’ industrial heritage (as heritage elsewhere) entered a new phase, centred on social and cultural interpretation. This brought ‘people’s history’ to the fore – this time, not as gwerin but as modern, urban and industrial workers, families and communities with their own intersecting cultural identities and diversities. Again, this shift did not occur in a museum-world bubble. A constellation of forces began to prioritize more socially oriented forms of cultural provision. One of these was undoubtedly political-economic. Gradually, during the 1990s, a new neoliberal economic logic and political ideology began to take hold in the UK cultural sector, in the wake of the 1980s market-economy turn. Regeneration became key to the new role of museums, especially in Wales.54 Another force, meeting this one and converging often uneasily with it, was the growing mobilisation of civic activism and social development movements calling for enhanced community participation in public policies and decisions.55 In the arts and creative sectors, this was aimed at countering the previous perceived dominance of elites in controlling and shaping cultural provision and heritage. It led to a thorough-going redefinition of museums’ public purpose, as discussed further below. One effect of these combined influences was a push towards more consumer-oriented types of heritage development. In addition, three major political-economic shifts that favoured a new ‘partnership’ model of heritage funding and governance can be discerned and that directly impacted on Wales’ cultural policy map. The first was the British government’s adoption of an ‘entrepreneurial governance’ model, which was subsequently to create a landscape of ‘islands of regeneration’ and ‘flagship’ redevelopment areas across the UK.56 Governments at various scales (nation, region, city, town) now had to compete for central pots of

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money to support their cultural sector ambitions, to be awarded on the basis of their entrepreneurial and growth-oriented potential and, where possible, private-sector involvement.57 New urban development corporations were one manifestation of this. The second shift was that parts of Wales became the recipient of new EU structural development (Objective 1 funding) in the late 1990s, later metamorphosing into ‘convergence funding’. This reflected new EU thinking around area-based regeneration, targeting regions experiencing particular economic and social disadvantage – including Europe’s former docklands, coalfields and depopulated rural areas (e.g. large parts of South-East and West Wales). The third factor was the advent of the UK Heritage Lottery Fund. This was to supply a growing pot of money in the next two decades for which heritage projects could competitively bid, on their own account, no longer needing to garner local authority support. The first casualty of the new entrepreneurial regeneration logic was the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum. It was located in land now earmarked for a vast waterfront development in the former docklands, promoted as capable of rivalling the Baltimore and Barcelona models of retail-driven redevelopment.58 The Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC), mixing public- and private-sector actors, was tasked to clear the docklands, build luxury housing, office and retail developments and construct a (controversial) barrage against the tidal Severn estuary for a new leisure marina. The aim was to rebrand the area as ‘Cardiff Bay’, eschewing the old ‘Tiger Bay’ identity based on sailors’ and dockworkers’ cultures. The Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum was located on a primary site at the very heart of the redevelopment area. At first, this gave the Museum confidence that WIMM had a bright new future. In 1987, the year when CBDC was established, the Museum’s Annual report notes with satisfaction WIMM’s ‘vitally important part . . . in the potentially enormous development which is envisaged’ creating a ‘stimulating and exciting’ promised future for the Museum.59 This initial confidence soon began to wane. As Cardiff Bay started to take shape, gradually enclosing the Industrial and Maritime Museum in its affluent embrace, the directors of the National Museum were left with a quandary. Their long-held plans for creating new social and cultural galleries at WIMM were now mired in a period of uncertainty as the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation progressed with its land clearance works. As land prices skyrocketed, expansion became impossible. As late as 1993, the Museum nevertheless remained convinced that WIMM ‘featured prominently in the Corporation’s plans for the future’,60 building on the previous year’s profile-raising campaign, which had targeted investment in a new-look museum to enhance its visibility.61 This had included a regrouping of the large external engines and exhibits so visitors could now travel around them on a miniature railway and the installation of new themed exhibitions and an

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events gallery with education activities, resulting in a 50 per cent increase in visitor attendance. Nevertheless, by now the museum was experiencing ‘ever-increasing disturbance and isolation’ from the new road constructions of CBDC62 and was left in a limbo with a deteriorating building lacking the social or historical interpretation required to attract the Bay’s intended consumer-visitors and no financial means of making it attractive to them. Several schemes were mooted but none attracted funding.63 How to take advantage of the Bay’s redevelopment without becoming its victim? The answer would have required significant investment in a new, revamped Museum on the part of the Development Corporation. CBDC’s vision, however, was to create a ‘new’ Cardiff Bay, complete with prestigious new Welsh Opera House,64 signalling the intention to meld high-end consumerism with high-end culture. Remnants of the industrial environment (whether mudflats at low tide or a museum decked with engines) was presumably antithetical to the shiny new cultural ambience of ‘Mermaid Quay’. Eventually, the National Museum accepted the Corporation’s offer to purchase the site in 1998 (for £7.5m), resulting in the sudden and controversial closure and demolition of WIMM. The sale agreement provided for the establishment of a new permanent Collections Centre at Nantgarw to house the WIMM artefacts and, eventually, a new museum for the industrial and maritime collections on an alternative site.65 A Report for the Welsh Affairs Committee66 on the closure of WIMM concluded that CBDC’s mission statement ‘to put Cardiff on the international map as a superlative maritime city, which will stand in comparison with any such city in the world’ was ‘not well served by the loss of a museum celebrating the city’s industrial and maritime heritage’. It criticized what it called CBDC’s ‘excessively commercial approach to regeneration’ with its ‘depressingly unimaginative and culturally impoverished’ strategy focused on ‘recreational shopping’. In its assessment of CBDC’s ‘combative approach’, it observed that it ‘exercised heavy pressure’ on the National Museum to sell the land that WIMM sat on, leaving the ‘impression that it was not sorry to see WIMM go’.67 The closure of the Industrial and Maritime museum in Cardiff docks meant that Wales’s national museum now had no exhibition space dedicated to the coal industry, which was by far the largest and most significant of its industries and whose legacy politically and culturally dominated the most populous, and yet most disadvantaged, area outside the cities: the South Wales Valleys. For ‘their’ heritage to be ‘closed down’ represented another crack in the social dislocation that Williams68 had observed. The national Slate and Woollen Industry museums were remote from the Valleys, telling largely local, folk-industrial stories that made no space for the topic of industrial society – or industrialization itself – in a way that would, or could,

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do justice to the populous coalfield cultures of the south. That story – of industrial labour organization and communist/labourist politics, bringing the urban working class, as opposed to the rural gwerin, to the fore – had never made it into the docklands museum. Now even its material remains were being shunted into oblivion, or so it seemed to public opinion at the time. The Valleys’ claim as an important player in the national imaginary had been, by then, successfully staked out by Wales’ new left historians and the Welsh media,69and its apparent dismissal was now painfully exposed.70 The South Wales Echo ran a well-supported campaign against the museum closure, and the UK national press picked up the story. The influential Labour MP for Cardiff South, Rhodri Morgan, who was later to become First Minister of the devolved Assembly Government, commented: It is an unbelievable scandal. It beggars belief that we could have got into a situation where for the sake of having a row of upmarket shops, we have sacrificed the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum. It is the ultimate step in the yuppification of Cardiff Bay. It extinguishes the memory of what made Wales such a powerful force in the industrialisation of the world for one and a half centuries. It is extremely ironic that not only have railways, mines and iron works been closed in Wales, but we have now closed the museum that commemorates them.71

This commentary suggests a commitment to a kind of national place-making that owes its allegiance to the labourist imagination of the left historians. It is as opposed to the entrepreneurial and consumer-oriented image of the ‘new new Wales’72 and its increasing socio-spatial inequalities73 as it is to that of the gwerin. The local paper summed up what it termed ‘the great cultural divide’ between ‘deprived Welsh valley communities’ and ‘the brave new world of Cardiff Bay’.74 At the same time, the independent Welsh coal-mining museum that since 1983 had allowed people to descend into the shaft of a real coal mine, Big Pit, on the Valleys’ coalfields’ northern edge at Blaenavon, had been struggling without public funding and by the 1990s was facing possible closure.75 Rescuing it would enable the National Museum to make good its responsibilities to that coalfield history. In 2001, it duly became the sixth National Museum site and is now known as Big Pit: National Coal Museum. This is a disused colliery on an upland moorland (now a designated world heritage site), where first ironworks, then a deep coal mine, had employed hundreds of men. It existed in an environment of historic spoil tips and a now-vanished network of communications to take the coal to port. Nevertheless, at the time, it contained little in the way of interpretation of the social life of the coalfield communities. J. Geraint Jenkins feels that it failed to make visitors understand ‘why coalminers throughout history fought employer and government over the wretched conditions of work in the mines’,

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nor ‘how life was lived in the villages that nestled around them or how their environments were shaped by the getting and transporting of coal’.76 Responding to these criticisms and to the perception that the social history of the industrial areas was still not sufficiently memorialized, the National Museum launched a new Industrial Strategy in 1998, designed to exploit the era’s new partnership funding model.77 The intention was to reinvigorate the National Museum’s commitment to industrial heritage and to address the call for more comprehensively social approaches. The Slate Museum was the first to be comprehensively redeveloped, with Heritage Lottery funding. It now includes a row of four terraced quarrymen’s houses, which afford ‘glimpses of the extraordinarily rich social lives of those who lived in the slate quarrying communities, as well as . . . the themes which conditioned life’.78 Following redevelopment, the National Slate Museum enjoyed a 600 per cent increase in visitor numbers, being awarded Wales’ Tourist Board’s ‘Sense of Place’ Award in 2002 ‘for the creation of a distinctively Welsh ambience’.79 The redevelopment of the National Woollen Museum followed suit, as did Big Pit, which received funding for a comprehensive new set of above-ground galleries telling the history of coal and its communities. Both of these museums now reflect a social, community-oriented ethos.

The National Waterfront Museum: Wales on the World Stage The culmination of the National Museum’s Industrial Strategy came with the launching of a competition to find a new site for the displaced industrial and maritime collections and their history. Its project manager wrote: ‘in view of its rich industrial and maritime history, availability of land and buildings, . . . complete with revenue support, Swansea proved particularly attractive’.80 Swansea and Cardiff have long engaged in inter-urban political and economic rivalry,81 and Cardiff’s perceived monopolization of the flagship political and cultural assets following devolution has been met with efforts by Swansea to reassert its own identity via ambitious regeneration developments.82 The new National Waterfront Museum duly opened in 2005, championed by the City and County of Swansea, who committed their own funds to support running costs. This was a major coup for Swansea’s place making ambitions. Not only did it wrest responsibility for Wales’ prime national industrial and maritime heritage away from the capital city, it also obtained a significant revamp and award-winning new premises for its flagging Swansea Industrial and Maritime Museum, whose collections, in part, were moved to the new premises. Most valuable of all, it created a highstatus focal point for the new ‘Maritime Quarter’, with marina, leisure centre and, nearby, the existing Swansea Museum (the Royal Institution, founded

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1835). Wales’ industrial and maritime history now has a home in a modern, attractive, up-and-coming environment, and Swansea’s own waterfront now seems richer in history and more connected to its industrial past than Cardiff’s.83 Swansea’s Waterfront Museum signals a shift in approach to industrial heritage interpretation in Wales, reflecting similar transformations underway elsewhere over the past two decades. Greater emphasis has been placed on telling a global story of Wales’ place in the world, moving away from the older, more localist, inward-looking gaze typified by St Fagans. In an attempt finally to reconcile the national narrative and the regional industrial stories, the displays bring out the latter’s global significance – uniting them under the banner of ‘the world’s first industrial nation’. Slate, wool, iron, coal and steel are narrated as parts of the same national story, providing, in the words of a Cardiff University socio-economic impact analysis,84 ‘a unique, holistic and difficult to substitute longitudinal insight into Wales’ industrial heritage’ in which ‘the distinct place of Wales in the industrial revolution’ is demonstrated. Putting Wales back on the map, in its ‘rightful place’ as world industrial pioneer, is also a key feature of new interpretation at the Wool, Slate and the (now being comprehensively redeveloped) St Fagans museums.85 The Waterfront Museum also highlights the future of industrial innovation and new technology, drawing attention to current economic innovations and utilizing the latest digital technology for display. Gone are most of the ‘prime movers’ and heavy machinery cherished by industrial archaeology fans, and gone, too, is Peate’s idea that new inspiration requires recovery of a more ‘authentic’ past. Above all, the Waterfront embraces the principle of ‘cultural participation’, a twenty-first century mutation of Peate’s old idea of the museum as ‘activator’ of new skills and learning. The 2008 impact report cited above sought the views of local community and educator groups and concluded that due to its provision of free community space and its contribution to public learning and fostering a sense of pride in the local area, the Waterfront Museum was playing an important ‘socio-community role’.86 The aspiration to work closely and more inclusively with communities represents a major direction in museum thinking today, although one fraught with difficulties and challenges, and has become a core requirement of public museums in governments’ eyes. Over the last few decades, museums have come under pressure to transform themselves into agents of social change, often hiring staff to undertake outreach work and co-curating exhibitions with community members.87 The National Museum of Wales has embraced this social role with passion, placing social inclusion, participation and cultural rights at the heart of its Vision.88 Whilst Peate’s vision assumed that museum professionals would nevertheless remain in control;89 the question confronting museums now is the extent

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to which non-museum actors could, or should, do so. Such debates suggest a new phase of place making in which the locus of cultural authority and expertise might shift to community spaces, in dialogue with institutions, suggesting a turning of museum attention away from ‘things’ onto people.90 The role of industrial heritage in this evolving and still contested trajectory remains to be seen.

Conclusion Industrial heritage has played an important role in ‘making places’ in Wales, through which the National Museum has told its national story – using different narratives in different historical moments. It began with twin, opposed desires: on the one hand to rescue and preserve the historical machines that were the by-product of human endeavour, and on the other, to revivify a ‘true’ Welsh-speaking people of Wales, which excluded industrialized ‘mass’ society as not authentically Welsh. From the 1970/80s, a new generation of radical historians depicted an alternative Wales, rooted in its southern industrial heartlands and anglophone working-class popular culture – eventually recognized and embraced by the National Museum, first at Big Pit and then at Swansea Waterfront. This shift occurred alongside a wider museum turn away from ‘puffing machines’91 towards more personalized and social stories. This reflected a political-economic context that was increasingly incorporating heritage into regeneration practices, requiring it to be more accessible and visitor-friendly. At the same time, the community-oriented wideningparticipation agenda opened up a more holistic approach to heritage, allowing far greater social diversity in national histories than Peate would have recognized. More recently, these narratives have been joined up into an integrated national story at the Waterfront Museum, the first new museum to open after Wales gained its own National Assembly following political devolution in 1999. The direction of travel is not, however, towards greater nationalism but a more ‘civic’ vision of a modern, outward-looking and heterogeneous population. The nation is no longer imagined as a container for special ways of life that must be protected but a tree with many different branches, which all contribute their essential part to play in ‘Wales: first industrial nation’. In the Waterfront Museum, the industrial populations of Wales are depicted as hard-working, skilled, mobile, ‘special’ – but not in the sense of Peate’s gwerin. They are, above all, forward-looking and diverse: different internal groups and ethnicities are recognized, while the difference from England is no longer explained by reference to authentic cultural ‘types’ but the ‘uniqueness’ and diversity of Welsh history and language.

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This latest is no less an imagined nation than the previous versions. What it suggests is a type of nation-building project seeking legitimacy not through ethnicity or class but through a civic and global identity. This has something in common with Beck and Levy’s notion of ‘cosmopolitanized nations’.92 This arguably leaves little room for a political story that positions social class as integral to the making of Wales, whether in its labourmovement sense or the second meaning of gwerin identified by Price Jones, above.93 Industry has, in a sense, been liberated from the mission of defining ‘Wales’ as a single community, a gwerin or a class, to become a symbol of its place in a global mosaic. Bella Dicks is a sociologist at Cardiff University, Wales, with a long interest in the social uses of industrial and other forms of heritage. She has written about the transformation of the Lewis Merthyr Colliery into the Rhondda Heritage Park and the impacts this had on the local community, the wider imagination of Wales and the industrial past. She has also written about the ways in which ‘community’ is harnessed in local regeneration initiatives and cultural policy. A further interest is in qualitative methods, especially digital and multimodal approaches.

Notes 1. This claim is made at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, albeit with a question mark (as in ‘Wales: the first industrial nation?’) and is worthy of some discussion, as below, since it decisively contests England’s claim to this title, as advanced at Ironbridge Gorge. 2. Political devolution in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland was granted in 1999 by the Labour Government of Tony Blair; National Assembly of Wales does not have as many independent powers as the Scottish Parliament but since 1999 has gradually been accruing more. 3. It is often argued that Wales’ raw materials were exploited by English industrialists, who provided the capital and siphoned off the profits (e.g. Williams, ‘Community’, 14–15). This is certainly true of the iron-making phase of Welsh industrial development in the second half of the eighteenth century, although the subsequent coal-mining phase was financed by more local capital, with most coal owners being Welsh (Minchinton, Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. 4. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, 174. 5. The copper was imported into the Swansea port, it being cheaper to bring the copper to the coalfield area than vice versa. First it came from Cornwall but was later joined by copper from Anglesey in North Wales. 6. Bowen, The Lower Swansea Valley: Cradle of the Industrial Revolution. 7. It should be remembered, though, that inter-UK nationality and borders counted for little in the story of early British industrialization; a number of Swansea copperworks were established by English industrialists and innovators (e.g. the Vivian family from Cornwall), drawn to the rapidly industrializing Tawe Valley in the early eighteenth century. 8. Williams, When was Wales? A History of the Welsh, 230–32.

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9. Smith, Wales! Wales?, 17. 10. Morgan, ‘The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour: The Welsh Experience, 1885–1929’, 159–82. 11. Indeed, these divisions of Wales, particularly between north and south, were openly aired in the 1890s parliamentary debates that ensued over the proposal to establish a National Museum for Wales, contribution in no small measure to the controversies and delays that beset it. Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities: Wales and its National Museums. 12. Williams, ‘Community’, 14–15. 13. Jones, ‘Comparative Disadvantage? The Industrial Structure of Wales’, 11–23. 14. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Prosperity without Poverty: A Framework for Action in Wales. 15. Dicks, ‘Heritage as a Social Practice’, 11–24. 16. Bendix, ‘Capitalizing on Memories Past, Present, and Future’, 469–87. 17. Dicks, ‘Heritage as a Social Practice’, 11–24. 18. Silva and Moto Santos, ‘Ethnographies of Heritage and Power’, 437–43. 19. Massey, For Space. 20. Smith, Wales! Wales?, 3. 21. Gruffudd, ‘Remaking Wales: Nation-Building and the Geographical Imagination, 1925–1950’, 219–39. 22. Martin, ‘“Place-Framing” as Place-Making: Constituting a Neighborhood for Organizing and Activism’, 730–50. 23. Berger and Lorenz, Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe. 24. Williams, When was Wales?, 236. 25. Geraint H. Jenkins describes Welsh academic history-writing prior to the 1980s as going through two phases; after a flowering in the early twentieth century, serious historical study in Europe neglected Wales until the post-1945 period when ‘the traditional mainstream narratives begin to change’ (p. 304). Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales. 26. In fact, both Swansea (which opened its own grand museum in 1841, the first in Wales, displaying art and natural science collections belonging to the Royal Institution of South Wales) and Newport (whose museum opened in 1888, centred on art collections) have civic museums, but neither of these were concerned with industrial history, until very recent times. 27. Morgan, ‘The Creation of the National Museum and Library’, 13–22. 28. Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities, 233. 29. Williams, When was Wales? 30. Price Jones, ‘The Gwerin of Wales’, 2–3. 31. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, 5. 32. Adamson, Class, Ideology, and the Nation: A Theory of Welsh Nationalism. 33. Blyn-Ladrew, ‘Ancient Bards, Welsh Gipsies, and Celtic Folklore in the Cauldron of Regeneration’, 225–43. Ironically, as Jenkins (2007) and Williams (1985) point out, it was modern, industrial Wales’ new urban centres, print cultures and commercialized leisure industry that paved the way for its promotion by nationalists as the seat of primitivism, antiquarianism and the Celts as ‘first Britons’. 34. Gruffudd, ‘Back to the Land: Historiography, Rurality and the Nation in Interwar Wales’, 61–77. 35. Gruffudd, ‘Back to the Land’, 63. 36. These ideas were drawing on a wider European conceptual notion of ‘habitat, economy and society’ influential in Scandinavia, Germany, Denmark, France. Blood and soil became the horrific Nazi corruption of it. But Gruffudd sees these ideas containing not just a reactionary nostalgic response to modernization but also the seeds of a utopian vision trying to meld future-looking progress with a rebirth of the traditional values of community and collectivity.

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37. Gruffudd, ‘Back to the Land’, 68. 38. Phillips, ‘A Picture of the Past and a Mirror of the Present: Iorwerth Peate and the Origins of the Welsh Folk Museum’, 69. 39. Ibid., 100. 40. Peate, ‘The Study of Folk Life: And its Part in the Defence of Civilization’, 108. 41. This critique of Americanization and industrialism was a common one in the 1930s– 1950s (shared by cultural critics such as F.R. Leavis in the 1930s, who also looked back to a pre-machine-age folk culture). 42. Peate, ‘The Study of Folk Life’, 102. 43. Ibid., 100. 44. Peate, Amgueddfeydd Gwerin – Folk Museums 46. 13. 45. Ibid., 61. 46. The focus on technical characteristics rather than social context was widespread at the time, not only in Wales. For example, Manchester’s North Western Museum of Science and Technology, opened in 1969 with a remit to exhibit ‘the worldwide importance of the inventions and industries in both science and technology that the area had made to our present civilization’, Hills, ‘The North Western Museum of Science and Industry, Some Reminiscences’. This echoed the ethos in the US, as the Director of Baltimore Museum of Industry describes: ‘Unlike relics of the ancient world, industrial artefacts were rarely examined or displayed for what they reveal about the work process, the workers who produced them, or the social structure of the workplace in which they were made’ (Leary and Sholes, ‘Authenticity of Place and Voice: Examples of Industrial Heritage Preservation and Interpretation in the U.S. and Europe’, 49–66. 47. Jenkins, Getting Yesterday Right: Interpreting the Heritage of Wales. 48. This became the North Wales Quarrying Museum in 1972, now the National Slate Museum. 49. This became the Museum of the Welsh Woollen Industry, now the National Wool Museum. 50. Jenkins, Getting Yesterday Right. 51. Ibid., 57. 52. On different periods of history-making see Berger, Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective. 53. Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. 54. Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community. 55. Dicks, ‘Participatory Community Regeneration: A Discussion of Risks, Accountability and Crisis in Devolved Wales’, 959–77. 56. According to Harvey, this ‘entrepreneurial governance’ model replaced the older ‘managerialist’ approach of regional assistance, where government had allotted funds according to a central calculation of local need. Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, 3–17; Bianchini and Schwengel, ‘Re-imagining the City: Enterprise and Heritage: Cross-currents of National Culture’, 212–34. 57. Prentice, Change and Policy in Wales: Wales in the Era of Privatism. 58. Thomas and Imrie, British Urban Policy: An Evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations. 59. National Museum of Wales Annual Report (1987–88). 60. National Museum of Wales Annual report (1992–93). 61. National Museum of Wales Annual Report (1991–92). 62. Ibid. 63. These schemes ‘variously involved an Imax movie theatre, an underwater museum to study the local marine life, and a centre to interpret the undoubted former significance of Cardiff Docks itself. Despite repeated attempts, which are still ongoing, none of these schemes

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has attracted enough funding to go ahead, and meanwhile the old WIMM has been in terminal decline’. Grenter, Industrial Archaeology News, no. 106. 64. In another place making twist, the Opera House winning design by Zahar Hadid was cancelled and the less highbrow Wales Millennium Centre built instead. 65. Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities. 66. Welsh Affairs Committee First report on the Closure of the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum, House of Commons, 1999. 67. Ibid., ix. 68. Williams, When Was Wales? 69. The BBC had made a popular and successful series Wales, Wales?, presented by left historian Dai Smith, which told this story. 70. Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities. 71. Quoted in the British national Independent newspaper, Monday 1 June 1998. 72. Humphreys, ‘Images of Wales’, 133–59. 73. Morris and Wilkinson, ‘Poverty and Prosperity in Wales: Polarisation and Los Angelization’, 29–45. 74. Western Mail, 17 March 1995. 75. Mason, Museums, Nations, Identities. 76. Jenkins, Getting Yesterday Right, 83. 77. The Industrial Strategy had a total of £40 million dedicated to it, including money from Heritage Lottery, Welsh Development Agency, Wales Tourist Board, EU Structural Development funds, the Welsh Government and the National Museum itself – see ‘A Salute to the World’s First Industrial Nation’, in National Museum Wales: Celebrating the First 100 Years (Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 2007). 78. Roberts, ‘Interpreting the Welsh Slate Museum’, 68. 79. Quoted in National Museum Wales: Celebrating the First 100 Years, 169. 80. Bevins, ‘The National Waterfront Museum, Swansea’, 21. 81. E.g. there was some resistance to Welsh political devolution in Swansea, since ‘Swansea residents, for example, could not see why they should be “ruled from Cardiff ”’, CAG consultants. 82. Cardiff Bay is the site of the Welsh Assembly’s debating chamber, the Senedd, and the iconic Wales Millennium Centre, granting it high status as Wales’ cultural centre and seat of government, to rival Cardiff’s old Edwardian civic centre – where the original National Museum building still sits. This high investment in Cardiff has not been matched in Swansea, which had to deal with similar large areas of derelict dockland and ex-industrial brownfields. Its centre has never fully recovered from the destruction of the ‘Swansea blitz’ during the war. Nevertheless, new regeneration includes the SA1 waterfront area in the northern docks, an Enterprise Park to the north and a determined effort by its Council to put the name ‘Swansea Bay’ on the map, with a new campus for the University, a Waterfront Innovation Quarter and other developments. A city centre regeneration plan is also underway. 83. Cardiff now has its own history museum, Cardiff Story, located in the Old Library in the city centre, supported by Cardiff City Council. 84. Welsh Economy Research Unit (2008) National Waterfront Museum Swansea: A Review and Analysis of Socio-Economic Impacts, Cardiff University, p. 4. 85. St Fagans: National Museum of History is the new name. 86. The 2008 impact report, p. 5. 87. Belfiore, Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion: Does it Really Work? A Critique of Instrumental Cultural Policies and Social Impact Studies in the UK’, 91–106. 88. The current Vision of the Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum of Wales is ‘Inspiring People, Changing Lives’ (approved by Trustees December 2017). The Museum’s purpose, in support of this Vision, is to ‘inspire people through our museums and collections to find a sense of well-being and identity, to discover, enjoy and learn bilingually, and to understand Wales’s place in the wider world’.

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89. Phillips, ‘A Picture of the Past and a Mirror of the Present’. 90. Selwood, ‘What Difference Do Museums Make? Producing Evidence on the Impact of Museums’, 65–81. 91. Francis, ‘A Nation of Museum Attendants’, 8–9. 92. Beck and Levy, ‘Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society’, 3–31. 93. Price Jones, ‘The Gwerin of Wales’.

Bibliography Adamson, D.L. Class, Ideology, and the Nation: A Theory of Welsh Nationalism. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991. Beck, U., and D. Levy. ‘Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society’. Theory, Culture & Society 30(2) (2013), 3–31. Belfiore, E. ‘Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion: Does it Really Work? A Critique of Instrumental Cultural Policies and Social Impact Studies in the UK’. International Journal of Cultural Policy 8(1) (2002), 91–106. Bendix, R. ‘Capitalizing on Memories Past, Present, and Future’. Anthropological Theory 2(4) (2002), 469–87. Berger, S. Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Berger, S., and C. Lorenz. Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Bevins, R. ‘The National Waterfront Museum, Swansea’. Amgueddfa 3 (1999/2000), 21 [Yearbook of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales]. Bianchini, F., and H. Schwengel. ‘Re-imagining the City: Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture’, in J. Corner and S. Harvey (eds), Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of National Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 212–34. Blyn-Ladrew, R. ‘Ancient Bards, Welsh Gipsies, and Celtic Folklore in the Cauldron of Regeneration’. Western Folklore 57(4) (1998), 225–43. Bowen, H. The Lower Swansea Valley: Cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Cardiff: Wales Online, 2012. Dicks, B. Heritage, Place and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. ———. ‘Participatory Community Regeneration: A Discussion of Risks, Accountability and Crisis in Devolved Wales’. Urban Studies 51(5) (2014), 959–77. ———. ‘Heritage as a Social Practice’, in G. Hooper (ed.), Heritage at the Interface: Interpretation and Identity (Florida: University of Florida Press, 2017), 11–24. Francis, H. ‘A Nation of Museum Attendants’. Arcade (6 January 1981), 8–9. Grenter, S. Industrial Archaeology News, no. 106 – Bulletin of the Association for Industrial Archaeology, 1998. http://industrial-archaeology.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/AIANews-106-Autumn-1998.pdf. Gruffudd, P. ‘Back to the Land: Historiography, Rurality and the Nation in Interwar Wales’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 19(1) (1994), 61–77. ———. ‘Remaking Wales: Nation-Building and the Geographical Imagination, 1925–1950’. Political Geography 14(3) (1995), 219–39. Harvey, D. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’. Human Geography 71(1) (1989), 3–17. Hills, R.L. ‘The North Western Museum of Science and Industry, Some Reminiscences’. Unpublished and undated. Humphreys, R. ‘Images of Wales’, in T. Herbert and G. Jones (eds), Post-War Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 133–59. Jenkins, G.H. A Concise History of Wales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Jenkins, J.G. Getting Yesterday Right: Interpreting the Heritage of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992. Jones, C. ‘Comparative Disadvantage? The Industrial Structure of Wales’, in J. Bryan and C. Jones (eds), Wales in the 21st Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 11–23. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Prosperity without Poverty: A Framework for Action in Wales. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2016. Leary, T.E., and E.C. Sholes. ‘Authenticity of Place and Voice: Examples of Industrial Heritage Preservation and Interpretation in the U.S. and Europe’. The Public Historian 22(3) (2000), 49–66. Martin, D.G. ‘“Place‐Framing” as Place‐Making: Constituting a Neighborhood for Organizing and Activism’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93(3) (2003), 730–50. Mason, R. Museums, Nations, Identities: Wales and its National Museums. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. Massey, D. For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. Minchinton, W.E. Growth of English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Methuen, 1969. Morgan, K.O. ‘The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour: The Welsh Experience, 1885–1929’, in K.D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History: Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1974), 159–82. Morgan, P. ‘The Creation of the National Museum and Library’, in J. Osmond (ed.), Myths, Memories and Futures: The National Library and National Museum in the Story of Wales (Cardiff, Institute of Welsh Affairs, 2007), 13–22. Morris, J., and B. Wilkinson. ‘Poverty and Prosperity in Wales: Polarisation and Los Angelization’. Contemporary Wales 8 (1995), 29–45. Peate, I.C. Amgueddfeydd Gwerin – Folk Museums. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1948. ———. ‘The Study of Folk Life: And its Part in the Defence of Civilization’. Gwerin: A HalfYearly Journal of Folk Life 2(3) (1959), 97–109. Phillips, E. ‘A Picture of the Past and a Mirror of the Present: Iorwerth Peate and the Origins of the Welsh Folk Museum’, in O. Rhys and Z. Baveystock (eds), Collecting the Contemporary: A Handbook for Social History Museums (Edinburgh and Boston: MuseumsEtc., 2014). Prentice, R. Change and Policy in Wales: Wales in the Era of Privatism. Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1993. Price Jones, F. ‘The Gwerin of Wales’, in G. Jenkins (ed.), Studies in Folk Life: Essays in Honour of Iorwerth C. Peate (London: Routledge, 1969), 1–14. Roberts, D. ‘Interpreting the Welsh Slate Museum’. Amgueddfa 2 (1998/99), 68 [Yearbook of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales]. Robertson, R. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992. Selwood, S. ‘What Difference Do Museums Make? Producing Evidence on the Impact of Museums’. Critical Quarterly 44(4) (2002), 65–81. Silva, L., and P. Moto Santos. ‘Ethnographies of Heritage and Power’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 18(5) (2012), 437–443. Smith, D. Wales! Wales? London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984. Thomas, H., and R. Imrie. British Urban Policy: An Evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations. London: SAGE, 1999. Wales Audit Office. Regeneration in Wales since the 1950s; Timeline and Synopsis. Cardiff: Audit Commission in Wales, 2005. Williams, G.A. When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh. London: Black Raven Press, 1985. Williams, R. ‘Community’. London Review of Books 7(1) (1985), 14–15.

CHAPTER

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The Steel Industry in Welsh History and Heritage Louise Miskell

In January 2016, the Indian conglomerate, Tata, announced a cut of 1,050 jobs from its workforce in British steel plants, with the majority of the losses (750) earmarked for Port Talbot steelworks in South Wales. The implementation of the job cuts was followed by protracted discussions over the possible sale of the Port Talbot works, sparking a wave of interest in the British media.1 Suddenly, Welsh steel was in the spotlight. The prospect of the end of steel making in the modern Welsh economy elicited some gloomy predictions about the future for communities like Port Talbot but also awakened new levels of public interest in the significance of steel in Welsh industrial history.2 Yet for much of the twentieth century, the story of steel in Wales has been relatively inconspicuous in public and academic history, especially when compared to the levels of interest in other industries – notably coal mining and iron production. The occasion of the opening of the new ‘Abbey’ steelworks at Port Talbot in July 1951 caused one journalist to reflect that, ‘The men of iron and of steel have not been written about in the way the miners have.’3 Historian Chris Williams has pointed out the paradox in twentieth-century Welsh history that steel, while being ‘the greatest single success story of the post-war Welsh economy’,4 at least until the 1970s, does not loom large in the historical record with the result that ‘our understanding of the nature of industrial society in, for example, Ebbw Vale and Dowlais, remains incomplete’.5 Notes for this section begin on page 102.

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This chapter offers some explanations for this relative blind spot in Welsh industrial history and heritage. It suggests that the interconnectedness of steel with the iron and tinplate trades has made the story of Welsh steel difficult to disentangle from the broader picture of non-ferrous metal manufacture. Steel history has also suffered from being out of step, chronologically, with other Welsh industries. While coal and tinplate experienced their zenith in the late Victorian and Edwardian years, steel’s high watermark came after 1945, when, according to one study, its importance was difficult to overestimate.6 Scholars of industrial history in Wales have not yet fully got to grips with the years after World War II, or the new and challenging issues of growing consumerism and changing patterns of work and leisure that characterized this era.7 Different obstacles to historical interpretation affected steel’s years of decline, which began in the 1970s, when several of Wales’s largest steelworks were closed. Economic and political priorities meant that industrial heritage played little or no part in plans for the redevelopment of sites of former steel production. Instead, the large acreage of former steelworks was evaluated for its potential as the location for new business and commercial investment; land reclamation and environmental clean-up took priority over their identity as sites of historical importance. The final section of the chapter will suggest that in more recent times the tide has begun to turn. Growing awareness of the uncertain future of steel making in Wales has stimulated an interest in the gathering of oral testimony from Welsh steelworkers and in developing the heritage potential of sites and structures associated with the industry. Much of this work has been undertaken by volunteers and community groups located in former steelworks towns, where grass-roots initiatives have led to some notable successes in local, heritage-led regeneration. Recent academic research, meanwhile, has begun to reveal a clearer picture of an industry and a labour force whose characteristics differed markedly from those of coal and iron, and which poses some challenges for the way in which the history of work and industry in Wales is understood and interpreted. Large-scale steel production in Wales had its origins in the ironworks on the northern edge of the South Wales coalfield in the Victorian era. Here, iron ore had been mined and smelted since the mid eighteenth century in a string of blast furnace plants ranged from Blaenavon in the east to Hirwaun in the west, with the dominant cluster of four works situated around the town of Merthyr Tydfil. By 1830, some 277,000 tons of pig iron was being produced in this region, amounting to over one third of total British output.8 Traditionally, the pig iron produced from the furnaces was processed into wrought iron, but in 1856 the development by Henry Bessemer of a new method of refining cast iron to remove its impurities inaugurated the mass production of steel. The metal produced through these refinements

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retained the same malleable properties as wrought iron but was stronger and better suited to heavy load-bearing functions.9 Demand for steel in place of wrought iron for use in the construction, railway and shipping industries prompted Welsh ironmasters to adopt the new processes. Bessemer converters were installed at a number of ironworks in the ‘heads of the valleys’ industrial belt in the decades after 1856. Dowlais and Ebbw Vale introduced Bessemer converters and began the manufacture of steel rails, and Rhymney, Blaenavon, Tredegar and Cyfarthfa had all followed suit by the mid 1880s.10 Further innovations followed with the development of open-hearth steel making by Charles Siemens in the 1860s and basic steel making pioneered by Sidney Gilchrist Thomas at Blaenavon in 1879. While the Gilchrist-Thomas process was more suited to use with foreign ores and gained little ground in Britain,11 the Siemens process established a firm foothold in the Lower Swansea Valley as an effective method for producing steel sheets for tinplate manufacture, which was heavily concentrated there. Yoked to rising global demand for tinplate, open-hearth steel making grew rapidly, and by 1912 the 328,000 tons of Bessemer steel being produced in Wales was dwarfed by the 1.36 million tons of Siemens steel.12 It was significant that tinplate production steered the South Wales steel industry towards sheet rather than heavy steel products because it was the sheet steel sector that was revolutionized by new American wide strip mill technology, developed in the 1920s. As a result, the industry in Wales underwent a greater degree of modernization in the interwar years than was the case in Scotland or the NorthEast of England, Britain’s other key steel-making regions.13 Wide strip mills were introduced at Ebbw Vale in 1935 and Shotton in 1938, replacing older handrolling techniques and equipment.14 The era of the small-scale producer was superseded as company mergers created large firms like Richard Thomas and Baldwins and the Steel Company of Wales. At least part of the impetus for this modernization came from the British motor industry, an increasingly important domestic consumer of Welsh sheet steel.15 Given the overlapping evolution and geographical location of these industries, it is perhaps not surprising that, traditionally, iron and steel and tinplate histories have often been bunched together in a kind of ferrous metals sub-discipline of Welsh industrial history.16 For some purposes, the subsuming of the history of steel with iron and tinplate makes sense, not least in a museum context, where space is at a premium. The most important museum interpretation of Welsh steel history is to be found in the ‘Metals’ gallery at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum (NWM), which opened in 2005 to display and interpret selected material from the National Museum’s vast industry collection. NWM’s broad task of interpreting some three hundred years of industrial and transport history in Wales necessarily limits the space and attention devoted in its gallery spaces to steel. Samples of the products

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of the Welsh steel industry, including steel rails and galvanized corrugated steel sheeting, sit alongside exhibits from other branches of Welsh metals smelting, such as copper sheathing, tinplated food cans, bar iron and pig iron. Touchscreen video installations provide visitors with information on the workings of a Bessemer converter and a Siemens open-hearth furnace, while these technical advances also feature in an interpretative panel highlighting Welsh innovation in the iron and steel industry. Although there has long been recognition that ‘The history of industry in Wales is not just a history of machines and of technological processes, but a history of a people and of communities that were concerned with making a living’,17 this has proved difficult to realize in the case of steel. Booklets and illustrated publications have tended to focus on the major processing innovations of the Victorian period, as writers have sought to celebrate the major technological advances in the refining of cast iron and the contributions of a few pioneering individuals who provided financial capital or management oversight during the major phases of growth.18 In the important booklet on Welsh Steel, published in 1995 by the National Museum, photographs from the collections held by the National Museums and Galleries of Wales are used primarily to illustrate the locations and techniques of steel making and processing.19 As studies of industrial heritage traditions elsewhere have found, this focus on the products and processes of industry is common and stems in part from the influence of industrial archaeology and site recording as priority aims.20 At NWM, a large audiovisual exhibit featuring interviews with Port Talbot steelworkers about their experience of the industry and their working day helps bring a much-needed human dimension to the story of Welsh steel. In addition to this, the museum’s temporary exhibition space has occasionally been used to display panels relating the history of the steel community in Port Talbot.21 Apart from these initiatives, there have been few attempts to investigate and interpret the twentieth-century history of Wales’s steelworkers and communities beyond unpublished academic research projects.22 Ironically, the dearth of investigation is particularly pronounced for the period of the industry’s heyday, in the two decades following the end of World War II, when steel replaced coal as the flagship of the Welsh economy. By 1964, the number of people employed in metal manufacturing in Wales (of which steel accounted for the greatest share) overtook the number employed in coal mining for the first time.23 By 1952, Wales had seventeen iron and steelworks, including five fully integrated plants at Shotton, Brymbo, Ebbw Vale, East Moors and Port Talbot, where blast-furnace operations, steel making and rolling mills were all combined on one site.24 South Wales and Monmouthshire was acknowledged as ‘the most important of Britain’s ten steel-making districts’ in terms of tonnage, producing 4,607,000 tons of

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crude steel, or 23.3 per cent of Britain’s total output in 1955.25 Port Talbot, in particular, became synonymous with steel making after 1945, when it was announced that a new strip mill plant designed to serve new markets for sheet steel in the manufacture of motor cars and domestic appliances would be built on a site adjacent to the town’s existing Margam and Port Talbot steelworks. The Steel Company of Wales was created in 1947 to construct the new plant at an initial cost of £60 million. The project propelled Welsh steel making into the modern age with a new-look plant and equipment based on American designs and was heralded as a beacon of Britain’s postwar economic reconstruction.26 Historians have been hampered by a different set of constraints from those of museum professionals in understanding and interpreting these developments. One pressing difficulty has been accessing the industry’s main archival collections, which since 1984 have been housed at Tata’s Record Management Centre in Shotton. The historical material held at this vast, modern records facility includes the main company records of many of Wales’s foremost twentieth-century steel firms, including Richard Thomas and Company, which operated the works at Ebbw Vale; Richard Thomas and Baldwins, the firm that built the Spencer steelworks at Llanwern, which opened in 1958; the Steel Company of Wales at Port Talbot; and John Summers and Sons, the family firm, which operated the Shotton steelworks. However, the material is almost entirely uncatalogued, leading the author of a recent survey to conclude that, ‘In their current state these records are only partially accessible to researchers.’27 The void has been filled in part by industry-sponsored histories published to mark significant company milestones or events, but these largely celebratory works tend to be mainly illustrative with little in the way of interpretative content or analysis.28 A further issue for historians of Wales has been the problem of how to reconcile post-war developments in steel with what was happening elsewhere in industrial Wales. From the late nineteenth century, steel production had begun to shift away from the historic heartland of the iron industry to new coastal locations as increasing reliance on imported iron ore favoured coastal sites with easy access to modern dock facilities.29 The new communities created there diverged ever more starkly from patterns of social and demographic development in Wales’s older industrial centres. The population of Port Talbot, for example, rose from 44,115 to 47,130 from 1951 to 1956, an increase that was ‘most uncommon for south Wales towns over this period’.30 Elsewhere, the contraction of the coal industry, with the number of producing mines falling from 203 at the end of 1948 to 101 by December 1962,31 caused significant population losses. The former coal mining region of the Rhondda never fully recovered from the effects of the interwar depression, and its population halved in the five decades after 1921.32 In con-

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trast, the labour force at Port Talbot steelworks numbered around 18,000 at its peak in the early 1960s, and in Wales as a whole there were 62,400 people employed in iron and steel by 1975.33 Port Talbot began to acquire a reputation as a ‘boom town’, with stories of steelworkers reputedly able to earn as much as £70 per week, from a combination of basic salary and shift bonuses. The town itself attracted new businesses, shops and facilities for leisure and entertainment, including a fifty metre swimming pool, an array of new social clubs and even a casino.34 A modern housing estate was built to accommodate the growing steel workforce. Located on a flat, spacious site of reclaimed dunes, the new ‘Sandfields Estate’ consisted of 4,500 dwellings by the mid 1960s.35 Many of the houses took the form of semi-detached dwellings with front and rear gardens, very different from the traditional terraces found in industrial towns in the coal mining valleys of South Wales. A few years before the publication of Goldthorpe’s first study of the ‘affluent worker’, which investigated attitudes towards work and social status among workers in the prosperous car manufacturing town of Luton,36 one social scientist struggled to interpret what all of this meant for the idea of class identity in Port Talbot. He concluded, from interviewing a number of steelworkers about the effects of industrial change, that there was no ‘transition from working class to middle class, in spite of changes in income levels’, but rather a ‘differential degree of “confusion” in social and status terms’.37 Understanding and interpreting Wales’s twentieth-century steel communities requires not only confronting some tricky issues of shifting social status but also of worker identity. For audiences more familiar with the notion of the Welsh industrial worker based on mining communities in the coalfield, where working-class identity was shaped by decades of protest over pay and conditions and a bond of fellowship derived from the shared experience of labour in the dark and dangerous world of the mine, steelworkers present a more complex picture.38 They were a more fragmented workforce with a less coherent experience of work. Not everyone employed on steelworks sites undertook work directly connected with making steel. The many bricklayers, electricians, crane drivers, canteen workers and personnel staff employed in the post-war Welsh steel industry shared little in common in terms of their experience in the workplace. Even in the steel making and processing departments there was huge diversity. Port Talbot steelworks had twenty-three different production departments including everything from ore preparation to coke ovens, blast furnaces, melting shop and hot strip mill. In effect, it comprised ‘a number of different workplaces, each giving rise to their own specific processes, conditions and cultures’.39 Levels of pay, conditions of work, patterns of trade union representation and

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perceptions of skill all varied considerably across these different departments, making the idea of a single steelworker identity problematic. Oral evidence gathered directly from current and former steelworks employees has begun to point to ways in which twentieth-century steelworker identity can be interpreted and understood.40 Employer-led welfare schemes designed to promote a sense of loyalty and affinity to the Company were not always fully embraced.41 Many steelworks employees took pleasure in the comforts and companionships of their homes and families or in the lure of town-based social clubs. But it was outside the workplace more than inside it that the term ‘steelworker’ took on particular significance and was most often used to define occupational identity. For those who had experienced retirement or redundancy, this continuing sense of steelworker identity became even more important.42 The era of decline and closure of the Welsh steel industry, without the complicating issues of worker affluence that characterized the post-war boom period, has arguably attracted more academic research. Since the 1980s, a number of studies have been published by economists and social scientists examining the scale and impact of unemployment in some of Wales’ former steelworks towns.43 By the 1960s, there were already signs that the favourable economic conditions enjoyed by Welsh steelworks since World War II were beginning to change. Increased competition from new steel plants in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Brazil put pressure on British works to reduce costs, primarily by a reduction in manning levels. The industry was renationalized in 1967, and successive governments in Britain tried to modernize and make the industry more competitive by concentrating production in a smaller number of larger plants.44 But economic recession deepened, and the UK industry failed to upgrade sufficiently to compete with the quality of competitors’ products.45 The result was a rash of closures and a dramatic contraction of the labour force employed in steel in Wales from the mid 1970s onwards (see Table 4.1). East Moors steelworks in Cardiff was the first of the large Welsh steelworks to close completely in 1978, with the loss of almost 4,500 jobs. Iron and steel making ceased at Ebbw Vale in 1975 and at Shotton in 1979, although some finishing processes continued in both locations. Table 4.1 Numbers employed at selected Welsh steel plants, 1974/1975–1979/1980.46 1974/5

1979/80

% Change

14,143

11,984

–15

Llanwern

9,497

8,611

–9

East Moors

4,461

96

–98

Ebbw Vale

8,338

3,797

–55

Port Talbot

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Wales was not the only part of the UK that felt the effects of the more competitive global marketplace. The UK workforce in iron and steel declined from 194,347 in 1974 to 112,120 in 1980.47 But there was a specifically Welsh context to the debate about what to do with the former steelworks sites. By the mid1970s, when the steelworks closures began, sites of industrial dereliction were already a major problem in Wales. Decades of decline in mining and metal smelting had left a legacy of waste tips, polluted ground and disused buildings. The Lower Swansea Valley, where a high proportion of Britain’s non-ferrous smelting works were located in the two centuries after 1700, had become a byword for industrial dereliction.48 An ambitious clean-up project was undertaken in 1961 by Swansea University academics and members of the local community, and the whole area was cleared of derelict industrial buildings and re-landscaped with the result that barely any visible remains of the former industrial activity was left.49 But many other problematic sites remained. An unofficial survey of derelict land carried out in 1964 identified 1,300 sites totalling some 26.6 square miles in South Wales alone.50 The urgency of this problem was brought into sharp relief in October 1966, when 145 people in the village of Aberfan were killed when the spoil tips from the Merthyr Vale Colliery above the village slid down the mountainside after a period of heavy rain.51 In the aftermath of the disaster, the issue of derelict industrial land in Wales advanced up the political agenda. Secretary of State for Wales Cledwyn Hughes noted that it had given ‘a new stimulus also to the effort to clear up the land left derelict by industrial processes of the past . . . not only to reclaim land now useless so that it may be available for industry or housing or other beneficial use, but also to make these areas more attractive to incoming industry and for those who live in them’.52 The objectives of clearance, landscaping and attracting new jobs articulated in these comments dominated thinking in Wales about the potential future uses and developments on the sites of steelworks, which closed from the mid 1970s onwards. They were, typically, large, sprawling sites where disused furnaces, mill buildings and rolling machinery, abandoned railway lines and contaminated soils all presented a problem for local authorities and communities. When East Moors steelworks closed in 1978, South Glamorgan County Council, the local authority responsible for the site, prioritized site clearance and the attraction of new jobs to the area in their first Structure Plan, published in 1977.53 Limited progress was made, however, until the allocation of substantial central government funds for regeneration and the formation of the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation. This brought about a shift in the focus of economic development in the city to the dockland area of Cardiff Bay. Like many dockland regeneration projects in Britain in the 1980s, this

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gave a maritime emphasis to the redevelopment of the area. The aim of the Development Corporation was, ‘To put Cardiff on the international map as a superlative maritime city, which will stand comparison with any such city in the world, thereby enhancing the image and economic well-being of Cardiff and Wales as a whole.’54 These ambitions did not necessarily bode well for the legacy of steel in the city. As far as the closure of East Moors was concerned: It represented a milestone in Cardiff’s modern history, shaping its future as it moved towards an administrative and cultural capital for Wales. However, such a move saw steel largely forgotten from Cardiff with little to no reference to it in the Bay region, whilst coal is still celebrated as a major factor in the city’s history.55

In Shotton, the decision to close the works brought to an end almost a century of steel making on the site, but in the context of economic recession and rising unemployment rates, it was understandably concern to mitigate the impact of job losses in the region, rather than the loss of identity with the steel industry, that dominated discussions over the future of the site. Barry Jones, MP for the area, summed up this sentiment during a lengthy debate on the closure in the House of Commons in July 1979: If we are to lose 6,300 jobs directly and perhaps several thousand more indirectly . . . what sort of society will we have on Deeside in two or three years’ time? Will unemployment rise to 20 per cent? Will masses of our young people either have to meddle away their time without a job locally or leave the area to make their fortune elsewhere? What will happen to the dozens upon dozens of local shops and small local jobbing builders? What social fabric will we have in three years’ time if the Government insist that the decision go forward? Shotton in the 1980s must not become what Jarrow was in the 1930s.56

These sentiments were widely shared and ensured that the emphasis after the Shotton closure was redevelopment and new job creation. Part of the former site was acquired by the Welsh Development Agency, the government-funded body established to assist economic regeneration in Wales. It embarked on an ambitious programme of factory building aimed at creating 2.4 million square feet of space for new manufacturing firms, much of it in areas of high unemployment, such as the newly created Deeside Industrial Estate near Shotton.57 As in Cardiff, consideration for interpretation of the 100-year history of steel making on the site played little part in this process. Yet, elsewhere in 1980s Wales, and particularly in areas remote from the main urban centres with less evident potential for new commercial development, industrial heritage considerations had played a part in regeneration and development planning. In the former slate-mining region of Snowdonia in North Wales, the Llechwedd Slate Caverns opened as a visitor attrac-

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tion in 1972 and was attracting over 220,000 visitors annually by the mid 1980s.58 In Blaenavon, meanwhile, Big Pit was developed as a coal mining museum in 1983, although low visitor numbers contributed to its acquisition by National Museums and Galleries of Wales in 1999.59 The opening of the Rhondda Heritage Park on the site of the former Lewis Merthyr colliery in Trehafod in 1989 provided a further example of the redevelopment and re-use of former industrial buildings at the centrepiece of a new visitor attraction.60 A detailed investigation into the potential of industrial heritage sites in Wales, on behalf of Cadw and the Council for British Archaeology, summarized the shifting attitudes towards these sites: . . . old industrial buildings need no longer be regarded merely as symbols of oppression, inequality, or ill-health. Solidly built of local materials, some have an architectural dignity or beauty difficult to replicate and are, in rarer cases, unsurpassed. Re-use or adaption for housing, offices of new light industries can nowadays make greater economic sense than does demolition.61

The impact of these shifts in how buildings and locations associated with Welsh industrial history are perceived and valued can be seen in the work of community groups active in two of Wales’s former steelworks towns: Brymbo in North Wales and Ebbw Vale in the Gwent valley, in South-East Wales. When Brymbo steelworks in North Wales closed in 1990, it seemed set to follow a similar fate to that of East Moors and Shotton. A programme of demolition cleared much of the site of its significant industrial structures, and the land was acquired by Brymbo Development Ltd., who drew up a plan for the site based on the development of new housing and retail outlets. But two further factors influenced the direction of regeneration plans for the former steelworks area. The first was the fact that a core of key industrial buildings, including the steelworks’ machine shop, survived the bulldozers; the second was the coming together, in 1994, of a group of enthusiastic members of the local community to form Brymbo Heritage Group. With knowledge of the historical significance of the site and with a collection of industrial buildings to focus its attention on, this group succeeded in attracting money from the Prince’s Regeneration Fund, which enabled it to draw up its own Masterplan that included the transformation of the steelworks machine shop into a visitors’ centre and the development of new public spaces named after individuals prominent in the town’s past as a centre for iron and steel production.62 Ebbw Vale’s part in the history of steel making in twentieth-century Wales came to an end in phases, beginning with the end of steel making on the site in 1975. By the time of the complete closure in 2002, much of the original steelworks site had already been demolished, and some redevelopment had taken place, notably with the staging of the National Garden

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Festival there in 1992.63 The former steelworks site was sold by Corus to Blaenau Gwent Council in 2005 and, with Welsh Government support, a regeneration project commenced. Like its counterpart in Brymbo, community initiative was also influential in this process. A group of local enthusiasts and former steelworks employees formed a Trust in November 2004 and, with the agreement of Corus UK Ltd., took over responsibility for housing and preserving historic records of the steel industry in the district. According to its website: ‘The objects of the Trust are to advance the education of the public by the establishment and maintenance of a museum and the collection, preservation and public display of the Trust’s Collection.’64 Significantly, the plans drawn up for the site by the local Council, which included extensive new housing developments, also embraced the idea of refurbishing the surviving former steelworks’ general offices building as a home for the Trust’s museum and archives collection. Along with new accommodation for Gwent County Archives, the General Offices site opened in 2011 as part of a phased regeneration plan due for completion in 2018.65 In Wales, with its high density of industrial sites of historic interest, ‘a case cannot be made out for the preservation of the entire industrial past’,66 but the examples of Brymbo and Ebbw Vale offer some indications of how recognition of a site’s historic importance can co-exist with other objectives in regeneration planning. The key role of community actors in both of these projects points to the survival in former steelworks towns of a connection with the industry and a sense of the steelworker identity, which has proven so elusive in the efforts of academics and public institutions to tell the story of post-war steel to the Welsh public. Although the history of these communities, with their diversity and their rapidly changing economic fortunes, is not straightforward or easy to communicate, it adds a new dimension to our understanding of how industrial life in Wales was evolving in the second half of the twentieth century. The identification of ‘twentieth-century Welsh history’ as a priority area for collecting in the National Museum of Wales’s most recent operational plan67 may help bring a higher profile to the history of Welsh steel as part of a wider strategy to update and rethink the way in which the story of Wales can be told. Louise Miskell is Professor of History at Swansea University, where she teaches courses on modern British history and on the history of Wales. Her research interests focus on the history of industries and communities from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, especially the social and economic impact of the copper and steel industries. She has published widely on urban and industrial development in Britain, and she is a member of the international advisory board for the Cambridge University Press journal Urban History.

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Notes 1. See for example, Dickins, ‘Steel Crisis: Tata Port Talbot Cuts Announcement Feared’; West, ‘Tata Steel’s Last Attempt to Revive Port Talbot’. 2. Duffy, ‘Why is Port Talbot Steelworks Important?’; Tovey, ‘Steeled for a Bleak Future: On the Streets of Port Talbot’; Pooler, ‘Port Talbot Broken by Steel Industry in Decline’. 3. Y Cymro, 20 July 1951. 4. Williams, ‘On a Border in History? Wales, 1945–85’, 218. 5. Williams, ‘Going Underground? The Future of Coalfield History Revisited’, 49. 6. Baber and Mainwaring, ‘Steel’, 201–32. 7. Notable exceptions to this include Johnes, Wales Since 1939; Gooberman, From Depression to Devolution: Economy and Government in Wales, 1934–2006. 8. Elliot, ‘The Iron and Steel Industry’, 76. 9. For a good description of the differences between wrought iron and steel, see Jardini, ‘From Iron to Steel: The Re-casting of the Jones and Laughlin Workforce between 1885 and 1896’, 275. 10. Minchinton, ‘Introduction’, xxii. 11. Protheroe-Jones, Welsh Steel, 20. 12. Minchinton, ‘Introduction’, xxiii. 13. Tolliday, ‘Steel and Rationalization Policies, 1918–1950’, 82–108. 14. Baber and Dessant, ‘Modern Glamorgan: Economic Development after 1945’, 601; Aylen, ‘The Construction of the Shotton Wide Strip Mill’, 57–85. 15. Tolliday, Business, Banking and Politics: The Case of British Steel, 1918–1939, 151. 16. See for example, Wilkins, The History of the Iron, Steel, Tinplate and Other Trades of Wales; Boyns, Thomas and Baber, ‘The Iron, Steel and Tinplate Industries, 1750–1914’, 97–154. 17. Jenkins, Getting Yesterday Right: Interpreting the Heritage of Wales, 51. 18. See, for example, Grey-Davies, Blaenavon: Birthplace of Basic Steel; Vaughan, Pioneers of Welsh Steel – Dowlais to Llanwern. 19. Protheroe-Jones, Welsh Steel. 20. Lubar, ‘The Historic American Building Survey/Historic American Engineering Record. America’s Industrial Heritage Project: Some Recent Publications’, 117–29. 21. For example, the National Waterfront Museum hosted the exhibition ‘Sandfields: A Community Built on Steel’ from April–July 2015 and was a partner in the Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Visions of Steel’, led by Swansea University in 2016. 22. See Penny, ‘Class, Work and Community: Port Talbot’s Steelworkers, 1951–1988’; Penny, ‘The Ebbw Vale Steelworks in its Society, 1945–1962’; Parry, ‘A History of the Steel Industry in the Port Talbot Area, 1900–1988’. 23. There were 88.3 thousand coal miners compares with 88.4 thousand in metal manufacture. Digest of Welsh Historical Statistics Volume 1 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1985), 136–37. Employment figures for steel are often aggregated with metal manufacture as a whole. See, for example, Tables showing figures for the insured population of Glamorgan in the twentieth century, in Baber and Dessant, ‘Modern Glamorgan’, 644–46. 24. See map of the British Iron and Steel industry in Anglo-American Council on Productivity Iron and Steel: Report of a Productivity Team (London: AACP UK section, 1952), fig.2. 25. British Iron and Steel Federation, The South Wales Steel Industry (Nov 1956). 26. Miskell, ‘Doing it for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955’, 184–213. 27. Capner, ‘Report on a Survey of Records held at Tata Steel Records Centre, Shotton, Deeside, and their Potential’ (Swansea University, 2012), 9. 28. See, for example, Smith, A Century of Shotton Steel (1896–1996); Waring, The Story of Brymbo.

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29. Watts, ‘Changes in Location of the South Wales Iron and Steel Industry’, 294–307. 30. Thomason, ‘An Analysis of the Effects of Industrial Changes upon Selected Communities in South Wales’, 216. 31. Humphrys, ‘The Coal Industry’, 83. 32. Johnes, Wales Since 1939, 124. 33. Welsh Government, Iron and Steel Statistics Bureau, ‘Iron and Steel Production by Year, Measure and Area’, https://statswales.wales.gov.uk. 34. Penny, ‘Class, Work and Community’, 271. 35. Western Mail, 2 September 1951; Western Mail, 20 July 1964. 36. Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. 37. Thomason, ‘An Analysis of the Effects of industrial Changes’, 7. 38. For a wider survey of coal-miner dominated studies of the Welsh working class, see Thompson, ‘Review Article: Class Cohesion, Working-Class Homogeneity and the Labour Movement in Industrial South Wales’, 81–91. 39. Penny, ‘Class, Work and Community’, 103–4. 40. Recent oral histories involving steelworkers include, Hall, Working Lives: The Forgotten Voices of Britain’s Post-war Working Class; Songs of Steel. Rotherham Community Oral History Project, https://www.joinedupheritagesheffield.org.uk/content/project/songs-of-steel. 41. Steel Company of Wales Bulletin, November, 1952. Company bosses lamented the fact that only around 50 per cent of employees had so far joined the new sports and social club. 42. This is based on the oral history-based research findings of Bleddyn Penny. See Penny, ‘Class, Work and Community’, 156–59. 43. See, for example, Fevre, Wales is Closed: The Quiet Privatisation of British Steel; Walkerdine and Jimenez, Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialisation: A Psychosocial Approach to Affect; Lee, ‘Re-training Following Redundancy in Steel’. 44. Owen, From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War, chapter 6. 45. Baber and Mainwaring, ‘Steel’, 219–24. 46. Adapted from Lins, ‘Changes in Production and Employment Decline in the South Wales Steel Industry’, 4. 47. Morris et al., ‘Beyond Survival: The Implementation of New Forms of Work Organization in the UK and German Steel Industries’, 309. 48. See Barr, Derelict Britain. 49. Hilton, The Lower Swansea Valley Project. 50. Gooberman, ‘Moving Mountains: The Reclamation of Derelict Industrial Land in Post-war Wales’, 535. 51. McLean and Johnes, Aberfan: Government and Disasters. 52. Hansard, 26 October 1967, quoted in Gooberman, ‘Moving Mountains’, 540–41. 53. Babalikis, ‘Cardiff Bay Development Corporation: A Critical Review of a Case Study in Urban Regeneration’, 84. 54. Cardiff Bay Development Corporation, Mission Statement, http://cardiffharbour .com/the-regeneration-project/. 55. Morel du Boil, ‘The Closure of East Moors Steelworks: A 1970s of Decline and Calamity, Possibility and Calm’, 80. 56. Barry Jones, MP (Flintshire East), HC Deb 17 July 1979, vol. 970, 1330. 57. Gooberman, From Depression to Devolution, 128–29. 58. Wanhill, ‘Mines – A Tourist Attraction: Coal Mining in Industrial South Wales’, 64. 59. Ibid., 60–69. 60. Details of this project can be found in Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community, 125–47. 61. Briggs, ‘The Future of Industrial Archaeology in Wales’, 145. 62. Details of this can be found in Brymbo Heritage Area Masterplan (The Prince’s Regeneration Trust, July, 2015), 1–59.

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63. Jenkins, Getting Yesterday Right, 48. 64. For the website of the Ebbw Vale Works Archive Trust, see www.evwat.co.uk. 65. Smith, ‘Ebbw Vale Steelworks Office Reopens after £12m Refit’; The Works Design and Masterplan: Supplementary Planning Guidance (Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council, Draft, January 2013), 1–23. 66. Palmer, ‘Problems of Recording’, 45. 67. Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, ‘Operational Plan, 2017–18’, 18.

Bibliography Aylen, J. ‘The Construction of the Shotton Wide Strip Mill’. Transactions of the Newcomen Society 78 (2008), 57–85. Babalikis, E. ‘Cardiff Bay Development Corporation: A Critical Review of a Case Study in Urban Regeneration’, unpublished MPhil thesis. University of Wales Institute Cardiff, 1999. Baber, C., and J. Dessant. ‘Modern Glamorgan: Economic Development after 1945’, in G. Williams and A.H. John (eds), Glamorgan County History Vol. V: Industrial Glamorgan. (Cardiff: Glamorgan County History Trust Ltd, 1980), 581–658. Baber C. and L. Mainwaring, L. ‘Steel’, in K.D. George and L. Mainwaring (eds), The Welsh Economy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988), 201–32. Barr, J. Derelict Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Boyns, T., D. Thomas and C. Baber. ‘The Iron, Steel and Tinplate Industries, 1750–1914’, in G. Williams and A.H. John (eds), Glamorgan County History Volume V (Cardiff: Glamorgan County History Trust Ltd., 1980), 97–154. Briggs, C.S. ‘The Future of Industrial Archaeology in Wales’, in C.S Briggs (ed.), Welsh Industrial Heritage: A Review (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1992), 137–48. Capner, S. ‘Report on a Survey of Records Held at Tata Steel Records Centre, Shotton, Deeside, and their Potential’. Swansea University, 2012. Dickins, S. ‘Steel Crisis: Tata Port Talbot Cuts Announcement Feared’, BBC News, January 15, 2016. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-35323177. Dicks, B. Heritage, Place and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Duffy, S. ‘Why is Port Talbot Steelworks Important?’, BBC News, January 18, 2016. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-35161054. Elliot, J. ‘The Iron and Steel Industry’, in C. Williams and S.R. Williams (eds), The Gwent County History, Volume IV: Industrial Monmouthshire, 1780–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). Fevre, R. Wales is Closed: The Quiet Privatisation of British Steel. Nottingham: Spokesman, 1989. Goldthorpe, J.H. et al. The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Gooberman, L. ‘Moving Mountains: The Reclamation of Derelict Industrial Land in PostWar Wales’. Welsh History Review 27(3) (2015), 528–51. ———. From Depression to Devolution: Economy and Government in Wales, 1934–2006. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017. Grey-Davies, T.G. Blaenavon: Birthplace of Basic Steel. Cardiff: Historical Metallurgy Group, 1972. Hall, D. Working Lives: The Forgotten Voices of Britain’s Post-war Working Class. London: Corgi Books, 2014. Hilton, K.J. (ed.). The Lower Swansea Valley Project. London: Longmans, 1967. Humphrys, G. ‘The Coal Industry’, in G. Manners (ed.), South Wales in the Sixties: Studies in Industrial Geography (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1964), 75–101.

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Jardini, D. ‘From Iron to Steel: The Re-casting of the Jones and Laughlin Workforce between 1885 and 1896’. Technology and Culture 36(2) (1995), 271–301. Jenkins, J.G. Getting Yesterday Right: Interpreting the Heritage of Wales. Amberley: Stroud, 1992. Johnes, M. Wales Since 1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Lee, R.M. ‘Re-training Following Redundancy in Steel’. ACCORD, Occasional Paper 9. Swansea: School of Social Studies, 1995. Lins, H.N. ‘Changes in Production and Employment Decline in the South Wales Steel Industry’, unpublished M.Sc. Econ. Dissertation. University College Swansea, 1982. Lubar, S. ‘The Historic American Building Survey/Historic American Engineering Record. America’s Industrial Heritage Project: Some Recent Publications’. The Public Historian 13(3) (1991), 117–29. McLean, I., and M. Johnes. Aberfan: Government and Disasters. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Minchinton, W.E. ‘Introduction’, in W.E. Minchinton (ed.), Industrial South Wales, 1750– 1914: Essays in Welsh Economic History (London: Frank Cass, 1969). Miskell, L. ‘Doing it for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955’. Enterprise and Society 18(1) (2017), 184–213. Morel du Boil, A. ‘The Closure of East Moors Steelworks: A 1970s of Decline and Calamity, Possibility and Calm’, unpublished MA dissertation. Swansea University, 2015. Morris, J. et al. ‘Beyond Survival: The Implementation of New Forms of Work Organization in the UK and German Steel Industries’. The International Journal of Human Resource Management 3(2) (September 1992), 307–29. Owen, G. From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War. London: HarperCollins, 2000. Palmer, M. ‘Problems of Recording’, in S. Briggs (ed.), Welsh Industrial Heritage: A Review (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1992), 45–48. Parry, S. ‘A History of the Steel industry in the Port Talbot Area, 1900–1988’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. University of Leeds, 2011. Penny, B. ‘The Ebbw Vale Steelworks in its Society, 1945–1962’, unpublished MA dissertation. Cardiff University, 2011. ———. ‘Class, Work and Community: Port Talbot’s Steelworkers, 1951–1988’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Swansea University, 2015. Pooler, M. ‘Port Talbot Broken by Steel Industry in Decline’, Financial Times, January 25, 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/b2751878-c10d-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf. Protheroe-Jones, R. Welsh Steel. Cardiff: NMGW, 1995. Smith, G. A Century of Shotton Steel (1896–1996). British Steel Strip Products, 1996. Smith, N. ‘Ebbw Vale Steelworks Office Reopens after £12m Refit’, BBC News, 24 October 2011, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-15421267. Thomason, G.F. ‘An Analysis of the Effects of Industrial Changes upon Selected Communities in South Wales’, unpublished PhD thesis. University College Cardiff, 1963. Thompson, S. ‘Review Article: Class Cohesion, Working-Class Homogeneity and the Labour Movement in Industrial South Wales’. Llafur 9(3) (2006), 81–91. Tolliday, S. ‘Steel and Rationalization Policies, 1918–1950’, in B. Elbaum and W. Lazonick (eds), The Decline of the British Economy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 82–108. ———. Business, Banking and Politics: The Case of British Steel, 1918–1939. Cambridge MA and London, 1987. Tovey, A. ‘Steeled for a Bleak Future: On the Streets of Port Talbot’, The Telegraph, January 23, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/12117491/ Steeled-for-a-bleak-future-on-the-streets-of-Port-Talbot.html. Vaughan, C.M. Pioneers of Welsh Steel – Dowlais to Llanwern. Newport: Starling Press, 1975. Walkerdine, V., and L. Jimenez. Gender, Work and Community after De-Industrialisation: A Psychosocial Approach to Affect. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2012.

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Wanhill, S. ‘Mines – A Tourist Attraction: Coal Mining in Industrial South Wales’. Journal of Travel Research 39(1) (2000), 60–69. Waring, W.A. The Story of Brymbo. Brymbo Steel Works Ltd., 1959. Watts, D.G. ‘Changes in Location of the South Wales Iron and Steel Industry’. Geography 3(3) (1968), 294–307. West, K. ‘Tata Steel’s Last Attempt to Revive Port Talbot’, The Guardian, January 18, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/18/tata-steel-last-attempt-revive-po rt-talbot. Wilkins, C. The History of the Iron, Steel, Tinplate and Other Trades of Wales. Merthyr Tydfil: Joseph Williams, 1903. Williams, C. ‘Going Underground? The Future of Coalfield History Revisited’. Morgannwg: The Journal of Glamorgan History 42 (1998), 41–58. ———. ‘On a Border in History? Wales, 1945–85’, in G. Elwyn Jones and D. Smith (eds), The People of Wales (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1999), 207–41.

CHAPTER

5

Cornish Mining Heritage and Cornish Identity Images, Representations and Narratives Hilary Orange

Above it all is the character of the Cornish Miner – who since the dawn of history has demonstrated that he is among the best in the world – which gives the Cornish people their pride. — Allen Buckley, The Story of Mining in Cornwall: A World of Payable Ground

Introduction In this chapter, I focus on images, representations and narratives of Cornish mining heritage in relation to regional identity. Cornwall is in the far south-west of the British Isles and is a long peninsula that is surrounded by sea except to the east where it borders the county of Devon. The large deposits of minerals contained within Cornwall’s granite uplands led to the development of a hard-rock tin and copper mining industry in the early eighteenth century. Mining was, according to Philip Payton, an important ‘geographically and culturally unifying factor’1 in the formation of a distinct regional identity. Following deindustrialization, from the late nineteenth century onwards, Cornwall’s economy became increasingly reliant on the Notes for this section begin on page 123.

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service sector, particularly tourism, and the region is one of Britain’s top tourist destinations. The mines in Cornwall were set within rural and small town locations and have not been subject to the same kinds of redevelopment pressures as their urban counterparts in, say, the North of England. In consequence, relict mine buildings and features are familiar sights in the Cornish landscape and can be found within a variety of topographic settings. Walkers can follow the tracks of leat systems above the Atlantic cliffs; tourists and day trippers can visit mine museums; and drivers will see engine houses recurring on the horizon (Figure 5.1). When Philip Payton reflected that the Cornish were ‘industrial Celts’,2 he referred to the perception that Cornwall is a Celtic nation: one of the territories in Western Europe where Celtic language and cultural traditions have survived. At the end of the nineteenth century, a Celtic Revival movement in Cornwall propagated a ‘new’ ethnohistory, which looked back to a pre-industrial past that was unsullied by the spectre of deindustrialization. By the mid twentieth century, Celticism was an established part of Cornwall’s cultural DNA, and after World War II, a Cornish nationalist movement emerged in Cornwall.3 Nationalism and revivalism have both contributed to the creation of characters who populate the story of Cornish mining: the iconic ‘Cornish miner’, ‘Cousin Jack’ and ‘Cousin Jenny’ (the colloquial term for the miners and their wives who travelled abroad) and the ‘industrial Celt’.

Figure 5.1 The mining landscape viewed from Carn Brea during the event ‘Smoking Chimneys’, June 2008. Photo by Hilary Orange.

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In this chapter, I will explore the intertwined histories of mining, the Celtic Revival and Cornish nationalism, before describing icons of the mining industry. I will argue that mining heritage in Cornwall focuses on the period of peak industrialization during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mining heritage conveys a homogenous sense of Cornish identity that is built around notions of industrial prowess and the pioneering spirit and influence of Cornish miners abroad. In comparison, twentieth-century mining, with themes of deindustrialization and the existence of a more multinational labour force, is a relative lacuna. I end the chapter by suggesting that the movement of non-Cornish miners and engineers into Cornwall is an underexplored aspect of heritage scholarship and practice, which could throw light on the nature of industrial mobility in Cornwall’s recent past.

The Celtic Revival In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, tin and copper mining in Cornwall benefited from advancements in mine engineering and steam technology, as well as increased demand for metal during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15).4 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Cornwall dominated world copper production, and the mines employed around one third of the working population.5 From the 1860s, the mining industry began to deindustrialize, mostly due to increased foreign competition and unstable metal prices. Lawrence Piper provides statistics of mine closures that outline the crisis. Two hundred mines were operating in Cornwall in 1838, eighty mines were still operating in 1873, but by 1885 only thirty-five mines remained open.6 By the end of the century, an estimated 200,000 Cornish miners and their families had emigrated to numerous mining regions around the world including South Africa, Australia, Mexico, Chile, North America and Spain. This relocation, known as the ‘Cornish Diaspora’ or the ‘Great Emigration’, fostered the establishment of numerous Cornish communities overseas.7 In the early twentieth century, in response to this crisis, members of the middle class in Cornwall initiated a Celtic Revival, which was based on the earlier Celtic Revival that had emerged in Brittany, Ireland, Wales and the Isle of Man in the nineteenth century. The Revivalists instigated a series of interconnected projects that focused on the revival of the Cornish language, the arts and the development of tourism as an economic solution to deindustrialization. In Philip Payton’s words, the Revival was a deliberate attempt to ‘look back over the debris of the industrial period’ to a ‘Cornwall which was Cornish speaking and unequivocally “Cornish” in all its cultural attributes’.8 Two leading Revivalists, Henry Jenner and Robert Morton Nance, founded an Old Cornwall Society in 1920 to collect cultural fragments of Cornwall’s

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past. Eight years later, Jenner founded the Kernow Gorsedd (Kernow is the Cornish word for Cornwall), which replicated the Bardic culture established within the Welsh Gorsedd. In July 1904, an express train service, the ‘Cornish Riviera Express’, opened up the route from London to the town of Penzance in the far west of Cornwall.9 The marketing team of the Great Western Railway came up with the idea of a ‘Cornish Riviera’ (mimicking the Mediterranean Riviera), and they also designed stylish travel posters that promoted Cornwall as an exotic and semi-tropical destination. In addition, popular guidebooks described the region’s folklore and prehistoric sites, strengthening the notion that Cornwall was different to England: a timeless and mystical place.10 Philip Payton noted the collusion between the tourism developers, guidebook writers and the Revivalists in creating these new constructions of Cornwall,11 and while portraits of fishermen, agricultural workers and craftsmen were included within such marketing, miners were notably absent.12 The absence of mining is pertinent given that tin and copper mines continued operating in the early twentieth century, some having been restructured as limited companies and modernized while investing in new equipment. However, fewer than twenty mines survived the Great War, and after 1918 miners returned to find mines in poor condition.13 At the outbreak of World War II, tin ore was in high demand but came principally from just three mines: South Crofty, Geevor, and East Pool and Agar.14 After the war, the strategic stockpiling of tin by the United States (from the 1940s to the 1950s) kept the tin price high, and in 1956 the International Tin Council (ITC) was established to act on behalf of principal tin producers to maintain tin prices at a steady level. With the ITC’s support and subsidies from the UK government, strong tin prices continued from the 1960s to the 1970s.15

Cornish Nationalism, English Immigration and the Heritage Industry Despite buoyant metal prices, the number of mines operating in Cornwall during the post-war period remained small (five mines remained in operation: Alfred Consoles (closed 1964), Geevor (closed 1991), Mount Wellington (closed 1991), Wheal Jane (closed 1992) and South Crofty (closed 1998)). From the 1960s, Cornwall’s economic base shifted substantially towards mass tourism and other service industries, in part due to improvements to roads.16 Cornwall’s resident population grew by nearly a half between 1961 and 2001, and most of the new arrivals were English immigrants, notably retirees, business people, New Age travellers and second-home owners.17 The arrival of English businesses and chain stores in Cornish towns created a feeling that the local was in danger of being submerged by the national.

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Furthermore, the retirees and English entrepreneurs had relative wealth and could purchase select coastal properties.18 In consequence, the ethnic and economic geography of Cornwall changed. The coastline became more touristy/English, and the inland areas became more Cornish. Furthermore, as Philip Payton observed, for outsiders Cornwall was a peaceful haven, while for many insiders it represented ‘poverty and poor housing’.19 English immigration led to some anxiety and panic; for instance, in a public address in 1973, Charles Thomas, then Professor of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, stated that there were ‘not many real Cornish left, and not all that much left of real Cornwall’.20 Against this backdrop, a growing sense of ethnic difference emerged in Cornwall, which paralleled a growth of ethnic consciousness in other parts of Britain (most notably in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland).21 In 1951, a Cornish nationalist pressure group formed called Mebyon Kernow (trans. Sons of Cornwall), which fought on various agendas, including a separate Cornish assembly, before registering as a political party in the 1970s. In the 1970s, several other groups also formed to campaign on Cornish issues; for instance, the Cornish Stannary Parliament (est. 1971) and the Cornish Nationalist Party (est. 1975).22 Within the mining industry, the global demand for tin reduced during the 1980s due to the increasing use of aluminium and industrial recycling schemes, and in 1985 the ITC collapsed as it was no longer able to maintain tin prices. The Conservative government withdrew its support for the industry, and in March 1998 the last remaining mine in Cornwall – South Crofty – closed. Across Britain, traditional industries – coal mining, steel and shipbuilding – experienced similar fates and within the new economic context of tertiarization (the growth of the service sector), the UK government advanced a cultural policy that supported the establishment of a ‘heritage industry’ as a vehicle for economic growth, nostalgia and nation-building.23 I have covered elsewhere how the development of industrial archaeology in Britain (from the 1960s) resulted in changing perceptions regarding the value of sites of the Industrial Revolution.24 In Cornwall, as elsewhere, a burgeoning heritage consciousness led to an increase in initiatives around industrial sites. For instance, between 1984 and 1985, the Carn Brea Mining Society restored the famous Crowns engine houses; during the 1990s, the National Trust cleaned up derelict land following acquisitions of coastal areas; and the ‘Mineral Tramways Project’ (led by Cornwall County Council, with the support of National Lottery and European Union funding) created 60 km of cycling trails in mid West Cornwall, mainly using disused tramway routes to link together mining sites (the project was completed in 2009). Bernard Deacon reports that by the 1990s Cornish nationalism was taking an increasingly oppositional stance to Englishness.25 As the relationship between tourism and heritage solidified, old concerns resurfaced around

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tourism and immigration, fears summed by Philip Payton that ‘a hitherto wild, dramatic, inherently Cornish landscape was being sanitised and anglicised, made safe and familiar for Home Counties refugees’.26 In 2002, members of the Cornish Stannary Parliament made the headlines when they confiscated English Heritage site signage (the organization was viewed as being a cultural imposter).27 The role of English Heritage in Cornwall made the headlines again in 2016 over the commissioning of Arthurian-themed artworks at the site of Tintagel Castle: the pressure group Kernow Matters claimed that Cornish history had been ‘Disneyfied’.28 Mining heritage in Cornwall has largely escaped such negative publicity, although small grumblings occasionally surface regarding the theme parking of once wild, industrial sites.29 Vandalism on mining sites is rare, although there have been some problems around public artworks; for instance, an artwork placed in the mining landscape at Botallack was burnt down in 1999.30 In 1998, the artist David Kemp created a series of dogs ‘The Hounds of Geevor’ out of miners’ wellington boots, which had been discarded after Geevor Mine closed in 1991. Cornwall County Council, in conjunction with Kerrier District and Redruth Town Councils, commissioned eight hounds in bronze, which were placed in the centre of the mining town of Redruth in 2007. A local newspaper, the Falmouth Packet reported a mixed reaction: while some townsfolk favoured the Hounds’ sentiment and humour others declared the hounds a ‘joke’ that might make a ‘laughing stock’ of the town’s history. Unfortunately, one of the dogs was subsequently decapitated with a hacksaw. The letters CNLA written on the body of the dog in black pen were attributed to the ‘Cornish National Liberation Army’ – a small pro-Cornish militant group.31 Despite over sixty years of campaigning by Mebyon Kernow and other pressure groups, and occasional headline publicity, the UK government has not granted the Cornish people a separate Cornish assembly. However, nationalists have celebrated some victories. In 2001, individuals could enter Cornish as their nationality on the Census for England and Wales (the proportion of the resident population in Cornwall who self-identified as Cornish on the most recent Census, in 2011, was 14 per cent).32 In 2002, the UK government added the Cornish language to the list of indigenous British languages (as recognized under the terms of the Council of Europe’s Charter on Regional and Minority Languages). In 2014, the distinct identity of Cornish  people as Celtic people was formally recognized by the UK government under the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. In 2016, Cornwall’s electorate voted by 56.5 per cent for the UK to leave the European Union; a move that seemed to act against the protections that the EU has afforded the Cornish people.33 Mebyon Kernow currently holds four seats (out of a possible 123 seats) in

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Cornwall Council (as of elections held in May 2017). Within national politics, Cornwall has traditionally been a Liberal stronghold, but over the last three general elections (2010–17) there has been a shift to the right, and in the 2015 and 2017 general elections, the Conservative Party won all six parliamentary seats in Cornwall.

The Cornish Mining World Heritage Site Towards the end of the 1990s, a Partnership Board, formed of local authorities in Cornwall and Devon and around seventy organizations, drew up ambitious plans to nominate the Cornish mining industry as a World Heritage Site (henceforth Site). In 2006, ten landscape areas were inscribed by UNESCO as the ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape’. The Site covers an area of c. 200 sq. km and its landscape areas have around 81,000 residents. The Site comprises ‘the most authentic and historically important components of the Cornwall and West Devon mining landscape dating principally from 1700 to 1914’, and the status is testimony to the contribution Cornwall and West Devon made to the Industrial Revolution in the rest of Britain and to the fundamental influence the area had on the mining world at large. Cornish technology embodied in engines, engine houses and mining equipment was exported around the world. Cornwall and West Devon were the heartland from which mining technology rapidly spread.34

Within the ten landscape areas are significant remains of mines, engines houses, smallholdings, ports, harbours, canals, railways, tram roads and allied industries such as arsenic extraction. An expectation of the Site Partnership was that the status would ‘communicate the distinctiveness of Cornish mining culture and identity’.35 To meet the criteria for Site selection, the Site needed to ‘Bear a unique or at least an exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared’,36 and hence the role of mining as a Cornish cultural tradition is accentuated within Site documentation. For example, the Site website has a section covering ‘Mining characters and society’, and within this section the lives of Cornish Miners and their families are discussed.37 It is also interesting to note that although the official title of the Site is the ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape’ a popular title – ‘Cornish Mining World Heritage Site’ – is commonly utilized and is used on the Site’s website. The dropping of the English county Devon from the title as well as the change of a noun ‘Cornwall’ – signifying a region – to a verb ‘Cornish’ – signifying the region, the people and the language – creates, I suggest, a closer link between the Site and Cornish identity.

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The Cornish Engine House and the Flag of St Piran An important aspect of the Site’s significance is the global impact of Cornish mining. This includes skill and technology transfer, the formation of Cornish communities overseas and the role that Cornwall played in ‘the growth of an international capitalist economy’.38 This significance is highlighted by the Site’s tagline ‘Cornish Mining – We Made Your World’. Alongside this tagline, the Site logo features a Cornish engine house; an iconic symbol of Cornwall and of mining heritage. The prevalence of engine house imagery across Cornwall is in part due to the use of an engine house logo being used for Cornish products within an ‘Approved Origin Scheme’, which was launched by Cornwall County Council in 1991. The ‘Made in Cornwall’ scheme is one of the ways in which an image of mining has been appropriated as a symbol of Cornishness.39 Engine houses are also widely photographed landmarks, and images are shared on popular social media platforms. The popular sites of Crowns Mine at Botallack and Wheal Coates Mine at St Agnes provide stunning clifftop views of engine houses set against the Atlantic Ocean (Figure 5.2). To illustrate the diversity of engine house imagery, I refer here to field notes that I made in 2010 when I visited the village of St Agnes in North Cornwall and the town of Liskeard in East Cornwall. In St Agnes, I noted representations of engine houses on signage (a caravan park and a public

Figure 5.2 Wheal Coates, St Agnes. Photo by Hilary Orange.

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house) and on a Sunday School banner in a Methodist chapel (a simple cross, an engine house and a Bible). An engine house was part of the logo of the St Agnes Surf School (an engine house standing above waves). I saw an engine house sticker on the bumper of a car, and I bought a packet of sandwiches with an engine house on the food label. In Liskeard, I photographed engine house representations within a large mural 40 (Figure 5.3) and within several trompe l’oeil banners of local clubs and institutions that were painted in the stairwell of the public library. As a further example, between 2008 and 2012, I photo-recorded the graffiti on vertical sections of disused twentieth-century dressing floors at Botallack Mine in West Cornwall (closed in 1914). These graffiti included sketches of engine houses and St Piran’s Flag, the Patron Saint of Tin Miners. There was also writing in English and Cornish: ‘English Out’, ‘Kernow bys Vyken’ (trans. ‘Cornwall Forever’) and ‘I Am Local’. These slogans have subsequently been painted over, presumably by the National Trust, who own the site, but other graffiti have since taken their place. The flag of St Piran is also used as a Flag of Cornwall. Along with Cornish Tartan (designed in 1948) and other standards, sporting colours and ensigns, the flag is one of the most prominent visual signatures of Cornish identity as it appears across multiple spheres: the domestic, commercial, institutional, political and cultural. The flag depicts a white cross on a black

Figure 5.3 Mural on facade of Co-op supermarket in Barras Street, Liskeard. Made by Julian George in 1996. Photo by Hilary Orange.

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background. These colours are widely interpreted as representing tin metal on a background of charcoal ash. The flag can be seen at sporting events, such as the traditional Cornish sports of rugby union, football, wrestling and gig racing. In June 2008, some 4,000 people climbed to the summit of Carn Brea, a hilltop near Redruth, to view an outdoor event called ‘Smoking Chimneys’ (Figure 5.1), when the stacks of mines encircling the hilltop were relit. Some of those who climbed Carn Brea that summer’s evening carried the Cornish flag.

The Cornish Miner in Public Art and Media Memorials to mining history, including public artworks, are also dotted around the Cornish landscape. On the summit of Carn Brea is a memorial to Francis Bassett, landowner and mine owner, which was erected by public subscription in 1836. Some three miles from Carn Brea, in the centre of Redruth, is a 2m high bronze statue of a ‘Cornish Tin Miner’ (Figure 5.4), which was erected in 2008. Sculpted by David Annand, the Tin Miner is dressed in flannel trousers, heavy boots and a hard felt hat, with a candle stuck to the hat with a lump of clay. The figure strikes a heroic pose: feet planted strongly, leaning forward slightly and in his outstretched hands a tin ingot and a pick. The top images in a Google search of the term ‘Cornish Miner’ are photographs and illustrations of miners from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 41 in similar dress to this figure. The contemporary photographs that appear in a Google search show miners working at the surface and underground: some are the work of the photographer J.C. Burrows, who used flash photography in the 1890s to capture miners underground. I have argued previously that heroism is a common trope within narratives of Cornish mining, as is the demonic mine (a place of accident and death),42 and this statue romanticizes the Cornish miner, as it depicts strength and virility without the environmental context of dire working conditions underground (in comparison, the miners in Burrows’ photographs appear fatigued and malnourished). Cornish miners were not always seen as heroes, and the heroic trope is, I would argue, a modern sensitivity. Allen Buckley notes that poverty in the eighteenth century led to periodic food riots and a perception that miners were ‘dangerous and given to riot and violence’.43 By the mid nineteenth century, however, Philip Payton suggests that the role of the Methodist religion in Cornish society helped to refine the image of the miner. Methodist preachers advocated independence, self-help and orderly conduct and were instrumental in establishing miners’ mutual aid societies and educational institutes.44

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Figure 5.4 Cornish Tin Miner memorial by David Annand, Redruth. Photo by Hilary Orange.

An image of a Cornish mine captain has recently reappeared on British television. From 1975 to 1977, a television adaptation of Winston Graham’s ‘Poldark’ novels was broadcast by the BBC on prime-time British television.45 The Poldark novels are set in Cornwall in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they narrate the trials of a mine owner, Ross Poldark (characterized as being loyal, intelligent, handsome and strong), who

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has returned to his homeland after serving in the British Army in the American War of Independence. In 2015, the BBC broadcast the first season of a new dramatization of the ‘Poldark’ novels, again on prime-time television. Filmed on location in Cornwall, the series’ viewing figures have exceeded five million,46 and the term the ‘Poldark effect’ has been coined to describe an increased public interest in Cornwall. Tourist boards and businesses have reported an increase in visitors, and estate agents have reported a doubling of online property searches. Some parishes in Cornwall have rebranded their area as ‘Poldark Country’ to attract tourists.47 In the summer of 2016, a unique Cornish miner – an 11.2m high, steam powered, iron-built puppet – ‘walked’ through the ten areas that comprise the World Heritage Site as part of the Site’s ‘Tinth Anniversary’ (Figure 5.5). The puppet, called the ‘Cornish Mining Man Engine’, was commissioned by the Site Partnership and constructed by Will Coleman of Golden Tree Productions. The body of the puppet referenced different periods of mining history, including mining in the twentieth century. As the Guardian newspaper commented, ‘the puppet’s rocking neck is a reminder of a giant beam engine, while the shoulders look like sheave wheels on mining headgear and the hands resemble 20th-century excavators’.48 The puppet also wore a miner’s helmet with a cap lamp (based on a mine helmet from South Crofty (pers. comm Dominique Trevail),49 as did the team of men and women who accompanied and animated the machine. This was a reminder that mining continued until the 1990s.

Figure 5.5 The Cornish Mining Man Engine, Geevor Mine, Cornwall. Constructed by Golden Tree Productions. Note the woman waving the St Piran’s Flag in the foreground. Photo reproduced with the kind permission of Iain Rowe.

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Mining in Cornwall from World War II Twentieth-century mining is less well represented within the images and narratives that construct mining heritage in Cornwall, and the reasons for this are, I suggest, multifold. First, the period from the outbreak of World War I onwards is beyond the purview of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site, which focuses on the period from 1700 to 1914. These are the generally accepted dates for the British Industrial Revolution, and this period was considered by the Site Partnership to be when the most significant industrial and social impacts in Cornish mining occurred.50 As noted above, after 1914, mining in Cornwall had progressively reduced in scale and ends with the closure of the industry, a narrative that is less conducive to the building of civic pride. In comparison, the Site can conclude its history with the cultural impact of the Great Diaspora. For example, the Site website has a section that asks, ‘What happened to Cornish Mining?’ The section ends with the text, ‘Today, there are an estimated six million people worldwide descended from migrant Cornish mine workers.’51 Second, only three twentieth-century mines reopened as museums: Geevor, Levant (closed in 1930), and East Pool and Agar (closed in 1945). In comparison, the mining sites of the earlier period are more numerous and are largely located in accessible landscapes. In turn, the materiality of modern mining – concrete, steel and corrugated iron – presents a different aesthetic. The prevalence of images of naturalized, granite mine ruins across multimedia might also inspire tourists to seek out similar scenes. Third, the character of the mining labour force changed from the outbreak of World War II and became more multinational, something that potentially unsettles the smooth narrative flow of the ‘industrial Celt’. During the war, a high demand for metals and a shortage of trained miners led Ernest Bevin (the Minister of Labour) to set up a scheme whereby men (nicknamed ‘Bevin Boys’) served in the mines rather than in military service. A proportion of men who were conscripted for National Service were selected by a ballot or they were ‘optants’ (volunteers). In addition, the Cornish mines were licensed to ‘employ’ German and Italian Prisoners of War, who were held in local camps. After the war ended, the British government remained in control of the Cornish mines until 1949 under the Combined War Materials Board and continued to manage the labour force by sending Polish men (many of whom had been working in the northern Collieries) and Italian men (presumably including former POWs) to the Cornish mines. During peacetime, some Italian POWs chose to stay in Cornwall and continued working underground.52 From the 1960s to the 1990s, the mines engaged the services of miners and engineers from throughout Britain and from overseas. As a training school of global standing, the Camborne School of Mines

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(founded in 1888) has a long tradition of teaching international students and supplying graduates into the local industry.53 The museum that best covers the history of mining in the post-war period is Geevor Tin Mine in the village of Pendeen in West Cornwall. Geevor operated between 1911 and 1991 and employed around 300 people. The mine managed a small mining museum and ran visitor tours alongside its day-to-day operations, until production ceased in 1990. When Geevor closed, miners went abroad to work in numerous countries including Saudi Arabia, Sudan, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ireland, Mexico, Egypt, Hong Kong and Iceland. Some miners also went on to work on the Channel Tunnel project.54 Geevor reopened as a visitor attraction in 1993 under the management of Pendeen Community Heritage, on behalf of the site’s new owners Cornwall County Council. The museum operates as a ‘Gateway’ to the St Just World Heritage Mining Landscape wherein it is located. In 2008, a new exhibition area, the ‘Hard Rock Museum’ opened at the museum. This exhibition tells Geevor’s story, including industrial processes, the campaign to keep the mine open, and the relationship between the mine and the local community. In addition, visitors can undertake tours led by former miners and explore buildings with preserved interiors, which act as time capsules to the late 1980s. In the Dry (the managers’ offices, change and showerroom facilities), interpretation panels and photographs present the workforce through vignettes that tell the story of ‘A Day in the Life of [insert job title]’. Within this interpretation, there are names that suggest possible Polish, Welsh, Italian, Irish and Scottish ancestry (e.g. Szlitkus, Szathowski, Fanelli, McArdle, Williams, Leo and Dydyk). Interestingly, within the interpretation in the Dry, the term the ‘Cornish Miner’ is not used, and instead miners are referred to as ‘the underground workforce’, ‘miners’ and ‘the men’. Geevor’s website confirms that during World War II around seventy men were directed to Geevor under the Essential Work Order and that Polish miners were also sent to the mine in 1947. In 2015, a new memorial was unveiled near the entrance to Geevor Mine (Figure 5.6). ‘The St Just Miner’s Statue’ is a 2m high bronze figure created by Colin Caffell. The statue was funded by the community of the St Just Mining District, and the design was put to a public ballot. The statue depicts a bare-chested miner holding a pick axe and wearing a helmet with a cap lamp. A plaque located on the plinth states that the memorial is ‘. . . in honour of the courageous men who worked the narrow lodes in dangerous conditions far below land and sea in the mines of this district; and the women and children who toiled on the surface crushing and dressing ore. As pioneers, many of these Cornish families took their skill and expertise to the far corners of the world . . .’ The statue is set in a memorial garden with

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Figure 5.6 The St Just Miner’s Statue by Colin Caffell, Pendeen. Photo by Hilary Orange.

‘plants from the four continents – Africa, Americas, Asia and Australasia – where miners from here emigrated’.55 An opportunity has been missed to note that the garden might also relate to the men who moved into Cornwall to work in the Cornish mines. The statue forms another element within the (re)creation of a traditional Diasporic image and narrative of the Cornish Miner.

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Discussion and Conclusions Mining heritage strongly informs a sense of regional identity in Cornwall. The flag of St Piran, the Cornish engine house and the Cornish miner are icons of Cornish mining and identity. These icons take many forms: graffiti, tourist souvenirs, food packaging, ensigns, memorials and public artworks. In the case of Cornwall, there is a synchronicity between the projects of Celtic Revivalists and the Cornish Nationalists. The Revivalists sought a return to a pre-industrial age and the Nationalists a return to an age before and a future without English interference. In turn, mining heritage most typically focuses on the period of peak industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period that occurred before mass tourism and large-scale English immigration. Therefore, while heritage narratives fully elucidate the outward migration of the Cornish during the Great Diaspora, inward immigration receives relatively little attention. The common thread, however, is industrial mobility, an international labour market and globalization. Such selection creates a past that is more easily authenticated and essentialized through the lens of Cornish identity. While the mine workings are an intrinsic part of the Cornish landscape, Cornish heritage is not. Cornish heritage cannot be dug out of the ground ready formed, or shaped from granite: it is created through a process of selection and decision-making, the goal being to utilize the past for the curation of certain contemporary values, such as economic growth, education, the development of prestige and civic pride, and the stimulation of ethnic-group identity. Although significant work has been done by scholars on twentiethcentury Cornwall,56 there is a gap in scholarship and heritage practice pertaining to industrial mobility in Cornwall in the twentieth century. There is an opportunity to more deeply explore the scale, nature and experience of these industrial relocations, whether voluntary or non-voluntary, whether temporary or permanent. There are several questions. For example, how many miners and engineers came to Cornwall of their own accord and how many through enforced mobility programmes? What were the characteristics of the workforce in the mines at various points in time? How did incoming miners and engineers see themselves and each other? How is their individual and collective sense of self, and the stories of their relocations, reflected within the heritage-making practices within the region? As Bernard Deacon notes, identities coexist at different scales, are hybridized and nested.57 A heritage of industrial identities need not be oppositional, rather it can be accommodating. I suggest that the story of Cornish mining might end in 1998 with an ensemble cast. The tagline being: ‘Together they shaped your World’.

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Hilary Orange is Honorary Research Associate at UCL Institute of Archaeology. She is also a Trustee and the Grants Officer for the Society of Post-Medieval Archaeology and a member of the ‘CHAT’ group (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) standing committee. She has published on industrial heritage, public archaeology, Cornish identity and more recently on popular music heritage. Her most recent publications include an article in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology (2018) on artificial light, daycentrism and contemporary archaeology, and an essay in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (2017) on industrial tourism in Japan.

Notes 1. Payton, Cornwall: A History, 196. 2. Payton, ‘Industrial Celts? Cornish Identity in the Age of Technological Prowess’, 116–35. 3. Trower, Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall. 4. Buckley, The Story of Mining in Cornwall: A World of Payable Ground, 91. 5. Payton, Cornwall, 196. 6. Piper, The Camborne School of Mines: The History of Education in Cornwall, 2. 7. Payton, The Cornish Overseas. 8. Payton, ‘Paralysis and Revival: The Reconstruction of Celtic-Catholic Cornwall 1890–1945’, 28. 9. Discussion on the Cornish Riviera Express in Payton, ‘Paralysis and Revival’, 36; Williams and Shaw, ‘The Age of Mass Tourism’, 85. 10. Deacon, ‘And Shall Trelawney Die? The Cornish Identity’, 206; Gibson, Trower and Tregidga, Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity. 11. Payton, ‘Paralysis and Revival’, 36. 12. Perry ‘Cornwall Circa 1950’, 42. 13. Buckley, The Story of Mining in Cornwall, 117, 158–65. 14. Bristow, ‘Wealth from the Ground: Geology and Extractive Industries’, 107. 15. Baldwin, The World Tin Market: Political Pricing and Economic Competition, 55–56. 16. The extension of the M5 motorway and improvements to the A30 and A38 (linking South Cornwall to Plymouth) aided transport into the county, see Charlesworth, A History of British Motorways, 50–71. 17. Perry, ‘The Making of Modern Cornwall, 1800–2000: A Geo-Economic Perspective’, 180. 18. Perry, ‘Economic Change and “Opposition” Politics’, 48–83. 19. Payton, Cornwall, 1. 20. Inaugural lecture by Professor Charles Thomas on 8 March 1973 ‘The Importance of Being Cornish in Cornwall’. 21. Deacon, ‘And Shall Trelawney Die?’, 209. 22. In the 1980s, a pro-Cornish militant group, An Gof, claimed responsibility for attacks on properties. A separate group, the Cornish National Liberation Army (est. 2006), has more recently issued threats against celebrity TV chefs who own restaurants in Cornwall. Morris ‘Cornish Militants Rise Again and This Time They’re Targeting Celebrity Chefs’. 23. Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline.

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24. Orange, ‘Industrial Archaeology: Its place within the Academic Discipline, the Public Realm and the Heritage Industry’, 83–95. 25. Deacon ‘Cornishness and Englishness: Nested Identities or Incompatible Ideologies’, 9–29. 26. Payton, Cornwall, 284. 27. BBC, ‘Historic Signs Case Trio Bound Over’. 28. Morris, ‘“This is Not Disneyland, it’s Cornwall”: The Battle of Tintagel Castle’. 29. Orange, ‘Cornish Mining Landscapes: Public Perceptions of Industrial Archaeology in a Post-Industrial Society’, 215. 30. Orange, ‘Benders, Benches and Bunkers: Contestation, Commemoration and MythMaking in the Recent Past’, 191–211. 31. Two articles on the ‘Hounds of Geevor’ appeared in the Falmouth Packet: Harlow, ‘Cash “Wasted” on “Grotesque” Dogs’; Harlow, ‘Dog Decapitated’. 32. Cornwall Council, ‘2011 Census: Cornish Identity’. 33. BBC, ‘EU Referendum Results’. 34. UNESCO, ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape’. 35. Cornwall Council, ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site: Management Plan 2013–18’, 77. 36. Cornwall Council, ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site’, 21. 37. Cornwall Council, Cornish Mining World Heritage Website [Section on ‘Mining Characters and Society’]. 38. Cornwall Council, Cornish Mining World Heritage Website [Section ‘Why is Cornish Mining a World Heritage Site’]. 39. The ‘Made in Cornwall’ scheme is discussed by: Busby and Meethan, ‘Cultural Capital in Cornwall: Heritage and the Visitor’, 151; Howlett, ‘Putting the Kitsch into Kernow’, 55. 40. The mural is located on Barras Street. Created by Julian George in 1996. 41. Top Google image search in May 2017. 42. Orange, Cornish Mining Landscapes, 286–88. 43. Buckley, A Story of Mining in Cornwall, 87–88. 44. Payton, Cornwall, 195–98. 45. Winston Graham’s first novel in the series, Ross Poldark, was published in 1945 by Ward, Lock & Co.; the first episode of the original BBC television adaptation was broadcast on 5 October 1975. 46. Sweney, ‘BBC’s Poldark Finale Attracts 5.9 Million Viewers’. 47. Morris, ‘“Poldark is Brilliant for Cornwall”’: County Open Arms as TV Tourists Swoon’. 48. Morris, ‘Mechanical Puppet to Tour South-West England to Highlight Mining Past’. 49. Email communication with Dominique Trevail, Golden Tree Productions, 20 June 2017. 50. UNESCO, ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape’. 51. Cornwall Council, Cornish Mining World Heritage Website [Section ‘Why is Cornish Mining a World Heritage Site’]. 52. Mining in Cornwall during World War II is discussed by: Buckley, A Story of Mining in Cornwall; Hancock, Cornwall at War, 1939–1945; Noall, Geevor; Perry, ‘Cornwall Circa 1950’, 24–25. 53. From 1951 to 1971, students at the Camborne School of Mines came from a total of 38 countries: the majority were from England, Malaysia and India. Piper, Camborne School of Mines, 392–93. 54. Harvey [former miner at Geevor Tin Mine], personal communication.

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55. Gainey, ‘Crowds Celebrate Unveiling of St Just Miner’s Statue at Geevor in Tribute to Cornwall Heritage’. 56. For instance: Buckley, A Story of Mining in Cornwall; Hancock, Cornwall at War; Payton, Cornwall; Payton, Cornwall Since the War; Deacon, George and Perry, ‘Cornwall at the Crossroads?: Living Communities or Leisure Zone?’; Deacon, Tregigda and Cole, Mebyon Kernow and Cornish Nationalism; Peters, The Archaeology of Cornwall: The Foundations of Our Society’; Trower, Rocks of Nation. 57. Deacon, ‘Cornishness and Englishness’, 9–29.

Bibliography Baldwin, W. The World Tin Market: Political Pricing and Economic Competition. Dartmouth: Duke University Press, 1983. BBC. ‘Historic Signs Case Trio Bound Over’, 18 January 2002. Accessed 21 August 2018. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/1768853.stm. ———. ‘EU Referendum Results 2016’. Accessed 21 August 2018. http://www.bbc.com/ news/politics/eu_referendum/results. Bristow, C. ‘Wealth from the Ground: Geology and Extractive Industries’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1993), 98–134. Buckley, A. The Story of Mining in Cornwall: A World of Payable Ground, 2nd edn. Fowey: Cornwall Editions Ltd., 2007. Busby, G., and K. Meethan. ‘Cultural Capital in Cornwall: Heritage and the Visitor’. Cornish Studies 16 (2008), 146–66. Charlesworth, G. A History of British Motorways. London: Thomas Telford, 1984. Cornwall Council. ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site: Management Plan 2013–18’. Truro: Cornwall Council, 2013. ———. Cornish Mining World Heritage Website [Section on ‘Mining Characters and Society’]. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/environment-and-plan ning/conservation/world-heritage-site/delving-deeper/mining-characters-and-society/ the-cornish-miner/. ———. Cornish Mining World Heritage Website [Section ‘Why is Cornish Mining a World Heritage Site’]. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/envi ronment-and-planning/conservation/world-heritage-site/world-heritage/. ———. ‘2011 Census: Cornish Identity’. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://www.cornwall .gov.uk/council-and-democracy/data-and-research/data-by-topic/2011-census/ 2011-census-cornish-identity/. Deacon, B. ‘And Shall Trelawney Die? The Cornish Identity’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1993), 200–23. ———. ‘Cornishness and Englishness: Nested Identities or Incompatible Ideologies’. International Journal of Regional and Local History 5(2) (2009), 9–29. Deacon, B., George, A. and R. Perry. Cornwall at the Crossroads?: Living Communities or Leisure Zone? Redruth: Cornish Social and Economic Research Group, 1988. Deacon, B., G. Tregigda and D. Cole. Mebyon Kernow and Cornish Nationalism. Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 2003. Gainey, T. ‘Crowds Celebrate Unveiling of St Just Miner’s Statue at Geevor in Tribute to Cornwall Heritage’, Cornwall Live, 28 November 2016. http://www.cornwalllive .com/.

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Gibson, M., S. Trower and G. Tregidga. Mysticism, Myth and Celtic Identity. London: Routledge, 2013. Hancock, P. Cornwall at War, 1939–1945. Wellington: Halsgrove 2002. Harlow, G. ‘Cash “Wasted” on “Grotesque” Dogs’, Falmouth Packet, 6 June 2007. Accessed 21 August 2018. http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/1449724.cash_wasted_on_ grotesque_dogs/. ———. ‘Dog Decapitated’, Falmouth Packet, 24 September 2007. Accessed 21 August 2018. http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/1710551.dog_decapitated/. Hewison, R. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen, 1987. Howlett, J. ‘Putting the Kitsch into Kernow’, Cornish Studies 12 (2004), 30–60. Morris, S. ‘Cornish Militants Rise Again and This Time They’re Targeting Celebrity Chefs’, Guardian 14 June 2007. Accessed 21 August 21 2018. www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/ jun/14/terrorism.ukcrime. ———. ‘“This is Not Disneyland, it’s Cornwall”: The Battle of Tintagel Castle’, Guardian 18 March 2016. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/ mar/18/this-is-not-disneyland-its-cornwall-battle-tintagel-castle. ———. ‘Mechanical Puppet to Tour South-West England to Highlight Mining Past’, Guardian online, 25 July 2016. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2016/jul/25/the-man-engine-mechanical-puppet-tour-devon-cornwall-mininghistory. ———. ‘“Poldark is Brilliant for Cornwall”: County Open Arms as TV Tourists Swoon’ Guardian online, 4 September 2016. Accessed 21 August 2018. https://www.theguardian .com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/04/poldark-is-brilliant-for-cornwall-county-opens-armsas-tv-tourists-swoon. Noall, C. Geevor. St Ives: Geevor Tin Mines Plc, 1983. Orange, H. ‘Industrial Archaeology: Its place within the Academic Discipline, the Public Realm and the Heritage Industry’. Industrial Archaeology Review 30(2) (2008), 83–95. ———. ‘Cornish Mining Landscapes: Public Perceptions of Industrial Archaeology in a PostIndustrial Society’, PhD thesis, UCL, 2012. ———. ‘Benders, Benches and Bunkers: Contestation, Commemoration and Myth-Making in the Recent Past’, in H. Orange (ed.), Reanimating Industrial Spaces: Conducting MemoryWork in Post-Industrial Societies (London: Routledge, 2015), 191–211. Payton, P. ‘Paralysis and Revival: The Reconstruction of Celtic-Catholic Cornwall 1890– 1945’, in E. Westland (ed.), Cornwall: The Cultural Construction of Place (Penzance: Patten Press, 1997), 25–39. ———. ‘Industrial Celts? Cornish Identity in the Age of Technological Prowess’. Cornish Studies 10 (2002), 116–35. ———. Cornwall: A History. Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2004. ———. The Cornish Overseas. Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2005. Perry, R. ‘Cornwall Circa 1950’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1993), 22–46. ———. ‘Economic Change and “Opposition” Politics’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1993), 48–83. ———. ‘The Making of Modern Cornwall, 1800–2000: A Geo-Economic Perspective’. Cornish Studies 10 (2002), 166–89. Peters, C. The Archaeology of Cornwall: The Foundations of Our Society. Fowey: Cornwall Editions Ltd, 2005. Piper, L. The Camborne School of Mines: The History of Education in Cornwall. Camborne: The Trevithick Society, 2013.

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Sweney, M. ‘BBC’s Poldark Finale Attracts 5.9 Million Viewers’, Guardian online, 27 April 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/27/bbc-poldark-finale-viewersaidan-turner. Thomas, C. The Importance of Being Cornish in Cornwall: Inaugural Lecture on 8 March 1973. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Trower, S. Rocks of Nation: The Imagination of Celtic Cornwall. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. UNESCO. ‘Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape’. Accessed 21 August 2018. http:// whc.unesco.org/en/list/1215. Williams, A.M., and G. Shaw. ‘The Age of Mass Tourism’, in P. Payton (ed.), Cornwall Since the War: The Contemporary History of a European Region (Redruth: Institute of Cornish Studies, 1993), 84–97.

CHAPTER

6

Industrial Heritage and the Remaking of Class Identity Are We All Middle Class Now? Laurajane Smith

Introduction This chapter commences from the position that to talk of industrial heritage without explicitly engaging in issues of class, and indeed class alongside gender and race or ethnicity, is to misunderstand the social and political context of the memory work undertaken at such sites and to risk misidentifying what this remembering does. The research reported here is concerned with documenting and understanding what is being remembered at industrial and other sites of working class heritage but also considers the social and political consequences this memory and commemorative work might have. Given recent events in Britain, Australia and, in particular, the United States, in which issues of immigration have publically become intertwined with the traumas of deindustrialization and the rise of radical conservative politics, a new sense of urgency has emerged in understanding working class memory work. Previous work on working class heritage has noted the tendency of such heritage to be marginalized or disregarded, often conceived as having little if any national value or meaning.1 However, class matters and frames both the historical and contemporary social and economic experiences of individuals and communities, which in turn influences the ways in Notes for this section begin on page 143.

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which the past is recalled and used in the present to address contemporary social and political issues.2 Class still matters, but it now matters in new ways. Issues of class have tended to be unfashionable in humanities and social science research and certainly have often been regarded as marginal within heritage and museum studies. In wider society, terms such as ‘chav’ in England and ‘bogan’ in Australia casually dismiss the political and social complexity and legitimacy of working class identity. As one of the respondents in Vik Loveday’s recent analysis of male working class identification in England asks: ‘Why have working class people gone from being the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth?’3 In the United States, white working class identity has been subsumed under popular references to a monolithic ‘middle class’, in which acknowledgement of class and economic inequality have all but disappeared, while white middle class values have become normalized and are continually re-privileged.4 Moreover, class in the United States and elsewhere must also be seen as racialized.5 These contexts render class identifications highly problematic and complex. Moreover, dismissal of what some refer to as ‘smokestack nostalgia’6 further marginalizes the heritage and memory work done at and around industrial heritage. Nostalgia can be politically radical and indeed specifically future-orientated.7 Moreover, as Alistair Bonnett8 has forcefully argued, the political left’s historical tendency to look only to the future has devalued nostalgia by negatively characterizing it as ‘a dwelling in the past’. This, he argues, misses the persuasive nature of nostalgia as not inherently reactionary but rather something that should be a compelling part of the processes of radicalization. This chapter first reports on an aspect of a wider study that seeks to identify the memory and identity work – or the heritage work – that individuals undertake while visiting a range of heritage sites and museums of history and culture. The wider study examines six different genres of sites, one of which are sites and museums of industrial and working class heritage. This chapter isolates the industrial and working class heritage sites from the wider study and identifies the memory and identity work visitors undertook at this genre of site. The discussion of these sites is then analysed in the context of the overall study. The aim here is to illustrate the specific nature of the memory work done at industrial sites and to identify how it differs from other types of heritage work at other genres of museum and heritage sites, and to consider why these differences matter. Second, the chapter draws on individual interviews with visitors from industrial sites in the United States to illustrate both the emotional complexity of the heritage work undertaken by visitors at these sites. The aim here is to identify the conflicting emotions of loss and pride and to analyse how

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these emotions work to underpin a politics of continuing misrecognition of class. In documenting the memory and identity work at industrial heritage sites, and in exploring key aspects of the emotions that underpin that work, the chapter argues that the interpretation of industrial heritage must facilitate the recognition of experiences of class and facilitate a sense of place focused on affirming visitor self-esteem. To develop this argument it is, however, important to identify the way I am defining heritage and the utility of this definition for understanding the role of memory and heritage in the politics of class.

Industrial Heritage as Meaning Making As I have argued elsewhere, heritage is a performative process of meaning making.9 Heritage is thus not so much the industrial relics or sites that communities and nations may seek to conserve and interpret, but rather heritage making occurs during the interactions individuals and communities have with such places, artefacts and each other. Meanings and values are re/negotiated, re/created and de/legitimized in these interactions. Those artefacts or places traditionally identified as ‘heritage’ gain value through their use – following Wertsch10 – as a particular form of ‘cultural tool’ that facilitates individual and collective remembering and forgetting. As such, those things and places often defined as heritage must be understood as having no essential value as heritage, but are rather attributed value due to their utility in helping individuals, communities and nations create and legitimize heritage values and meanings. In doing so, heritage may be understood as a process involved in navigating social change and dissonance.11 It is explicitly a process that works to negotiate and continually create and re-create the historical narratives and values that address the political and social needs of the present. Heritage is not only linked to the activities of remembering and commemoration and the continual renegotiation of historical narratives and social and cultural identity, which are also underpinned by affect and emotion. Drawing on Margaret Wetherell’s12 pragmatic arguments about affect, affect and emotion are thus understood as having consequences for the ways in which individuals understand and experience the world in which they live, but that we can also identify particular practices as affective – that is, embodied. It is important to stress that this conceptualization of affect, in contrast to other positions on affect,13 acknowledges that affect is always socially and discursively mediated. Emotions tend to give legitimacy to the meanings generated through the process of heritage making and remembering. They do this though the perception of what Adam Morton14 calls ‘emotional accuracy’.15 Memories and processes of recollecting that invoke feelings held to be au-

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thentic in turn validate those memories and the narrative templates and the cultural tools16 used in that remembering. In addition, the social and political values that underpin those narratives are also simultaneously legitimized. The affective practices and performances of heritage making have a range of consequences. To understand some of these consequences, I draw on the politics of recognition as defined by Nancy Fraser17 and argue that heritage can be understood as one of a range of specific resources of power that is drawn on to validate or invalidate claims for recognition, or to maintain misrecognition and political marginalization. In this rendering of the politics of recognition, claims to identity are contextualized within historical and contemporary acknowledgements of inequity to make claims for parity in policy negotiations over the distribution of such material things as access to education, jobs, land, housing, welfare and so forth.18 As Andrew Sayer19 argues, the assertion of self-esteem is central to this. In contexts where individuals and communities have been socially and economically marginalized, a search for self-esteem and an assertion of moral worth are part of demands for political recognition.20 Thus, expressions of identity through heritage make appeals to both past and continuing human experiences that, in contexts of marginalization, seek to garner empathy and thus bonds with the past that are used in affective calls for recognition, respect and, ultimately, the redistribution of resources. However, prior to the development of demands for recognition and respect, recognition of yourself or your community as either the inheritor of privilege or of marginalization is crucially important. This ‘self-recognition’ maybe understood as the first step in the playing out of the politics of recognition.21 In this context, heritage as an embodied performance of meaning and identity making can be understood as a process that actively works not only to assert or negotiate the nature of individual and collective identity, but can and does have very overt and covert material impacts on the social justice issues negotiated within the politics of recognition.

Visiting Industrial and Working Class Heritage Sites Between 2010 and 2017, qualitative interviews with visitors to a range of sites and museums in Australia and the United States were undertaken. This built on interviews conducted in 2004 and 2007 in England. The combined database of visitor interviews consists of 4,502 interviews from 45 sites, museums and individual exhibitions across the three countries.22 These sites were initially divided into those representing consensus national narratives and those representing dissonant and contested history. Within that latter category are several genres, including sites of Indigenous, immigration and enslavement history, which are significant for the purposes of this chapter on

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labour and working class history. Table 6.1 identifies those sites in the latter category at which interviews were undertaken. With the exception of the larger Eureka and Wakefield museums, which are directly funded by regional and national governments respectively, the museums or heritage sites in table 6.1 are run by local community groups or local historical societies. Interviews with staff and volunteers at these sites all illustrated a strong commitment to maintaining community and class memory, and they all placed that memory in wider social contexts, with an overriding aim to foster a remembering and commemoration that acknowledges that this history was important. This is illustrated in a 2017 interview with a docent at the Museum of Work and Culture, Woonsocket, in which she described the aims of her guided tours, particularly those involving children: I try to remind the children or [other] people about their past and their histories and how . . . they got to the point they are at and how appreciative they should be to these people [in the past]. . . . I like giving [visitors, but especially chilTable 6.1 Heritage sites, museums and exhibitions of labour and working-class heritage and dates interviews were undertaken. Country

Heritage site, museum or exhibition

Year

England

Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum

2004

England

North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish (interviews 2004 related specifically to the coal mining heritage at this site)

England

National Coal Mining Museum, Wakefield

USA

Museum of Work and Culture, Woonsocket RI (discusses 2012 and the local textile industry and immigrant labour to the area) 2017

USA

Museum of Labor and Industry, Youngstown Ohio (discusses the history of steelworks in that town and the Mahoning Valley)

USA

Rivers of Steel Heritage Area (interviews were undertaken 2012 at the abandoned Carrie Furnace following one of the annual tours of that site)

Australia

2013 Museum of Australian Democracy, Eureka (reportedly built at or near the site of the Eureka stockade and minors’ rebellion of 1854. It includes the original flag that flew at the stockade and discusses labour and migrant history and the role of organized political action in Australian history)

Australia

Mt Kembla Heritage Centre and Festival (interviews were 2010 conducted at the festival that annually commemorates the largest industrial accident in Australian history; in 1902 a gas build-up caused an explosion killing 96 miners and injuring 21)

2004

2012

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dren] that sense that they belong somewhere; this is their life, and what they do with it is going to matter, like their grandparents did. Their lives matter.

A core set of twelve open-ended questions were asked of visitors in addition to demographic questions that recorded gender, age, educational attainment, occupation and so forth. All were exit interviews and were recorded and transcribed. Each of the open-ended questions was coded according to the themes that emerged from the answers given. Coding was undertaken without reference to the demographic data, and two or more people coded responses, double checking each other’s interpretations of the codes and answers. The coded data was entered into the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), and descriptive statistics relating to the coded themes were produced and cross-tabulations were undertaken against the demographic data. Chi square tests were used to determine statistical significance. Within the overall study that analyses the data from all forty-five museums and heritage sites, several different affective heritage practices and performances may be identified. Space does not allow the documentation of all of these;23 however, the dominant performance across all genres and countries is one of ‘reinforcement’. That is, visitors, regardless of whether or not they claim to come for educational reasons, are seeking and finding reinforcement of what they know, believe and value. Moreover, they are emotionally investing and reinforcing their emotional, as well as intellectual, commitment to particular historical, social and cultural narratives. In general, and framing all of these individual heritage performances, is a larger individual and collective performance of white middle class privilege, and unsurprisingly this is particularly prevalent among, but not restricted to, sites of nationalizing narratives. It is a performance that is strongly resisted when it is challenged by curatorial or interpretive strategies in a range of both passive and explicit ways.24 In developing my analysis, I utilize the concept of ‘registers of engagement’.25 This is a characterization of the complex interplay and scales of emotional investment and engagement that visitors display, and the way this then feeds into the reinforcement or challenging of narrative templates used in visitor remembering, or of what Doering and Pekarik26 define as a visitor’s ‘entrance narrative’.27 What emerges from the interview data is that visitors from dominant ethnic affiliations, such as Caucasian Americans, White British or Anglo-Australians, visiting sites in their own country, tend to be emotionally invested in these sites yet are cognitively relatively uncritical. Overseas tourists, who are less invested in national narratives, will be a little more critically engaged. Those from nondominant ethnic backgrounds, and to a lesser extent those from dominant ethnic backgrounds but with low educational attainment, will in general be doing, on the relative register of engagement, even more emotionally and intellectually invested critical heritage work. In effect, there are reg-

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isters of engagement and performances of privilege, which sometimes are conscious and self-critical but on the whole not; and there are registers of engagement and performances undertaken in the context of marginalization and misrecognition, which tend to be more critical and self-conscious. This latter performance/register of engagement tends to be dominant at sites of industrial heritage and working class histories but also at sites representing immigration and enslavement and its legacies. Table 6.2 outlines the interview population at the industrial and working-class museums and heritage sites discussed in this chapter. Of note is the relatively small number of visitors interviewed in the United States and Australia relative to England. This represents a much lower visitation rate at such Table 6.2 Demographics of the interview population at industrial and workingclass heritage sites compared to the demographics of the overall study. Industrial/Labour heritage

Overall study

273

2,415

76

1,159

124

946

Male Female

49%

46%

51%

54%

Over 45 Under 44

68%

57%

32%

43%

Education Holds a university qualification Other qualifications1

45%

57%

55%

43%

91%

71%

9%

29%

65%

66%

6%

18%

Country England USA Australia Sex

Age

Ethnicity Dominant ethnic background Non-dominant ethnic backgrounds First-time visitor 2

Tourist

1. This includes high school qualifications, trade qualifications, never went to high school / did not graduate. 2. This refers to a non-domestic visitor/tourist and denotes someone who identified as a temporary overseas visitor/tourist to the country in which the site was located.

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sites compared to other site types in the overall study, but also a much lower visitation rate in the United States and Australia compared to England. It is important to note that a roughly equal amount of time was spent at each site in the study. Why visitation rates to such sites in England may be higher than the other two countries is not known, but certainly it is interesting to note that there is a far more overt acknowledgement of issues of class in Great Britain28 than there is in the other two countries, which tend to obscure issues of class and mythologize ideas of a monolithic middle class.29 Various studies have documented that visitors to museum and heritage sites, particularly those that speak to national histories, tend to be well educated, middle class and white,30 a profile that was also recorded in the overall study figures in Table 6.2. At the industrial sites considered in this study, slightly more men visited these sites than visited other types of heritage and museum sites in the overall study, and this is also atypical of patterns of museum visitation around the world. Visitors to industrial sites also tended to have an older, less well-educated profile than that recorded in the overall study. Education also varied according to age at the industrial sites, as those aged over 45 were slightly more likely not to have gone to university than those 44 and under (i.e. 58% and 50% respectively did not hold a university degree). There is not the space here to go through a detailed analysis of all the interview questions. Rather, I will draw on some of the statistically significant results of a selection of questions that are revealing of the profile of the memory work undertaken at the industrial sites across all three countries. It is important to note that while there were some variations between the three countries in the way visitors related to sites and museums these were minor relative to the greater differences that occurred between different genres of site/museum type. That is, different genres of museum and heritage site tended to have particular types of memory work and affective practices of heritage making occurring at them regardless of the country in which they were located.31 Labour and industrial history and immigration sites and museums both stand out from the overall study, in that the heritage performances and affective practices that were most frequently observed at these sites are based on and reinforce close personal and familial connections to the history of the site being visited.32 This was in contrast to many other genres in which visitors tended to make less personal or familial connections. Empathetic reflections based on historical gratitude were frequently made by visitors to both these genres of sites.33 However, overt and self-conscious forms of remembering and identity making occur at industrial sites far more than at any other type of site in the study. Further, expressions of politically progressive social messages dominate at these sites, which are inevitably reinforced by feelings

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of historical gratitude. These sites tend to be explicitly identified as aides to class and local memory rather than national memory. While immigration museums and sites tended to be used to reflect on present day issues,34 industrial sites were far more frequently used to express historical gratitude that measured and assessed how far society had changed and, on the whole, to be glad about that. This backwards reflection is often, but not always, framed by a progressive form of nostalgia in which the past values about work and organized labour were brought to the present to set agendas and aspirations for the future.35 This is discussed further below; however, before discussing this, it is useful to identify how the demographics of the visitor population may correlate to the memory and identity work undertaken at these sites. Industrial sites are typically associated with forms of masculinity; however, gender was not statistically significant in identifying patterns in the forms of remembering and identity work being done. Although men tended to define the history they were visiting as specifically a heritage of class history, and women tended to identify the heritage they were visiting as either their own or their family’s, this was not statistically significant. However, a strong statistically significant correlation does emerge within the genre of industrial sites between how people related to the sites and age, educational attainment and if people had travelled from a home or a holiday address, and/or whether the visitor was a first or returning visitor. In summary, those over 45 and/or those who did not hold university qualifications lived locally and/or were repeat visitors and far more frequently made strong personal and empathetic links to the sites themselves than younger, university-educated non-locals. Older visitors tended to draw on a strong physical sense of being in place to recall workplace memories that were framed by politically progressive nostalgia and active forms of identity work. This is a particularly strong pattern in England, where admittedly far more interviews were undertaken, but nonetheless also occurs in the other two countries. In all these countries, this remembering was also framed by a sense of loss, but in Australia and the US, unlike in England, it was also framed by an explicit sense of pride. Those 44 and under, and/or first-time visitors, and/or visitors from holiday addresses, were more likely to see the sites as educational, and first-time visitors especially were more likely to offer politically conservative views. Younger, university-educated visitors tended to either not make or made weaker personal connections. Alternatively, however, those who held university degrees when making links tended to do so through family histories and used the sites to make the sort of intergenerational links that Dicks36 has identified, or they nominated that the social and political values represented by the sites was something that spoke to them, and which they wanted to reinforce.

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This is a pattern we would of course expect. People with close experiences to the sites are making personal connections, and those a generation and/or a university degree removed from the experiences represented by these sites are making connections through family ties. It is, however, a profile that speaks to class, and class and familial social and economic mobility. There is not the space here to look at the intergenerational connections that tended to be made by the younger and/or university-educated group, rather this chapter will focus on the interplay of loss and pride that, while not confined to the older group and/or non-university educated, nonetheless tended to dominate that group’s response. There is a complex interplay of emotions of loss and pride occurring, as people make connections to place or to family histories and heritage. This tends to play out in a form of ‘progressive nostalgia’. As Smith and Campbell37 have argued, this form of nostalgia tends to bring together the progressive social values of working-class communities, particularly around organized labour, to underline future aspirations; for example: There’s an awful lot going on [in my mind as I visit] – I mean I just continue to – especially in the last one, in the labour union [reconstruction of a union hall], of exactly what’s happening in class, in politics, in everything that’s going on today. It’s extremely relevant. (WC4: female, 55–64, retired speech therapist, American, 2012) Well, the analogy I put is it’s kind of like visiting a cemetery. You know, it’s a dead industry now as far as Pittsburgh goes. . . . It gives you a sense of what went on and what the struggles that the guys had and how dangerous their work was, and I mean I’m a staunch, I’m a staunch union person so, I mean all you have to do is walk through there and see why the labour movement started. So, yeah, it’s kind of an eerie feeling. (RS12: male, 55–64, retired educator, Anglo-American, 2012) It brings back – especially in the room right here [union hall] – I came from a railroad union that was started in the mid1800s. . . . I believe that [this museum is important]. For various reasons, I think that the world today has got towards too much push button and nobody knows about manual labour, or the fact that you have to rely on your other workers for support, whether it be safety or help or training, or whatever. (WC11: male, 55–64, retired railroad worker, Dutch-English American, 2012)

In the extracts above, the speakers are engaged in remembering the values of organized labour. As Smith and Campbell38 argue, this form of nostalgic remembering can be vital for impelling progressive political action in the present. However, as they also note, the nostalgic rememberings of working-class and industrial heritage can also have politically conservative implications. I want to turn to the implications of what occurred when older visitors attempted to place their remembering and identity work into wider social and economic contexts. That is, when older visitors attempted

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to assess the degree to which their own and/or their familial heritage ‘mattered’. When this was done, what often occurred was a reinforcement of the realization that working-class heritage was either misrecognized or, more often, simple not recognized or respected at all. The pattern of older, nonuniversity educated visitors was strongly maintained across almost all the questions asked during the interviews – except when I asked the question ‘what, if any, meaning does this site have to contemporary society?’ In England, visitors talked explicitly about the site being an aide to personal or class memories. In Australia, visitors tended to talk about such sites as aides to national memory more so than in the other two countries, an unsurprising result given the national respect for the Eureka stockade incident but also because there was a strong, if frustrated, sense at the Mt Kembla site that the mining disaster should be, even if it was not, part of national memory. In the United States, this frustration was also notable; however, this tended to be rendered through vague and meaningless platitudes, such as: Oh I think history – I mean, it always has a particular meaning, or what it’s led to. (WC6: female, 25–34, homemaker, Caucasian American, 2012) Historical purposes, yes. (LI13: female, 35–44, program co-ordinator, African American, 2012) We need to show where we’ve been to. . . (RS3: female, 45–54, writer, American, 2012) Hopefully a lot, I would think. (RS13: male, 55–65, builder, White American, 2012)

This was a question many at industrial sites in the United States appeared to stumble on and give stock answers about ‘knowing your history so you don’t repeat it’. Platitudes in the wider study were often offered in response to visitor cognitive dissonance with the curatorial or interpretive message. In the contexts of the interviews here, however, it appears to be a fumbling inability to place their sense of heritage into a national context. This is coupled with a deep sense of disregard and loss for the experiences of working people, as illustrated here between two younger visitors to the museum in Youngstown Ohio: LI7: Really the loss of an amazing industry. The fact that we’re still losing jobs daily, and we’ve got the ability to make large job openings. We’d just rather send the jobs overseas for it and make someone else do it. LI8: If that’s how hard it was back then, how hard it was to work and to keep a job and everything. Honestly, I think it’s harder now. At least back then all the companies were here. You could walk down the street to your job. Now you have to have a car and drive a mile to get a decent job. It’s harder now to have a job than the way it used to be. Yes, it was – you know, there was no unions and, you know, people got hurt a lot more often, but your job was there. You knew it was there.

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LI7: Job security. LS: Job security, yeah, that’s true. LI8: That doesn’t exist anymore. LI7: As well as employee/employer faith . . . LI8: Relationship. LI7: Thank you. The relationship between the employer and the employee. There was truly a bond. If you got hurt your employer knew it, instead of, ‘Oh you got hurt? Oh, goodbye.’ (LI7: male, 25–34, unemployed coal miner, Caucasian American; LI8: female, 25–34, nurse, Caucasian American, 2012)

In this interchange, there is a strong lament for the loss of industry and job security; it is a reactionary nostalgia that romanticizes paternalistic employer and employee relations, so that despite the lack of unions, employers once knew how to treat workers. However, the lamentation is real. Others lamented a lack of respect, loss of values of solidarity and caring, and/or an erosion of workers’ rights, for example: Well, I like values that are – you know, that stay, that remain. Their hard work, their dedication, but also their desire to be respected. Whether they had to do that for unions or – I’m here with my nephew. His father didn’t work in a steel mill; he worked at General Fireproof, but it was somewhat the same idea, and he is now working right across the street there, at Catholic charities, and he’s interested in the people’s lives today, at a different level. So I think – and his dedication is the same, you know, the same as my grandfather’s [who worked with the speaker’s father in Ohio steel industry]. (LI18: male, over 65, priest, Slovak-American, 2012) Absolutely. Yes. As I mentioned before, yeah, this is something that we continue to struggle with in America, between the rights of owners to run their business however they want versus the decency of how we respect what workers do. So, yeah, and that’s still true. . . . I’m a fan of labour unions, and I am hopeful that workers will again find their strengths. (WC13: female 25–34, student, American, 2012)

Loss of jobs, jobs security and respect are linked of course to a loss of self-esteem and recognition of sense of social and economic place in wider society. Self-esteem, moreover, was something that people who had worked in these industries, who had direct connections, often sought by their visits to such places. While most people in response to the question ‘What meaning does an exhibition like this have for contemporary America?’ gave an affirming answer that the history mattered, there was nonetheless a sense that this history and the various values it represented was being forgotten – working people were not being recognized. As one local resident visiting the Museum of Work and Culture to remember her family – and in particular her mother’s work history – noted, this history was not recognized:

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Unfortunately, I am going to say no. LS: Why would you say that? Because I don’t think the people who live, ah, in the city care about what happened to people [immigrant workers] when they first came here [to Woonsocket to work the mills]. (WC19: female, retired accounting manager, over 65, 2017)

Visitors at the Museum of Labour and Industry in Youngstown similarly identified a lack of recognition that was accompanied by a sense that the country was ‘off track’ and not ‘doing so well’: Yeah. It means we need to get back to some of the grass roots and what made us who we are. And we’re very, very – I mean this country’s 250 years old or so, and it’s very – it’s disappearing. We are an infant, and in my opinion we won’t last as long as England has lasted. We’re not doing so well – I think we’re doing things really wrong here. Yeah. It’s terrible, really. (LI11: male, 45–54, sales, American, 2012) Look at where we came from and remember it, because unfortunately we’re forgetting it. And so, yeah, I think this has a great meaning, and people aren’t – they’ve got to remember their roots to be able to keep where they are, you know, on track. I think we’re off track. (LI15: female, 55–64, own business, Caucasian American, 2012)

While many visitors talked about positive feelings such as pride that they gained from their visits and reconnecting to their own or their familial histories, this was nonetheless often coupled with a palpable sense that many visitors were searching for a sense of belonging and recognition missing in their current lived experience: Well, I think it does have meaning because it gives people a sense of pride, which is sometimes lacking in this area. I think that as the museum develops it becomes a tool for continuing dialogue about what’s good about the area, what needs to be remembered . . . (WC17: female, 45–54, nurse, Irish-French-American, 2012)

Feelings of pride tended to rest on the values and respect given to hard work and to a sense of achievement, often measured in the United States as contributing to the development of the country, for example: Certainly a great sense of pride, privilege – to sort of connect to these heritage destinations that play such a role in, like, our history as a country. I mean so much of America was built by these steel mills. (RS15: male, 45–54, journalist, German-American, 2012)

A mixture of pride and a sense of loss, particularly of respect and selfesteem, was palpable in many older visitors’ responses to industrial heritage. The emotional truth and authenticity of the intermixing of feelings of pride and loss often worked to affirm that the past and working-class heritage mattered, for example:

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LS: What meaning, if any, does a site like this have for contemporary America? Yes I do. This was the backbone of America. This made America. That’s what concerns me today, which way are we going? Because steel is dying out of this country, and it’s what made it. I hope somebody takes the bull by the horns soon, believe me. LS: And do what? What would you like them to do? I’d like them to rebuild the industry and to make steel what it was. It’s what made us a great nation. (RS5: male, over 65, retired steelworker, Greek-American, 2012)

This formulation in 2012 of a ‘great nation’ speaks to the rhetoric actively utilized by the political right in the United States during the 2015–2016 election campaign to successfully recruit disenfranchised white working communities. The sense of loss of workplace solidarity and of self-esteem and belonging, either covertly or overtly, was able to be mobilized for reactionary political purposes. This occurs though a seeking of recognition, in which a search for acknowledgement and of self-esteem is linked to a remedy for social injustice and lack of social and economic respect. That visitors to the sites in the United States at least could not place their heritage in a critical national context is significant and underlines their sense of misrecognition. The mixture of pride, loss and frustration becomes easily mobilized by those offering recognition – no matter how shallow, rhetorical or passing that recognition may be – as this 2017 amusing and self-conscious visitor exchange in response to the question ‘How does it make you feel to visit this place?’ reveals: WC21: Proud of what our ancestors built, because they built all of this with their hard labour. Sadness in a way that it’s gone, you know that they, Woonsocket, like Lawrence where I come from, was all textile mills, and now they’re all converted into housing, condominiums and there is no manufacturing anymore, which is unfortunate, we need to make America great again [rueful laugh]. WC22: [Mirthful laughing] You just wait my friend, those jobs are coming back, Lawrence will be [great again, laughing] tell your mom! (WC21: male, 55–64, realtor, Italian-American; WC22: female, 55–64, writer, Polish-French-American)

That the misrecognition many of those interviewed expressed will, of course, continue in the United States hardly needs stating. However, what this illustrates is that industrial remembering speaks to and affirms a sense of pride that is simultaneously lost and affirmed in this remembering, but is also contextualized by a reinforcement of belief in a collective national forgetting and a dismissing of class identity and experience. The forgetting or obscuring of historical and contemporary class experiences in the ways in which industrial heritage is interpreted and commemorated has social and political consequences. Further, if the aim of industrial heritage interpretation is, as

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the docent at the Museum of Work and Culture asserted, to illustrate that working lives matter, then an explicit engagement with issues of class and the role it places in contextualizing people’s lives is vital.

Conclusion The memory and heritage work at industrial and working-class history sites are, relative to other types of heritage and museum sites, actively self-conscious and critical. These affective heritage practices occur, alongside those at sites of immigration and the history of enslavement, in the context of a wider, less self-conscious heritage performance of white middle class privilege that is routinely undertaken at sites of national narratives. There is a compelling juxtaposition here that underlines the degree to which we are all meant to be middle class now, and thus the degree to which class, and other forms of historical and contemporary difference, are negated and actively forgotten. In the seeking of a sense of place provided by the making of connections to the past, certain visitors to industrial sites draw on past historical experiences to bolster self-esteem and pride which is often missing in their current working and social experiences. Self-recognition is being reinforced and wider recognition is being sought through the authorizing status of sanctioned heritage sites – however, the emotional complexities of these heritage practices are undertaken in the context of an ongoing failure to acknowledge the lived experiences of class facilitates the continuing possibility of misrecognition. Laurajane Smith is the Director of the Centre of Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Science in Australia; founder of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies; editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies; and co-general editor (with William Logan) of the Routledge Series Key Issues in Cultural Heritage. She has authored or edited fourteen books, most notably Uses of Heritage (2006, Routledge) and Intangible Heritage (2009, edited with Natsuko Akagawa), and most recently Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present (2018 with Margaret Wetherell and Gary Campbell). She has a long-term research interest in the interplay between class and heritage, particularly in contexts of deindustrialization.

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Notes The research in Australia and the United States was funded by the Australian Research Council (FT0992071), the English research was funded by a British Academy grant. I wish to thank the museums and heritage sites that allowed me to undertake visitor, staff and volunteer interviews at them. Gary Campbell helped with the coding of the interviews and assisted with the interviews at the Rivers of Steel site. 1. See chapters in Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Class. 2. Ibid. 3. Loveday, ‘“Flat-capping It”: Memory, Nostalgia and Value in Retroactive Male Working-class Identification’, 722. 4. Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret; Zweig, ‘The Challenge of Working Class Studies’, 6; Lawler, ‘Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities’, 429–46; Russo and Linkon, ‘What’s New About New Working-Class Studies’, 1–15. 5. Fletcher, ‘How Race Enters Class in the United States’, 35–44. 6. See, for example, Rudacille, ‘A Lethal Nostalgia’. 7. Smith and Campbell, ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class’, 612–27. 8. Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia; idem, The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. 9. Smith, Uses of Heritage. 10. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering. 11. Smith, Uses of Heritage, 83–84. 12. Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding; idem, ‘Affect and Discourse – What’s the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice’, 349–68. 13. See, for example, Waterton and Watson, ‘Framing Theory: Towards a Critical Imagination in Heritage Studies’, 546–61. 14. Morton, ‘Emotional Accuracy’, 265–75; idem, Emotion and Imagination. 15. See also Campbell, ‘Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value’, 361–80. 16. Wertsch, ‘Collective Memory and Narrative Templates’, 133–56. 17. Fraser, ‘Rethinking Recognition’, 107–20. 18. See for fuller discussion Smith, ‘“We Are . . . We Are Everything”: The Politics of Recognition and Misrecognition at Immigration Museums’, 69–86; Thompson, The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction. 19. Sayer, ‘Class, Moral Worth and Recognition’, 947–63. 20. Smith and Campbell, ‘Don’t Mourn, Organize: Heritage, Recognition and Memory in Castleford West Yorkshire’, 85–105; Sayer, ‘Class, Moral Worth and Recognition’, 947–63. 21. Smith, ‘“We Are . . . We Are Everything”’, 69–86; idem, Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. 22. Ibid. 23. See Smith, ‘Theorising Museum and Heritage Visiting’, 459–84; idem, ‘“We Are . . . We Are Everything”’, 69–86; idem, Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. 24. Smith, ‘“Man’s Inhumanity to Man” and Other Platitudes of Avoidance and Misrecognition: An Analysis of Visitor Responses to Exhibitions Marking the 1807 Bicentenary’, 193–214; Idem, ‘Theorising Museum and Heritage Visiting’, 459–84; idem, ‘“We Are . . . We Are Everything”’, 69–86. 25. Smith, ‘Affect and Registers of Engagement: Navigating Emotional Responses to Dissonant Heritage’, 260–303; Smith and Campbell, ‘The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion’, 443–460.

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26. Doering and Pekarik, ‘Questioning the Entrance Narrative’, 20–23. 27. See also Pekarik and Schreiber, ‘The Power of Expectation: A Research Note’, 487–96. 28. Cannadine, Class in Britain. 29. Zweig, ‘The Challenge of Working Class Studies’, 1–17; Russo and Linkon, ‘What’s New About New Working-Class Studies’, 1–15; Scanlon, ‘Bogans and Hipsters: We’re Talking the Living Language of Class’. 30. Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction; Bounia et al., Voices from the Museum: Survey Research in Europe’s National Museums; Selwood, ‘Unreliable Evidence: The Rhetoric of Data Collection in the Cultural Sector’, 38–53. 31. Smith, Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. 32. Space does not allow the demonstration of these summary statements. For a breakdown of the results of the analysis on which these statements are based see ibid. 33. See for discussion of immigration sites Smith, ‘“We Are . . . We Are Everything”’, 69–86. 34. Ibid. 35. Smith and Campbell, ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”’, 612–27. 36. Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community. 37. Smith and Campbell, ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”’, 612–27. 38. Ibid.

Bibliography Bennett, T. et al. Culture, Class, Distinction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Bonnett, A. Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Bounia, A. et al. Voices from the Museum: Survey Research in Europe’s National Museums, EuNaMus Report No 5. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2012. Campbell, S. ‘Our Faithfulness to the Past: Reconstructing Memory Value’. Philosophical Psychology 19(3) (2006), 361–80. Cannadine, D. Class in Britain. London: Penguin, 2000. Dicks, B. Heritage, Place and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000. Doering, Z.D., and A.J. Pekarik. ‘Questioning the Entrance Narrative’. Journal of Museum Education 21(3) (1996), 20–23. Fletcher, B. ‘How Race Enters Class in the United States’, in M. Zweig (ed.), What’s Class Got To Do With It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2004), 35–44. Fraser, N. ‘Rethinking Recognition’. New Left Review 3 (2000), 107–20. Lawler, S. ‘Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities’. The Sociological Review 53(3) (2005), 429–46. Loveday, V. ‘“Flat-capping It”: Memory, Nostalgia and Value in Retroactive Male Workingclass Identification’. European Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2014), 721–35. Morton, A. ‘Emotional Accuracy’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (2002), 265–75. ———. Emotion and Imagination. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Pekarik, A., and J. Schreiber. ‘The Power of Expectation: A Research Note’. Curator: The Museums Journal 55(4) (2012), 487–96. Rudacille, D. ‘A Lethal Nostalgia’. Aeon 23 (2015). Retrieved 24 August 2018 from https:// aeon.co/essays/how-toxic-is-smokestack-nostalgia.

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Russo, J., and S.L. Linkon. ‘What’s New About New Working-Class Studies’, in S.L. Linkon and J. Russo (eds), New Working-Class Studies (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2005), 1–15. Sayer, A. ‘Class, Moral Worth and Recognition’. Sociology 39(5) (2005), 947–63. Scanlon, C. ‘Bogans and Hipsters: We’re Talking the Living Language of Class’. The Conversation, 24 February 2014. Retrieved 24 August 2018 from http://theconversation.com/ bogans-and-hipsters-were-talking-the-living-language-of-class-23007. Selwood, S. ‘Unreliable Evidence: The Rhetoric of Data Collection in the Cultural Sector’, in M. Mirza (ed.), Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? (London: Policy Exchange, 2006), 38–53. Shackel, P.A., L. Smith and G. Campbell. ‘Labour’s Heritage’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 17(4) (2011), 291–300. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006. ———. ‘“Man’s Inhumanity to Man” and Other Platitudes of Avoidance and Misrecognition: An Analysis of Visitor Responses to Exhibitions Marking the 1807 Bicentenary’. Museum and Society 8(3) (2010), 193–214. ———. ‘Affect and Registers of Engagement: Navigating Emotional Responses to Dissonant Heritage’, in L. Smith et al. (eds), Representing Enslavement and Abolition in Museums: Ambiguous Engagements (New York: Routledge, 2011), 260–303. ———. ‘Theorising Museum and Heritage Visiting’, in A. Witcomb and K. Message (eds), The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 459–84. ———. ‘“We Are . . . We Are Everything”: The Politics of Recognition and Misrecognition at Immigration Museums’. Museum and Society 15(1) (2017), 69–86. ———. Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites (working title). London: Routledge (forthcoming). Smith, L., and G. Campbell. ‘Don’t Mourn, Organize: Heritage, Recognition and Memory in Castleford, West Yorkshire’, in L. Smith, P. Shackel and G. Campbell (eds), Heritage, Labour and the Working Class (London: Routledge, 2011), 85–105. ———. ‘The Elephant in the Room: Heritage, Affect and Emotion’, in W. Logan, M. Nic Craith and U. Kockel (eds), A Companion to Heritage Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 443–60. ———. ‘“Nostalgia for the Future”: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 23(7) (2017), 612–27. Smith, L., P.A. Shackel and G. Campbell (eds), Heritage, Labour and the Working Class. London: Routledge, 2011. Thompson, S. The Political Theory of Recognition: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Waterton, E., and S. Watson. ‘Framing Theory: Towards a Critical Imagination in Heritage Studies’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 19(6) (2013), 546–61. Wertsch, J.V. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. ‘Collective Memory and Narrative Templates’. Social Research: An International Quarterly 75(1) (2008), 133–56. Wetherell, M. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage, 2012. ———. ‘Affect and Discourse – What’s the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/ Discursive Practice’. Subjectivity 6(4) (2013), 349–68. Zweig, M. The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. ———. ‘The Challenge of Working Class Studies’, in M. Zweig (ed.), What’s Class Got To Do With It? American Society in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2004), 1–17.

CHAPTER

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The Agents of Industrial Heritage in the Midst of Structural Transformation of the Latrobe Valley, Australia Erik Eklund

This chapter explores the agents of influence that articulate and promulgate industrial heritage and the industrial past, using the case study of the Latrobe Valley in Australia. The Latrobe Valley is a distinct geographic and economic region in South-East Australia in the state of Victoria. It includes the towns of Moe, Morwell, Churchill and Traralgon and has been the centre of brown coal mining and electricity production in Victoria since the early 1920s. The Valley is bordered by mountain ranges to the north (the Baw Baw Ranges) and the south (the Strzelecki and Jeeralang Ranges) and is part of a larger region known as the ‘Gippsland’ region. The Latrobe Valley is criss-crossed by a series of rivers that flow from the ranges along the Valley to the eastern side of Gippsland. The region provides 75 per cent of the Victoria’s power, but the future of the remaining power stations and open pit coal mines is uncertain. The Hazelwood power station and mine closed in April 2017, leaving only three major operating power stations and two open pit mines. This discussion of industrial heritage, then, comes at a crucial moment when the region’s economy is rapidly changing and with the economic future of the region in flux. Notes for this section begin on page 157.

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In reviewing the historical and contemporary situation in the Latrobe Valley with regard to memorializing the industrial past, the chapter identifies a somewhat negative to modest picture for the profile of industrial heritage. This chapter focuses on the main agents of influence for industrial heritage. These include the official or formal purveyors of information and messages about the region (including the local government authority), as well as the influential corporate renderings of industry and its regional role. There are also informal or vernacular renderings of industrial heritage and the industrial past exemplified by the small volunteer-run museums and dissenting groups, who have focused on the adverse health impacts of living and working in the power industry. Overall, the chapter offers a picture of the industrial past as seen through the lens of regional restructuring. In the middle of challenging economic times, industrial heritage has yet to be firmly identified as an economic and cultural resource, at least at an official or formal level. For reasons of space, this chapter shall only focus on the industrial heritage of the brown coal mining and power industries. The recent power station closures and ongoing discussions about this industry make this an important and pressing focus for scholarly attention.

Economic and Regional Development The passage of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria Act through the Victorian parliament in 1921 ushered in an era of government-owned and sponsored coal mining and electricity generation. The Latrobe Valley is a case of state-sponsored industrial development. The region was rich in natural resources, especially timber, coal and some gold, but it was the decision of the Victorian State Government to utilize brown coal deposits and establish a state-owned mining and electricity generation hub that was the trigger for major industrialization from the early 1920s. At Yallourn, an open pit mine was established, and construction began on a nearby power station on the Latrobe River in 1921. This was the site of six successive additions to the original Yallourn A power station (tagged B, C, D, E and W). All of these except the still-operational W have been demolished. The State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) was both an employer and a major player in regional urban development. The town of Yallourn, for example, was a purpose-built community modelled on garden city principles. It was specifically built for SECV employees and opened in 1921. The SECV sponsored subdivisions in nearby Yallourn North and Newborough and built hostels for short-term accommodation.1 This was followed by later innovation such as the new town of Churchill, opened in

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1966, again designed by the SECV for workers and their families nearby to the planned new Hazelwood power station. By the 1950s, the Latrobe Valley was the focus of post-war growth. The Valley was the central axis of the Gippsland region with the advantage of a rail connection to Melbourne from 1878 and major brown coal deposits. In 1954, the town of Moe had a population of 8,770, Traralgon, 10,033, and Morwell, 13,033. These towns were major sites of urban growth and eclipsed older rural towns. There were steady flows of migrants from the United Kingdom and Ireland for the new mines and power stations. As the decade progressed, more migrant families arrived from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the Ukraine and other European countries.2 Forestry was also an important industry for the region. In 1939, Australian Paper Mills (APM) opened the Maryvale paper mill, on the outskirts of Traralgon. Large-scale coal mining and then electricity generation brought associated industries to the Valley, including the briquetting industry and engineering works. The timing of the deindustrialization of the Latrobe Valley is different to many industrial and mining regions in the Western world. Despite industrial regions experiencing rising unemployment from the early 1970s, and then the effects of the oil shock in 1973/74, the Valley by contrast enjoyed a decade of industrial consolidation, as the state-owned electricity enterprise invested in new power stations and urban growth. The new Hazelwood power station officially opened to much fanfare in 1971, although the first units were in production from 1965. The new Yallourn W station was commissioned in 1973. Moe and Morwell maintained their populations over this decade, while Traralgon grew strongly from the late 1970s. A new open pit coal mine at Loy Yang (closer to Traralgon than Morwell) began production in 1984. Energy production began at nearby Loy Yang A power station in 1984, while the construction of Loy Yang B started in 1985. By 2016, the Latrobe Valley’s population, including Latrobe City, and adjacent Baw Baw and Wellington Shires was 165,603.3 As a consequence of this continued development, when deindustrialization came to the region, it had its origins in a different set of economic and ideological concerns around corporatization and privatization. Privatization, which began in earnest in 1994, led to significant job losses. By 1989–1990 the SECV employed 8,481 employees, but through a process of privatization and asset sales, the workforce declined to less than half that number by 1994–1995.4 This traumatic wave of job losses was also accompanied by local government reorganization (the most extensive since the first shires were established in 1878) and the withdrawal of services. By the 1990s, local academics Jenny Cameron and Chris Gibson suggested the region was characterized by ‘an overarching sense of despair’ through high unemployment

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and the loss of the security, certainty and good wages that came with the SECV.5 From the early 1990s, all of the different mining, electricity generation, administration, maintenance and specialist engineering services were privatized and split into separate businesses with a large contractor workforce. The sense of one large common enterprise working for a state vision of development has now completely disappeared. Despite these major job losses, there were no closures until 2014. That year, the Morwell power station and briquette factory closed, followed by the Hazelwood power station in 2017. These closures also meant the nearby open pit mine (which had supplied both the Morwell and Hazelwood power stations) was also closed. There are still three major power stations and two open pit mines in operation in the region. The ongoing discussion of when these facilities will close, with even some industry sources arguing for the construction of a new ‘super-efficient’ brown coal power station, means that the end of the industrial era of brown coal mining and power generation is not yet upon us. This is despite the presence of climate change protocols, which mandate greenhouse gas reduction and the seemingly inexorable rise of renewable energy alternatives with their consequent drop in costs per megawatt of electricity produced. Industrial heritage is not yet a strong theme in current debates, which are focused on economic uncertainty and regional transition but with no clear plan or timeline towards closure.

Official Representations of the Industrial Past One method of exploring the official presentation of the region’s past as recognized by a local government entity is to assess its public presentation through the ‘Visit Latrobe Valley’ website and the area’s heritage management strategy. This is a measure of what Laurajane Smith has called the ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ (AHD).6 The official ‘Visit Latrobe City’ website has sections on ‘The Arts’, and ‘Museums’, and one entire section on the historic gold mining town of ‘Walhalla’ (which is in fact in the nearby Baw Baw Shire), but it does not foreground industrial heritage or even heritage as such. All of these sections include references to heritage, but the theme is muted. In particular ‘industrial heritage’ as a distinct theme is difficult to isolate separately from other themes such as rural settlement, multiculturalism and town development.7 The muted official profile of industrial heritage for tourist purposes is somewhat at odds with Latrobe City Council’s Heritage Strategy, which does specifically mention ‘industrial heritage’ and has to as one of its major recommendations seek assistance from the Victorian state government to assess the heritage significance of the electricity industry. Furthermore, the

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City’s branding tagline ‘Latrobe City: A New Energy’ and its waveform logo specifically calls upon the region’s industrial past and evokes a (hopefully) thriving future. As the Council document notes: The wave of New Energy surges through the spectrum of yellow and red, rising from a field of black, reflecting our industrial heritage, the traditional custodians of the region and the diversity of its citizens who, with unique talents and skills, contribute to one another and our society.

Adding further substance to the heritage assets of the region, four of the eight sites in the area on the Victorian State Heritage Register are industrial heritage sites including the brown coal Bucket Dredger at Morwell, the Traralgon Engine Shed and Turntable, the former Yallourn Power Station Administrative Building, and the Staplegrove Meat Works at Flynn.8 Here we see state-based agents of influence, which have stepped in to identify, protect and conserve industrial heritage. The Victorian Heritage Register is a tangible sign of the state’s recognition of the region’s industrial heritage, though no major resources to conserve and interpret this heritage have been forthcoming. There is a Council-initiated project that sought to bring together the power station and mine sites in the region into a touring route known as ‘Power Drive Route 98’. This route has been advertised through a self-drive tourism map with fourteen stops including the power stations, lookouts at the open pit mines and local museums. It focuses on the power industry, but it also includes a stop at the Maryvale Pulp mill, west of Traralgon. The brochure includes heritage elements (such as stops at the original site of the now demolished original Yallourn Power stations – A, B, C, D and E) but is mostly focused on energy education. Taken together, then, these disparate and at times conflicting official views suggest an uncertainty or unease with the industrial past. While the heritage strategy acknowledges industrial heritage, and key heritage assets are important industrial heritage items, the public promotion and presentation through the tourism website suggest a different set of priorities. Where mining and industry is celebrated most clearly on the official tourism website it is through the older gold mining heritage of the Walhalla region, which lies in the adjacent Baw Baw Shire and not in the Latrobe City local government area. There are significant tangible and intangible heritage assets in the region; not just the mines and power stations but the associated transport and rail infrastructure, the residential communities built for SECV employment such as the town of Churchill as well as sites of social significance such as the Gippsland Immigration Park at Morwell, and the ethnic clubs that were established from the 1950s such as the Italian Club in Morwell, the Ukrainian Club house in Newborough, and the German Club also in Morwell. At this point, however, this network of industrial, transport, residential and social

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sites remains a project of great potential but one not yet realized in formal heritage or tourism planning for the region.

Corporate Representations of the Industrial Past Privatization of the state’s electricity assets, which was announced in 1991 and began in earnest in 1994, moved the power industry away from public statutory control, eventually creating four separate business enterprises. These four groupings themselves were not stable, with numerous ownership changes since the original privatization moves. All of these factors meant that new corporate players have become increasingly important agents of influence in the region since the mid 1990s yet they do not have major commitments to the industrial past of their own operations. At the Hazelwood power station, for example, a new managing director would be appointed every two or three years – usually an individual who was not from the region and had come from appointments at the group’s other power stations in the UK or North America.9 Privatization had important implications for heritage, since it transferred assets into private hands and made some forms of protection and conservation more difficult. Yallourn C, D and E stations, which dated from the 1950s and early 1960s, were all demolished in 1995. These older stations were not part of the privatized assets and so were still under public control. This demolition was the first time that an effort was mounted to preserve all or parts of the old power stations for heritage reasons, though it was ultimately unsuccessful. The Victorian Heritage Advisory Committee required the Corporation (set up to manage the remaining assets of the SECV) to make an assessment of items on site and provide an orderly disposal to nearby Yallourn North museum or the Powerworks Visitors Centre in Morwell. Engineering Heritage Victoria commissioned a report in 2011, which nominated the site as a place for an Engineering Heritage National Landmark, but such was the disinterest in heritage from the new owners, TruEnergy, they ‘declined to have a publicly accessible engineering heritage marker and interpretive panel on or immediately beside the former YPS site’.10 Yallourn W (now with different owners) and indeed all of the mine sites and power stations are subject to influential corporate renderings of their profile and presentation. For the most part, however, these representations focus on presenting the companies as good community partners working hard to minimize environmental impacts. There are very few corporate attempts to mobilize history or heritage. AGL’s Miner’s Lookout has an impressive vista over the Loy Yang open pit mine and a view of Loy Yang A and B stations. The Lookout was curiously named ‘Miners Lookout’, even

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though there are very few if any ‘miners’ employed by the companies, with nearly all mining completed by large dredging equipment and moveable conveyors. The Lookout is actually part of the mining lease so AGL and at its absolute discretion can decide what is presented there. There are three carparks, two telescopes to view the operations and a covered area with five boards outlining the history of the site since white colonization, the company’s operations, its community engagement efforts and its environmental land rehabilitation plans. In 2016, the Lookout was renamed the ‘Jack Vines Lookout’ in memory of a former long-term employee who was the coal production manager for the three open pit mines and the supervising engineer on the Loy Yang mine development. Vines was an influential senior manager and coal mining historian who was also a local; an ideal candidate from the company’s point of view. Vines was no doubt a worthy and influential individual, but it is the absence of any other heritage or corporate memory focusing on other workers, both senior staff and less high-ranking individuals, that indicates a very clear sense of who the company believed ‘made history’ at the site.11 The Jack Vines Lookout has a partner that overlooks Loy Yang B power station. Set in an attractive bushland setting adjacent to the station, this small park contains a walking track with two interpretative panels with pushbutton audio commentary outlining what you are seeing and emphasizing the productivity, scale and environmental credentials of the operation. Like the Jack Vines Lookout, this area is also named in honour of a former longterm senior SECV official, George Bates.12 All of the Latrobe Valley power stations have experienced extensive union organization and, at times, industrial action, but this theme is absent in the accessible heritage of the region. Scholarly studies exist that cover union mobilization and major industrial action in the 1970s and 1980s.13 Yet this material is not manifest at any of the museums or public sites that cover the industrial past of the region. There were an unknown number of workers killed at all of these sites. Deaths through workplace incidents have continued until recent times. In one six-week period at the end of 2006, two workers died; one at Loy Yang A and one in the Yallourn open cut.14 Yet these workers are not in any way publicly acknowledged or officially remembered.

Vernacular Representations – Local Museums and Historical Societies The Powerworks Visitors Centre was originally a SECV training facility that acquired the role of a visitor and energy education centre. After privatization in 1994, it was supported by the new private owners until 2012, when funding was withdrawn. In 2015, Powerworks reopened as a not-for-profit cor-

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poration, still with an energy education theme but including an increasing concern for industrial heritage. Powerworks has made the transition from an official SECV agent of influence to now being a vernacular agent that supports the conservation and display of engineering heritage in particular, while the older role of energy education has persisted. In the context of scarce resources and volunteer labour, Powerworks continue to encourage the retention and conservation of the region’s industrial heritage with a strong focus on engineering artefacts.15 A nearby museum, which has acquired an important collection of industrial heritage items, is the Old Brown Coal Museum at Yallourn North, just a few kilometres north of the Yallourn open pit. Housed in an old School building, the museum, despite its small size, has eclectic and wideranging displays, which capture various themes in the history of the region. It displays range across regional social life, childhood, marriage, commercial development and sport to local government and industrial heritage. As noted above, when the older Yallourn power stations were being demolished, some engineering heritage items were relocated to this museum. The museum includes ‘The Turbine Room’, which houses the original Turbine Generator from Yallourn A, as well as control panels and the reconstructed tile floor from Yallourn A and B.16 Yet not all vernacular heritage is tangible, and the region has a very strong and influential set of memories and stories that surround the model town of Yallourn. After more than thirty years as the jewel in the crown of the SECV, the town of Yallourn was progressively dismantled from the early 1970s to make way for an extension of the open cut mine. This decision was a controversial one, and Yallourn remains fixed in the minds of many former residents and others, with regular annual social events and a website that seeks to imagine a virtual Yallourn.17 The myriad of social as well as technological efforts to preserve the memory of Yallourn, even if only in an intangible form, is a powerful resistance to the modernist commands of the SECV, which deemed the town surplus to requirements and its humanized living space less important than the value of the coal that lay beneath it. In the memories of Yallourn, we see the clearest expression of a vernacular and critical view of the role of the SECV in destroying the town.

Vernacular Representations – Health Effects There is another area where a dissenting view of both the industrial past and the industrial present has been manifest. Electricity workers whether in the brown coal mining operations or in the generating plants have been exposed to major dust-borne workplace hazards. Lung and respiratory diseases have a high rate of incidence in the region amongst the current and former work-

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force. In 1977, population studies found that the Latrobe Valley experienced mortality rates above the Victorian state average – especially for adult males, who had high rates of respiratory illness, heart disease and cancer.18 A further government-sponsored study followed in 1990. By 2001, the widespread risk of high incidence of death from asbestosis was given formal acknowledgement through the publication of a Health Department Report, which found that the Latrobe Valley had the highest rate of death from mesothelioma across all Victorian municipalities in the period 1986 to 1998 and that men in the Latrobe Valley suffered mesothelioma at a rate 3.3 times above the state average.19 Support services were established in Community Health Centres and through a vigorous and active support group, Gippsland Asbestos-Related Diseases Support Inc. (GARDS), formed in 1991. This was a difficult and controversial issue, not least because of the suffering and grief that ARD deaths engendered but also because the Valley was experiencing a difficult time economically. Local criticisms of working conditions were viewed by some as undermining the region’s efforts to recover from the privatization retrenchment. Exposure to asbestos in the workplace was accompanied by the high incidence of asbestos building material in the swathe of new (mostly public) housing built in Moe and Morwell and to a lesser extent Traralgon in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The formation of GARDS in 1991 and an annual asbestos awareness event, which started in 2004, are the clearest signs of this dissenting and critical view of the industrial legacy of high levels of occupational disease and poor community health.20 The annual event is commemorated in Gippsland by GARDs and the trade union movement with a ceremony in the Morwell Centenary Rose Garden during national asbestosis awareness week. In 2008, there was a closure of sorts delivered by the Victorian State parliament, which meets in Churchill; they offered an apology to those affected by mesothelioma and asbestosis. The then Victorian Premier, John Brumby, said in Parliament, which convened at a special sitting in the region: On behalf of the Victorian government and the community I want to say sorry and to express our regret for the pain and the suffering felt by some former power industry workers and their families where that was caused by asbestos exposure at the former SECV. Some workers and families have endured intolerable suffering, including the slow and painful effects of lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma. The government sincerely apologises to these workers and their families for the injuries caused by the exposure at the SECV.21

This public health theme reveals how dissenting representations, often carried by social movements and trade union groups, can eventually be incorporated into the formal record, in this case through a Parliamentary apology to victims.

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Media and Public Representations – Greenhouse Gases Another reason for the modest profile for industrial heritage is that the region suffers from a common and very negative image of the smoke stacks of Hazelwood power station, or less often the Low Yang power stations, forming its major identifying symbol to outsiders. In a 2012 survey of 300 Victorians from outside of the Latrobe Valley, their strongest associations with the region (where they had any knowledge at all) were with electricity generation, mining and pollution. In the context of uncertainty over the future of the power stations, the rising concerns over exposure to particulate matter from coal-fired power stations, and now especially the role of emissions as a greenhouse gas, the region’s industrial imagery is fraught to say the least. Even news stories not ostensibly about the Latrobe Valley but about climate change or industrial pollution feature images of or references to Latrobe Valley power stations.22 The more chronologically distant and less politically complex industrial imagery of an old dairy factory or a coal mining headshaft is a safer option with regard to tourist icons. The difficult privatization of the 1990s, and the uncertainty over the future of the still operating coal mines and power stations, makes it very difficult for an unfettered celebration of the industrial age.

Dealing with Closure – Representations The focus on contemporary regional restructuring and job losses has seen the industrial past lose profile amidst a concern over unemployment and regional economic transition. The more recent closures of the Hazelwood power station and mine attracted national media attention. In November 2016, Engie, the French company and majority shareholder of the Hazelwood power station and its adjacent brown coal mine, announced that the coal-fired power plant would be shut by the 31 March 2017.23 There had been weeks of speculation about the closure, with the Australian press running a range of stories from a definite programme for closure to its opposite. The Federal and State Governments’ public positions were firstly that the decision rested with the company and, secondly, that coal-fired power stations remain a vital part of Australian-wide infrastructure. The company position was that the workers would be the first to know and that no decision had been taken. This remained Engie’s public position until 3rd November, when workers were called to a 10 AM meeting, and moments after the meeting finished the public announcement was made.24 The closure of the Hazelwood power station and mine affected up to 450 workers. While the current media narrative is overwhelmingly focused on the present challenges of closure, economic transition and workforce retraining,

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locals perceive it as a continuation of a longer tradition of major setbacks to the regional economy. They intuitively evoke past disruptions and so connect with a dissenting vernacular heritage of industrial employment and unemployment. One Hazelwood worker, Ron Bernardi, was interviewed on the day Engie confirmed the impending closure of the Hazelwood power station. As the report noted: ‘Responding to media suggestions the Valley will become a “ghost town” without Hazelwood, Ron said the closure news would be nothing like the power industry’s privatisation in the 1990s.’ Bernardi’s memories went to the early 1990s and focused on a specific incident in seeing the Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, the architect of privatization, at Melbourne airport: ‘To this day I dislike Jeff Kennett for what he did . . . I saw him give an interview at the Tullamarine airport about the SEC being privatised and it took all of my energy to walk past him and not tell him off. He treated the Valley very badly.’25 Likewise, for some workers, they recall the notification of other redundancies throughout the state. At Hazelwood power station, Denis Clough was quoted as saying he should have given more notice to employees: ‘I’ve heard about Hazelwood closing for 20 years. It was inevitable. It was done in a pretty ordinary, pretty bad way by the company. . . . Ford, Holden, and all those people – they’ve had three years’ notice. These blokes here have got five months.’ In this case, Clough evokes knowledge of other closures and criticizes the company for the short notice. That Victoria has been through a number of major industry closures in manufacturing in the last five years shapes an immediate perception that the company cannot control the memories of the privatization of the early 1990s or erase them so easily.26 As this chapter goes to press, a loose alliance of heritage activists have nominated the Morwell power station and Briquette Factory for inclusion on the State Heritage Register. The initial advice from Heritage Victoria supported this nomination, and a final decision will be made by the Victorian Heritage Council, and Heritage Victoria. The group includes individuals who were involved in the unsuccessful attempt to preserve Yallourn C, D and E from demolition in 1995, with the addition of the author of this chapter, who has been offering support and input with their efforts. These moves – some coordinated, some not – were ultimately unsuccessful and work started on the demolition of the Morwell power station in May 2019, with the Hazelwood power station to follow in the next few months.

Conclusion This chapter has shown how there is a low to modest profile for industrial heritage in the Latrobe Valley, at least at an official or formal level. Industrial

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heritage has not been clearly identified as an economic and cultural resource. Through the mechanism of state legislation, there has been a number of sites placed on the Victorian Heritage Register, but there has been little follow-up investment in conserving or interpreting the region’s industrial heritage. New corporate owners of a privatized industry have been less interested in the histories of their operations, while contemporary policy imperatives focus on preserving jobs or securing replacement industries. The reality of human-induced climate change has further complicated the standing of the brown coal mining and generating sector since the industry has been so strongly identified as a major source of greenhouses gases. Overwhelmed by contemporary economic challenges or seemingly difficult to celebrate in the midst of climate change debates, the region’s industrial heritage has suffered from relative neglect. At the vernacular or informal level, there are signs that the tangible and intangible heritage of the region has survived either in small volunteer-run organizations such as the Old Brown Coal Museum and Powerworks, or in powerful memories of lost places such as Yallourn. This chapter has also shown how even in the midst of current-day job losses, workers call upon a wider knowledge of other retrenchments throughout Victoria or connect their experiences back to the trauma of the electricity industry privatizations of the 1990s. There exists a rich vernacular heritage of the Latrobe Valley’s power generation era, and active voluntary agents of influence supporting it, but limited official recognition and resourcing of this vital element of the region’s history. Erik Eklund holds a chair in Australian history and is the Director of the Centre for Gippsland Studies as well as a member of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History (CRCAH) at Federation University Australia. He recently completed a term as the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian History at University College Dublin from 2015 to 2016. He has published in the areas of labour history, regional history, oral history and memory, as well as critical heritage studies. His recent works include Mining Towns, Making a Living, Making a Life (2012), Radical Newcastle (2015 coedited with James Bennett & Nancy Cushing) and The State of Welfare (2017 co-edited with Melanie Oppenheimer and Joanne Scott).

Notes 1. Fletcher, Digging Up People for Coal: A History of Yallourn, 159. 2. Zubrzycki, Settlers of the Latrobe Valley: A Sociological Study of Immigrants in the Brown Coal Industry in Australia; Erik and Fenley, ‘Introduction: Towards a New Environmental History of Gippsland’, 1–18. 3. See 2016 Census Data at www.communityprofile.com.au/latrobe (accessed 10 August 2017).

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4. Cameron and Gibson, ‘Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project’, 274. 5. Ibid. 6. Smith, The Uses of Heritage, 29. I am drawing on an approach taken by Chris Landorf, who conducted a comparative analysis of six UK heritage management plans to good effect. See his ‘A Framework for Sustainable Heritage Management: A Study of UK Industrial Heritage Sites’, 494–510. 7. http://visitlatrobecity.com/see-and-do/ (accessed 20 July 2017). 8. Latrobe City Council, ‘Heritage Strategy’, June 2014, p. 1 and p. 2. http://www .latrobe.vic.gov.au/Building_and_Planning/Planning/Heritage (accessed 10 October 2016). 9. Gowland and Aiken, ‘Privatisation – A History and Survey of Changes in Organisation Structures, Cultural and Environmental Profiles’, 43–56. 10. Engineers Australia & Engineering Heritage Victoria, ‘Nomination Document for the Yallourn Power Station’, Engineers Australia, March 2011, p. 27. 11. This description is based on a site visit on 8 August 2017. 12. This description is based on a site visit on 8 August 2017. 13. See, for example, Steel, ‘The Gippsland Trades and Labour Council and Industrial Agency in the Latrobe Valley’, 177–84 and Steel, ‘Injustice and Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Two Major Disputes’, 670–93. 14. ‘Power Station Deaths Prompt Workers’ Meeting’, ABC Radio, http://www.abc .net.au/news/2006-12-19/power-station-deaths-prompt-workers-meeting/2157494 (accessed 20 August 2017) and ‘Life Changing Accident’, Latrobe Valley Express, http://www.latrobeval leyexpress.com.au/story/218528/life-changing-accident/ (accessed 20 August 2017). 15. See http://www.powerworks.net.au/about-us/ (accessed 10 August 2017) and ‘Power Works Invites You to Visit’, Latrobe Valley Express, 14 August 2017, http://www .latrobevalleyexpress.com.au/story/4845676/power-works-invites-you-to-visit/ (accessed 14 August 2017). 16. See http://www.browncoalminemuseum.websyte.com.au/site.cfm?/browncoalmin emuseum/ (accessed 10 July 2016). 17. See http://www.virtualyallourn.com/ (accessed 14 November 2016) and Fletcher, Digging Up People for Coal. 18. Hunter and LaMontagne, ‘Investigating “Community” through a History of Responses to Asbestos-Related Disease in an Australian Industrial Region’, 370. See also Hunter and LaMontagne, ‘Dust in the Air in 1950s Victoria: History Has Lessons for Twenty-first Century Workers in Dusty Environments’. 19. Walker and LaMontagne, ‘Work and Health in the Latrobe Valley: Community Perspectives on Asbestos Issues: Final Report’. 20. Latrobe Valley Express, ‘Safe Decommission Urged by Unions’, http://www .latrobevalleyexpress.com.au/story/4317794/safe-decommission-urged-by-unions/?cs=1462 (accessed 30 November 2016). 21. See the GARDS Report on the apology and the text of the speech at Asbestos News 6(4) (Oct/November, 2008), https://gards.org/asbestos/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ GARDS-News-OCTOBER-NOVEMBER-2008-web.pdf (accessed 13 August 2017). 22. See, for example, ‘Australia’s Climate Change Authority Says Scientific Predictions Have Led it to Revise up the Recommended Carbon Emissions Reduction Target’, ABC News, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-27/smoke-rises-from-hazelwood-powerstation-in-la-trobe-valley2c-/5288960, which features a photo of Hazelwood (accessed 14 October 2016). The Australian Financial Review’s story (‘Climate Change Authority Backs Emissions Trading Scheme’) has a photo of Low Yang B, though it is not identified. See http://www.afr.com/business/energy/climate-change-authority-backs-emissions-tradingscheme-20160831-gr5hsu (accessed 12 October 2016). 23. ‘Hazelwood Power Station in Australia to Close at the End of March 2017’, Engie

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Press Release, http://www.engie.com/en/journalists/press-releases/hazelwood-power-sta tion-australia/ (accessed 10 November 2016). 24. In fact, the French press had been reporting both that the plant would close and that the company had reached this decision the week before the meeting with the Australian workforce. See ‘Charbon: Engie va fermer sa centrale d’Hazelwood, la plus polluante au monde’. 25. Ron Bernardi cited in Latrobe Valley Express, 7 November 2016 http://www.latro bevalleyexpress.com.au/story/4275174/shock-to-the-system/?cs=1210 (accessed 10 November 2016). 26. Latrobe Valley Express, ‘Made to Pay the Price’, http://www.latrobevalleyexpress .com.au/story/4289861/made-to-pay-the-price/ (accessed 14 November 2016) and Cameron and Gibson, ‘Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development’, 274–85.

Bibliography Cameron, J., and K. Gibson. ‘Alternative Pathways to Community and Economic Development: The Latrobe Valley Community Partnering Project’. Geographical Research 43(3) (2005), 274–85. Eklund, E., and J. Fenley. ‘Introduction: Towards a New Environmental History of Gippsland’, in E. Eklund and J. Fenley (eds), Earth and Industry: Stories from Gippsland (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2015), 1–18. Feitz, A. ‘Charbon: Engie va fermer sa centrale d’Hazelwood, la plus polluante au monde’, Les Echos 23 October, 2016. Retrieved 21 August 2018 from http://www.lesechos .fr/industrie-services/energie-environnement/0211420212546-charbon-engie-va-ferm er-sa-centrale-dhazelwood-la-plus-polluante-au-monde-2037087.php?2Ih11eVZs38Ll2 7A.99. Fletcher, M. Digging Up People for Coal: A History of Yallourn. Carlton (Victoria): Melbourne University Press, 2002. Gowland, D., and M. Aiken. ‘Privatisation – A History and Survey of Changes in Organisation Structures, Cultural and Environmental Profiles’. Australian Journal of Public Administration 62 (1) (March 2003), 43–56. Hunter, C., and A.D. LaMontagne. ‘Investigating “Community” through a History of Responses to Asbestos-Related Disease in an Australian Industrial Region’. Social History of Medicine 21(2) (2008), 361–79. ———. ‘Dust in the Air in 1950s Victoria: History Has Lessons for Twenty-first Century Workers in Dusty Environments’. Retrieved 21 August 2018 from http://www.ohsrep .org.au/hazards/asbestos/dust-in-the-air-in-1950s-victoria. Landorf, C. ‘A Framework for Sustainable Heritage Management: A Study of UK Industrial Heritage Sites’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 15 (2009), 494–510. DOI: 10.1080/13527250903210795. Smith, L. The Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Steel, K. ‘Injustice and Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Two Major Disputes’. Labor History 56(5) (2005), 670–93. ———. ‘The Gippsland Trades and Labour Council and Industrial Agency in the Latrobe Valley’, in J. Kimber, P. Love and P. Deery (eds), Labour Traditions (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2007), 177–84. Walker, H.H., and A.D. LaMontagne. ‘Work and Health in the Latrobe Valley: Community Perspectives on Asbestos Issues: Final Report’. Centre for the Study of Health & Society School of Population Health. The University of Melbourne, 2004. Zubrzycki, J. Settlers of the Latrobe Valley: A Sociological Study of Immigrants in the Brown Coal Industry in Australia. Canberra: ANU Press, 1964.

CHAPTER

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‘Hardly a Cause for Tears’ Job Insecurity and Occupational Psychology Culture in Italy – Oral Narratives from the Falck Steelworks in Sesto San Giovanni, Milan Roberta Garruccio

Drawing from Laurajane Smith’s The Uses of Heritage (2006), in this chapter I would like to extend the idea of industrial heritage to the field of occupational psychology, and by presenting a case study of restructuring, downsizing and eventually plant closing, I would like to explore how the experience and moreover the concept and the study of job insecurity began to emerge in Italy as a construct and a distinct field of study from that of job loss. The central interest here is in workers and managers that experienced a major change in their set of beliefs regarding not only the durability of their employment relation with a given industry/factory but also in their affects and behaviours. These workers and managers experienced the threat of job loss, if not job loss itself, because of technology advancement, globalization processes, erosion of rights and social and economic downshifting related to deindustrialization processes. Changes in beliefs, affects, behaviours and the threat and anticipation of job loss speak of a major breach of a psychological contract wherever the expectation of job continuity in a given organization is a major component. Since the 80s, evidence has shown that reactions are largely diversified in the coping repertoires and the efficacy of individuals struggling with the stressful effects of job insecurity and future-oriented appraisals of the job Notes for this section begin on page 178.

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threat. Therefore, I would like to extend the idea of dissonant heritage1 to the different attributions of meaning that can be associated with job insecurity, which is not only a concept, and today a field of studies in its own right, but also an experience, a perceptual phenomenon and an objective state of affairs.

Preamble I would like to begin by introducing myself and explaining why and how I am involved in the study of deindustrialization and industrial heritage. I am an economic historian by trade, and my field of interest is business history. But I am also an oral historian, and the study of deindustrialization is a field in which oral history has proved to be useful. I work in the Department of Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication at the University of Milan, where cultural studies are also stressed, and this contributed to my choice of carrying out this particular research. Moreover, my department is located in Sesto San Giovanni campus (north of Milan), and this also explains why Sesto became my research topic. In 2014–2015, I was engaged in a Public History project together with two colleagues.2 We focused our attention on a single emblematic place, the town of Sesto San Giovanni, and a specific time period, from the 1980s to the present. The original purpose was to create an archive of oral history about the aftermath of the industrial shutdown in Sesto. Our focus was originally the closing of the mills and factories in the city of Sesto since the 1980s, but it was progressively narrowed to the case of the Falck Steelworks plant, which shut down in the 1990s. In the course of those two years, we collected almost fifty audio- and videotaped interviews with ex-workers (blue and white collars), local trade union leaders and residents,3 but we interviewed middle and top managers as well. In particular, we met the Falck technical staff, industrial engineers and top HR executives, who oversaw both the layoffs and the social buffers during the mill closings. Their interviews were particularly valuable because they showed a peculiar perspective on the deindustralization process, which conflicts with the memory coming from other oral sources.4

Research Positioning, Research Questions In positioning our research, we drew on the growing scholarship regarding deindustrialization, with special attention to the recent social and cultural turn in historically informed studies of factory and mill closing.5

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As the anthropologist Kathryne Marie Dudley wrote at the beginning of the 90s: ‘The rust belt is not a static landscape, it is a cultural drama of communities in transition and people struggling to find a place for the past in the present.’6 Our aim was to study this struggle in Sesto San Giovanni; this meant studying not only what happened but also how the events have been remembered, interpreted and represented. This is why we chose an ethnographic focus and the research methodology of the in-depth interview, asking informants in Sesto how they experienced the deindustrialization processes. In the same perspective, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott7 suggested that the central challenge in studying deindustrialization is to describe ‘how a historical bound set of working conditions were experienced in terms of permanence in daily life, up to the closings; how – since then – people account for the destruction of an economic and social order that seemed so rooted and pervasive; in what sense the effects of deindustrialization were more disorienting than overtly political, more elusive than tangible’. We identified our research questions on the basis of this literature: how do people remember both industrial work and its loss? How do they remember the aftermath of closing? What strategies and media do people use to frame and comment on the past? How do they use the history of the deindustrialization to understand the present and to think about the future? We did not make any attempt to determine whether the steel plants in Sesto San Giovanni should have been closed or not. Nevertheless, we tried to deconstruct the predominant ‘inevitability discourse’, keeping in mind what Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison pointed out at the beginning of the 1980s: ‘Deindustrialization does not just happen. Conscious decisions have to be made by corporate managers to move a factory from a location to another, to buy up a growing concern, to dispose of one, to shut down a facility’.8

Sesto San Giovanni: Context and Relevance of the Case Study We believe that what took place in Sesto San Giovanni was not (and is not) restricted to this area but was part of a worldwide economic and social shakedown. In other words, we believe that the case of Sesto San Giovanni has the potential not only to shed light on the meaning and the effects of industrial loss in a single site but also capture a broader history of deindustrialization and its aftermath. Because deindustrialization is a lasting phenomenon and an ongoing process, we aimed at exploring some of its long-term and cultural legacies in Italy.

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Regarding its location, Sesto is in a strategic position within the metropolitan area of Milan, just on the Northern Beltway; indeed, the Latin name Sesto means ‘at the sixth mile from the main centre’. Today, Sesto has a population of eighty thousand; it used to be less than ten thousand at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it peaked at one hundred thousand at the end of the 1970s. It should be kept in mind that the city of Milan is the second largest Italian city by population in Italy (1,300,000 inhabitants), but the population of the Metropolitan area of Milan, to which Sesto San Giovanni belongs, is the largest in Italy (3,900,000 inhabitants) and the third largest in Europe (after London and Paris, not considering the Ruhr region), with a per capita income almost twice the Italian average (the unemployment rate is half the national rate).9 Sesto San Giovanni also has an important industrial and political history, which covers almost the entire twentieth century.10 Between 1903 and 1919, four big companies moved to Sesto because of its proximity to Milan and cheap property: Breda, a specialist in railway engine manufacturing; Ercole Marelli, a manufacturer of large power-generating engines; Falck, an iron- and steelmaker that opened four plants in the city and then became one of Italy’s leading industrial companies; and, finally, Magneti Marelli (a joint venture between Ercole Marelli and FIAT), which made magnetos and equipment for the automotive industry. Thus, Sesto evolved into much more than a company town, or a monoproductive city, becoming an industrial hub. In the 1950s, Sesto, a town of forty-five thousand inhabitants, could boast over thirty-five thousand jobs in these heavy industries. During the economic boom, Sesto reached its maximum development, becoming the fifth largest Italian industrial centre. Afterwards, deep restructuring and production transformation were made in the steel, mechanical and engineering sectors, with the manufacturing of half-products or products for durable and mass goods. Decline accelerated in the 70s with the closing of one of the four Falck mills in 1976, followed by the closing of Ercole Marelli in the 80s, the crisis of the iron and steel sector, the bankruptcy of Breda, up to the last casting of the last Falck mill, in December 1994. From the 80s onwards, after a severe structural and occupational crisis, the main factories that had made industrial history in Sesto shut down. Unemployment rose from negligible levels to over 10 per cent. The same changes in the competitive position of steel production that affected the Ruhr and other heavy industries in Western Europe11 also had an impact on Sesto and especially on Falck.12 In their seminal book The Deindustrialization of America published in 1982, Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison foresaw that ‘despite the high personal costs of disinvestment pictured here, the price paid by workers, their

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families and their communities is likely to be much higher in the future’. Indeed, even in Sesto, the epidemic of closings and the downward pressure on wages in the 80s and the 90s reverberated throughout the economy and the whole society for more than twenty years afterwards. Sesto San Giovanni has experienced deindustrialization but not a full post-industrial transformation: today Sesto is one of the places in the Europe where deindustrialization is most visible, but it has not become a postindustrial space: it is rather in a slow process of moving from an industrial past towards a still uncertain future. Where there once was the so-called ‘City of Factories’13 there is now large empty spaces: the Falck area in particular is still an empty wasteland yet to be transformed, but it is also the object of one of Europe’s most important redevelopment projects of a former industrial space and a huge real estate deal in Italy.14 For the role the city played during the Resistance, Sesto was awarded the Gold Medal for the Resistance to Nazi fascism – and for its working-class culture, for its left-wing tradition and for a union density that reached 90 per cent after the WWII, Sesto San Giovanni gained the title of ‘the Italian Stalingrad’15. However, at the moment, Sesto is no more than Milan’s rust belt, a place caught up in the middle of an ‘uncertain transition’.16

The Restructuring at Falck and the Role of Occupational Psychology The closing of the Falck steel mills epitomizes the general changes that affected the steel industry in Europe and Italy during the 1990s. The restructuring, however, had already started during the previous decades. At the beginning of the 1970s, Falck was still the largest private steel company in Italy; it produced 1.25 million tons of steel per year – about 8 per cent of the whole domestic production. Of the 35,000 people who had a job in the heavy industry located in Sesto, 9,000 worked at Falck plants: more than half of the total company workforce on a national basis.17 The first and second oil crises that characterized the decade, however, led the company to carry out its first restructuring and workforce requalification, followed by the transfer of its entire electrical sector to a subsidiary in 1983. It was in the 1990s that the restructuring process gained momentum, mainly because of the introduction of innovations both in products and processes in steel making and because of the changing international economic landscape: the decade was marked by the entry of important new players from developing countries in the steel market. Therefore, in 1993–1994 the Falck management made some crucial strategic choices: the presence of the company in the steel sector was significantly reduced; the workforce was cut;

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and the company was repositioned in the production of energy from renewable sources. And while the Falck workforce in Italy had peaked at 15,00018 at the end of the 1960s, nowadays the group has 250 employees.19 In the course of the 1990s, the European Commission drafted a normative framework for the last wave of closures, requiring a 30 million ton reduction in total steel production and setting aside funds and incentives for restructuring. The first Berlusconi government adopted the EC measure by passing a law in 1994 (act n° 481/1994) that provided additional financial resources for the dismantling of domestic steel factories.20 This is the context in which, in May 1993, the first agreement between the Falck Steelworks, trade unions and the city council of Sesto was signed. The agreement, however, generically mentions the restructuring of the steel industry in Sesto and stresses the intention to relocate about 1,000 workers (out of the 3,800 Falck employees in Italy). It is, in fact, an agreement still informed by a robust welfare framework, and it provides for so-called social benefits as a shock absorber for redundant workers.21 In order to carry on with the downsizing, the Falck company hired a new CEO in 1989 and new Human Resources executives from outside. Drawing on the then recently renewed legal framework concerning active labour market policies,22 the new HR executives devised in turn an innovative measure: a corporate service of collective outplacement23 to buffer the blow for redundant workers, helping them improve their employability by developing their skills and qualification to better cope with the change ahead. This service was neutrally called the ‘Falck Observatory’, and it was presented as consistent with a specific corporate culture. To that purpose, the Observatory was counselled by Cesare Kaneklin – the then chair of Occupational Psychology at Catholic University in Milan – along with his research assistants and some external consultants. Having received funds from the European Commission for an equivalent of 23 million euros in today’s money,24 the Observatory did not lack resources to deploy. The Observatory started to work after the signing of the first agreement with the trade unions in 1993, and it was extended by a second agreement in January 1996, following the ‘final dismantling’ of the steelworks. The Observatory consisted of ten members: two corporate members, reporting to the HR direction; three union delegates; and five representatives of the workers. It had two main goals: on the one hand, workers had the opportunity to receive motivational counselling and training and do internships to acquire new skills and improve their own employability; on the other hand, the Observatory collected information about the job demand in the Northern Milan area and spread information to the local companies. The Observatory staff had to combine relational skills (towards Falck steelworkers), a sound understanding of labour organization and a consul-

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tancy attitude (towards other companies that, for instance, needed to be informed about the tax incentives they would get). In a word, the Observatory saw its work as ‘matchmaking’. The Observatory contacted directly over 250 companies and followed the outplacement of each worker for a period of several months, during which Falck continued to pay the worker’s salary and the receiving company had no obligation to retain the worker. Between 1993 and 1999, this programme created new jobs for 970 former Falck workers. As part of our oral history project conducted in 2014–2015, we also interviewed the HR top executives who were working at Falck at the time of the closings and supervised the process, setting up the Observatory itself. They did not only explain to us in detail how the Observatory functioned but made available a few valuable documents produced by this office: three main reports, around 60–80 pages each, drafted by the research group coordinated by Cesare Kaneklin between 1994 and 1998 in cooperation with the HR staff.25 The most interesting of these reports is the one documenting the activity carried out in order to assess the ‘deprivation by labour’ experienced by the low-skilled and generic workers on redundancy schemes or in the re-employment process. The report tried to understand the changes that those experiences had triggered by investigating the redundant workers’ representation of both employment and joblessness; its theoretical framework was largely based on Serge Moscovici’s theory on ‘social representation’,26 introduced in Italy by psychologists of a social-cognitive background, such as Marco Depolo and Guido Sarchielli.27 Referring to the experience of being made redundant after the mill closings, in the 1990s researchers never mentioned the word ‘trauma’ in their reports, using the milder term ‘discomfort’ instead – which they defined as ‘a complex process, by “complex” meaning reflective, open to double-loop learning, influenced by variables of mutual interaction where lived experience depends largely on the resources the individual can use in order to cope with change’.28 At the time, however, the use of the word trauma – understood as ‘affective discontinuity’ and applied to the combined effects of longterm work and stability in contrast with the final experience of the phasing out of the industry as it is nowadays29 – was as yet unknown to the people involved in the process of factory closings and deindustrialization. This led us to ask one of the psychologists involved in the activity of the Falck Observatory to comment on this linguistic choice: The word ‘trauma’, in connection to discontinuity, was not very popular at the time; the word trauma was mainly used in connection with extreme shocking events. The expression work ‘discomfort’ had a wider use: it affected those who had already lost their job, those who were losing it, those who thought they were the next in line to lose it. The main problem for us was to outline a con-

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text that didn’t have any clear boundaries; it wasn’t a status that could be defined socially. There was also another advantage in using ‘discomfort’ – because the word included the wait, the anticipation of a damaging event, both on a social and on a personal level. The word ‘discomfort’ then, could refer to different categories of people: people who were still working, people who would never work again, people who might have found another job – all these people shared a common experience of discomfort.30

An important factor in the outplacement programme promoted by the Falck Observatory was the fact that about 80 per cent of companies receiving Falck workers were small or medium-sized, and only 20 per cent were large companies. In most cases, no company hired more than one or two people coming from Falck, with only a few exceptions: a single state-owned enterprise such as the National Railways (Ferrovie dello Stato) hired 100 workers; AMSA – the waste collection company of the city of Milan – hired 75 workers; the Municipality of Sesto city hired 9 workers. The Observatory played a marginal role in relocating high-skilled workers, whose highly marketable competences allowed them to find new occupations by themselves; however, it proved crucial for older (45 and over) and low-skilled workers. These older and low-skilled workers were the main focus of the Observatory and the reason for its cooperation with local government and unions in finding job opportunities. The research group of the Observatory decided to rely on unstructured interviews with male unskilled workers between 40 and 50 years old, married with children, living in Sesto or in nearby areas, who had been employed at Falck for a long time, who had been through the temporary lay-off with wage guarantee (‘cassa integrazione’) and who had been afterwards displaced from Falck and relocated to a small-sized company. The interviews aimed at eliciting anticipations, personal perceptions and experiences but also at inducing adjustments to their expectations. The research then walked a rough terrain: organization models at Falck – the starting point – were quite different from those adopted by the receiving company, and the move from a big company to a small one meant leaving behind a relatively good salary package and union protection and joining a work environment with a different culture, heavier pressure in terms of work and immediate checks on results. The reports, nevertheless, framed the displacement as an event in which the individual had an active role, in which the loss of a job was seen as a change of status but one of the many changes that are part of life and in which the stress is indeed on change and not on deprivation. The reports also insisted on paying attention to the resources that could be mobilized by the redundant worker, as well as to the elements of his/ her vulnerability. The factors that explained individual differences resulted

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from a complex combination: the commitment to one’s job, age, class, gender – men seemed to react worse – the length of the transition, the level of economic deprivation, the availability of welfare plans, the vulnerability to stress, the degree of self-esteem.31 The investigation documented that after the loss of one’s job at Falck the resources available to the worker were limited: lower wage, lower employment protection, loss of social relationships, one’s personal role put into question, lack of an established routine and inability to make good use of one’s free time. Losing a job is, in this sense, a threat to self-realization, but it does not provoke a single type of reaction. ‘Discomfort’ is considered only one of the possible effects. And coping strategies depend on a range of alternative resources: social, psychological and material. The bigger the inventory of strategies, the higher the possibility of reaching a new balance in terms of wage, social relationships and usage of time. As for the word ‘trauma’, finally, even though it was never used by researchers who drafted the Falck Observatory Reports during the 90s, it was often used in connection with the redundancy scheme by many of the interviewees. And even if the experience of change opened up possibilities that were judged favourably – the opportunity to dedicate more attention to one’s family, or to make some money on the side with informal occupations – reactions remained negative. Among these we found a sense of worthlessness, boredom, social isolation and, most of all, uncertainty: in fact, according to the 1990s informants, the worst moment was just before the beginning of the paid temporary redundancy, as the closure of the steel mills began to loom; when there was still work to do, but it was perfectly clear that the plants would be dismantled in the near future – the computers would start to be unplugged. Bits of information came scattered from different sources (from the company, the media or the union), and there was the feeling of being on unstable ground, which one of the workers articulated in this way: ‘we went along with the tide, the first wave passed, you waited for the following one, it was like a Russian roulette, not as ferocious, but quite brutal’.32 The most symbolic moment, on the other hand, was the closure of the last furnace: ‘I was there when the last furnace was shut. It was quite an experience . . . When everything was extinguished, some were celebrating, they jumped and shouted, others just broke into tears.’33 Job losses and the use of the adjective ‘traumatic’ by the workers seems bitter in light of previous idealization of Falck as a safe place, a protected and protective world. This aspect surfaces clearly in the words of a training professional of that time: It was 1996. For me it was the first experience of requalification of Falck redundancies. They were the most difficult to relocate. They were psychologically in tatters. I remember it very well. It was the thing I remember most from those training courses. They spoke about the mill as though it was a continuation

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of their home. The mill was their whole world. They spoke as if they wanted to say ‘there used to be everything in here’. Here was the problem: their total identification with the company, their company loyalty, because identification gave them a measure of strength. They thought they had completely lost it.34

This closely reminded us of what Alice Mah recently concluded in a comparative research on industrial ruination and urban decline: ‘research suggests that neither mobility nor fixity creates a sense of loss, but that limited choice – based both on economic structures and on conflicted feelings of place attachment and despair over economic realities of industrial decline – does.’35

An Observatory on Job Insecurity I personally believe that the three Observatory Reports drafted during the 90s can help our general interpretation of the Falck shutdown through the oral histories we collected twenty years afterwards – providing us with at least the ‘flavour’ of a longitudinal enquiry – and can link our interpretation to recent deindustrialization studies, in particular to the recent effort of cooperation between scholars in deindustrialization studies and social psychology.36 The Falck Observatory records offered to our research the manifold chance to understand the activity of this service, which in Italy was quite an unique experiment, and to study the role the Observatory played as a moderator of the negative effects of job insecurity for Falck workers.37 Moreover, those records gave us some clues about when and how occupational psychology in Italy got in touch with the international research on job insecurity, a field of investigation independent from the research on job loss, which was rapidly growing and becoming mainstream in North America and Northern Europe. Job insecurity began to capture the attention of international scholars during the 80s, when in the US millions of jobs in heavy industry were lost and when the nature of work began to change in all industrial countries. Since then, the notion of job insecurity, an element pertaining both to the job itself and the individual, has slowly emerged as an important social phenomenon and an intellectual construct, with a multidimensional definition and a specific characterization as a perceptual and a subjective phenomenon38. Job insecurity began to be recognized as one of the biggest ‘stressors’ in employment situations, a stressor with several potential outcomes on both individual and organizational attitudes, including short or long reactions that affect physical and mental health and work-related behaviour.39 The psychologists commissioned by Falck to carry out their research at the time were not yet fully aware of the development their discipline was

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undergoing in the meantime in the US and Northern Europe: until 1995, the international literature on job insecurity only listed a few contributions. It increased significantly only after the end of the decade; since then, it has slowly grown as an extensive body of research. The same kind of elaboration took several years in Italy and led to the first scientific publications in the 00s.40 As we already underlined, during the early 90s, the psychologists studying the Falck case still concentrated on the category of social representation, drawing on Moscovici, but they were also inspired by the first Italian translation of the research on the unemployed workers in the Austrian city of Marienthal, conducted by Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel under the direction of Paul Lazersfeld in 1931–1932. Promoted by the department of psychology of the University of Vienna, and published as a book in Germany in 1933, Die Arbeitlosen von Marienthal, the research built on a wide collection of biographies and testimonies of the Great Depression. It was the first systematic study on unemployment and the multidimensional effects of unemployment, and its investigation of ordinary people was innovative. The book was translated into English for the first time in 1971 – depressingly timely, stated a reviewer in the British Journal of Sociology in 1972 – French in 1981, and Italian in 1986, becoming a reference point for scholars studying unemployment and work discomfort: ‘because it showed how the effects of job loss could last for years and how the damage caused could be so structural and deep to affect the reshaping of everyday life in the collective representations of the following decades’.41 And since the geopolitical and technological changes marking the end of the century confirm the topicality of this concept, while the level of stress in the job market is constantly growing, the employment/unemployment polarity is outdated, and work itself is characterized by uncertainty and insecurity, not just by its presence or its absence. Since then, the psychologists involved in Falck have gradually began to shift towards new key words and concepts; they have understood that ‘job insecurity’ refers to the anticipation of a stressful and involuntary event well beyond a general concern over future employment and that prolonged uncertainty inherent to job insecurity will make it more difficult for the individual to employ effective coping strategies. As the Swedish occupation psychologist Magnus Sverke stated: ‘it may have as detrimental consequences as job loss itself: [because] anticipation of a stressful event represents an equally important, or perhaps even greater, source of anxiety than the actual event’.42 Moreover, even in the Falck downsizing, organizational psychologists recognized that many variables act as a buffer against the negative effects of job insecurity: personality dispositions, such as locus of control, individual need for security, degree of neuroticism and centrality of work;43 or demo-

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graphic factors, such as age or family situation;44 and more important ‘moderators’ as well, such as the role played by unions, local governments and by the company itself through work support but also by explaining why the lay-offs occurred and how they were implemented.45 The Falck Observatory may be deemed a ‘moderator’ that proved effective. The Observatory may also be useful to investigate the consequences of job insecurity both on those who lost their job and on the few ‘survivors’ – workers who remained in the company after the lay-offs had taken place, which was 8 per cent of the total Falck workforce in 1995.46 As mentioned before, the Observatory operated by carefully examining the local demand for labour (it managed to establish more than 250 contacts in the area), as well as by providing outplacement counselling and individualized training. The purpose of the Observatory was not only to lower the level of perceived job insecurity but also reduce the actual distress for workers between the ages of 40 and 50 (older workers had access to an early retirement scheme) in providing benefits and insurance well beyond the date of severance. With respect to survivors, job insecurity has been studied by adapting some general principles of (procedural) justice theory to the lay-off situation and focusing on justice issues and fairness-related questions. Indeed, both those laid off and the survivors may wonder whether redundancies were justified; whether managers had given clear accounts and explanations of the reasons underlying their decision and whether they had considered alternative measures; and whether the lay-offs were consistent with the corporate culture examined.47 The last couple of questions are particularly crucial in the case of Falck, a company with a long paternalistic tradition in human resource management, a company that had always put a strong emphasis on employment security as an integral part of the informal organization (many interviewees told us they were Falck workers but also sons or daughters of former Falck workers) and where employment security – together with a high salary and allowances for shift work – was perceived as part of an implicit ‘psychological contract’ between employer and employees.48 Falck was definitely a paternalistic company that had created schools, that had created homes (the Falck Village) and all the rest. And so the firm was mentally convinced that it had an important social function. At a certain point, the Falck family was told ‘but all that stuff, it’s paternalism, it’s old capitalism’. This could only have produced a negative effect on the overall attitude of the Falck family. It seems to me to be quite a reasonable reaction: all sorts of horrible things were said to them. . . . One of the most negative impacts on Falck that led to the end of the Falck industry was that the connection between ownership, top management and middle managers that had been the backbone of Falck had come undone. (Fran-

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cesco Benvenuti, Head of Public Relations, interviewed by Roberta Garruccio and Sara Zanisi, Crema 14 march 2015)

The strength of that corporate culture – endorsed by the Falck Family across generations49 was crucially put to the test in the effort made by the Falck Observatory; defending the reputation of that culture proved critical in the phase of downsizing and repositioning of the Falck group in a different economic sector. During this activity, the Falck Observatory walked a narrow line between support and manipulation, and the workers involved did not always trust the group of psychologists coming from the Catholic University, who were hired by the company as a truly credible neutral third party.50

The Managerial Narrative of the Shutdown In job insecurity literature, very few case studies have dealt with the issue of corporate support as a moderator within a downsizing context: this is one further reason to examine the Falck Observatory case. In job insecurity literature, by contrast, a lot of consideration has been devoted to executives and managerial narratives. But this is not true for deindustrialization studies, where little attention has generally been paid to this particular perspective.51 In Falck, during the 90s, the cuts hit managerial levels as well. In our oral history interviews conducted in 2014–2015 with former Falck employees, we grasped the opportunity to examine not only the workers’ reaction but also the managers’ reaction to the shutdown. Though indirectly, it was the reading of the Observatory records that led us to include Falck managers’ narratives in our interpretation: we came across job insecurity literature because of the study of the workers’ reaction collected in the Falck Observatory reports, and that also shed light on the reactions of senior middle managers, and because we elicited middle managers’ narratives, we decided to collect also those of the new top HR managers. Therefore, one of the main findings in our research has been that the most visible tension in the sense-making and memory of the abandonment of the steelworks was the one between executives: on one side, senior middle managers with a long job tenure at Falck who had been made redundant in the 90s; on the other side, the new cohort of HR executives, who managed the closings: these executives had just arrived at Falck, and many came from large companies that had previously been restructured, so their reputation was that of being ‘hatchet men’. The managerial narrative was in fact an alternative version of the story, or rather a narrative of a different experience of job insecurity, different from the workers’ experience, different from the union leaders’ narratives and most of all ‘dissonant’ from the strong ‘inevitability’ narrative expressed by

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the HR officials, who were proud of the Falck Observatory and its activity and who claimed that ‘nobody in Falck was left alone’. The arrival of the new CEO in Falck in 1989 was the sign that things had changed. He didn’t have anything to do with steel; he didn’t even know how steel was made – but he knew what he wanted, he had a clear vision of the direction we had to take and what to do in order to take new managers on board, executives with the highest ranking position reporting to him. This phase lasted about four or five years.52

Several features of the senior managers’ narratives are worth noting. And we can illustrate each feature with an example taken from our interviews. The first of these features is the perception of a growing and deliberate distancing of the top managers from the lower hierarchical level, marked by the strategic minimizing of personal contacts: It was as though nobody knew who you were, you were the same as any other, the fact that you had worked your ass off for 25 years and someone else had arrived the day before didn’t make any difference to the new CEO.53

Even if managers recognize today that the word ‘mobbing’ had not been even invented at the time the facts occurred, this new attitude fed the senior managers’ awareness of being the object of abusive measures before being fired, and it was made explicit with the brutal style of their abrupt dismissal: My relationship with the new top management was total conflict. In our case, it was ‘mobbing’. Yes, the word mobbing came later, but it describes perfectly what was happening then.54 I was on a trip in Japan with some colleagues; one of my co-workers phoned me from Sesto and said: ‘Gianni (my name is Gianni), what have you done?!?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You know, a person presented himself here in our office, saying he is the new boss’. I freaked out . . . There are many ways of shutting down, but that chosen by the new CEO was to erase the senior management with what appeared to me to be brutal, gross and absurd behaviour. I have personally paid a big price for this experience.55

This last point also shows that refusing to recognize the perception of job insecurity among executives could exacerbate existing problems and resistance to change because the job insecurity climate affects physical and mental health, professional opportunities and personal lives (anxiety, depression, heart conditions, relationship problems etc.). In those years, I developed heart trouble. I don’t know whether it happened by chance, whether I would have got sick anyway; the thing is, in those very same years, when this new boss arrived, between 1990 and 1993, I didn’t feel well at all, I suffered a lot . . . I have personally paid a big price for this experience. I felt bad, because I was fifty, and five people in my family depended on my support. I kept asking myself: ‘If they kick me out of here, where can I go? Where? . . . It was a personal tragedy for me . . . I also suffered from heart failure.56

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I would like to borrow two concepts from job insecurity literature in order to underline two further points that make the Falck case relevant. The reactions of the senior managers reveal the most acute perception of a ‘psychological contract breach’,57 in other words, the perception of broken promises, the perception of an unmet obligation or an unfulfilled implicit promise on the part of the employer. Old managers saw all their perceived safeguards against job loss crumbling: seniority, professional capabilities, work experience and competence, indispensability to the company, upstairs connections, popularity among colleagues, health and family solidity. After 1990, senior Falck managers, like me, were marginalized – their history didn’t count anymore. . . . When the new CEO arrived, we were written off; our previous experience didn’t count any more.58 As soon as he arrived, the new chief of personnel asked my opinion about a line foreman, and I told him ‘Look, I find him a very competent person, I have known him for years, he is very capable, someone that knows his job’; and, somewhat pleased, the chief of personnel replied ‘But are you really sure that competence is important?’ At that point, I realized that something was falling to pieces.59 I had joined Falck as a boy. I wanted to get on well with everybody – colleagues, bosses, contractors, workers. It wasn’t me who claimed ‘I was a “good one”’, it was the others who said it. Anyway, there comes this new guy [the new CEO], and totally out of the blue he demoted me.60

During our in-depth interviews, senior Falck managers also revealed the apprehension caused by what they interpreted as growing ‘organizational cynicism’. Senior Falck managers, indeed, blamed the new top management for such cynicism, referring in particular to their inclination to distance themselves from people who would be made redundant and more generally accusing them of violating fundamental expectations regarding trust and honesty in the organization and of the loop effect that this attitude generated: When a new CEO arrived in 1989 – he definitely was a big deal in terms of managerial training – he truly believed it possible to reverse the crisis, but instead, he created a gap between himself and the Falck management, which was very negative because in the end there was no longer an authoritative chain of command: people no longer felt like obeying; there was a lack of legitimacy and there was a lack of leadership . . . The new HR managers – hired by the new CEO – weren’t having a good influence either, because they were going around saying that senior managers didn’t know how to do their job. Thus, with the coming of the new top managers and consultants from outside the company, Falck became a house of lies: nobody was telling their boss how things really were, deception everywhere. It was a defensive attitude, thus many things were kept hidden. A reaction, a sort of inner conviction prevailed, something like ‘these new guys don’t know a thing about the company, don’t know a thing about the steel industry, they come here blabbing and they don’t really want to save the company’.61

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We believe that this is not mere anecdotal evidence and that it is less idiosyncratic than it may appear at first sight. During the 90s, managerial studies started paying closer attention to the concept of organizational cynicism, which had developed since the end of the 80s. The multidisciplinary literature available on this issue has underlined that organizational cynicism seems to be particularly engendered by corporate change and defines it as ‘a negative attitude toward one’s employing organization, comprising three dimensions: (1) a belief that the organization lacks integrity; (2) negative affect toward the organization; (3) tendencies to disparaging and critical behaviours that are consistent with this belief and affect’.62 During the 90s, it should be noted that occupation psychology in Italy was just beginning to study the leadership crisis in the contemporary economic transformations.63 Later, occupational psychology and organizational studies dedicated greater attention to the fact that, because of the decline of manufacturing, the increasing weight of finance and the emergence of new forms of enterprise and managerial models were shifting from a technocratic to a propriety form.64 Falck managers also were experiencing change, with a new generation of executives who apparently stopped seeing themselves as neutral brokers among different stakeholders and between capital and work and turned instead into a special class of shareholders. An interesting example of these dynamics may be found in the words of the head of the HR direction, who arrived at Falck together with the new CEO: his words recall the fierce discussion that was going on in the Falck family regarding reorganization, diversification65 and the exit of the company from the steel sector, but, most of all, they underline the general lack of cohesion at the executive level. People always resist change; people cling to everything that means continuity. Here there was a fault line in the ownership: Alberto Falck talked about finance and his cousin Giorgio Falck talked about production, but no one talked about business!66

Indeed, in the period in question, corporate compensation and incentive practices also changed, and compensation gaps between the top executive officers and the other members of the senior management widened: ‘The new managers that were hired to replace those who were leaving Falck received twice the salary, twice the average of our salary, and that annoyed us, annoyed us really bad.’67 The Falck case well exemplifies a general trend in big business under the pressure of globalization: since job insecurity has become a major component of the work experience, the implications for the theory and practice of career choice, recruitment, selection, training, job design, motivation and reward systems, management development and employment discipline have been many and relevant.

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I believe that the Falck case may help us see some issues of general relevance in a clearer way. In their experience of job insecurity, facing the closing of steel production, long-tenured Falck managers surely had more personal resources compared to Falck workers; higher human capital, for instance, and in all likelihood more financial resources. However, they also had less or no access to social buffers, and they still kept stronger expectations about their own career and upward mobility. I had signed a letter of resignation, but I didn’t have a new job. I was 47, I had a high salary, a high position, a son attending University, a daughter in high school, financial commitments. They were really tough moments.68

At the same time, in the transition, they experienced unemployment (even if temporary) and a downward career trajectory (in order to find a new job, many of them often began working outside their own field of expertise) in a social vacuum. As the anthropologist Katherine S. Newman ironically put it, referring to the deindustrialization process that had already begun in the US, the case of rejected and displaced executives ‘is hardly a cause for tears [and gets] little public comprehension’.69 This statement echoes what one of the steel engineers we interviewed – a high-level executive with a good salary and several people that reported to him – told us: ‘this is the first time I’m telling this story. In twenty years, nobody has ever asked me.’70

Conclusions I would like to conclude with one of the most quoted sentences in deindustrialization studies: ‘What has been labeled deindustrialization in the intense political heat of the late 70s and early 80s turned out to be: a more socially complicated, historically deep, geographically diverse, politically perplexing phenomenon that previously thought.’71 Indeed, our research also gave us an insight into the phenomenon of the squeezed middle class, which appeared in Europe later than in the US but which highlighted a similar level of political mistrust, dissatisfaction and resentment as a consequence of the polarization/ hollowing out of the labour market.72 From the 80s, an acute fear of falling was experienced by the American middle class,73 in particular by the middle class composed of people with a university degree and other higher education credentials and employed in managerial positions in the manufacturing industry. In Italy during the 90s, this perception of losing control over many social processes resulted in the establishment of ‘ceto medio’, better known as the middle classes,74 and it has only begun to be addressed by scholarly research in our country.

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By way of conclusion, I would like to come back to the title of this chapter and highlight the purpose of my contribution, which is to ask why and how the experience and sense-making of job insecurity can also be a kind of dissonant heritage. I believe that our research reinforces some of the findings of deindustrialization studies stating that the true significance and the cultural meaning of deindustrialization become apparent with time.75 Those studies agree that deindustrialization is transformative on a cultural as well as material level, being not a neutral process but a political one. And because not everyone bears the scars of deindustrialization, since deindustrialization creates winners and losers, the recent scholarship also highlights that the way people experience deindustrialization is multilayered, revealing emerging tensions on the meaning and the memory of this process and showing an ongoing negotiation over this meaning and its changing nature over time. Our research on Sesto San Giovanni allowed us to explore these kinds of fractures too, in an original and unusual perspective. We have known since the 90s that there is profound disagreement over the nature and the meaning of deindustrialization, what Kathryn Marie Dudley in 1994, quoting Clifford Geertz, would have called a ‘politics of meaning’, ‘a struggle for the real’, a cultural conflict that is ‘the attempt to impose upon the world a particular conception of how things at the bottom are and how men are therefore obliged to act’.76 Laurajane Smith, who introduced the concept of dissonant heritage, stated: ‘Heritage involves acts or remembering . . . also in embodying that remembering’ (and) provides meaning,77 adding: All heritage is uncomfortable to someone . . . also because heritage has the power to legitimize someone’s sense of place and thus their social and cultural experiences and memories. . . . Dissonance is inherently created when something takes on the status of heritage. This is a vital point because it not only draws our attention to the multi-vocality, it also locates this observation in a political context. . . . By politics, I simply mean that some groups, individuals or communities will have a greater ability to have their value and meanings taken up and legitimized than others, and power both moulds and is moulded by this process.78

Roberta Garruccio is Assistant Professor in Economic History at the Department of Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication, University of Milan. Her interests focus on business history, history of industry and labour history. Over the last decade, she has been practising oral history, collecting several oral archives and authoring and editing related publications. She is now working in the field of deindustrialization studies. Her more recent publications are: ‘Chiedi alla ruggine: Studi e storiografia della deindustrializzazione’ (Meridiana, n. 85, 2016); ‘The Commodification of

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Loss: Advertising and the Rhetorical Exploitation of Post-Industrial Narratives as Myth-Reinforcing Symbols in Crisis-Ridden America’ (with Paola Catenaccio), in B. Mottura, L. Osti (eds), Media and Politics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017); ‘La rivoluzione deindustriale’ (with Gilda Zazzara, in Passato e Presente, n. 105, 2018).

Notes 1. Also taken from Smith, Uses of Heritage. 2. My two colleagues are Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, who were both holding a temporary research position in my department at that time. Our research project was funded by the Lombardy Region, and we worked in partnership with a local historical foundation – ISEC, Institute for Contemporary History – and with an independent association for ethnographic research – AVoce. 3. Our interviewees were mostly male workers, but we also managed to include a number of female as well as younger workers, and we also interviewed children of displaced workers. 4. This oral archive has been completed and saved, and it is now professionally maintained by the ISEC Foundation. From our interviews, video recorded, we made a 45 minute documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcF1GY0DBlY&vl=en). 5. Van der Linden and Altena, ‘Deindustrialization: Social, Cultural and Political Aspects’; High and Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization; Strangleman, Linkon and Rhodes, ‘Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class and Memory’. 6. Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs New Lives in Postindustrial America, 6. 7. Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins: The Cultural Meanings of Deindustrialization, 4. 8. Bluestone and Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America, 6. 9. Milanosesto [printed confidential presentation of the Falck area last regeneration project]. 10. Varini, L’opera condivisa, La città delle fabbriche, Sesto San Giovanni (1903–1952): L’industria; Tedeschi and Trezzi, L’opera condivisa, La città delle fabbriche, Sesto San Giovanni (1903–1952): La società; Suffia, Oltre la grande dimensione: Le ‘altre’ imprese di Sesto San giovanni nel XX secolo. 11. Kirk, Contrepois and Jefferys, Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions: Perspectives on the Past and Present; Wicke, Berger and Golombek, Industrial Heritage and Regional Identities. 12. OECD, ‘Industrial Restructuring and Enterprise Development’; James, Family Capitalism: Wendels, Haniels, Falcks and the Continental European Model. 13. Borgomaneri and Petrillo, La città delle fabbriche: Sesto San Giovanni 1980–1945. 14. Moro, Ex Area Falck. 15. Valota, Streikertransport: La deportazione politica nell’area industriale di Sesto San Giovanni 1943–1945. 16. I am borrowing the expression from Michael Burawoy and Katheryne Vardery, Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in Postsocialist World. 17. IRES (Istituto di ricerche economiche e sociali), ‘Il processo di riconversione della Società Anonima Acciaierie e Ferriere Lombarde Falck’. 18. Ibid. 19. It should not be neglected that Falck still exists as an industrial concern: Falck is now a group of over 60 medium-sized companies, and it keeps its headquarters in Sesto (https:// www.falckrenewables.eu). The main focus of today’s company on energy production is not accidental: since its origins at the beginning of the twentieth century, Falck has always boasted

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large-scale hydro-electricity production, which guaranteed power supply to its iron and steel factories. See James, Family Capitalism. 20. IRES, ‘Il processo’. 21. Ibid. 22. Zucchetti, et al., Politiche del lavoro e dimensione locale. 23. Petrella, Outplacement collettivo. 24. IRES, ‘Il processo’. 25. We received a xeroxed copy of the three reports from one of our interviewees, Alberto Frizzi, the HR executive who set up the Falck Observatory at the beginning of the 90s. Alberto Frizzi also introduced us to Riccardo Zuffo, who, at the time, had been actively collaborating with Cesare Kaneklin and the Department of Psychology at Catholic University in Milan. On behalf of the Falck Observatory, Zuffo – who would later become associate professor in Organizational Psychology – between 1994 and 1998, tutored the research group coordinated by Kaneklin, reporting to Falck HR Direction. The following written reports – which are mimeos without the name of the authors – were respectively titled: ‘Rapporto sugli atteggiamenti dei manager e degli imprenditori nei confronti dei lavoratori in difficoltà lavorativa’, 1995; ‘Disagio lavorativo: il caso Falck’, 1996–1997; ‘Gestire il ricollocamento: Le peculiarità dell’Osservatorio Falck (esperienza pratica guidata, con Oriana Cecchini, Paola Favarano, Edoardo Lozza, Giovanna Scardilli)’, 1997–1998. The three reports are now preserved in the ISEC Foundation archive. 26. Moscovici, ‘The Phenomenon of Social Representations’, 39–69. 27. Depolo and Sarchielli, Psicologia della disoccupazione. 28. Falck Observatory, report: ‘Disagio lavorativo: il caso Falck’. 29. Walkerdine and Jiminez, Gender, Work, and Community after Deindustrialization: A Psychosocial Approach to Affect. 30. Giorgio Zuffo, organizational psychologist (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Roberta Garruccio, Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 12 May 2015). 31. Falck Observatory, Report: ‘Gestire il ricollocamento: Le peculiarità dell’Osservatorio Falck’; Depolo and Sarchielli, Psicologia della disoccupazione; Warr, Work, Unemployment and Mental Health. 32. Falck Observatory, Report: ‘Disagio lavorativo: il caso Falck’, 48. 33. Falck Observatory, Report: ‘Disagio lavorativo: il caso Falck’, 49. 34. Maria Balena, trainer for Falck employees in the 1990s (interviewed in Sesto San Giovann, by Sara Roncaglia, 5 May 2015). 35. Mah, Industrial Ruination, Community and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline, 153. 36. Walkerdine and Jiminez, Gender, Work, and Community After Deindustrialization. 37. Falck Observatory, report: ‘Gestire il ricollocamento: Le peculiarità dell’Osservatorio Falck’. 38. Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt, ‘Job Insecurity: Toward Conceptual Clarity’, 438–48. 39. Hartley et al., Job Insecurity: Coping with Jobs at Risk. 40. Kaneklin and Zuffo, ‘Alle origini dello studio sulla Job Insecurity e sui Survivors: I modelli di Greenhalgh e Brockner’, 137–72; Kaneklin and Zuffo, ‘Spunti su Job Insecurity, crisi della leadership, neo-mercenarismo professionale’, 161–88. 41. Ibid., 161. 42. Sverke et al., ‘No Security: A Meta-analysis and Review of Job Insecurity and its Consequences’, 244. 43. Hartley et al., Job Insecurity: Coping with Jobs at Risk. 44. Warr, Work, Unemployment and Mental Health. 45. Brockner et al., ‘When it is Especially Important to Explain Why: Factors Affecting the Relationship between Managers’ Explanations of a Layoff and Survivors’ Reactions to Layoff’, 309–407.

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46. Riconversider-Federacciai, ‘Il caso Falck: cosa abbiamo appreso, contributo per il progetto europeo SECTOR (Shared Enhancement for Cooperation to Transform and Restructure)’. 47. Brockner, ‘Survivors’ Reactions to Layoffs’, 526–41; idem, ‘The Effects of Work Layoffs on Survivors: Research, Theory and Practice’, 213–55; idem, ‘Managing the Effect of Layoffs on Others’, 9–27; idem, ‘Scope of Justice in the Workplace’, 95–106; Wisenfeld, Brockner and Thibault, ‘Procedural Fairness, Managers’ Self Esteem, and Managerial Behaviour Following a Layoff’, 1–21. 48. Cullinane and Dundon, ‘The Psychological Contract: A Critical Review’, 113–29. 49. Gritti, ‘Una Comunità immaginata: Human Relations e Identità aziendale nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta’, 237–64. 50. Falck Observatory, report: ‘Disagio lavorativo: il caso Falck’. 51. A valuable exception is Newman, Falling from Grace: Donwoard Mobility in the Age of Affluence. 52. Francesco Veronesi, Head of Steel Strip Production Division (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Roberta Garruccio and Sara Roncaglia, 17 April 2015). 53. Ibid. 54. Francesco Ciampi, Plant Manager (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 5 December 2014). 55. Gianni Maddaloni, Head of Technology Division (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 12 January 2015). 56. Ibid. 57. Andersson and Bateman, ‘Cynicism at the Workplace: Some Causes and Effects’, 449–69; Johnson and O’Leary-Kelly, ‘The Effect of Psychological Contract Breach and Organizational Cynicism’, 627–47. 58. Francesco Veronesi, Head of Steel Strip Production Division (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Roberta Garruccio and Sara Roncaglia, 17 April 2015). 59. Francesco Benvenuti, Head of Public Relations (interviewed in Crema, by Roberta Garruccio and Sara Zanisi, 14 March 2015). 60. Gianni Maddaloni, Head of Technology Division (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 12 January 2015). 61. Francesco Benvenuti, Head of Public Relations (interviewed in Crema by Roberta Garruccio and Sara Zanisi, 14 march 2015). 62. Dean, Brandes and Dharvadkar, ‘Organizational Cynicism’, 341–52; Folger and Skarlicki, ‘When Tough Times Make Tough Bosses: Managerial Distancing as a Function of Layoff’, 79–87. 63. Fulchieri and Novara, Stress e Manager: Un riesame della letteratura e una ricerca sul campo. 64. Englander and Kaufman, ‘The End of Managerial Ideology: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Indifference’, 404–49. 65. James, Family Capitalism. 66. Angelo Perucconi, Head of HR Direction (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Roberta Garruccio and Sara Zanisi, 14 January 2015). 67. Gianni Maddaloni, Head of Technology Division (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 12 January 2015). 68. Francesco Ciampi, Plant Manager (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 5 December 2014). 69. Newman, Falling from Grace, 42. 70. Gianni Maddaloni, Head of Technology Division (interviewed in Sesto San Giovanni by Sara Roncaglia and Sara Zanisi, 12 January 2015). 71. Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins, 2. 72. Goos, Manning and Salomons, ‘Explaining Job Polarization in Europe: The Roles of Technology, Globalization and Institutions’, 58–63; Parker, The Squeezed Middle: The Pressure on Ordinary Workers in America and in Britain.

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73. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. 74. Sciarrone et al., La costruzione del ceto medio: Immagini sulla stampa e in politica; Bison, ‘Le classi medie: definizione, mobilità, declino nel caso italiano’, 155–83; Bagnasco, La questione del ceto medio: Un racconto del cambiamento sociale. 75. Cowie and Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins. 76. Dudley, The End of the Line, 160. 77. Smith, Uses of Heritage, 47–48. 78. Ibid., 81.

Bibliography Andersson, L.M., and T.S. Bateman. ‘Cynicism at the Workplace: Some Causes and Effects’. Journal of Organizational Behaviour 18 (1997), 449–69. Bagnasco, A. La questione del ceto medio: Un racconto del cambiamento sociale. Bologna: il Mulino, 2016. Bison, I. ‘Le classi medie: definizione, mobilità, declino nel caso italiano’. Società Mutamento Politica 7 (2013), 155–83. Bluestone, B., and B. Harrison. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982. Borgomaneri, L., and G. Petrillo. La città delle fabbriche: Sesto San giovanni 1880–1945. Milano: Istituto milanese per la storia della Resistenza e del movimento operaio, 1981. Brockner, J. ‘Survivors’ Reactions to Layoffs’. Administrative Science Quarterly 32 (1987), 526–41. ———. ‘The Effects of Work Layoffs on Survivors: Research, Theory and Practice’. Research in Organizational Behaviour 10 (1988), 213–55. ———. ‘Scope of Justice in the Workplace’. Journal of Social Issues 46(1) (1990), 95–106. ———. ‘When it is Especially Important to Explain Why: Factors Affecting the Relationship between Managers’ Explanations of a Layoff and Survivors’ Reactions to Layoff’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 26 (1990), 309–407. ———. ‘Managing the Effect of Layoffs on Others’. California Management Review (1992), 9–27. Burawoy, M., and K. Vardery. Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in Postsocialist World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Cowie, J., and J. Heathcott (eds). Beyond the Ruins: The Cultural Meanings of Deindustrialization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Cullinane, N., and T. Dundon, ‘The Psychological Contract: A Critical Review’. International Journal of Management Review 8 (2006), 113–29. Dean, J., P. Brandes and D. Dharvadkar. ‘Organizational Cynicism’. The Academy of Management Review 23(2) (1998), 341–52. Depolo, M., and G. Sarchielli. Psicologia della disoccupazione. Bologna: il Mulino, 1987. Dudley, K.M. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Ehrenreich, B. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York: Knopf, 1989. Englander, E., and A. Kaufman. ‘The End of Managerial Ideology: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Indifference’. Enterprise and Society 5(3) (2004), 404–49. Folger, R., and D.P. Skarlicki. ‘When Tough Times Make Tough Bosses: Managerial Distancing as a Function of Layoff’. Academy of Management Journal 41(1) (1998), 79–87. Fulchieri, M., and F. Novara. Stress e Manager: Un riesame della letteratura e una ricerca sul campo. Roma-Ivrea: Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, 1992. Goos, M., A. Manning and A. Salomons. ‘Explaining Job Polarization in Europe: The Roles of Technology, Globalization and Institutions’. American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 99(2) (2009), 58–63.

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Greenhalgh, L., and Z. Rosenblatt. ‘Job Insecurity: Toward Conceptual Clarity’. Academy of Management Review 9(3) (1984), 438–48. Gritti, A.U. ‘Una Comunità immaginata: Human Relations e Identità aziendale nell’Italia degli anni Cinquanta’. Italia Contemporanea 284 (2017), 237–64. Hartley, J. et al. (eds). Job Insecurity: Coping with Jobs at Risk. London: Sage, 1991. High, S., and D. Lewis. Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. IRES (Istituto di ricerche economiche e sociali). ‘Il processo di riconversione della Società Anonima Acciaierie e Ferriere Lombarde Falck, a cura di Stefano Palmieri’. Working Paper, June 17, 2013. James, H. Family Capitalism: Wendels, Haniels, Falcks and the Continental European Model. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Johnson, J., and A.M. O’Leary Kelly. ‘The Effect of Psychological Contract Breach and Organizational Cynicism’. Journal of Organizational Behaviour 24 (2003), 627–47. Kaneklin, C., and M.C. Isolabella. Immagini emergenti della leadership nelle organizzazioni. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1997. Kaneklin, C., and R.G. Zuffo. ‘Alle origini dello studio sulla Job Insecurity e sui Survivors: I modelli di Greenhalgh e Brockner’, in L. Ferrari and O. Veglio (eds), Donne e uomini nel mercato del lavoro atipico: La dimensione psicologica e di genere nel lavoro precario e flessibile (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2006), 137–72. ———. ‘Spunti su Job Insecurity, crisi della leadership, neo-mercenarismo professionale’, in S. Balduzzi (ed.), L’individualismo emergent:. Il nuovo volto del lavoro in azienda (Milano: Guerrini e Associati, 2006), 161–88. Kirk, J., S. Contrepois and S. Jefferys (eds). Changing Work and Community Identities in European Regions: Perspectives on the Past and Present. London: Palgrave, 2012. Mah, A. Industrial Ruination, Community and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Milanosesto [printed confidential presentation of the Falck area last regeneration project]. Milano: Bizzi & Partners Development, 2015. Moro, A. Ex Area Falck. Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis, 2017. Moscovici, S. ‘The Phenomenon of Social Representations’, in R.M. Farr and S. Moscovici Social Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 39–69. Newman, K.S. Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988. OECD. ‘Industrial Restructuring and Enterprise Development’, Paris, December 2006. Retrieved 24 August 2017 from https://www.oecd.org/cfe/leed/37068503.pdf. Parker, S. (ed.), The Squeezed Middle: The Pressure on Ordinary Workers in America and in Britain. Bristol: Policy Press, 2013. Petrella, D. Outplacement collettivo. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1998. Riconversider-Federacciai (2008). ‘Il caso Falck: cosa abbiamo appreso, contributo per il progetto europeo SECTOR (Shared Enhancement for Cooperation to Transform and Restructure)’, internal report, April. http://www.riconversider.it/documenti/caso_falck.pdf. Sciarrone, R. et al. La costruzione del ceto medio: Immagini sulla stampa e in politica. Bologna: il Mulino, 2011. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Strangleman, T., S. Linkon and J. Rhodes (eds). ‘Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class and Memory’. International Labor And Working Class History Journal, special issue (2013). Suffia, I. Oltre la grande dimensione: Le ‘altre’ imprese di Sesto San Giovanni nel XX secolo. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2015. Sverke, M., and J. Hellgren. ‘The Nature of Job Insecurity: A Meta-analysis and Review of Job Insecurity and its Consequences’. Applied Psychology 51 (2002), 23–42.

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Sverke, M., J. Hellgren and K. Näswall. ‘No Security: A Meta-analysis and Review of Job Insecurity and its Consequences’. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 7(3) (2002), 242–64. Tedeschi, P., and G.L. Trezzi. L’opera condivisa, La città delle fabbriche, Sesto San Giovanni (1903– 1952): La società. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2007. Trezzi, G.L. Sesto San Giovanni (1953–1973): Economia e Società: La Crescita. Milano: Skira, 2007. ———. Sesto San Giovanni alla fine del XX secolo (1974–1996). Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2012. Valota, G. Streikertransport: La deportazione politica nell’area industriale di Sesto San Giovanni 1943– 1945. Milano: Guerini e Associati, 2007. Van der Linden, M., and B. Altena (eds). ‘Deindustrialization: Social, Cultural and Political Aspects’. International Review of Social History, special issue (2002). Varini, V. L’opera condivisa, La città delle fabbriche, Sesto San Giovanni (1903–1952): L’industria. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2006. Walkerdine, V., and L. Jiminez. Gender, Work, and Community after Deindustrialization: A Psychosocial Approach to Affect. London: Palgrave, 2012. Warr, P. Work, Unemployment and Mental Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Wicke C., S. Berger and J. Golombek (eds). Industrial Heritage and Regional Identities. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Wisenfeld, B., J. Brockner and V. Thibault. ‘Procedural Fairness, Managers’ Self Esteem, and Managerial Behaviour Following a Layoff’. Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes 83 (2000), 1–21. Zucchetti, E. et al. Politiche del lavoro e dimensione locale. Milano: FrancoAngeli, 1996.

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Between Dream and Nightmare Political Conventions of the Industrial Past in the North of France Marion Fontaine

‘Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth.’1 The black avenging army is that of the miners, a symbol of the working-class struggle. This is the final sentence of Emile Zola’s famous novel, Germinal, published in 1885. The novel confirms that the world of coal miners, in particular in the French Nord basin, was already on its way to becoming true myth during this period. The phenomenon continued to grow over the following decades. Both at the local and national levels, the Nord ‘Black country’, stretching from Lens and Béthune to the west and from Anzin to Valenciennes to the east appeared as the symbol of triumphant industrialization. Similarly, the miners, the ‘black faces’, were depicted by the communist novelist André Stil, in his novel Le mot mineur,‘camarades’ (1949), as economic and political heroes, and also martyrs, who gave their lives to the quest for coal, or at the very least were the standard bearers of the future. More than a century after Germinal, the perception of the Nord basin has changed considerably. The promising future now belongs to the past. As in the rest of Western Europe, and other French regions, the decline of coal has made its effects felt, and the pits began closing down as from the 1960s, finally disappearing altogether from the Nord in 1990, and from France in 2004.2 The memory of the mining world is still present, although Notes for this section begin on page 195.

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it arouses contradictory representations and conventions. On one hand, whether material (landscapes, slag heaps, housing estates) or intangible (history of the basin, working-class culture), mining heritage has, since the end of the 1990s, come under the spotlight and been celebrated by developers, associations and local political stakeholders.3 All consider the valorization of this heritage to be a form of acknowledgement, of pride resuscitated among a population that has been sorely tried by the post-coal crisis. They consider that this heritage, along with related businesses and cultural infrastructures (museums, exhibitions, tourism . . .) can act as a major lever for growth and economic development. In 2012, the listing of the former mining area of Nord as a UNESCO World Heritage Site4 (in the cultural landscape section) was, for all of the stakeholders, a consecration and an encouragement to pursue their work in this direction. On the other hand, however, the situation is not as bright. Although the mining history is glorified, it is also frequently denounced, at both local and national levels. It is indeed considered to be a stigma, associated with ugliness and closure. The traces of the former working-class culture (under- qualification, dependency on social policies) are presented as the obstacles that explain the region’s enduring difficulties, in particular the high level of unemployment and the lack of economic vitality.5 In recent years, a further accusation has been added to this: the former mining area is no longer fertile ground for the future but, to the contrary, is portrayed as the cradle of archaism and decline, as it is now one of the main strongholds of the Front national (the French extreme right wing party).6 The Nord basin’s mining history therefore now arouses eminently ambiguous and ambivalent representations and expectations. The purpose of this chapter is to examine this ambiguity, to attempt to explain it by drawing upon the narratives on its mining past, by exploring what they say, for example, on the representation of the unity and diversity of the mining population or its relationship with the state and, finally, to observe the way in which the protagonists use these narratives. We shall first, therefore, look at the construction and evolution of the myth surrounding the mining area in the 1970s. Then we shall study the controversies and debates concerning the management of mining heritage and history as from that period; we shall also touch upon the identity and political stakes related to the different narratives relating this past.

Between Miserabilism and Populism: The Myth of Miners (1930s–1970s) Early in the nineteenth century, the mining world became an object of fascination due to fantasies related to underground work and the awareness that

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coal played a major role in industrialization. This phenomenon was present both in France and in other European countries. The British novelist George Orwell continued to express it in the 1930s when referring to the miners of Northern England: ‘More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins.’7 The collective imagination around mines was forged by a range of artistic representations (novels, films etc.) and by certain terrible events. One illustration is that of the Courrières disaster, in 1906, in Northern France, causing 1,099 casualties, and which contributed to the image of miners as so many soldiers giving up their lives to rip coal from the bowels of the Earth.8 However, it was the members of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) – the French Communist Party who, as from the interwar period, established the features of this mythical representation, giving it a purely political scope.9 The Nord basin, which prior to World War II mined more than 60 per cent of the national coal production, became a land of conquest, where they strove to oust their socialist rivals, who, at the time, were the basin’s leading political force. The communists thus attempted to supplant the latter and to turn the mining Nord into one of their electoral strongholds; in return, they were counting on the aura of the ‘black faces’ to establish the PCF as ‘the’ working class party. The general secretary of the PCF, Maurice Thorez, who came from the Nord mining area, emerged as the leading representative of this strategy. His highly political autobiography, Fils du peuple (1937), begins with the Courrières disaster, described as his earliest childhood memory.10 His roots and mining background gave him legitimacy and were supposed to help make him the leading working-class representative in France. This type of narrative achieved its apogee in the wake of World War II.11 The role played by the communists during the miners’ strikes, in particularly that of 1941 against the occupying Nazi authorities, gave them a prime political position upon the Liberation of France. Meanwhile, all of the mining companies, including private properties, were nationalized and brought together within a single company: the Houillères nationales du bassin Nord-Pas-de-Calais (HBNPC), which, in turn, were headed at the national level by a new public institution, Charbonnages de France (CDF). To begin with, the communists played an active role within the HBNPC, but they were ousted at the beginning of the Cold War. This eviction gave rise, in 1947–1948, to violent strikes that were harshly repressed (the army stormed the housing estates and several thousands of miners were sacked).12 Although the communists had been pushed aside, they continued to play a

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major role in the area: they were the leading union for miners through the CGT (Confédération générale du travail, who supported the communists); additionally, they represented a significant electoral body on the heels of their eternal socialist rivals, controlling many municipalities in the area. The communists therefore benefited from numerous relays: they had their own newspapers and organized union demonstrations and multiple ceremonies and commemorations within the municipal context.13 They were thus in a position to disseminate their own narrative on the mines. The latter placed the miners at the centre, depicted as the heroes and martyrs of labour, battling at once against the underground forces and against those of the ‘reaction’. Through the account they gave of the main events and major social combats – 1906 (Courrières), 1936 (le Front populaire), 1941 (‘la grève patriotique’ [‘the patriotic strike’]), 1947–1948 – they portrayed miners as the perfect representatives of the working-class identity, and of the patriotic identity through their fight against the Germans (1941), and then against ‘American imperialism’ during the Cold war. ‘The’ miner appeared not only as the ultimate wage-worker but also as the supreme representative of the French nation and its future. In 1949, the communist author André Stil thus made the Nord mining basin the ‘site of new combat’, which inscribed ‘by its sharpest point, France’s present. And in moving toward a future worthy of her, it is the miners who are carving the path’.14 This type of narrative served two purposes:15 firstly, to assert the group’s dignity, its value within the social and political arena and to ground the conviction that this dignity could only be embodied by communism. The challenge was, moreover, to affirm the homogeneity and unity of miners so that they might withstand the catalysts of dispersal that spread among them. This was no easy task. Far from being as united as the communists would have liked, the ‘black faces’ were indeed subject to perpetual movement and strong division: local rivalry between neighbourhoods and housing estates, ethnic opposition between the native population and the numerous immigrants present in the basin (the Polish between the two wars, and then the Algerians and Moroccans) and lastly political dissent (between communists, socialists and conservatives, the latter being characterized by the catholic religion). Lastly, the modernization and mechanization of labour gathered momentum as from the beginning of the 1950s, increasing the risks of dislocation and destructuring the unions. It is not, therefore, surprising that the communists attempted to offset all of this by, to the contrary, putting the spotlight on the common points that united the group: from social and political combat to . . . football, in particular le Racing Club de Lens, the region’s main football club, supported by all, as, for them, it was the sporting symbol of mining values (courage, solidarity, fighting spirit etc.).

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A clear inflection transpired during the 1960s. The communist discourse on the mine was subsequently stripped of its power. The first pit closure plan was announced in 1959 (the Jeanneney plan), and it seemed less and less likely that coal would be the energy of the future. The Nord’s reputation as a place of considerable industrial wealth gradually faded, and it increasingly became known as a declining industrial area, whose fate was of concern to political and planning authorities.16 The same phenomenon could be observed among the miners themselves, for the new generation of French miners (Alain Touraine, Serge Mallet) were far from being models.17 To the contrary, they were portrayed as a typical example of archaic blue collars: manual labourers who were resistant to change and entirely subservient to the CGT, whose demands were solely quantitative; conservatives whose distinctive features were, practically word-for-word, the contrary of the characteristics displayed by the new working class – qualified, skilled, mobile, open to new forms of syndicalism with more qualitative claims – and which was, in turn, seen to truly carry hope for the future. This evolution was not unilateral, however, as interest in the miners was revived by the extreme left-wing activists of 1968.18 Indeed, the latter formed an almost ‘magical’ relationship with ‘the’ working class: they dreamt of it, glorified it and wished to become a part of it, hoping that that it would lead a revolution, which, in their opinion, had been betrayed by the communists. It is not surprising that, under these conditions, a certain number of them flocked to the Nord basin, drawn by the reputation that the miners had managed to uphold as the heroes of the working class. At least for a certain time, therefore, these activists spread narratives that glorified the virtues and courage of the ‘black faces’, recalling their epic combat during the French Resistance or against the state in 1948.19 These narratives, dating back to 1968, also included certain new elements: they attempted to suffuse the more sensitive aspects of the miners’ circumstances with political meaning – such as the suffering caused by silicosis – and also made sure that they gave a voice to other stakeholders, such as women or Moroccan immigrants, of whom there were many in the late mining period. But this glorification of the ‘black faces’ was short-lived. Disappointed by what they saw to be a lack of fighting spirit, of revolutionary leanings, the activists swiftly shifted from populist celebration to the darkest of miserabilism.20 The Nord basin was thus described as a world headed for ruin, already corrupted by the consumer world, still entirely dependent on the HBNPC’s paternalistic management, an ‘immoral and degraded flock’,21 seemingly doomed to extinction. The activists of 1968, who had come to the region to revive the mining myth, actually heralded a loss of impetus and the predominance of a henceforth highly pessimistic view of the basin.

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Erase the Mining Past or Use It (1970s–1990s)? The global economic crisis, triggered by the oil shock of 1973, did not put a stop to this situation. Despite the fleeting hope that coal production might be revitalized, the mining industry continued to decline, to the benefit of oil energy and, above all, nuclear energy. The National Coal Pact (1994) marked the permanent end of coal mining in France. But the remaining problems, which had appeared well before the final decision, were gigantic. They were caused by major job losses and the disappearance of what was, at least in the Nord, a mono-industry. They also raised the question of the future of the mining heritage. Indeed, the companies, followed by the HBNPC, were actually much more than mere companies: they truly controlled the area, owning and organizing the workers’ housing estates, which formed as many private towns; they managed all facets of the miners’ lives (health, education, leisure etc.). At the end of the 1970s, they therefore found themselves with tremendous assets to manage: 120,000 lodgings, thousands of hectares taken up by surface mines and slag heaps, dozens of churches, hospitals, stadiums etc.22 Although this property seated the HBNPC’s power during the mining era, it suddenly became a weight and a handicap when the mines shut down, particularly as its management increased the company’s deficit. Encouraged by the public authorities, the Houillères endeavoured to rid itself of this burden. The most profitable assets – the land – were sold. The rest – for example, service infrastructures that were often in very poor condition – were handed over to the local authorities, who were left to deal with it. The traces of the mining past were therefore considered, by the very company itself, as so many stigmas, destined to disappear: the pits were filled in, the slag heaps and pitheads were torn down and the headframes dismantled. This transformation was also demanded by the state. The latter had, at least since the 1960s, launched numerous plans to revitalize the region and create jobs,23 attracting new businesses and other companies. Although this strategy, between the 1960s and the 1980s, was implemented in different forms,24 the successive decision-makers all agreed on at least one point: all of the material and cultural remains of coal mining were stigmas associated with archaic industrialization and had to be removed if the region were to become attractive once again.25 The local authorities (town councils, Nord-Pas-de-Calais Regional Council) reacted in vastly different, and sometimes contradictory, manners to these policies adopted by both the state and by the HBNPCs. The elected communist officials were those who fought the longest, remaining obstinately loyal in their defence of the mines and attempting to preserve the

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social and communal lifestyles of the workers’ housing estates: indeed, here resided the cornerstone of their influence.26 The socialists, who gained an even more dominant footing during the 1980s27 – they were at the head of the largest mining cities, such as Lens or Liévin, and controlled the regional Council – had a more complex approach. On one hand, they abided by the discourse of modernization and eradication, as pronounced at the national level. ‘There is no history in Lens’, meaning no history worth speaking of, declared the mayor of Lens, André Delelis, as late as 1999.28 A. Delelis and his counterpart in Liévin, Jean-Pierre Kucheida,29 thus intended to fully concentrate on the challenges of the present, and they positioned themselves as mayors and developers. They thus multiplied the construction of new social housing, shopping centres and superstores, motorways, ring roads, parks . . . as many elements that were to eradicate the features of the black Country, rendering it modern and free of the remnants of the former coal-mining period.30 Meanwhile, the mayors and elected officials continued to be influenced by the mining era, during which they had led their first political campaigns. They still saw themselves, just like their communist rivals, moreover, as the main representatives of the miners, of the opposition between ‘Us’ the workers against ‘Them’ the rulers or bosses. Although they talked of modernization, they continued to simultaneously extol the traditional values of the working-class mining culture around which they were supposed to unite the majority of the population. They thus continued to define themselves as the advocates of the mining population against the HBNPC – which was in operation until 1992 – and increasingly against the central state.31 They accused the former of disposing of the fruit of the miners’ work solely for its own interest – selling or destroying it – in particular the housing. As for the state, it was accused of supporting the HBNPC and of not doing enough for the miners, whereas the miners had contributed so much to their country. Here, the mining past was used as the prop for a policy based on complaint, which justified the demands made on the state and brought legitimacy to those who acted as spokesmen for these demands. This is what the predecessor of J.-P Kucheida, Henri Darras, explained after the Liévin disaster, one of the last to take place within the area in 1974: They (the miners) fell by the thousands, and when we talk of the debt of gratitude owed by the nation to this mining region, it is one made of sweat and blood. Only if we allow the region to survive and make it possible for their children to find jobs, will we be concretely honouring the sacrifices of those whose lives we mourn today, and of all those we have mourned in the past.32

This doleful instrumentation of the past, for political ends, did not preclude other types of valorization of the mining history, but, until the end of the 1990s, these took place in a highly fragmented manner. To begin

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with, initiatives were undertaken here and there (in Auchel, for example, and Noyelles-sous-Lens or Bruay-la-Buissière) to conserve one element or another of the mining heritage (a slag heap, a pithead . . .), by local stakeholders, private parties (more often foremen or engineers rather than miners) or town councils who sought to preserve these elements as the traces of a recollection combining the memories of a professional life and its integration within the local environment.33 A project of broader scope led to the opening in 1984, near Douai in Nord, of the ‘Centre historique minier de Lewarde’, which was to become the leading mining museum of the region.34 This project was initiated by one of the employers, the secretary general of the HBNPC, Alexis Destruys. Rather than the sign of a comprehensive reflection on mining heritage, it was probably the fruit of certain practical considerations, in particular related to the HBNPC’s desire to have a site in which to store their archives. The hesitations of the HBNPC directors was still perceivable, torn between a rational approach to the mine closures and the desire, despite all else, to preserve some traces of their own version of mining history. The ‘Centre historique minier de Lewarde’ was indeed, at least to begin with, based on a representation of the past that praised the company’s technical and productive progress, a highly hagiographic and irenic history that remained almost entirely mute on the topics of tension, inequalities, managerial arbitrariness and other ‘negative’ subjects. This explains why the Centre, until the end of the 1980s, came up against a certain reluctance on behalf of both elected officials and trade unionists. The companies were therefore highly heterogeneous and depended upon the decision of specific stakeholders or groups to defend their interests or to assert their own continuity. We may also note that these interventions do not seem to have provoked massive mobilization akin to that which was happening at the same time in Lorraine, where miners and steelworkers were becoming involved in trade union and associative organizations, both to defend their industrial sites against closure and to put the spotlight on their collective memory.35 It is not easy to explain the relative indifference of the population in the Nord basin. We may postulate that, during the 1980s– 1990s, the population was concentrating on managing the shock caused by the pit closures, and their initial reaction was one of withdrawal (falling back on the family unit, in particular) or the development of adaptation strategies, learning to live without the support of social mining policies or attempting to extract themselves from the working-class condition and to leave the mining basin.36 The general lack of support and positive representation of the mining heritage on behalf of the principle decision-makers is another explanatory factor. Yet this indifference was not absolute. In the same period, the Racing Club de Lens football club received increasing support thanks to its excellent scores; this support can also be explained by the fact that the

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club, which was seen as the symbol of mining values, was considered by the population to be a form of continuity and a way of reminiscing about the not so distant past.37

Between Integration and Exclusion: The Challenges of the Contemporary Valorization of Mining History Another period of major change came at the end of the 1990s. Developers and public authorities abandoned any hope of reindustrializing the former Nord mining basin. They shifted their focus towards the development of services and cultural activities to revive and boost the region’s appeal. This course, adopted with great enthusiasm by the regional Council and its president, Daniel Percheron,38 gave a different type of importance to the material or intangible traces of mining history. The latter were no longer considered to be a burden but rather as a foundation for this new strategy: the old mining infrastructures could be used for cultural and leisure activities, and the industrial history could become the object of a more positive and attractive narrative and thus develop into a resource for tourism. From that point on, the number of initiatives multiplied.39 The ‘Centre historique minier de Lewarde’ was taken over by the local authorities and gained increasing interest on behalf of the public. The remaining mining sites were listed as Historical Monuments: the 9/9 bis pit in Oignies in the Nord, the giant slag heaps and the 11/19 pithead in Loos – in Gohelle. They were the object of more intense enhancement efforts, based on cultural activities (tours of the slag heaps, theatrical performances etc.). The process reached an apex in 2012, when a branch of the Louvres museum, the Louvres-Lens, was opened on the site of a former pit; during the same year, the entire former mining basin was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Although all of the local stakeholders contributed to this new momentum, there was a certain amount of rivalry, misunderstanding and competition. The old petty squabbles reared their heads once more between the city councils of Lens and Liévin and the Nord department – home to the ‘Centre historique minier de Lewarde’ – and the Pas-de-Calais department and the city of Lens, Daniel Percheron’s stronghold, each claiming to be the ‘genuine’ incarnation of the area’s mining history. Not all of the stakeholders encountered equal success in the process, moreover. The former members of the CGT Miner’s Union also attempted to jump on the bandwagon with the creation, in 1998, of an association named ‘Mémoires et cultures de la région minière’ (Memories and cultures of the mining region), to defend the union’s activist version of the mining history.40 But this shift took place at the expense of deep divisions within the union: certain people defended

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this patrimonial reconversion while others, to the contrary, believed that the union should concentrate solely on defending the concrete claims of the mining widows and pensioners, yet the union failed both in the latter and in imposing its own version of mining history. The ‘Mémoires et cultures’ association had very little influence, and even this finally fizzled out. Others were far more successful in this new approach: this was the case for the ecologist mayor of Loos-en-Gohelle, Jean-François Caron.41 He was anything but a newcomer, as prior to his office his own father had been the (socialist) mayor of the city. In as early as 1990, J.-F Caron invested in the protection of mining heritage, in particular that of the slag heaps. Upon his election as mayor, in 2001, he intended to turn the city into a model for the rest of the area. He viewed the mining history as a stock of elements that, on one hand, had to be developed to fulfil new functions (tourism and culture) and, on the other, needed to be reorganized (regarding housing, business and the environment) in order to make a place for itself in the twenty-first century, marked by the digital economy and the desire to achieve sustainable development. Beginning in the 2000s, he also campaigned for the listing of the mining basin as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here again, he viewed this listing as the opportunity to participate in redeveloping the zone – by upgrading the sites and landscapes – while reigniting a common identity among the inhabitants. During this period, for example, a number of ‘UNESCO mining basin clubs’ were set up; these took the form of participative workshops, which were intended to promote local mobilization and involve inhabitants in preserving the mining basin’s memory. All of these operations were relatively successful and endowed J.-F Caron with a reputation that grew beyond the boundaries of the basin, while his city, Loos-en-Gohelle, was considered, by the national press, to be a showcase.42 The idea was, therefore, to form a consensual narrative around the mining history, which, rather than putting the spotlight on a class identity as such, highlighted a popular culture that reinforced a local identity and portrayed the ex-mining basin in a more attractive and positive light. This, however, was not achieved without as few hiccups and unexpected issues. The mining world, depicted in this manner, often appeared as a homogenous whole – ‘the miner’, ‘the miner’s wife’ – but not much was said about the constant tensions within the group, or about the different forms of internal cleavage. If any mention was made of the mine employers (i.e. the companies or the HBNPC), it was as fleeting as a passing ghost, or merely a word, and certainly fails to describe the highly complex relationships, forged of conflict and cooperation, between the corporate managers, the working community and the representatives of the workers’ unions. As for any account of the migratory aspect, this remained ambivalent. Of course, the narrative mostly

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lauded the role of foreign workers in the constitution of the ‘black faces’ and celebrated the mine as a melting pot of successful integration.43 But this type of narrative can have its drawbacks, by comparing the previous period and the old migrants (in particular the Polish) with the more recent immigrants (North Africans), whose ‘integration had not been successful’.44 The apparently inclusive narrative was therefore liable to feed certain forms of exclusion. We may finally note that the miners were frequently presented as a single body and as victims – of work, wars and the recession – while their ‘agency’, the active role that they played in their own history, was neither highlighted nor really taken into account. This raises the question of the appropriation and tangible effects of this type of narrative. We should firstly note that more than twenty-five years after the closure of the last pit, the population of the Nord’s former mining basin has radically changed. It is no longer composed solely of miners’ descendants but also includes new inhabitants (from the nearby metropolis of Lille, for example), generations for whom the mining experience holds no tangible reality. All of these inhabitants,45 many of whom live in extremely underprivileged conditions, while others have achieved a certain stability or even social advancement – by investing in the new cultural market, for example – have very different relationships with the mining past: nostalgia, indifference, oblivion, reinvention. Although, in these conditions, the past can continue to form the basis for individual identity, for ‘one’s own story’, it is sometimes difficult to use it as the foundations of a collective identity, a ‘We’, at least in a positive and open manner. Indeed, the mining history narrative is of strictly local value. At the national level, of course, the memory of the ‘black faces’ is occasionally recalled as a testimony to a past that now seems highly exotic and remote.46 But at this scale, it is the discourse of economic and social modernity – digital, ecological, agile, fluid, post-industrial – that prevails and that alone benefits from a truly positive overtone. It is difficult to give a place to the mining history narrative within this framework: either it resembles an Epinal print but with no impact on the present or it continues to carry in its wake the negative features of the archaic – industrial, monolithic, pollutant, stable – whose only conceivable fate is eradication. If the mining history narrative is to be used as the foundations for a ‘We’, this remains a purely local, or even localistic ‘We’: the ‘We’ of the ‘locals’, the ‘insignificant’, those ‘left along the way’, the ‘archaic’, as compared to the ‘They’ of the national state (the discourse of the local elected officials, who constantly accuse the state of abandonment, had an impact here), the elite, Europe, Parisians etc. It is easy to see what the radical right-wing party can and, indeed, has done with such a version. The usage of the mining past is therefore torn between the forging of a positive, consensual and open narrative embodied in patrimonial actions, but that fails to systematically gain

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a hold over the population, and a faint expression of withdrawal, the sense of a lack of acknowledgement, a humiliation whose political consequences are visible, and there is little hope of reconciliation. In Loos-en-Gohelle, the home town of Jean-François Caron, in the first round of the presidential elections in 2017, the Front national won 39 per cent of the votes . . . The risk of such a situation is that it may nourish the mythological view of the ex-mining basin, yet this has now become a purely negative myth.47 Whereas for many years the miners personified the future and the apotheosis of the working class, those who are still occasionally referred to as miners, who are actually no more than the current inhabitants of the ex-mining basin, are now considered as the substance of a nightmare or regret, which neither the political decision-makers nor the political authorities know how to deal with. Although it is difficult to make any recommendations in this direction, we may at least note that one of the most useful approaches would be to move away from the narrative on mining history, from the burden of the myths that weigh upon it and from the sole focus on the local context. It should be recalled that the miners were neither victims nor heroes but were the protagonists of a collective history, animated by different forms of rallying and enthusiasm, but also subject to strong dissent and extreme cleavages. It would also no doubt be necessary to reorganize the local and national levels, to stop opposing ‘the archaic’ and ‘the modern’, each equally cultivated as a myth, to take advantage of the aspects of mining history that can be useful and fertile, not only in terms of heritage but by drawing on past experiences – those of labour standards, the precarity/stability ratio, the nationalism/internationalism dilemma and even the relationship with the environment – that can be universally instrumental for the future. Marion Fontaine is Lecturer (‘Maître de conferences’) at the Université d’Avignon (France), fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France and a member of the Research Centre ‘Centre Norbert Elias’. She is interested in the social and political history of the European working classes and in the history of the deindustrialization process. She recently published Le Racing Club de Lens et les gueules noires: Essai d’histoire sociale (2010) and Fin d’un monde ouvrier: Liévin, 74 (2014). She edited, with Xavier Vigna, the special issue ‘Désindustrialisations’ (20 and 21, Revue d’histoire, 2019).

Notes 1. E. Zola, Germinal. 2. Leboutte, Vie et mort des bassins industriels en Europe: 1750–2000; Verschueren, Fermer les mines en construisant l’Europe: Une histoire sociale de l’intégration européenne; Fontaine, Fin d’un monde ouvrier: Liévin, 74.

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3. Mélin, ‘Le patrimoine minier du bassin Nord-Pas-de-Calais: un outil de dynamisation territoriale’, 237–54. 4. ‘L’Unesco distingue les terrils et les cités des bassins miniers du Nord’. 5. Mission Bassin Minier Nord-Pas-de-Calais, ‘Le Livre Blanc: Acte II. Cent propositions pour accompagner la mutation du bassin minier’, 13–14, 17, 20–21. 6. Giblin, ‘Comment le Pas-de-Calais a basculé du PS au FN’. 7. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 19. 8. Bonnet and Fontaine, ‘“Courrières les morts”, l’évènement et la mémoire’, 241–47. 9. Lazar, ‘Le mineur de fond: un exemple de l’identité communiste’, 190–205. 10. Thorez, Fils du Peuple, 8–9. 11. Trempé, Les trois batailles du charbon, 1936–1947. 12. Fontaine and Vigna, ‘Les grèves des mineurs de l’automne 1948 en France’, 21–34. 13. Dubar, Gayot and Hédoux,  ‘Sociabilité et changement social à Sallaumines et à Noyelles-sous-Lens’, 365–463. 14. Stil, Le mot mineur ‘camarades’, 28. 15. Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens et les ‘gueules noires’: Essai d’histoire sociale, 188–193. 16. Monod and De Castelbajac, L’aménagement du territoire, 29. 17. Touraine, La conscience ouvrière, 254–321. Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, 229–72. 18. Fontaine, Fin d’un monde ouvrier, 62–77. 19. Secours rouge du Nord, Les mineurs accusent, 26–36. 20. Libération Nord-Pas-de-Calais, ‘Des héros qui sont aussi des victimes’. 21. Ewald, ‘La condition du mineur’, 9–11. 22. Baudelle, ‘Le système spatial de la Mine: l’exemple du bassin houiller du Nord-Pasde-Calais’, 831–945. 23. Voir aussi les archives des dirigeants de CDF déposées aux Archives nationales du monde du travail (ANMT, Roubaix), et en particulier le fonds Michel Hug (directeur des CDF, 1982–1985), ANMT 1994 014. 24. Eck, Friedemann and Lauschke, La reconversion des bassins charbonniers: Une comparaison interrégionale entre la Ruhr et le Nord-Pas-de-Calais. 25. Lacaze, ‘Les grandes friches industrielles’. 26. Dubar, Gayot and Hédoux, ‘Sociabilité et changement social’, 365–463. 27. Sawicki, Les réseaux du Parti socialiste: Sociologie d’un milieu partisan, 67–75. 28. Interview with André Delelis, mayor of Lens (1966–1998), Lens, 8 January 1999. 29. Interview with J.-P. Kucheida, mayor of Liévin (1981–2013), 18 January 2013. 30. Tesnières and Tourneboeuf, Liévin hier, aujourd’hui, demain. 31. Desage, ‘La “bataille des corons”: Le contrôle du logement minier, enjeu politique majeur de l’après-charbon dans l’ancien bassin du Nord-Pas-de-Calais’. 32. Centre Historique Minier de Lewarde (CHM), 55W250, Discours d’Henri Darras pour les funérailles des obsèques des victimes de Liévin, 31 December 1974. 33. Mélin and Kourchid, ‘Mobilisations et mémoires du travail dans une grande région industrielle’, 44–47. 34. Desage, ‘Le Centre historique minier de Lewarde: Ressorts et enjeux d’un “lieu de mémoire” en bassin minier’. 35. Tornatore, L’invention de la Lorraine industrielle: Quêtes de reconnaissance, politiques de la mémoire. 36. Schwartz, La vie privée des ouvriers: Hommes et femmes du Nord. 37. Fontaine, Le Racing Club de Lens, 197–236. 38. Percheron, ‘Le Louvre à Lens’, 23–27. 39. Mélin and Kourchid, ‘Mobilisations et mémoires’, 42–49. 40. Interview with Marcel Barrois, 9 May 2001; interview with Louis Bembenek, 27 April 2017.

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41. Interview with Jean-François Caron, 26 April 2017; Mélin, ‘Loos-en-Gohelle: Du noir au vert’, 59–67. 42. Croquet, ‘À Loos-en-Gohelle, la transition verte au pays des gueules noires’. 43. Cegarra, Tous gueules noires. 44. Interview with André Delelis, 8 January 1999. 45. INSEE, ‘Le Louvre à Lens: un défi culturel, économique, sociétal et urbain’. 46. See, for instance, Beziat and Nancy, ‘L’épopée des gueules noires’. 47. The same phenomenon can be seen in the United States, see Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the English Working Class.

Bibliography Baudelle, G. ‘Le système spatial de la Mine: l’exemple du bassin houiller du Nord-Pas-deCalais’. PhD dissertation, Université de Paris I., 1992. Beziat, F., and H. Nancy. ‘L’épopée des gueules noires’. TV Documentary, France 2, January 2017. Bonnet, A., and M. Fontaine. ‘“Courrières les morts”, l’évènement et la mémoire’, in Centre Historique Minier (ed.), 10 mars 1906: La catastrophe des mines de Courrières. . . Et après ? (Lewarde: Centre Historique Minier, 2007), 241–47. Cegarra, M. Tous gueules noires. Lewarde: Centre historique minier, 2006. Cowie, J. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the English Working Class. New York/ London: The New Press, 2010. Croquet, P. ‘À Loos-en-Gohelle, la transition verte au pays des gueules noires’. Le Monde, 23 July 2015. Desage, F. ‘Le Centre historique minier de Lewarde: Ressorts et enjeux d’un “lieu de mémoire” en bassin minier’. Master, Institut d’études politiques de Lille, 1998. ———. ‘La “bataille des corons”: Le contrôle du logement minier, enjeu politique majeur de l’après-charbon dans l’ancien bassin du Nord-Pas-de-Calais’. Master, Université de Lille II, 1999. Dubar, C., G. Gayot and J. Hédoux: ‘Sociabilité et changement social à Sallaumines et à Noyelles-sous-Lens’. Revue du Nord 2 (1982), 365–463. Eck, J.-F., P. Friedemann and K. Lauschke (eds). La reconversion des bassins charbonniers: Une comparaison interrégionale entre la Ruhr et le Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Lille: Revue du Nord/ Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille III, 2006. Ewald, F. ‘La condition du mineur’, in A. Théret (ed.), Paroles d’ouvrier (Paris: Grasset, 1978), 9–11. Fontaine, M. Le Racing Club de Lens et les ‘gueules noires’: Essai d’histoire sociale. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2010. ———. Fin d’un monde ouvrier: Liévin, 1974. Paris: EHESS, 2014. Fontaine, M., and X. Vigna. ‘Les grèves des mineurs de l’automne 1948 en France’. Vingtième Siècle 1 (2014), 21–34. Giblin, B. ‘Comment le Pas-de-Calais a basculé du PS au FN’. Libération, 11 May 2007. INSEE. ‘Le Louvre à Lens: un défi culturel, économique, sociétal et urbain’. INSEE NordPas-de-Calais 110 (2012). Lacaze, J.-P. ‘Les grandes friches industrielles’. Rapport pour le Ministère de l’Équipement, du logement et de l’aménagement du territoire. Paris: La Documentation française, 1985. Lazar, M. ‘Le mineur de fond: un exemple de l’identité communiste’. Revue Française de Sciences politiques 1 (1985), 190–205. Leboutte, R. Vie et mort des bassins industriels en Europe: 1750–2000. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

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Libération Nord-Pas-de-Calais. ‘Des héros qui sont aussi des victimes’. Libération, 17 February 1974. ‘L’Unesco distingue les terrils et les cités des bassins miniers du Nord’. Le Monde, 1 July 2012. Mallet, S. La nouvelle classe ouvrière. Paris: Seuil, 1969. Mélin, H. ‘Le patrimoine minier du bassin Nord-Pas-de-Calais: un outil de dynamisation territoriale’, in J.-C. Daumas (ed.), La mémoire de l’industrie, de l’usine au patrimoine (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2006), 237–54. ———. ‘Loos-en-Gohelle: Du noir au vert’. Multitudes 52 (2013), 59–67. Mélin, H., and O. Kourchid. ‘Mobilisations et mémoires du travail dans une grande région industrielle’. Le Mouvement Social 2 (2002), 44–47. Mission Bassin Minier Nord-Pas-de-Calais. ‘Le Livre Blanc: Acte II. Cent propositions pour accompagner la mutation du bassin minier’. Conférence Permanente du Bassin Minier, December 2013. Monod, J., and P. De Castelbajac. L’aménagement du territoire. Paris: PUF. Orwell, G. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937. Percheron, D. ‘Le Louvre à Lens’. Le Journal de l’Ecole de Paris 78 (2009), 23–27. Sawicki, F. Les réseaux du Parti socialiste: Sociologie d’un milieu partisan. Paris: Belin, 1997. Schwartz, O. La vie privée des ouvriers: Hommes et femmes du Nord. Paris: PUF, 1990. Secours rouge du Nord. Les mineurs accusent. Paris: Maspero, 1972. Stil, A. Le mot mineur ‘camarades’. La Bibliothèque Française, 1949. Tesnières, F., and P. Tourneboeuf. Liévin hier, aujourd’hui, demain. Paris: Les Editions du Palais, 2011. Thorez, M. Fils du Peuple. Paris: Éditions sociales, 1937. Tornatore, J.-L. (ed.), L’invention de la Lorraine industrielle: Quêtes de reconnaissance, politiques de la mémoire. Paris: Riveneuve, 2010. Touraine, A. La conscience ouvrière. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Trempé, R. Les trois batailles du charbon, 1936–1947. Paris: La Découverte. Verschueren, N. Fermer les mines en construisant l’Europe: Une histoire sociale de l’intégration européenne. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2013. Zola, É. Germinal, English translation by Ellis Havelock. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005.

CHAPTER

10

Memory Culture and Identity Constructions in the Ruhr Valley in Germany Stefan Berger and Jana Golombek

Introduction The Ruhr region, deep in the west of the country, was Germany’s foremost region of heavy industry, principally coal and steel, for more than a hundred years between roughly the 1860s and the 1970s, when deindustrialization hit the region. The coal crisis of 1959, which, at the time, many commentators still thought of as a cyclical crisis, marked the beginning of the long end for coal, with the last coal mine in the Ruhr closed in 2018. In the 1970s, steel also became a crisis-ridden industry, and although a handful of steel industries producing usually highly specialized steels are still operative in the region, heavy industry in the Ruhr is increasingly a memory rather than a lived presence.1 In this chapter, we would like to explore what kind of memory cultures are produced by an increasingly (albeit not entirely) postindustrial Ruhr. We will trace, in the first part of the chapter, the discovery of the industrial past in the region and identify key actors and events in the making of that past. As we shall argue, the key memory actors of the region have framed the memory of the industrial past predominantly around constructions of regional identity. Non-spatial forms of identity, especially class but also ethnicity, gender and religion, are part and parcel of a remarkably homogeneous regional memory and are rarely discussed either on their own Notes for this section begin on page 212.

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or in contradistinction to regional forms of memory. In the chapter, we shall demonstrate this with reference to class, religion and gender, using paradigmatically the permanent exhibition of the most influential regional history museum of the Ruhr, the Ruhr Museum, and we shall conclude that the uniformity of the memory ‘mindscape’2 of the Ruhr poses serious problems for mastering the ongoing structural social change of the region.

Discovering and Constructing the Past of an Industrial Region The cities located on the so-called Hellweg, a medieval trading route connecting Western and Eastern Europe, have a medieval history. Duisburg, Essen, Bochum and Dortmund had all been members of the medieval Hanse association, and traces of their medieval history are, to this very day, an important part of those cities’ memorial landscapes. However, today they are also identified as the key cities of the Ruhr region. That region did not exist in medieval times; it came about as the result of the extraordinary industrial development that started when it became first possible, with the help of the steam engine, to break through the hard stone surface of the earth and allow deep coal mining to proceed in earnest, from the 1830s onwards. Coal mining in the Ruhr developed from the south – where surface mining of coal was already happening in medieval and early modern times – to the north, where the coal could only be accessed by tunnelling deep down, eventually to above 1,000 metres deep. In the north, little hamlets and villages developed into conurbations with 100,000 people and more over the course of one to two generations.3 Iron and steel followed coal, and the rapid industrial development of the region during the second half of the nineteenth century was largely unregulated and followed only the logic of industrial production. Although the region became the motor for German industrialization in the nineteenth century and ensured the phenomenal rise of Germany from industrial backwater in the first half of the nineteenth century to Europe’s mightiest economy just before World War I, it did not develop much of a regional identity. If people had to refer to it, they used functional descriptions, such as Rhenish-Westphalian coal region. Things were written about its industries, about technological developments, even about the difficult development of trade unionism and an industrial relations system, but virtually nothing about the region as such. In a country, Germany, where the concept of Heimat had produced phenomenally strong sentiments of regional identity,4 the Ruhr region lacked memory and history actors that could provide the construction of regional identity and Heimat sentiment. It was arguably only in the interwar period that the region as region began coming into its own, and the reasons for this were political rather than

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economic or social. Following the German revolution of 1918/19, many workers in the mines and steelworks of the Ruhr were radicalized. Revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist unions became strong in the Ruhr. The Independent Socialists and later the Communists had some of their strongholds here. After the failed right-wing Kapp putsch against the Weimar Republic of 1920, a Red Ruhr army formed of workers attempted to push the revolution of 1918/19 further. It was defeated in bloody battles by right-wing paramilitary formations, the infamous Freikorps, and the regular German army, but the Red Ruhr brought the region to national attention.5 Those political forces opposed to the revolution now saw a need to develop a stronger regional identity as a positive counterforce to the radical class identities during the post-World War I years. Their hour came with the occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops in 1923 and the passive resistance at the Ruhr against this occupation.6 A ‘national Ruhr’ now stood alongside the ‘red Ruhr’, and the regional memory culture of the Ruhrkampf against the French turned into a powerful national memory landscape that began to overshadow the memory landscape of the ‘Red Ruhr’. It was in the interwar period that reports about the Ruhr first came to national attention. Some focused on the social question. Among the most famous were Heinrich Hauser’s and Erich Grisar’s writings and photography, capturing the proletarian milieu of the Ruhr in the interwar period.7 Others were keen to preserve the memory of a region engaged in a monumental economic and political struggle for the nation.8 The National Socialist memoryscape of the Ruhr used the image of the ‘national Ruhr’ to underpin their ideology of a people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) and aimed to woo workers from their dominant Communist, Catholic or Social Democratic allegiances. Under the National Socialist dictatorship, the mindscape of the Ruhr moved from being a very heterogeneous and divided one to being a very homogenous one. Wilhelm Brepohl, heavily borrowing from National Socialist race theories, constructed the ‘Ruhr people’ as almost a separate regional ethnicity, which, for him, allegedly explained much about the character of the region.9 Whereas before 1933, political divisions between Communists, Catholic supporters of the Centre Party and Social Democrats all had different memory cultures and there were also separate memory cultures associated with employers and trade unions, the National Socialist suppression of all other political parties and their streamlining of the diverse memory cultures into a unitary stream arguably had important repercussions on post-war memory cultures of the Ruhr.10 The divisions of the memoryscape of the Ruhr that had been so characteristic of the pre-1933 period did not return after 1945. This was largely due to the development of a strong corporatism in post-war West Germany. The

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union movement functionalized the memory of its destruction on 2 May 1933 in order to achieved unity in the post-1945 years.11 The employers, on the defensive, given their large-scale collaboration with the National Socialist regime, left their impeccable hostility to trade unionism behind and were willing to talk about a social partnership with workers’ representatives. The emerging West German state set itself up as a powerful broker and partner of the two sides in the industrial relations system of West Germany. The system that became popular in the English-speaking world as ‘Rhenish capitalism’ had one of its key bulwarks in the Ruhr.12 Its corporatist culture found it difficult to develop a memoryscape of its own, as it neither wanted to hark back to ideological divisions of the Weimar Republic nor was there any way of actualizing the unitary mindscape of the National Socialist period. Hence the period up until the late 1960s and 1970s was very present-minded, focusing on the ‘economic miracle’ and on bringing about improvements for both workers and employers and strengthening the economic performance of the German state. An interest in the past and in the memory of the region only developed belatedly with the crisis of the key industries of the Ruhr. When it dawned on most observers in the late 1960s that this crisis was not cyclical but terminal, the question arose as to what to do with the heritage of those industries that had dominated the region’s history. The first iconic battles over industrial heritage were fought over the preservation of the art deco machine hall of Zeche Zollern in Dortmund and the preservation of the working-class housing estate Eisenheim in Oberhausen.13 Those battles were fought by 1968-inspired social movements from below that were made up of a motley assembly of academics, intellectuals, preservationists, art historians, teachers and workers interested in maintaining the physical remains of their lived experience at work and at home. The powerful corporatist alliance that had dominated the politics and mindscape of the Ruhr after 1945 at first was hostile to those urban movements from below. Unionists naturally showed more interest in protecting jobs in mining and steel making than being concerned with industrial heritage. Employers tried to minimize the costs associated with the closure of mines and plants; the state was still in modernizing mode; and its representatives looked towards constructing a future that often showed little concern for the past. Yet the 1960s provided a congenial context for urban social movements, as it was a period of dissent and bottom-up mobilization, associated above all with the student protest movement. Calls for a greater democratization of politics and the public sphere helped the urban movements to fight for the preservation of industrial heritage.14 In the 1970s, the rise of the environmental movements seriously questioned the growth orientation and modernization pathways of Western societies, which also played into the hands of those social movements. In the meantime, the

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corporatist consensus in the Ruhr had produced a unique solution to the coal crisis, which saw the de facto nationalization and unification of all mines under the roof of one company, the Ruhrkohle AG, which was to manage, under strong participation of the unions, the long-term end to the mining industry in Germany.15 Once this decision had been taken, unions, employers and the state became more willing to take into account the concerns of the urban social movements and began to reorient their position towards industrial heritage. Social Democracy, which had achieved a dominant political position in the Ruhr in the course of its post-war development,16 now saw a political opportunity to strengthen the Social Democratic identity by adopting and promoting industrial heritage. Under the governments of Johannes Rau and his extremely creative Minister for City Planning, Christoph Zöpel, the Social Democrats not only became champions of managing structural social change in the interests of the ‘kleine Mann’ – i.e. the workers of the Ruhr – but they also used industrial heritage to underpin the idea of a memory culture that celebrated the achievements of the Ruhr industries and its workers. Hence, during the 1980s, the corporatist culture of Rhenish capitalism in the Ruhr was endorsing the project of the social movements from below, which, on one level, ensured their victory and gave it unprecedented resources to implement plans for industrial heritage. But on another level, it also made those social movements superfluous, as the state was now taking over and developing the industrial heritage on a scale and in a way that was truly breathtaking but arguably less participatory than the actions taken by earlier social movements. The decision by Zöpel to preserve the site of Zeche Zollverein in Essen, the biggest interwar mine of the world, and the decision to hold a decade-long International Building Exhibition (IBA), the IBA Emscher Park, during the 1990s were key decisions on the road of making industrial heritage the dominant memory culture of the region.17 The IBA’s charismatic director, Karl Ganser, was extremely successful in using the generous funds to bring together a powerful alliance of municipalities, industrialists and trade unionists to shape a unique programme of building up iconic sites of industrial heritage, including the landscape park of Duisburg-Nord (a former steelworks turned into a park), the gasometer in Oberhausen and many other sites. Another idea of the IBA Emscher Park was the creation of an open and self-governing network for the regional history culture. It developed in 1991 from an IBA-initiated history competition with the topic ‘Industrial History of Ruhr and Emscher’. Since then, the ‘Forum History Culture in Ruhr and Emscher’ offers all those interested in the history of the Ruhr area various opportunities for contact, exchange, discourse and qualification. It brought together local history workshops and amateur historians that were inspired by the ‘Dig where you stand’ move-

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ment and the emerging research on working-class culture in the 1970s. In different workshops, the ‘Forum’ identified blank spots in regional history as, for example, Women’s and Gender history. By the 2000s, there was an all-party consensus about the worthiness of the industrial past and the establishment of another extremely unitary memoryscape around regional industrial heritage, which had the aim of underpinning regional identity in the process of structural social change.18 It was re-enforced by a powerful cultural industry, state-supported and statefunded, which promoted that mindscape in museums, festivals and the media. The history department of the local radio and television station, the Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR), under the leadership of Beate Schlanstein, promoted that memory culture as did the main daily newspaper of the region, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ). The aspect of industrial heritage underpinning regional identity in a difficult process of structural reorientation was augmented with an aspect of commodifying that heritage for the interests of a booming tourism industry, focusing on event management and the attraction of paying tourists to the region.19 At a time when the mines and steelworks were still working, the idea of promoting tourism to the Ruhr would have sounded ridiculous to most. But when those sites had become heritage, they could be marketed as the globally distinct feature of a post-industrial region successfully reinventing itself. The industrial heritage events surrounding Essen in 2010 (the Ruhr area was the European Capital of Culture that year) confirmed this trend towards the touristification of the industrial heritage of the Ruhr.20 Heritage now became a branding and marketing strategy for the region, powerfully supported by the key regional administrative body of the Ruhr, the Regionalverband Ruhr, and the federal governments of North-Rhine Westphalia. Characteristically, the latter increasingly decided to take foreign dignitaries not to the Cologne dome but to Zeche Zollverein in Essen. The development of a powerful and remarkably uncontested memory culture around the industrial heritage of the region is confirmed by the succession of projects carried out at the Institute for Social Movements of the Ruhr University since 2012 – often in conjunction with other major cultural and research institutions of the region, such as the Ruhr Museum in Essen and the Deutsche Bergbau-Museum in Bochum, in particular the project on industrial heritage in global comparative perspective, of which the current volume is one result, and the Zeit-Raeume Ruhr project, which analyses the memory landscape of the Ruhr.21 But such success arguably comes at a price, which is the relative silence about the multiple divisions that have been characterizing the society of the Ruhr, or if not silence then the making safe of those divisions in a past that is buried in its pastness. We will subsequently use the examples of class, religion, ethnicity and gender to demonstrate this.

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Narratives of Class Whereas many parts of the English-speaking world have seen the development of industrial heritage initiatives that were based on strong workingclass narratives – often in opposition to dominant political ideologies22 – the link between industrial heritage and class in the Ruhr is rather weak. We would like to exemplify this with reference to the permanent exhibition of the Ruhr Museum. In its permanent exhibition, the Ruhr Museum presents the visitor with an incredibly rich display on myths, memory and history, both natural and man-made, of the Ruhr region on three levels of the former coal washery of Zeche Zollverein.23 However, the naming of the three levels is already misleading. The top level, entitled myths, is only very partially about myths – they are represented in the form of iconic images of miners and steelworkers and their lifeworlds in a photographic panorama that awaits the visitor on entering the museum. Here we find mostly the heroic archetypal proletarians that could be straight out of a socialist realist novel or film. The myths are also present in a wonderful display of individual key objects (Zeitzeichen – i.e. signs of the time) that all contribute their own narrative about the Ruhr that is connected with different facets of its history, natural and human. However, not all of the objects necessarily represent myths. In the display of these objects, the working-class Ruhr is present. Many of them refer to the hard labour in mining and in the steelworks but also the hard work of housewives managing the homes of miners and steelworkers. Yet this is not framed in the language of class but in the language of ‘people of the region’. Otherwise, this level presents the visitor with huge amounts of statistics and factual information about the Ruhr area at information tables, where I have rarely observed visitors loitering for very long. In addition, we find on this level a wonderful photographic display of the diversity of the Ruhr area in the process of structural social change. Workers and workers’ culture is again strongly represented here. But this culture and its carriers are nowhere narrativized in terms of class. Rather, they become synonymous with the region. After all, this is the foremost regional museum of the Ruhr, whose main aim is to present the region in the development of its natural and man-made history. It presents the region here as primarily a proletarian region, but that workers’ region is not one where class seems to be a meaningful concept or idea. On the second level, entitled memory, we do not so much deal with memory as with the deep history of the region, from the ice age to the early nineteenth century. This is often impressive in its objects and provides a multifaceted picture of the pre-industrial Ruhr area. Naturally, workers do not feature prominently here, and it is also not terribly surprising that the language of class is absent here.

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On the third level, we arrive at ‘history’, which is a telling title for the section, as the museum makers here explicitly make the argument that history proper for the Ruhr area only begins with modernity and industrialization. The visitor is again presented with a rich kaleidoscope of different aspects of the Ruhr area from the nineteenth century to the present. The Prussian reformers are present, as are the major industrialists and scientists. The region’s development is traced through Imperial Germany, Weimar Germany, National Socialist Germany and the history of the Federal Republic. There are many echoes here of the ‘national Ruhr’, not so much in the conservative and nationalist mould of the interwar and National Socialist years but in the Rhenish-capitalist corporatist mould of the post-war years. There are impressive displays on the emergence and development of the industrial landscape, everyday life in the Ruhr, on its rich associational life, and on its divided and violent pre-1933 politics. There is also much cultural and social history, and visitors are given a comprehensive overview of the making and remaking of the region in modernity. While workers and their cultures again feature prominently, the overall narrative is not framed in terms of class. There is much discussion of work processes and the meaning of work as well as the precariousness of working-class life in the nineteenth century – i.e. its many vagaries and attempts to counter them, such as the consumer co-operatives. But all of this is narrated outside of a class framework. Class conflict is mentioned most prominently in connection with the thematization of the master-in-one’s-own-house perspective of many Ruhr employers until 1945 and in connection with the Communist and anarchosyndicalist movements that had been strong during the Weimar Republic. But class and class conflict is made safe in a past that is irredeemably past. The section ‘social struggles and conflicts’ is dated 1914 to 1957. Class conflict in this narrative is part and parcel of the bad old times culminating in National Socialism. In the corporatist post-World War II world of the Ruhr, class seems to have lost its meaning as a dominant memory frame. For the Federal Republic, the exhibition’s narrative follows very much the dominant corporatist consensus about employers, workers and the state working together in order to master the structural social change that characterized the history of the Ruhr from the 1960s. Much room is given to trade unions overcoming their divisions after 1945 and to the development of an industrial relations system, where forms of social partnership allowed for rising living standards for all. The end of coal and steel is presented as a happy end, for coal and steel are replace by education, entertainment and the return of nature. Problems are mentioned, such as the rising unemployment in the 1980s with its accompanying ‘new poverty’ and social problems, but these are told within a regional paradigm that does not take recourse to class. What is more, the corporatist consensus continues to deliver ‘social plans’

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that avoid massive social hardship even when major factories closed. The region is thus successful in mastering its past and developing a future out of a positive identification with the past. That positive identification is, above all, spatial and leaves little room for non-spatial fissures, as exemplified here by the absent narratives of class. The regional perspective to a large extent excludes a class perspective, excerpt where it can be made safe in the past as a negative example of social division, economic decline and political defeat.

Narratives of Religion If class has been a divisive issue in the Ruhr and is therefore difficult to integrate into a consensually oriented memory landscape, the same can be said for religion. The most important employers of the region were traditionally Protestant, whilst many workers were Catholic. The latter, however, were further subdivided by ethnicity, as Polish Catholic workers formed their own subculture, separate from the German Catholic workers. The latter tended to support the Catholic Centre Party, whilst many Protestant workers became increasingly alienated from religion and joined Social Democratic organizations, which have been described as another form of religion. The theme of religion is also present in the permanent exhibition of the Ruhr Museum. On the first level, the information tables have extensive information on the development of religion in the Ruhr, demonstrating how multifaith and multicultural the society of the Ruhr has become today. Among the iconic objects, there are also some related to religion, including the figure of a saint brought by Italian immigrants. And the photographic exhibition has a strong section on sacred buildings, mostly Protestant and Catholic churches but also mosques, synagogues and Hindu temples. Here a story is being told of the enormous importance of religion during industrialization. Few areas in Germany saw so many new churches being built. And in the early twentieth century, many sacral building were reflecting the architectural styles of the avant-garde, in particular expressionism and modernism. After World War II, the revival of religion brought a new building frenzy, but from the 1960s onwards the importance of the mainstream Christian religions waned, whilst others, in particular Islam, gained in importance. All of this is being told as a story of diversification and multiculturalism characterizing the region. Religion is written into the region rather than being a dominant narrative itself. Like with class, it vanishes behind the spatial memory-screen. Especially its divisive, problematic and contested elements tend to disappear behind the homogenizing regional memory narrative. Similarly, at the third level, the history one, religious associations do get a lot of coverage. The exhibition emphasizes religion and confessionalism in

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Imperial Germany as dividing factors – they separated whole milieux from one another and had a major influence over the everyday lives of believers. Like with class, though, this relevance is largely in the past, and it refers to a divided region. The major Christian denominations are present also in the post-World War II period, but the narrative here focuses on their contribution to the making of the region. The Catholic Ruhrbistum and its bishop sharpen the awareness of the region both inside and outside, and the Protestants organize their annual Kirchentag in 1991 for the first time not in a city but a region. Overall, then, it is hard to avoid the impression that religion, like class, is subsumed under the regional paradigm.

Narratives of Gender In 2010, the Ruhr became the European Capital of Culture, and numerous projects highlighted different aspects of the region. Under the title ‘Grasping the Myth of the Ruhr’, a series of events, projects, exhibitions and guided tours dealt explicitly with the past and the development of the region. One of these projects was the Internet portal ‘FRAUEN.ruhr.GESCHICHTE’ (WOMEN.ruhr.HISTORY),24 which tells the history of the region by looking at the gender-specific organization of work and life. By presenting biographies and personal memories in the form of audio documents, it wants to show how women shaped the Ruhr area. Furthermore, it functions as a research platform with literature, essays and important links. The platform is an integral component of making women visible. It helps to diversify the narrative of women in the Ruhr thus also contributing to the intangible industrial heritage of the region. It is continuously being expanded by many different contributors, some of which have been active in history workshops and other institutions researching women’s history since the 1980s. However, this attempt to diversify the memory landscape of women in the Ruhr seems, by and large, an exception to the rule – at least until today. The dominant narrative concerning women is still one of hard-working housewives managing the homes of miners and steelworkers. Of course, the latter construction is rooted in social history. Women in the Ruhr did work on leased land and in the gardens of the colonies. They sowed and patched, knitted and took care of the livestock. The miners’ wives supplemented their husbands’ wages and kept the wage costs low. By taking in boarders, they mitigated the housing shortage. By doing the washing and mending of the work clothes, they saved on additional costs. All in all, they had an unpaid seven-day working week, which was usually longer than the miner’s shift.25 This image of the worker’s wife who is not gainfully employed has blocked the view of a longer history of women’s employment in the region. This is

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especially true for the post-1945 period, when, during the 1950s and 1960s, women’s unemployment rate in the region was above the national average, indicating their availability for the job market. Eventually, women firmly established themselves not only in cleaning and cafeteria jobs but also in the offices of major mine companies.26 Additionally, women also gained importance as workers in the consumer economy. As they represented a calculable low wage and flexible workforce, they were essential for the development of mass consumption. In 1950, the number of employees in the clothing, textile and food industries was already at 455,000 and rose to 551,000 by 1970.27 Female unskilled workers also made their way into other branches, such as the metal industry,28 but it was in the clothing industry that the first major battle took place in 1961.29 Women suddenly became visible, self-confident and were noticed. With the coal and steel crisis, the purchasing power of working-class families decreased, and subsequently smaller companies producing consumer goods moved their companies out of the Ruhr. In the shadow of the big crisis of coal and steel, the closure of the comparatively small clothing companies and the mass lay-offs of female workers attracted no public attention in the Ruhr or nationwide.30 All the discussion of structural transformation centred on male-dominated industries and male workers.31 The memory landscape of the Ruhr has no space for working women and stubbornly clings to outdated images of the wives of miners and steelworkers. Industries where women were prominent, such as clothing and consumption, have not been constructed as an important part of the region’s history. Women and the gendered nature of work and of deindustralization are thus also hidden, like class, behind the homogeneous construction of a regional mindscape.

Narratives of Ethnicity When the exhibition ‘Fremde Heimat – Yaban, Sılan olur’ (Foreign Homeland) opened in February 1998 in the Ruhrlandmuseum (now Ruhr Museum), it was the first major exhibition in Germany devoted to the topic of immigration. Germany had long refused to see itself as a country of inmigration, and the debates surrounding the changes in citizenship laws during the second half of the 1990s exacerbated attention on issues of migration.32 The 1998 exhibition was also the first time a large German museum cooperated with a migrant organization. The exhibition was carried out on an equal footing by DOMiD33 and the Ruhrlandmuseum Essen. It documented the recruitment of migrant workers from Turkey from the 1961 recruitment agreement to the 1973 recruitment stop and broached the issue of the so-called ‘first generation’ settling down until the early 1980s. Told

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from a Turkish and German perspective, the exhibition focused especially on the beginnings of migration and illuminated the origins of the immigration debate in the Federal Republic at the time. For a long period it was the only exhibition that dealt with the topic of migration until the ‘guest workers’ came back into focus with the anniversaries of the different recruitment agreements in the 2010s. Over the last couple of years, we can talk about a new visibility policy not only in museums in the Ruhr but also nationally as far as different ethnic groups are concerned. Civil society actors and city governments played an influential role here. Some city museums and cultural forums used such anniversaries as an opportunity to acknowledge the presence of former ‘guest workers’ after decades of ignoring them.34 In comparison to the celebrations of major city anniversaries, however, those are usually rather modest special events, which are hardly designed to anchor migration in the urban or regional self-image. Moreover, such representations of migration, which refer to governmentregulated labour migration, are not without problems. On the one hand, migration in such narratives becomes a temporary phenomenon with seemingly clear start and end points, which can be ordered and cancelled by the state according to its needs. Other dimensions, such as self-organized migration projects, discursive contexts, transnational networks and routes, as well as the overall effects of migration on cities and regions, remain hidden histories. On the other hand, these modes of representation follow a gaze regime in which migration becomes culturally visible, especially after national assignment, without problematizing the categorization structures themselves. The anniversaries have been celebrated and so the history has been acknowledged but without migration having a place in overall narratives of the region. There is a common understanding that the existence of the region as such depended on migration, but when it comes to a differentiated presentation of this narrative within the memoryscape of the Ruhr, the execution seems lopsided. One popular narrative is the integration of the ‘Ruhrpolen’ (Ruhr Poles), a term that stands for the Poles from Silesia, Masuria and Kashubia, who migrated to the rapidly industrializing Ruhr during the last third of the nineteenth century.35 This history of Polish immigration in the area is present in the contemporary memory landscape of the Ruhr as a success story. It contributes to the self-image of the Ruhr as a tolerant and open society where multiculturalism is practised and where the people know how to deal with migration. However, like with class, it can be argued that the dominant focus on Polish migration is making the migration issue safe in the past. It contributed to the formation of a regional society, and it is yet again the formation of the region that takes precedence over the problematization of migration and ethnicity. The exclusionary practices in Imperial Germany, the racism of National Socialism vis-à-vis ethnic minorities and the non-

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acceptance of ‘guest workers’ in the Federal Republic are not a prominent theme in the memory landscapes of the Ruhr today. True, most of those histories have been acknowledged in Ruhr histories. And there have also been attempts, above all at the LWL-Industrial Museum Zeche Hannover in Bochum, to problematize migration as a difficult legacy for the Ruhr, but overall it cannot be said that migration and ethnicity are cornerstones of a regional memory landscape in their own right. They seem to only fit if they celebrate the making of the region in a positive sense.

Conclusion The Ruhr region’s identity constructions are tied up strongly with its past as foremost region of heavy industry in Germany. Ironically, the more heavy industry disappears, the stronger this imagined community rooted in coal and steel seems to become. As we have argued above, the homogeneity of that invented tradition is striking and largely due to the support of such narrativizations of the past by all important memory players in the region, from politics to economics and further to trade unions and cultural institutions. If the industrial heritage movement, in its beginnings, was an oppositional movement seeking to counter the threatened erasure of industrial memory from the region, its co-optation by powerful interests of Rhenish capitalist corporatism meant unparalleled resources and success but also the streamlining of the industrial heritage narrative to suit the interests of Rhenish capitalism. Hence industrial heritage is discussed almost exclusively in terms of the promotion of regional identity. It is an extraordinarily homogeneous mindscape of the Ruhr that is emerging from such stories. Everything that threatens that homogeneity is either brushed aside or safely condemned to the past. We have given mere glimpses of such omissions and silences vis-àvis the discourses of class, religion, gender and ethnicity. The monolithic nature of the heritage discourse in the Ruhr is a great strength and allows it to be groomed and paraded before international audiences as model of its kind. Yet its homogeneity could also be a decisive weakness, as it essentially leads to a rather self-congratulatory and uncritical attitude towards both the past and the present of the Ruhr region. As there is no debate about the past, there is also no debate about how that past may or may not relate to the present and to ideas about the future for the region. Problematizing and pluralizing the past may then be the best way of encouraging debate about where the region is standing today and where it would like to go tomorrow. The ‘Route of Industrial Heritage’,36 which lies like a net over the memoryscape of the Ruhr and is one of the main tourist attractions, could use a revision in terms of pluralizing its memory discourse and

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allowing an integration of aspects of memory associated with class, gender, religion and ethnicity that do not neatly tail onto the dominant heroic narrative of the continuous reinvention of a resourceful and successful region. Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. He is also Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has published widely on the history of deindustrialization, industrial heritage, memory studies, the history of historiography, nationalism, and labour movement history. His most recent publications are a special issue, co-edited with Steven High, on deindustrialization by the North American journal Labor 19(1) (2019) as well as a special issue on German labour history by the British journal German History 32(2) (2019). Jana Golombek works as a researcher and curator at the LWL-Industrial Museum. She has curated exhibitions on the cultural history of the Ruhr region, focusing on migration, the impacts of deindustrialization and the social history of the workers. Previously, she was a researcher at the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum on the project ‘The Ruhr Region: A Global Beacon for Industrial Heritage?’ and a research associate at the German Mining Museum on the project ‘From Boom to Crisis: The Coal Industry in Germany after 1945’. She has published on the history of migration to the Ruhr, deindustrialization and industrial heritage. Her most recent publications include a book on industrial heritage and regional identities, co-edited with Stefan Berger and Christian Wicke, and the catalogue to her recent exhibition on deindustrialization and industrial heritage activism in the Ruhr. Currently, she is also working on her PhD thesis on industrial heritage and the construction of memoryscapes in the Ruhr and Pittsburgh.

Notes 1. A good survey of the development of the Ruhr, in its various facets, is still provided by Köllmann et al., Das Ruhrgebiet im Industriezeitalter. On the attempts to adapt structurally to deindustrialization compare Goch, Eine Region im Kampf mit dem Strukturwandel: Strukturpolitik und Bewältigung von Strukturwandel im Ruhrgebiet; idem ‘“Tief im Westen ist es besser als man glaubt”? Strukturpolitik und Strukturwandel im Ruhrgebiet’, 93–115; Bogumil et al., Viel Erreicht, wenig Gewonnen: ein realistischer Blick auf das Ruhrgebiet. 2. On the concept of mindscape, see Smith, Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales, 92f. 3. Vonde, Revier der grossen Dörfer: Industrialisierung und Stadtentwicklung im Ruhrgebiet. 4. Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat; Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918. 5. Joana Seiffert is completing, under my supervision, a PhD on the memory of the

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Red Ruhr army from the Weimar Republic to the present day. See https://www.ruhr-unibochum.de/histdidaktik/Forschung/seiffert.html (accessed 30 July 2018). 6. Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924. 7. Hauser, Schwarzes Revier: Reportagen; Grisar, Schreie in der Nacht: Ein Buch zur Besinnung; idem, Mit Kamera und Schreibmaschine durch Europa: Bilder und Berichte. 8. Spethmann, Die Grosswirtschaft an der Ruhr; idem, Der Ruhrkampf, 1923–1925. 9. Goch, ‘Wege und Abwege der Sozialwissenschaft: Wilhelm Brepohls industrielle Volkskunde’, 139–76. 10. This is being discussed in greater detail in Berger and Evans, ‘Two Faces of King Coal: The Impact of Historiographical Traditions on Comparative History in the Ruhr and South Wales’, 29–42. 11. Berger, Gewerkschaftsgeschichte als Erinnerungsgeschichte: der 2. Mai 1933 in der gewerkschaftlichen Erinnerung und Positionierung nach 1945. 12. Abelshauser, The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path Toward the New Economy and the American Challenge. 13. Parent, ‘Die Entdeckung des Jahres 1969: zur Geschichte der Maschinenhalle der Zeche Zollern II/IV und zur Frühgeschichte der technischen Denkmalpflege in NordrheinWestfalen’, 155–74; Günter, Leben in Eisenheim: Arbeit, Kommunikation und Sozialisation in einer Arbeitersiedlung. 14. Kozicki, Aufbruch im Revier: 1968 und die Folgen. 15. Stefan Berger is currently directing an oral history of the Ruhrkohle AG at the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum. See https://menschen-im-bergbau.de/ (last accessed 30 July 2018). 16. Faulenbach, ‘Die Sozialdemokratisierung des Ruhrgebiets in der Nachkriegszeit: “naturwüchsiger Prozess” oder “Ergebnis ehrlicher Arbeit”’, 143–57. 17. Buschmann, ‘Wie Zollverein ein Denkmal wurde’, 31–36; Ganser, Liebe auf den zweiten Blick: Die internationale Bauausstellung Emscher Park; Reicher and Schauz, IBA Emscher Park: Die Wohnprojekte zehn Jahre danach. 18. Egberts, Chosen Legacies: Heritage in Regional Identity, chapter four. 19. See the website of the organization promoting tourism to the Ruhr: http://ruhrtourismus.de/startseite/?usersource=ruhr (accessed 2 April 2018). 20. On the Ruhr.2010, see the detailed Wikipedia page https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ RUHR.2010_%E2%80%93_Kulturhauptstadt_Europas#Literatur (accessed 2 April 2018). 21. http://www.zeit-raeume.ruhr/ (accessed 2 April 2018). 22. High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984; Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes. 23. See also the museum’s wonderful catalogue: Borsdorf and Grütter, Ruhr Museum: Natur – Kultur – Geschichte. 24. http://www.frauenruhrgeschichte.de// (accessed 3 April 2018). 25. ‘Am größten Arbeitsplatz der Welt: Aus dem Alltag einer Bergmannsfrau’, Werk und Wir, Heft 1 (1956), 38–39. See also De Jong, ‘. . . und die Wäsche, die war schwarz, ja, wie die Kohle!’ Erzählungen von der Großen Wäsche der Bergarbeiterfrauen, zusammengetragen vom Gesprächskreis ‘Lebenserfahrung von Frauen in Bergarbeiterfamilien’. 26. Schmidt, ‚Im Vorzimmer: Arbeitsverhältnisse von Sekretärinnen und Sachbearbeiterinnen bei Thyssen nach dem Krieg’, 191–232; Gordes-Herbst, Frauen und der Hüttenbetrieb Duisburg-Meiderich: Zeitzeuginnen berichten über lebens- und arbeitsgeschichtliche Erfahrungen in Haus und Hütte, 41f. 27. Sonnenschein, Das Ruhrgebiet: Struktur seiner Wirtschaft. Teil: 1, Industrie, 47. 28. Schneider, ‘Frauen in der Essener Metallwirtschaft 1946–1996’, 51–70; 29. See Beese and Schneider, Arbeit an der Mode: Zur Geschichte der Bekleidungsindustrie im Ruhrgebiet, 97ff.

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30. Ibid., 138. 31. Kopel, ‘Regionale Entwicklungskonzepte und Frauenpolitik in NRW – eine Querschnittsauswertung’, 25–32. 32. See Jamin and Eryilmaz, Fremde Heimat: Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei. 33. See http://www.domid.org/en. 34. For an overview see https://www.lwl.org/industriemuseum/standorte/zeche-han nover/migration-ausstellen. 35. Kleßmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet: 1870–1945; Kift and Osses, Polen – Ruhr: Zuwanderungen zwischen 1871 und heute. 36. http://www.route-industriekultur.ruhr/ (accessed 30 July 2018).

Bibliography Abelshauser, W. The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany’s Path Toward the New Economy and the American Challenge. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. Applegate, C. A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Beese, B., and B. Schneider. Arbeit an der Mode: Zur Geschichte der Bekleidungsindustrie im Ruhrgebiet. Essen: Klartext, 2001. Berger, S. (ed.). Gewerkschaftsgeschichte als Erinnerungsgeschichte: der 2. Mai 1933 in der gewerkschaftlichen Erinnerung und Positionierung nach 1945. Essen: Klartext, 2015. Berger, S., and N. Evans. ‘Two Faces of King Coal: The Impact of Historiographical Traditions on Comparative History in the Ruhr and South Wales’, in S. Berger, A. Croll and N. LaPorte (eds), Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies (London: Routledge, 2005), 29–42. Bogumil, J. et al. Viel Erreicht, wenig Gewonnen: ein realistischer Blick auf das Ruhrgebiet. Essen: Klartext, 2012. Borsdorf, U., and H.T Grütter (eds). Ruhr Museum: Natur – Kultur – Geschichte. Essen: Klartext, 2010. Buschmann, W. ‘Wie Zollverein ein Denkmal wurde’. Forum Industriedenkmalpflege und Geschichtskultur 1 (2002), 31–36. Confino, A. The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. De Jong, J. (ed.). ‘. . . und die Wäsche, die war schwarz, ja, wie die Kohle!’ Erzählungen von der Großen Wäsche der Bergarbeiterfrauen, zusammengetragen vom Gesprächskreis ‘Lebenserfahrung von Frauen in Bergarbeiterfamilien’. Herten, 1988. Egberts, L. Chosen Legacies: Heritage in Regional Identity. London: Routledge, 2017. Faulenbach, B. ‘Die Sozialdemokratisierung des Ruhrgebiets in der Nachkriegszeit: “naturwüchsiger Prozess” oder “Ergebnis ehrlicher Arbeit”’, in B. Faulenbach and G. Högl (eds), Eine Partei in ihrer Region: eine Geschichte der SPD im westlichen Westfalen (Essen: Klartext, 1988), 143–57. Fischer, C. The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Ganser, K. Liebe auf den zweiten Blick: Die internationale Bauausstellung Emscher Park. Dortmund: Harenberg, 1999. Goch, S. ‘Wege und Abwege der Sozialwissenschaft: Wilhelm Brepohls industrielle Volkskunde’. Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen 26 (2001), 139–76. ———. Eine Region im Kampf mit dem Strukturwandel: Strukturpolitik und Bewältigung von Strukturwandel im Ruhrgebiet. Essen: Klartext, 2002.

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———. ‘“Tief im Westen ist es besser als man glaubt”? Strukturpolitik und Strukturwandel im Ruhrgebiet’, in S. Grüner and S. Mecking (eds), Wirtschaftsräume und Lebensschancen: Wahrnehmung und Steuerung von sozio-ökonomischem Wandel in Deutschland, 1945– 2000 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), 93–115. Gordes-Herbst, C. Frauen und der Hüttenbetrieb Duisburg-Meiderich: Zeitzeuginnen berichten über lebens- und arbeitsgeschichtliche Erfahrungen in Haus und Hütte. Duisburg: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Industriekultur, 1998. Grisar, E. Schreie in der Nacht: Ein Buch zur Besinnung. Leipzig: Verlag für proletarische Freidenker, 1925. ———. Mit Kamera und Schreibmaschine durch Europa: Bilder und Berichte. Berlin: Der Bücherkreis, 1932. Günter, J. Leben in Eisenheim: Arbeit, Kommunikation und Sozialisation in einer Arbeitersiedlung. Weinheim: Beltz, 1980. Hauser, H. Schwarzes Revier: Reportagen. Bonn: Weidle Verlag, 2010 [first published 1930]. High, S. Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, 1969–1984. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Jamin, M., and A. Eryilmaz. Fremde Heimat: Eine Geschichte der Einwanderung aus der Türkei. Essen: Klartext, 1998. Kift, D., and D. Osses (eds). Polen – Ruhr: Zuwanderungen zwischen 1871 und heute. Essen: Klartext, 2007. Kleßmann, C. Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet: 1870–1945. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978. Köllmann, W. (eds). Das Ruhrgebiet im Industriezeitalter, 2 vols. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1990. Kopel, M. ‘Regionale Entwicklungskonzepte und Frauenpolitik in NRW – eine Querschnittsauswertung’, in Initiativkreis Emscherregion e.V (ed.), ‘. . . zum Stand der Dinge . . .’ Strukturwandel im Ruhrgebiet (Dortmund/Essen: Initiativkreis Emscherregion, 1997), 25–32. Kozicki, N. Aufbruch im Revier: 1968 und die Folgen. Essen: Klartext, 1993. Parent, T. ‘Die Entdeckung des Jahres 1969: zur Geschichte der Maschinenhalle der Zeche Zollern II/IV und zur Frühgeschichte der technischen Denkmalpflege in NordrheinWestfalen’, in M. Rasch and D. Bleidick (eds), Technikgeschichte im Ruhrgebiet: Technikgeschichte für das Ruhrgebiet (Essen: Klartext, 2004), 155–74. Reicher, C., and T. Schauz. IBA Emscher Park: Die Wohnprojekte zehn Jahre danach. Essen: Klartext, 2010. Schmidt, M. ‘Im Vorzimmer: Arbeitsverhältnisse von Sekretärinnen und Sachbearbeiterinnen bei Thyssen nach dem Krieg’, in L. Niethammer (ed.), ‘Hinterher merkt man, dass es richtig war, dass es schiefgegangen ist’: Nachkriegs-Erfahrungen im Ruhrgebiet (Berlin: Dietz, 1983), 191–232. Schneider, B. ‘Frauen in der Essener Metallwirtschaft 1946–1996’, in IG Metall, Essen (ed.), Im Wandel gestalten: Zur Geschichte der Essener Metallindustrie 1946–1996 (Essen: Klartext, 1996), 51–70. Smith, D. Aneurin Bevan and the World of South Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993. Smith, L., P.A. Shackel and G. Campbell (eds). Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes. London: Routledge, 2011. Sonnenschein, U. Das Ruhrgebiet: Struktur seiner Wirtschaft. Teil 1, Industrie. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1972. Spethmann, H. Die Grosswirtschaft an der Ruhr. Berlin: Verlag Ferdinand Hirt, 1924. ———. Der Ruhrkampf, 1923–1925. Berlin: Verlag Reimar Hobbing, 1933. Vonde, D. Revier der grossen Dörfer: Industrialisierung und Stadtentwicklung im Ruhrgebiet. Essen: Klartext, 1989.

CHAPTER

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Sounds of Decline Industrial Echoes in Asturian Music Rubén Vega García

The reference to the industrial labour and to the workers’ struggles as milestones of a shared memory was present in Asturias all through the twentieth century. The miners have been present as a heroic collective actor in an epic struggle told many times over. Nevertheless, the context has changed at the same time as the industrial decline has been reducing the employment in key sectors (mining, iron and steel, shipyards . . .), leaving in particular the young with precious few prospects. Music has never stopped paying attention to these changes and has commented on lives lived in a traumatic way, marked by resistance fights and dominated by a dark pessimism about the future. A century ago, most of the songs about the chronicle of events – including those referring to the labour movement – did not have a known author. Often, an existing song was adapted to new lyrics to update the repertoire, to include serious topics and anecdotes, main episodes and almost any other imaginable matter. Only exceptionally were these songs preserved and handed down from one generation to the next, and, even more rarely, sometimes they were even recorded. The main way to rescue this popular creativity is the oral memory, which supplies very fragmented information but allows us to get an idea about cultural environments very different from today’s, dominated by audiovisual media, digital technology and market logic.1 The period on which this text focuses has hardly any non-recorded or broadcasted musical creations, either via commercial circuits or through social networks.2 Yet technical innovations did make a significant impact, Notes for this section begin on page 226.

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facilitating the preservation of songs and the identification of their authors. At the same time, the authorship and recording of these songs diminish their versatility to be reinterpreted and changed in collective creative processes. No matter whether the authorship of these songs is known or not, they come into the space of collective representations and shared accounts. This is more evident in popular and anonymous songs, but it happens as well in individual creations, to the extent that the authors interact with a society from whom they collect and transmit their concerns. This text departs from the assumption that the lyrics of the songs reflect shared feelings and points of view, expressing a situation as it is being perceived and understood not only by the individual author but a wider sector. We do not forget, though, that the discourse contained in songs addressing themes of social criticism is a cultural expression, coming from those who feel more concerned about the problem, and therefore should not be extrapolated and generalized. They cannot be taken as representative of those who usually do not express any worry or those who adopt an attitude of making a clean slate of the past. Usually, the writers of the lyrics have a cultural level above average and show political concerns to a greater extent. Artists have the capacity to mobilize the History and the industrial and working memories, boosting and reformulating the collective thinking. The traumatic transit from deindustrialization requires revisiting the past expressed by the cultural creators. It is about local demonstrations of global processes, where the roots of the artists and their links to the past play a fundamental role in expressing symbolically cultural and social change.3 In Asturias, the social trauma related to deindustrialization seems to have produced a fruitful creativity. This is stated by journalist J.L. Argüelles in a recent article: One of the paradoxes of the long socio-economic mutation in Asturias is the extraordinary strength with which the generations of young artists and creators have responded to the many difficulties of this historic turn . . . While entire sectors of Asturian life agonize ostensibly or hardly survive (from mining to fishing, from shipbuilding to agricultural facilities), there has been a curious (and almost miraculous) phenomenon of a young cultural hatching that includes poetry and cinema, music and theatre, painting and photography. Almost everything is at low hours, except the talent.4

The generation component is much in evidence: most of the authors are young, and their position is one of bitterness, which does not allow for feelings of nostalgia that are still widespread in an older generation, who are prone to find in their childhood and youth intimate and personal reasons for nostalgia. The feelings most present in the younger generation are feelings of defeat, betrayal and loss. The vindication of the working-class struggles acts as the link between a past recalled in an epic way and a present that seems

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to offer neither opportunities of combat nor hopes for the future. In most of the cases, there is no analysis, just feelings and emotions. When the analysis surfaces, it is usually acidly critical of unions and politicians. They have come to replace the owners and bosses, who were the villains in an industrial society of the past. In the music, there is no lack of reference to an ongoing class struggle (La Col.lá Propinde: ‘La foguera’, 2002; Desakato: ‘Los mineros’, 2005; Dixebra: ‘Don Vito’, 2013), yet it is no longer primarily against employers but against corrupt politicians and unionists, who have sold out to capital and lost all ideas about a socialist society (Macho de Feria: ‘Cuenca del Nalón’, 2017; Fe de Ratas: ‘El espabilao’, 1999; La Tarrancha: ‘Presente indicativu del verbo nuntrabayar’, 2004; Arma X: ‘Zona minada’, 2008, and ‘Santa Bárbara Bendita’, 2012; Skontra: ‘Santana’, 2010). The authors of the songs are mostly young people, and they have seldom any direct experience of manual work in factories or mines, but often they carry life lessons transmitted from generations within the family unit or through the social environment. To a large extent, when they represent the labour condition they do it as custodians of this memory. The singer Anabel Santiago places her roots there: My grandfather was a miner and I grew up in a tavern, with the men, the crème de la crème of the revolutionary Asturias, listening to them singing and talking about adult topics. That builds character, believe me. Now from that Asturias that I lived as a child, there are only left the grandchildren of mining, who have not suckled the workers’ struggle.5

She is 36 years old and feels herself to be part of world that has already disappeared, a world that the younger ones have not known and where the work of the mine and the workers’ struggles were basic pillars. This sense of loss acts often as a stimulus to create memorial landscapes that counteract the dissolution of values and the fragility of past memories. In this context, the lyrics express a critical and nostalgic look, where a very pessimistic view of the present and the future is combined with the idealization of the past, not through the denial of the hardness of life (work conditions, economic conditions, dictatorship) but through the attention given to the ability to fight, the social conquests, the communal ties and the pride of class. At the same time, the insistence on remembering the inheritance of the working-class past confirms the strength with which industrial work forged class identities. This cultural creativity is taking place in a context (Asturias) in which the artists show deep local and regional roots and a strong feeling of belonging to a community. So they feel threatened by the undermining of the basis of past prosperity, by the perspective of impoverishment and emigration, by the loss of values and, generally speaking, by a future that opens in front of them with dark perspectives. Since most of them grew up in a coal basin

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or in an industrial town, their choice of themes related to working-class memory comes naturally, and it is part of their life experience. Since the future appears dark and threatening, the industrial past and the values of the labour movement act as powerful reference points. Many of the current groups emphasize their working-class origins and search for their roots there: ‘We live in a working village, we were born among strikes’, answer the members of Escuela de Odio (a hardcore punk band) when they are asked about the social concerns of their lyrics.6 In a similar way, the rock band Dixebra sings about their childhood growing up beside a steel factory: ‘We had by altar a smokestack / We grew up looking at it / Give us the bread, a place on the workforce / deliver us from evil . . . and from the coal dust!’.7 Hard times are remembered with pride: ‘They were born in neighbourhoods of suffocated people / with black lanes of smoke and coal / They suffered hunger and took beatings / they carry rage inside their hearts’.8 Blue collar parents become invested with dignity, in a kind of class pride and a feeling of gratitude: ‘Any day, January cold / the same routine every day / He wakes up early . . . Life was hard, he could not choose / He looked at his hands and saw / they were smashed / Silently looking to reach a future for me / and risking his neck / An example of courage / a mirror to look at’.9 The elders are creditors of a debt of gratitude that contrasts with the reproaches that deserve the powerful: ‘Neither ministers or councillors / want to get wet under this rain / How much our grandpas did fight! / It was for Asturias, it was for what is ours’.10 Although these roots in workers’ environments are often part of the personal memory of the artists, they can be activated too as ingredients of a wider identity related to a certain way of seeing Asturias and the relevance that a past full of struggles acquires in it. The history of the labour movement becomes then a distinctive feature of the region. Asturian identity is thus constructed in a proletarian key. This is expressed, for instance, by the group Filanda: ‘It’s the gag of wind that grows on its coast / And a tree above the bones that tell memory / We are stone chips of that silenced history / daughters of coal and barricade’.11 Theirs is an ideological leftist vision of Asturias. Right-wing discourses are almost completely absent in Asturian young music. Workers’ struggles act as a source of identity and singers are able to see themselves as advocates or custodians of that legacy: ‘Working class and lower social strata of this society are being beaten. We have to be more aggressive. Music is our weapon . . . Currently, the groups are obliged to channel through the music the feeling of the people. We must be their channel and also continue to remove the consciousness of the sleepers’.12 From this perspective, memory loss becomes part of the problem and its preservation part of the solution, since it connects past with hopes for the future: ‘We

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have no conscience, we have no memory / We have no job, we have no history / We do not laugh but cry, thinking about the future . . . When we start playing, we get filled with rage / We lose the minutes, also the seconds / We don’t lose the hope to create another new world’.13 Defiance in the lyrics stands next to a sense of defeat: ‘Subversive, fighter / Accelerate your strong heart / Future is over / You don’t fight anymore / You feel a loser / They say you are extinguishing / That a species like yours will not be able to change the world / They say those futile efforts soon will end / which are the reason for your existence’.14 For many young people the future is, in fact, the biggest problem, and it is often presented as nonexistent. The lack of jobs is the cause of a deep pessimism: ‘Our story is easy to tell: there is no future, we want to work’.15 And this unsettling perspective connects with the forgotten past: ‘There is nothing left in global memory / what there was some years ago / Past and future are the same colour / gloomy, dark, black / black as coal’.16 The fight of the labour movement acquires a central position in both the invocations of memory and the calls to mobilization. Remembering the suffering, the heroic deeds and the conquests of workers becomes almost automatically a complaint about the current situation, where the weakening of class consciousness appears as the root cause of the defeat. The old heroes of the working class, the revolutionaries of 1934, the strikers who fought against the dictatorship, come to be models to copy. The epic then turns out to be the appropriate language: ‘Join us, comrade / We share hunger, sorrow and fear / If we fight together we will overcome / Soul of metal, mining heart / Short is the dream for those who dream to reach a star . . . Asturias does not forget, it takes refuge in its memory / The struggle of the proletarian who wanted to change History / Your feat becomes heroic / and your dignity today is flag’.17 The loss of this memory means the dissolution of the elements of identity and the disappearance of the defence tools: class consciousness, solidarity, willingness to fight, which should be retrieved to face the current difficulties. The band Escuela de Odio explains the meaning of one of their songs, significantly entitled ‘Production machines’, with lyrics including an anti-capitalist allegation, rhythm echoing the assembly line and a video clip filmed in an industrial unit: ‘“Production machines” is a theme that from its genesis conjugates a cyclical rhythm, with a letter of “resetting” the situation of the working class, as a “comeback” you can say . . . They have filled our heads with illusions of false freedom . . . we have lost class consciousness . . . we are one more gear of the great machine’.18 The feeling that the defeats of the present are directly related to forgetting the battles in the past drives the authors to fight the lack of memory.

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From their point of view, the example offered by the workers’ struggles serves to call the mobilization against the current problems, and the decline provides new reasons to fight. Somehow, the loss of memory could be seen as part of an Orwellian conspiracy. If people forget or believe in propaganda, they will be defeated: Here we never made a revolution nor did we face up to fascism / Here we never cut the streets around the Naval / Here we never sympathise with other oppressed peoples / Here we never denounce the persecution of immigrants / Here we never gave reason to the worker against the master / It’s all a lie / They are all lies that we invented for feeling better / You pay attention to TV.19

The positive memory of past epic struggles has been fuelled by very recent conflicts, such as the last major miners’ strike in the summer of 2012, a protest that lasted more than two months and produced hard confrontations between miners and police. The song ‘Barricade days’ draws on images of past conflict to support present conflict: ‘A dry murmur cuts the air, proletarians, they are miners in protest / Rockets sound in the distance, miners with slings / in the sky, clouds of black smoke / they cut the highway / The antiriot police open fire / but no matter how hard they hit we rise again / These are days of barricade’.20 Don’t mourn, fight! This is, actually, the model of response proposed by many songs, taking as an example the past working struggles and reproducing them in the present. The tendency to passivity must be broken. Social conflict is not seen as the problem but the solution: ‘In this time of Asturias / there will be a new degree / Bachelor in Barricades / is the future study . . . You will not last unemployed / There is workload in large amount / Youth students / lads without occupation / supporting the working class / and screaming no submission’.21 Many of the songs also condemn state repression and police violence: ‘The strategy of power / How to calm the situation / Always in the name of repression / I don’t understand why, why your response is always / bringing more police! / How you hide information / always in the name of your reason / You send your dogs to bite / workers meat, dismissed without a reason’.22 But the labour movement is also accused of betraying working-class interests: the pain of betrayal is worse if it comes out of your own litter . . . I think of what you [coal basin] once were and today I see you mutilated by those who buy, sell, steal, cheat, hide in ballot boxes and do not shut up. Unions sign pacts trying not to leave their ass exposed . . . Mined area, they mutilate your wings. Nothing remains to fight for. Traitors, whores, I still have my gun loaded. Mined area, the air suffocates me between soot and words. I am the barricade, caged pigeon, the light of my helmet turns off.23

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But neither workers who accepted early retirement agreements nor society as a whole are free of guilt. The previous generation can be accused of not having defended the future enough and for having ‘sold’ their jobs in exchange for dole and pensions. Their inheritance has provided material goods for a while but not acceptable values or valid schemes to face a transformed world: You don’t understand other paths, neither that yours failed / You call us lost bullets but is ’cos the target has changed / You legate us a culture which leaks water everywhere . . . You sell us free trade instead of freedom / You could change the world . . . If you asked for ‘the impossible’ why did you settle? / Does comfort compensate for betraying an ideal?24

The defeat was not only a political one but also a moral one. And with the loss of the economical basis, people have lost old values too. Now they are survivors or emigrants, but they do not fight united any longer and the future appears not as a promise but as a threat: ‘A future as black as the mine / So many mates, all scattered / Those plans came out crooked / Hell of life, streets without people . . . At the table in a bar, totally drunk / all of them were workers, now they sold out themselves.25 Especially for the young, the lack of a job and a labour market dominated by unemployment, underemployment, precariousness, absence of rights etc. compose a situation that weighs on their life conditions and marks a deep difference from the experience of their parents, who lived in times of work with rights and sufficient wages. Inequality, injustice and desperation lead to renunciation, and social rights, hardly won, are disappearing almost without resistance. Looking for a job can be a traumatic experience, and finding one can become even more frustrating: ‘My contract is over and I’m again unemployed / Running the streets, another round to look for / a shit of contract or maybe with no papers / working a thousand hours uncovered / One hundred conventions a day signed by unions / One hundred businesses a day the bosses make / What kind of rights are these?’26 The everyday reality of the labour market is presented as a dystopia that amounts to the triumph of the most brutal capitalism: Any job seems impossible to get / This story is too much, it cannot happen to me. / Four thousand applications, a temporary position, / infinite examinations and more tests of aptitude / Graduates, bachelors, courses, masters . . . lots of fucking degrees / Everything to be a pariah, to be able to survive / Internship contracts. Free exploitation! / Shit of the future they are carving to us.27

The children of the former miners or metalworkers have had the opportunity to study. The generous social payments won by the labour movement in exchange for the closures allowed the workers to send their children to university. In fact, more than half of the Asturian youth are or have been university students. But their career expectations, once they have finished

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studying, crash into a labour market with very high youth unemployment rates. Emigration appears as the most probable option, and many of them feel fooled with false promises. Threatened with being uprooted, they defy the neoliberal discourses about business ventures, opportunities and flexibility: ‘Ten years of school and ten at the University / twenty years studying and you can’t work in Asturias / You have to take your bag and migrate / and they still say you are an urban legend . . .’.28 The expression ‘urban legend’ became an ironic way of referring to those who are forced to emigrate and includes a load of political criticism since the day the former Asturian president tried to deny the issue, affirming that the youth emigration was an ‘urban legend’. At least three songs have this title (Dixebra: ‘Lleenda urbana’, 2005; Toli Morilla: ‘Leyendes urbanes’, 2006; Crudo: ‘Leyendas urbanas’, 2012), and several others mention it in their lyrics. Thousands of youngsters have to go every year. Given their strong roots in their hometown and their marked regional identity, they are left with the trauma of having to leave. Among the large amount of songs around emigration, the sorrow is often described not only (and maybe neither mainly) as a matter of living conditions in their new surroundings but as a matter of roots and identity. The most successful Asturian rapper became famous in 2006 with a song about his homesickness while he was living in Madrid. When listing the absences that make him feel in exile, the places, the landscape and people left behind get mixed in the lyrics with characteristics of a political identity typical of the coalfields: ‘They closed your mines / They fooled you in a council / They condemned your children to exile / Rockets in tubes against anti-riots / Miners’ strike / whom Franco was scared / The red star lights up the entrance to Eden / I know where I come from . . . I am an Asturianman in Madrid’.29 The depressing situation of being unemployed, a precarious worker or a migrant becomes even gloomier when attention is paid to drug consumption, which is often portrayed as a direct result of the economic crisis. Many songs have made drug addiction a prominent topic: ‘I live in a paradise of methadone / I am not but the shadow of another person / You can meet me in the Miner bar / there’s always a dose for a mate’.30 Drugs act as a symbol of moral decline, probably because they are a means of individual escape and self-destruction that represents the disarticulation of collective values and the waning willingness to resist: ‘While the Government and their henchmen fuck us / you only think about going out and get drunk / Click “liked” is the only thing you do / Revolutionary? Yes!! Getting your license in the toilet / Speed, cocaine, ketamine, this is your routine / Your brain gets empty, that is your ruin’.31 From the more radical (in a political sense) point of view, addictions and drug trafficking are seen as a weapon the enemies (capital and State) introduced in order to weaken the resistance to industrial dismantlement.

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The most acidic chronicles about the situation of youth come from the mining basin, where hardcore, punk and rap serve as channels of expression of rage and despair. Two songs, recorded in 2004 and 2017, offer panoramic views of this sensation of collapse that dominates the mood among the young. The first one (‘Sunless homeland’) became very popular, not only because of its musical quality and its lyrics but also partly thanks to an excellent video clip that combines images of a cemetery, brownfield sites, workers’ housing and a luddite act: As dark as the mine / As clear as water / A relentless struggle / A breaking future / Nothing goes well today / Your payroll money feeds / but at the same time kills the future of your child / It’s the Coalfield dying or it’s me dying in there / It’s the Coalfield killing me or it’s me stifling it harder / It’s the Coalfield that made me, it’s the Coalfield ’cos I exist / Coalfield, dynamite and alcohol / Asturias beloved homeland, Asturias sunless homeland / Coalfield of Nalón / Today I only sing to scare you, Death / To put off your whispers / Getting away from Thursdays to Mondays is so easy / that it even scares me / Controlling the scattered youth through drugs traffic / is as easy as tying and nullifying aged ladies with soap operas.32

More recently, another video clip has revisited the same problem, offering in its lyrics a very similar vision: If you have a friend that got hooked to coke / If you have a job where you get paid shit / If you have to sell weed to survive / You live in the Nalón coalfield / Valley of Nalón, how much have you changed! / There is no revolution, now everything is closed / There is no job for no one, money to the State . . . Here nobody bloody works, clearly speaking / Lots of people said goodbye, and the dole queue is overcrowded / Nothing works, whose fault is this? / People are divided, here it is not the same any longer / Dominated by a god called capitalism / The working class is a prisoner, 100% slaves / Inebriation, drug intoxication / As depraved as a whore / the drug is a swing / Dangerous fellow, snake in Eden / Public workers slotted in, good salary at month end / Unions, deals, pacts and contracts of interest / Thieving politicians, uneducated workers, kingdom of corruption / And we blame the immigrant.33

In summary, the soundtrack of Asturian deindustrialization talks about memory, identity, struggle, defeat, betrayal, unemployment, migration, loss of values and rights. It is a traumatic vision of past, present and future. There is no future, in fact – no future for youth, no future for dignity. Many of the authors tend to look for answers in the past when they care about the present and future. Given the predominant feeling of having lost the ground beneath their feet, references to the past appear much more solid and were able to provide both guidance for action and roots for identity. However, it is also important to note that it is difficult to know to what extent these songs express the feelings of their generation. After all, many young people in Asturias are also listening to more mainstream music.

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The lyrics of deindustrialization, as they are reviewed here, reflect a political commitment that might not be representative of the young generation as a whole. But the music is calling the young generation to rebellion – in light of the past struggles and the revolutionary dreams of their forefathers. Their rage and distress is tangible through their music. What is largely absent in these lyrics is generational conflict. The young have more freedom to enjoy leisure and sexual relationships, and they receive economic support from their parents (usually, they still live in their parents’ home), and sometimes even from their grandparents, early retired from the mines or the industry. Their dissatisfaction refers above all to their future perspectives and the feeling of defeat. They recall the ideals and values of their parents, which they posit against their own lack of a future. In 1977, during the transition from Francoism, Nuberu (the most important band in the Asturias music scene in the last forty years) proclaimed their hope for the arrival of better times: ‘The future is always ours, / the reason of the majority / Always when the feet walk / and the hands find hands / it is our time / Time of affirming / that in Asturias it is time / of fight and work’.34 It is difficult to find in current Asturian music any similar lyrics, including such a positive view of the future. Despite the deep pessimism, all the lyrics of the music reviewed here position their writers on the left. They see themselves as inheritors of a leftwing tradition. International solidarity, for example with migrants, is a steady commitment. Demonstrations of xenophobia are hardly found, even if some of the lyrics reviewed here are clearly nationalist. Many of the lyrics are written in the Asturian language, not in Spanish – another confirmation of how strongly these lyrics are tied to notions of cultural identity. The voices addressing the memory of the industrial past and its decline heard in the Asturian music are mainly masculine. Women’s presence is shockingly limited, and lyrics rarely address any question specifically related to women or bring up the effects of the decline from a gender perspective. To a certain extent, this surprising fact must be related to the persistence of a marked male bias in the music genres paying the most attention to themes of industrial decline: hardcore, punk and hip-hop are always male territories in which few women are able to enter. Rubén Vega García is a Professor at Oviedo University and responsible for the Oral Sources Archive for the Social History of Asturias. He has worked on the Francoist and democratic periods, following research lines focused on working cultures, labour unionism, social unrest and deindustrialization processes. He has also paid attention to testimonies and memory of repression. He is currently responsible for the project ‘Sociocultural Change, Memory,

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Heritage and Identity in Contexts of Deindustrialization’ and curator of the exhibition ‘Female Leaderships in Mining Communities’.

Notes 1. AFOHSA (Archivo de Fuentes Orales para la Historia Social de Asturias) stores oral testimonies accounting for this music of popular tradition related to labour and struggles: Constantino Alonso, Aquilino Gómez and Eufrasia Albes. At the same time, the popular songbook of the Asturian revolution in 1934 has been recorded: Xana, ‘El son nos cantares de la revolución d’Ochobre’, Fonoastur, 1998. 2. An exceptional example of a recent song adjusted to the traditional pattern of lack of recording and collective authorship referred to a working conflict and was created and sung by the workers themselves as a carnival song. The song was born in 2013, in the heat of the resistance to the closing of the plant of the multinational company Tenneco in Gijón, Spain. The lyrics combine a humorous tone with ideological discourse, referring to offshoring, unemployment and politicians’ inefficacy. The chorus focuses on the will of stopping the closing (crowned with success several months later). Song lyrics provided by Nacho Fuster, unionist and worker in the plant. 3. Trigano, ‘Les imaginaires urbain et ouvrier chez des artistes-habitants stéphanois: Étude des (re)formulations d’images, de mythes, de stéréotypes et d’emblèmes locaux par divers procédés artistiques’, 169; MacKinnon and MacKinnon, ‘Residual Radicalism: Labour Song-Poems of Industrial Decline’, 276. 4. ‘The great eclosion’, La Nueva España, 23 September 2016. 5. El Comercio, 20 August 2017. 6. La Nueva España, 25 October 2015. 7. Lyrics of ‘Química inorgánica’ (title: ‘Inorganic Chemistry’; group: Dixebra; disc: Tiempos Modernos; year: 2013; genre: rock; language: Asturian). 8. Lyrics of ‘Fumu y carbón’ (title: ‘Smoke and coal’; group: Sambre; disc: Na solombra; year: 2009; genre: punk; language: Asturian). 9. Lyrics of ‘Friu de xineru’ (title: ‘January cold’; group: Desakato; disc: Miseria, sangre y plomo; year: 2010; genre: rock; language: Asturian). 10. Lyrics of ‘La semeya’ (title: ‘The photo’; group: Avientu; disc: Y agora qué; year: 1999; genre: folk rock; language: Asturian). 11. Lyrics of ‘Enraigonaes’ (title: ‘Rooted’; group: Filanda; disc: Despeinando’l vientu; year: 2015; genre: ballad; language: Asturian). 12. Spanta la Xente (folk rock band) interview, Asturias.com, 13 April 2015. 13. Lyrics of ‘Sin pelos en la lengua’ (title: ‘Without mincing words’; group: Adizión Etílika; disc: Heridas de mina; year: 2006; genre: punk; language: Spanish). 14. Lyrics of ‘Luchador en crisis’ (title: ‘Fighter in crisis’; group: Stukas; disc: Sudor negro; year: 1999; genre: rock; language: Spanish). 15. Lyrics of ‘Falses promeses’ (title: ‘False promises’; group: Milicia Astur; disc: Astursónicu’02; year: 2002; genre: folk metal rock; language: Asturian). 16. Lyrics of ‘El últimu prexubiláu’ (title: ‘The last early retired’; group: Skanda; disc: Folk & Roll Circus; year: 2010; genre: rock; language: Asturian). 17. Lyrics of ‘Fame, murnia y mieu’ (title: ‘Hunger, sorrow and fear’; group: Taranus; disc: Taranus; year: 2012; genre: folk metal; language: Asturian). 18. http://metalkorner.com/entrada/2017/04/04/6236/entrevistamos-a-escuela-deodio-ante-la-salida-de-el-espiritu-de-las-calles-su-ultimo-trabajo (accessed 6 May 2017).

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19. Lyrics of ‘Ye too mentira’ (title: ‘It’s all a lie’; group: Skama la Rede; disc: Ye too mentira; year: 2010; genre: ska; language: Asturian). 20. Lyrics of ‘Díes de barricá’ (title: ‘Barricade days’; group: Spanta la Xente; disc: Fíos d’esta tierra; year: 2009; genre: folk rock; language: Asturian). 21. Lyrics of ‘Licenciáu en barricaes’ (title: ‘Bachelor in Barricades’; group: Avientu; disc: Glayíos dende’l fondu; year: 1999; genre: folk rock; language: Asturian). 22. Lyrics of ‘Los antidisturbios invaden la cuenca minera’ (title: ‘Antiriot squads invade the coal basin’; group: Escuela de Odio; disc: Sólo nos queda luchar; year: 2004; genre: hardcore; language: Spanish). 23. Lyrics of ‘Zona minada’ (title: ‘Mined area’; singer: Arma X; disc: 25 Otoños; year: 2008; genre: hip-hop; language: Spanish). 24. Lyrics of ‘¿Generación perdida?’ (title: ‘Lost generation?’; group: Fe de Ratas; disc: A esta civilización; year: 2000; genre: punk; language: Spanish). 25. Lyrics of ‘Ascu de vida’ (title: ‘Life loathing’; group: La Col.lá Propinde; disc: A teyavana; year: 2010; genre: folk rock; language: Asturian). 26. Lyrics of ‘Presente indicativu del verbo nuntrabayar’ (title: ‘Present tense of the verb nowork’; group: La Tarrancha; disc: Rock & Llingua; year: 2004; genre: ska; language: Asturian). 27. Lyrics of ‘Contratos de prácticas’ (title: ‘Internship contracts’; group: Fe de Ratas; disc: A esta civilización; year: 2000; genre: punk; language: Spanish). 28. Lyrics of ‘Qué feliz soy’ (title: ‘How happy I am’; group: Skontra; disc: Cantares pa dempués d’una guerra; year: 2008; genre: punk folk; language: Asturian). 29. Lyrics of ‘Un asturiano en Madrid’ (title: ‘Asturianman in Madrid’; singer: Dark la eMe; disc: Chigre y Dragón; year: 2006; genre: hip-hop; language: Spanish). 30. Lyrics of ‘La cai el viciu’ (title: ‘Vice street’; singer: Anabel Santiago; disc: Desnuda; year: 2007; genre: waltz; language: Asturian). 31. Lyrics of ‘Vida y obra de un montón de heces fecales’ (title: ‘Life and work of a pile of faecal faeces’; group: Sartenazo Cerebral; disc: Actividades Extraescolares; year: 2016; genre: punk rock; language: Spanish). 32. Lyrics of ‘Patria sin sol’ (title: ‘Sunless homeland’; group: Stoned Atmosphere; disc: Issue 3; year: 2004; genre: hip-hop; language: Spanish). 33. Lyrics of ‘La Cuenca del Nalón’ (title: ‘Nalón basin’; group: Macho de Feria; disc: none; year: 2017; genre: hip-hop; language: Spanish). 34. Lyrics of ‘Asturies, tiempu de nosotros’ (title: ‘Asturias, our times’; group: Nuberu; disc: Asturies ayeri y güei; year: 1977; genre: folk; language: Asturian).

Bibliography MacKinnon, R., and L. MacKinnon. ‘Residual Radicalism: Labour Song-Poems of Industrial Decline’. Ethnologies 34(1–2) (2012), 273–98. Trigano, S. ‘Les imaginaires urbain et ouvrier chez des artistes-habitants stéphanois: Étude des (re)formulations d’images, de mythes, de stéréotypes et d’emblèmes locaux par divers procédés artistiques’, in M. Rautenberg et al. (eds), L’imaginaire urbain dans les régions ouvrières en reconversion (Lyon: Centre Max Weber/Clersé ANR, 2012), 169–202.

CHAPTER

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The Coal-Environment Nexus How Nostalgic Identity Burdens Heritage in Romania’s Jiu Valley David A. Kideckel

Coal, Environment, Identity and Heritage in the Jiu Valley This chapter examines coal mining identity formation and the relationship of mining identity to perception and use of the natural environment. I argue that the quality and extent of this relationship, based on the objectification of identity and of nature, burdens the potential for development of both industrial and environmental heritage. The Jiu Valley is Romania’s premier coal-producing region. Located in the western Carpathian Mountains, the Valley’s coal industry (minerit) and mining culture dominated identity formation and practice throughout modern history.1 Concentration on coal permeated society and culture to such an extent in this mono-industrial region that mining and mining identity became fetishized, encouraging in turn objectification of the natural environment.2 As coal declined, coal mining nostalgia proliferated, further enabling over-exploitation of environment. Coal nostalgia focused on reinvigorating production, while environment was largely exploited in place of lost coal incomes. Such practices foreclosed the uses of both coal mining and environmental resources for regional heritage. Enabling the heritage potentials of coal and environment remains an important solution for the region, now experiencing multidimensional decline. Notes for this section begin on page 237.

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Fetishized Production and Nostalgic Identities Limit Coal and Environmental Heritage Jiu Valley dependence on coal mining for 175 years turned inanimate carbon into fetish, giving coal and mining spiritual qualities able to serve as the base of a regional heritage. Coal images grace the graves of miners and influence funerary customs. Coal icons are spread throughout the Valley on buildings, in town square sculptures, at the university and football stadia. Coal formed the core of church sermons and the superstitions of miners and others about mine-related events. But fetishizing coal makes its use for heritage problematic. When socialism fell, coal mining became the focus of an angry nostalgia. Miners especially expressed intense longing for the past when the Valley was the centre of Romanian coal production and its miners the highest paid labourers in the country. This was also goaded by regional elites, whose positions were also threatened by minerit decline. By virtue of the rapid and extreme loss of ideological supports, means of livelihood and even historical understanding, nostalgia is prevalent throughout formerly socialist East-Central Europe.3 Nostalgia is expressed for lapsed states like former Yugoslavia,4 for the lost solidarity of industrial labourers,5 or even for simpler, less competitive lives in economies of shortage.6 Though widespread, the effects of nostalgia on identity and agency remain debatable. Nostalgia often emerges due to displacement from one’s past, as in deindustrialization,7 and thus can foster degrees of identity continuity and coping.8 However, nostalgia can also disrupt the present to frustrate individuals and ideologies that would set society on a different path. Such has been the case in the Jiu Valley. In her discussion of former East Germany, Daphne Berdahl considers how nostalgia can be used for new identity formation by posing contestation of hegemonic and oppositional memories.9 But the power of coal in the Valley was such that views of frustrated miners and regional elites differed by degree and not kind. Furthermore, the persistence of coal nostalgia was enabled by unity of belief of elites and miners in response to the pejorative evaluation of the Jiu Valley by Romanian others. The so-called mineriade, actual and threatened invasions by the region’s miners of Romania’s capital in the 1990s, defined the Valley as a place of violence, backwardness, limited possibility and general degradation to outsiders.10 The uninterrupted pervasiveness of these views for three decades angers and frustrates local citizens and prompts defence of miners’ actions by reference to their difficult lives then and now. Thus, as nostalgic coal identities were affirmed and reaffirmed by many in the region – including miners, pensioners, union leaders, some intellectuals and officials – they largely foreclosed development of new outlooks and

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practices. Some people give lip service to the need for alternative practices but still question why coal production cannot be maintained at levels of previous decades, as a reserve for ‘when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow’. Many others who might have challenged prevailing ideologies have left, most as labour migrants, to go elsewhere in Europe. In fact, in the last two decades the region has seen close to a fifty per cent decline in its population, from a high of roughly 150,000 in the 1980s to about 100,000 in the last years.11 As coal declined, environment was elevated by default. Though some people and groups began to look to environment as an oppositional identity, most regional attention turned to environmental exploitation. This, then, is the tension faced in the Valley today. New forces, reflected in regional media, educational cadres, incipient government budgetary commitments and development planning, seek to broaden social and economic practice, including heritage development. At the same time, the greatest concentration of interests exploits what remains of the minerit and supports the same treatment of environment. How this situation developed and how it has begun to change is a function of Valley history examined below.

Formation of Coal Identities and Incipient Environmentalism in Jiu Valley History The coal-environment relationship developed over four separate phases. In the formative and maturing years of Jiu Valley culture, the mid-nineteenth century until World War II, coal identity was pioneering. Passage of a law allowing privatization of mining12 prompted Austro-Hungarian entrepreneurs to develop the region’s sizable coal resources. As immigrants from throughout the Dual Monarchy poured in to the region, establishing a common culture and purpose out of this multiethnic, multilingual, and multiconfessional population was paramount. The creation of a new industry and new towns – digging shafts, erecting buildings, laying railroad track – thus became the main source of regional identity along with urbanity and labour activism,13 even exceeding that of religion and ethnicity. As coal became established, the surrounding environment served as an alternative to the developing industry. Related to the pioneering identities of industry, the region’s natural environment also was a source of a mountaineering identity for those considering themselves ‘lovers of the mountains’. To serve these ends, Retezat National Park was established in 1935 while the Salvamont mountain rescue organization was formed in 1938 in Bras‚ ov. However, for most of the region’s new residents, the surrounding environment was exoticized and even somewhat feared. Diaries and monographs

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from outlying towns emphasize the region’s frontier nature, stuck as it was between the historical provinces of Oltenia to the south, Banat to the southwest, and Transylvania to the north. Even into the twentieth century, the borderlands gave rise to a vibrant culture of bandits,14 further exoticizing upland images. The region’s autochthonous upland peasants, the so-called Momârlani, were defined as part of nature and gained their name to distinguish them from Barabe, the new industrial population.15 Barabe thought Momârlani more wild and traditional, defined by their peasant dress, ownership of domestic animals – especially horses – and custom of burying their dead on their property and marking male graves with ribbon-festooned pine trees.16 Differentiation of rural and urban, natural and built environment is found in narrative constructions and pictorial images of settlers. Journalist Marian Boboc’s analysis of the comings and goings in the Valley as reported by the regional press highlight the urban and industrial nature of the region and barely make mention of events outside the towns.17 Information about the region sent by post throughout the Empire emphasizes urban culture,18 while the new rail network facilitated immigration into the increasingly intensively settled urban zone.19 Thus, 138 photographs and picture postcards from the period held by a former dispatcher of the Lupeni mine portray an urban industrial region and its exotic environment. Images are overwhelmingly urban (N=67, or 49%), including schools, churches, hospitals, communal baths and state administrative buildings. Many show people involved in and around these places. Next in number, industrial images depict railway and mining scenes (N=25 or 18%). Environmental photos (N=13 or 9%) mainly include attractions such as the Boli cave or nearby Pa˘râng Mountain, though people are typically absent. A suggestive print from 1898 shows all the elements of the new Jiu Valley identity: coal, urbanism and exotic environment. In the upper left corner four ‘Petros‚ ani rural Vlachs’ (Petrosényvidéki olàhok, i.e. Momârlani) look definitely odd and unmodern in peasant dress and headgear. The lower left shows the main hall from the Petros‚ ani coal preparation complex. Completing the card, two images of roads through the Carpathians imply transport overcoming the region’s wilds. Environmental exoticism and the pioneering mining identity did not survive World War I and II, and the intervening Great Depression. The years from 1914 to 1945 roiled the Valley, producing flux in population, production and interethnic relations. The turmoil provided a chance to broaden Valley identities, which ultimately came to nought in the destruction and transformations of crisis. Significant military action around Pasul Vulcan in World War I and the creation of ‘greater Rumania’ in the wake of war was the background for upheaval in the region’s population. But owners and workers from Greater Romania soon replaced many Austro-

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Hungarians. The Great Depression also affected the Valley, with the population remarkably in flux. Only World War II and the victorious Russian forces put an end to the waves of flux, but they instituted a stolid materialism in its place for both coal and nature.

Socialist Political Economy Elevates Coal and Instrumentalizes Environment The opposition of industry and environment and development of coal fetishism and identity was especially a function of socialist ideology and political economy. From the end of World War II until the 1990s, the minerit, regional population and urban settlement expanded furiously. Labourcentred materialism and identities overrode other practices as environment was forcibly defined narrowly and instrumentally as a zone of corporate relaxation for workers and systematically exploited for resources. Minerit expansion began immediately after the war with the so-called SOVROMs, joint Soviet-Romanian institutions to administer the mines and ensure Romanian war reparations. As the apartment blocks proliferated, citizens became dependent on and enamoured of heating and power derived from the Paros‚ eni ‘mine mouth’20 coal-fired power plant, whose turbines co-generated both electricity and hot water.21 Coal fetishism further grew with the socialist ‘cult of labour’ (cultul muncii), which portrayed labour heroism in art, literature and journalism.22 Miner statues, mosaics and bas reliefs spread through the Valley, while the brick ‘hammer and sickle’, with Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR) initials, dated 1948, built in a retaining wall through the Jiu defile, was testimony to socialist labour heroism. Fetishized mining and coal transformed environment to serve class instrumentalities. The new political economic and ideological system severely circumscribed mountain access to restrict possibilities for political resistance.23 The forests were heavily guarded by the Ocolul Silvic (Forest Protection Agency), and only the politically trustworthy were allowed access to firearms for hunting. The uplands also began to be exploited more intensively as forest products became a critical export for the Romanian economy.24 Miners now mainly experienced the out of doors and upland areas on union excursions for national holidays like May 1st, International Workers’ Day, and August 23rd, socialist Romania’s national day, and on Miners’ Day, August 6, also celebrating Saint Barbara, the miner’s patron.25 The state’s commitment to development actively suppressed the practice, if not the memory, of the earlier mountain culture, though some ecological associations (like the aforementioned Salvamont rescue group) tried to preserve environmental access to little effect. Those employed in the minerit who had thought

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themselves ‘of the mountains’ and enamoured of fishing or hiking became rarities. Mountain culture all but disappeared after the strike of August 1977, when much of the mining population was replaced by former soldiers, prisoners and workers from poorer regions, like Moldavia, who moved into new housing complexes like the ‘Airport’ in Petros‚ ani or Dallas in Vulcan and were hardly attuned to their mountainous region.26 Momârlani images changed, too, as they took roles in the region’s ‘second economy’ and drifted in to mine work. Throughout mining’s formative decades, Momârlani remained somewhat separate and culturally distinct from the growing mining population. They mainly satisfied their own subsistence, though obtained some cash through relations with clients in the mining towns to whom they sold milk, meat and brandy. But in socialism, they were no longer part of nature and also were objectified beginning in the late 1970s.27 At that time, they began to enter the mines in significant numbers, though were employed mainly in surface occupations as signalmen, dispatchers, office maintenance and in lamp distribution centres. Also, rationing of resources in late socialism assured informal economic transactions between mining households and these mountain peasants.

Rise and Decline of Coal Nostalgia and Environmental Commodification Coal nostalgia emerged with early postsocialism, as the objectification of environment begun in socialism reached new heights. Jiu Valley mining declined gradually unlike the ‘shock therapy’ experienced elsewhere in East Europe.28 In the first years after the fall of the socialist state, the new Romanian governments slowly unwound the minerit to keep politically restive miners at bay and enable the mono-industrial Valley to retain some economic heft. Minerit decline intensified with mass lay-offs beginning in 1997. The minerit employed about 52,000 people in 1990, but by the new millennium, the number of employees had fallen to about 18,000. Despite the job loss, of fourteen mines eleven remained open in the phased restructuring of the minerit, thus creating social discord between the employed and unemployed.29 Coal nostalgia was a natural response, observed in union demonstrations, hunger strikes of miners and emotional public remembrances of mine accidents and fatalities. Coal identities were also bolstered by mineriade-related judgement of the Valley. Both those processes facilitated conspiratorial thinking and encouraged views that the Valley is purposefully discriminated against. With 1990s mass unemployment, environment for many workers became a source of income instead of recreation. Families hunted mushrooms

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in local forests during socialism, but after their unemployment benefits were exhausted and severance pay dissipated, many scavenged wild resources more to sell than consume. As unemployed miners collected mushrooms, wealthier interests began commercial exploitation of upland forests by legal and illegal timbering. Stefan Dorondel documents how postsocialist corruption enabled deforestation in two hill communes in Arges‚ County.30 Illegal timbering and deforestation in the western Carpathians are at an even greater scale. The forest supervisory organization Romsilva and its policing agents, the Forest Guards (Ga˘rzile Forestiere), are responsible for forest protection. However, as Dorondel shows, Romsilva officials are easily bribed by local politicians, manipulate marginalized groups to cut forest illegally or are often themselves principals in timbering concerns. Some of the Jiu Valley’s wealthiest people who started Valley wood processing enterprises at the time began their careers as agents of Romsilva or its socialist predecessor Ocolul Silvic. EP, one of the wealthiest men in the Valley is one such person. Though lauded for his charitable activities and social responsibility, his career also follows the maxim of many Valley entrepreneurs who are ‘happy to tell you how they made their second million, but you ought not to ask how they made their first’. Since Romania’s EU accession in 2007, Jiu Valley coal mining has been further pressured, and fewer than 5,000 active miners remain today. The EU’s acquis comunitaire Chapter Fourteen on Energy specifies integrating the European market, eliminating inefficiencies in production, decreasing fossil fuel use and expanding renewables.31 An EC decision32 required the closure of inefficient mines, a category encompassing all Jiu Valley entities. Since then four of eight remaining Valley mines have been transferred to a separate agency empowered to close them. Four mines remain open, but two were threatened with closure in 2018, and the fate of the last two is now uncertain, as is that of the regional coal company itself.33 Taken together, these events have placed great pressure and encouraged considerable rancour among leaders of the regional coal company, remaining miner union leaders, political officials and officials of the mine closing agency. These conflicts have especially disrupted coal-centred identity throughout the Valley. At the same time, mining’s recent steep decline has had generally positive health effects and prompted greater popular concern for environment. Regional health has marginally improved with a declining population, fewer open mines, less subterranean work and restricted coal combustion.34 During socialism, local opinion about coal’s environmental effects was generally muted.35 Mining employment encouraged people to look past these environmental sins. However, a recent study showed that of over two hundred individuals surveyed, 70 per cent across all educational levels express concern about environmental degradation and support radical climate action.36 Taken

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together, the decline in nostalgic identity and the greater appreciation of environmental health make this a moment of great possibility for the development of heritage and heritage for development.

Reintegrating Coal and Environment for Regional Identity, Heritage and Development Today, with the minerit in danger of absolute extinction, and deforestation of the Valley uplands a visible disaster, some heritage efforts have emerged among local intellectuals, youth, a few entrepreneurs and resident foreigners. However, many of them are more concerned with profit than heritage. The Cabana Groapa Seaca˘ (The Dry Hole Inn) was an early postsocialist effort that successfully combined entrepreneurial initiative and environmental heritage. Built by a retired mine engineer, and located on the magnificent road through the Jiet‚ i Canyon, placards and exhibits at the Cabana’s gate attested to the importance of Romania’s mountain heritage and other world mountain areas. Admonitions told visitors to not litter, pick wild flowers or spoil the area’s peacefulness. Interpretive trails in the vicinity offered educational explanations of flora and fauna. Youth groups often stopped during backpacking trips. The cabana was rented out for events like New Year’s Eve parties or an occasional wedding. Middle class doctors, teachers and artists were the main clientele, but despite the owner’s mining background, miners were largely absent. Today, the original owner has sold out. He was unable to countenance the increase in traffic and the loud and boisterous clientele that had grown as a function of expansion of regional tourism. Heritage again was forced to make way for class interests, so he left. Groapa Seaca˘ had an overt environmental and heritage message. The same cannot be said about many new restaurants, inns and hotels, thrown up willy-nilly to serve the new tourist class. Tourism’s growth has produced an extraordinary increase in automobile traffic taxing the local road system. The new Trans-Alpin highway over the mountains connecting Hunedoara, Vâlcea and Gorj counties also encouraged an unprecedented amount of services built along the highway.37 For example, the town of Rânca, just across the Gorj county line, is overgrown with dozens of restaurants, pensions and hotels that spread along the main road and into side streets, leaving a feeling of disorder and over-competition for the growing tourist population. Still, other initiatives speak more positively to a future regional environmental identity and have even begun to influence workers and their families. A new hydroelectric dam on the Jiu River in the defile through the Carpathians will generate only 10 MW of electricity but will substitute for similar power generation at the Paros‚ eni complex and have great psycho-

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logical, cultural and identity implications. Local youth challenge regional deforestation by reporting on the coming and going of wood transports on a Greenpeace website built expressly for that purpose.38 An extensive network for mountain biking linking many regional peaks and a rock-climbing institute built in an abandoned apartment complex in Vulcan town also attract regional youth with the potential to put the Valley on Europe’s eco-touristic map. The international energy consortium ENEL provided 20,000 Euros for the mountain bike network to the New Horizons organization, an NGO led by an American expat challenging decades of coal nostalgia through a variety of programmes aimed at area youth.39 Even a few Momârlani have built a small heritage museum in a village outside of Petros‚ ani, the Valley’s main city. Coal heritage development has been less successful. An attempt by a Bucharest-based NGO and a Jiu Valley artist to preserve a number of important buildings at the Petrila mine complex is actively contested by town government. Many of the region’s architectural gems dating to the early years of the minerit have been leased or sold to private interests and removed from general access. The remains of once productive mines are scavenged by so called ‘magnets’, hunters of scrap iron. The region’s mining museum remains small, poorly visited and out of date. And the mines soon to close make few plans to preserve their collections of memorabilia, technology, buildings and other aspects of the minerit’s remarkable history. Though some former miners have participated in a few heritage projects, like that in Petrila, most are so angered by the coal company problems and union infighting they are ready to declare their industry at an end. Nonetheless, with the minerit’s closing on the horizon and with excessive exploitation of environment beginning to be effectively countered, some definite rethinking of both sectors may begin to create a new, integrated regional identity. Consequently, this is the time for serious decision-making by Jiu Valley elites and Romanian officials. Regional growth strategies must valorize the region’s key resources in new and different ways. Some current government initiatives again prioritize integrated development of troubled regions like the Jiu Valley, Moldavia and the Ros‚ ie Montana mining region.40 However, to what ‘integrated development’ refers is left unstated beyond ‘leveraging an increased amount of European Union funding’. Here, then, is the opening for a heritage-focused strategy integrating the past of coal and the environmental future. ‘Heritage’ offers a key trope to promote the region and show off its critical elements, long absent from regional touristic approaches.41 Like elsewhere throughout Europe, hopes for growth via eco-tourism and agro-tourism have taken over regional minds.42 However, unlike the aforementioned mountain bike initiative, most are of the cabana–restaurant variety, clearly within the bounds of entrepreneurial comfort zones though

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less compelling as heritage. To Romanians, ‘Eco-tourism’ is still mainly a fundraising strategy. Foreigners who live in the region, inspired by the area’s natural beauty, have sponsored most ‘green’ activities. Romanians are less active for a few reasons, some relating directly to the influence of the coal economy, coal nostalgia and related relations of corruption and dependency the state system has generated over the years. Thus, Romanian activities, like development of a ski resort and chairlift at Pasul Vulcan or the road to the Herculane Spa, have been short-circuited by accusations of pay-to-play, diversion of resources and shoddy work. Missing in these initiatives is an umbrella concept to integrate and provide coherence to regional development and engage a great number and diversity of regional groups. Heritage, of course, can combine efforts of educators, miners, public officials, youth and other interested parties. The Jiu Valley is extraordinary rich in mineral and environmental resources. However, for most of its history, this wealth has been mined in only one way. Perhaps a new dawn awaits. David A. Kideckel is Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. He has published widely on the anthropology of East and Central European society, socialist culture, labour in socialism and postsocialism and, most recently, on change in coal mining communities. His last book was Getting By in Post-Socialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working Class Culture (Indiana University Press, 2008), concerning changing physical conditions of postsocialist Romanian workers, including a companion video, ‘Days of the Miners: Life and Death of a Working Class Culture’. His current project compares coal’s decline and political economic change in European and American mining communities, about which he recently published ‘Coal Power: Class, Fetishism, Memory and Disjuncture in Romania’s Jiu Valley and Appalachian West Virginia’ in ANUAC 7(1),129–50.

Notes 1. Baron, Ca˘rbune ‚si societate în Valea Jiului: Perioada interbelica˘; Cra˘ciun, Grecu and Stan, Lumea Vaii: Unitatea minei, diversitatea minerilor. 2. The region contains beautiful and pristine natural areas. Ringed by the Parâng Mountains, Mt. Straja and others, the mountains provide a stunning backdrop. Uplands have inspiring canyons, rushing rivers and incredible rock formations. 3. Todorova and Gille, Post-Communist Nostalgia. 4. Boskovic, ‘Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav Cultural Memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology’, 54–78. 5. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. 6. Berdahl, ‘“(N)Ostalgie” for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things’, 192–211.

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7. Jefferson, ‘“Not What it Used to Be”: Schemas of Class and Contradiction in the Great Recession’, 310–25; Walley, ‘Transmedia as Experimental Ethnography: The Exit Zero Project, Deindustrialization, and the Politics of Nostalgia’, 624–39. 8. Batcho, ‘Nostalgia: Retreat or Support in Difficult Times?’, 355–67; Milligan, ‘Displacement and Identity Discontinuity: The Role of Nostalgia in Establishing New Identity Categories’, 381–403. 9. Berdahl, ‘“(N)Ostalgie” for the Present’, 192–211. 10. Dâncu, ‘Miners – The Orphan Children of Communism’, 1–10. 11. Bran, ‘Recent încheiatul recensa˘mânt arata˘ ca˘ Valea Jiului a ajuns la limita sutei de mii de locuitori!’ 12. Baron, Ca˘rbune ‚si societate în Valea Jiului. 13. Among many labour actions, the 1868 strike of 3,000 railway workers constructing the Simeria-Petros‚ ani main spur, broken by force of military arms (see Velica and Shreter, Ca˘la˘torie prin Vârstele Va˘ii Jiului, 38), an 1880 strike and a mass demonstration on May Day, 1890, were especially notable. 14. Fa˘gas‚ , Localitatea Uricani din Valea Jiului: Vatra˘ de Tra˘ire Româneasca˘, 29; Velica and Shreter, Ca˘la˘torie prin Vârstele Va˘ii Jiului. 15. The name Momârlani allegedly derives from bastardization of the Hungarian phrase ‘Those who remain’ (maradvany), while ‘Barabe’ was coined from the German bahn arbeiter, describing the railway workers who came to region in the 1860s. 16. Lascu, Tradit‚ii Care Dispar: Comunitatea Momârlanilor din Zona Petros‚ani. 17. Boboc, Pra˘va˘lia cu Istorii de pe Jiul de Est ‚si Jiul de Vest, Vol. 1. 18. Baron and Dobre-Baron, ‘An Attempt at Historically Outlining the Towns of the Jiu Valley’, 21–50. 19. Iancu, ‘The Economic, Social, Demographic and Environmental Effects of the Economic Reorganization within Petros‚ ani Depression’, 130–31. 20. Mine-mouth power plants burn coal directly from adjacent mines, with minimal processing. 21. Hodor and Baron, Vulcan: Schit‚e Demografice. 22. Bârga˘u, ‘Oamenii Subpa˘mîntului’, 115–70. 23. The Carpathian region was one of the major areas where resistance fighters holed up in the years immediately following World War II, see Ogoreanu, Brazii se Frâng, Dar nu se Îndoiesc: Rezistent‚a Anticomunista˘ în Munt‚ii Fa˘ga˘ras‚ului, vol. 1 and 2. 24. Montias, Economic Development in Communist Rumania, 38–39. 25. Alin Rus relates how at a union May Day gathering near the Brazi glade the area was filled with people on blankets around campfires, eating sausages and drinking beer. Roma vendors sold grilled ears of corn, popcorn, balloons and other trinkets. 26. Matinal, Dupa˘ 20 de Ani sau Lupeni ’77- Lupeni ’97. 27. Some Momârlani worked in the mines before the 1970s, though most remained outside the sector until after the 1977 strike. 28. Poznanski, ‘Introduction: Stabilization and Privatization in Poland’, 10. 29. Grecu, ‘“We Remained the Foam of the Trade”: The Impact of Restructurings on Jiu Valley Miners, 1997–2013: “A Crisis without Precedence?”’, 123–38; Kideckel, Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor the Body, and Working Class Culture. 30. Dorondel, Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants, and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania. 31. Ghica, România ‚si Uniunea Europeana˘: O istorie cronologica˘, 71–72. 32. European Commission, ‘Decizia Consilului din 10 decembrie 2010 privind ajutorul de stat pentru facilitarea închiderii minelor de carbine necompetitive’, 24–29. 33. Matei, ‘Cum a fost bagat mamutul CE Hunedoara în faliment’. 34. Ba˘da˘u, ‘The Miner Industry from Jiu Valley – Environmental and Social Influences’, 103–6; Iancu, ‘The Economic, Social, Demographic and Environmental Effects of the Eco-

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nomic Reorganization within Petros‚ ani Depression’, 127–35. Coal’s environmental effects include pollution of the Jiu River and soil and land subsidence, especially in towns the mines underlay. Coal processing at preparation plants (prepa˘rat‚ii) created two slurry ponds (iazuri de suspensie) of toxic wastes and heavy metals. Separating coal from rock produced twenty-eight slag heaps (halde) of sterile rock and ash (steril) dotting the Valley end to end. Meanwhile, respiratory illness resulted from mine labour, combustion at the Paros‚ eni power plant and the spread of coal dust by coal trains (Ba˘da˘u, ‘The Miner Industry from Jiu Valley’). 35. Larionescu, Ra˘dulescu and Rughinis‚ , Cu Ochii Minerului: Reforma Mineritul în România, 53–54. Alin Rus suggests that in the 1970s pollution from the Paros‚ eni power plant was often discussed informally by people, and there was even some local pressure to better scrub the plant’s emissions. 36. Barbat et al., ‘Residents’ Perceptions of Coal Industry Long-Term Pollution in the Jiu Middle Valley (Romania): Premise for Environmental Education’, 872. 37. In summer 2016, the road between Petros‚ ani to the crossroads heading south-east toward Voineasa and Vâlcea County and south toward Gorj County was nearly impassable due to its destruction by heavy traffic and by recent rainstorms. 38. Ziarul Va˘ii Jiului, ‘Greenpeace lanseaza˘ o platforma˘ online pentru sesizarea ta˘ierilor ilegale de pa˘dure’. 39. Bates, ‘Developing the Eco-Touristic Capacities of the Jiu Valley’. 40. Butu, ‘Government Eyes Integrated Development Approach of the Jiu Valley, Rosie Montana and Moldovia regions’. 41. Pipan, ‘O analiza˘ ministeriala˘ da˘ verdictul pentru turismul insuficient dezvoltat al Va˘ii: nu prea avem infrastructura˘, promovare, s‚ i rata˘m obiective importante’. 42. Barna, Epure and Vasilescu, ‘Ecotourism: Conservation of the Natural and Cultural Heritage’, 87–96.

Bibliography Ba˘da˘u, A.-B. ‘The Miner Industry from Jiu Valley – Environmental and Social Influences’. Annals of the ‘Constantin Brâncus‚i’ University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Special Issue/2014 – Information Society and Sustainable Development 103–6. Barbat, A.C. et al. ‘Residents’ Perceptions of Coal Industry Long-Term Pollution in the Jiu Middle Valley (Romania): Premise for Environmental Education’. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 46 (2012), 870–74. Bârga˘u, V. ‘Oamenii Subpa˘mîntului’, in G. Has‚ a (ed.), Planeta Ca˘rbunului (Bucures‚ ti: Editura Eminescu, 1984), 115–70. Barna, C., M. Epure and R.Vasilescu. ‘Ecotourism: Conservation of the Natural and Cultural Heritage’. Review of Applied Socio- Economic Research 1(1) (2011), 87–96. Baron, M. Ca˘rbune ‚si societate în Valea Jiului: Perioada interbelica˘. Petros‚ ani: Editura Universitas, 1998. Baron, M., and O. Dobre-Baron. ‘The Emergence of the Jiu Valley Coal Basin (Romania) – A Consequence of the Industrial Revolution’. Annals of the University of Petros‚ani, Economics Department 9(3) (2009), 53–80. ———. ‘An Attempt at Historically Outlining the Towns of the Jiu Valley’. Annals of the University of Petros‚ani, Economics Department 15(1) (2015), 21–50. Batcho, K.I. ‘Nostalgia: Retreat or Support in Difficult Times?’ American Journal of Psychology 126(3) (2013), 355–67. Bates, D. ‘Developing the Eco-Touristic Capacities of the Jiu Valley’. Successful Grant Proposal submitted to ENEL, The International Energy Consortium. Manuscript. Author’s possession, 2016.

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Berdahl, D. ‘“(N)Ostalgie” for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things’. Ethnos 64(2) (1999), 192–211. Boboc, M. Pra˘va˘lia cu Istorii de pe Jiul de Est ‚si Jiul de Vest, Vol. 1. Craiova: Autograf MJM, 2010. Boskovic, A. ‘Yugonostalgia and Yugoslav Cultural Memory: Lexicon of Yu Mythology’. Slavic Review 72(1) (2013), 54–78. Bran, C. ‘Recent încheiatul recensa˘mânt arata˘ ca˘ Valea Jiului a ajuns la limita sutei de mii de locuitori!’ Ziarul Vaii Jiului, 10 November 2011. Retrieved 23 February 2016 from http://www.zvj.ro/articole-376 Recent+incheiatul+recens++mant+arat+++c++++V alea+Jiului+a+ajuns+la+limita+sutei+de+mii+de+locuitori.html. Butu, A.G. ‘Government Eyes Integrated Development Approach of the Jiu Valley, Rosie Montana and Moldovia regions’. The Romania Journal. Retrieved June 9 2016 from http://www.romaniajournal.ro/govt-eyes-integrated-development-approach-of-thejiu-valley-rosia-montana-and-moldavia-regions/. Cra˘ciun, M., M. Grecu and R. Stan. Lumea Vaii: Unitatea minei, diversitatea minerilor. Bucharest: Paideia, 2002. Dâncu, V. ‘Miners – The Orphan Children of Communism’. Sinteza 29 (2016), 1–10. Dorondel, S. Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants, and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania. New York: Berghahn, 2016. Dunn, E.C. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca: Cornell, 2004. European Commission. ‘Decizia Consilului din 10 decembrie 2010 privind ajutorul de stat pentru facilitarea închiderii minelor de carbine necompetitive’. Official Journal of the European Union (Romania) 1(336) (2010), 24–29. Fa˘gas‚ , P.G. Localitatea Uricani din Valea Jiului: Vatra˘ de Tra˘ire Româneasca˘. Petros‚ ani: Matinal, 2000. Ghica, L. România ‚si Uniunea Europeana˘: O istorie cronologica˘. Bucures‚ ti: Meronia, 2006. Grecu, M.V. ‘“We Remained the Foam of the Trade”: The Impact of Restructurings on Jiu Valley Miners, 1997–2013: “A Crisis without Precedence?”’ Travail et emploi 137 (2014), 123–38. Hodor, P., and M. Baron. Vulcan: Schit‚e Demografice. Vulcan: Realitatea Româneasca˘, 2003. Iancu, F.-C. ‘The Economic, Social, Demographic and Environmental Effects of the Economic Reorganization within Petros‚ ani Depression’, in Analele Universita˘t‚ii din Craiova: Seria Geografie, vol. 10 (2007), 127–35. Jefferson, A. ‘“Not What it Used to Be”: Schemas of Class and Contradiction in the Great Recession’. Economic Anthropology 2(2) (2015), 310–25. Kideckel, D.A. Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor the Body, and Working Class Culture. Bloomington: Indiana, 2008. Larionescu, M., S. Ra˘dulescu and C. Rughinis‚ . Cu Ochii Minerului: Reforma Mineritul în România. Bucharest: Editura Gnosis, 1999. Lascu, I. Tradit‚ii Care Dispar: Comunitatea Momârlanilor din Zona Petros‚ani. Craiova: Editura Craiova, 2004. Matei, C.P. ‘Cum a fost bagat mamutul CE Hunedoara în faliment’. Cotidianul On-line, 2015. Retrieved 14 January 2016 from http://www.cotidianul.ro/cum-a-fost-bagat-mamutulce-hunedoara-in-faliment-274439/. Matinal. Dupa˘ 20 de Ani sau Lupeni ’77- Lupeni ’97. Petros‚ ani: Grapho Tipex, 1997. Milligan, M.J. ‘Displacement and Identity Discontinuity: The Role of Nostalgia in Establishing New Identity Categories’. Symbolic Interaction 26(3) (2003), 381–403. Montias, J.M. Economic Development in Communist Rumania. Cambridge: MIT, 1967. Ogoreanu, I.G. Brazii se Frâng, Dar nu se Îndoiesc: Rezistent‚a Anticomunista˘ în Munt‚ii Fa˘ga˘ras‚ului. Timis‚ oara: Editura Marineasa, 1995. Pipan, A. ‘O analiza˘ ministeriala˘ da˘ verdictul pentru turismul insuficient dezvoltat al Va˘ii: nu prea avem infrastructura˘, promovare, s‚ i rata˘m obiective importante’. Ziarul Va˘ii Jiului, 14

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September 16. Retrieved 9 June 2016 from http://www.zvj.ro/articole-41102-O+analiz +++ministerial+++d+++verdictul+pentru++turismul+insuficient+dezvoltat+al+V++ ii++nu+prea+avem.html. Poznanski, K.Z. ‘Introduction: Stabilization and Privatization in Poland’, in K.Z. Poznanski (ed.), Poland: An Economic Evaluation of the Shock Therapy Program (New York: Springer, 1993), 1–15. Todorova, M., and Z. Gille (eds). Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Velica, I., and C. Shreter. Ca˘la˘torie prin Vârstele Va˘ii Jiului. Deva: Editura Destin, 1993. Walley, C.J. ‘Transmedia as Experimental Ethnography: The Exit Zero Project, Deindustrialization, and the Politics of Nostalgia’. American Ethnologist 42(4) (2015), 624–39. Ziarul Va˘ii Jiului. ‘Greenpeace lanseaza˘ o platforma˘ online pentru sesizarea ta˘ierilor ilegale de pa˘dure’, 2016. Retrieved 28 September 2016 from http://www.zvj.ro/articole-40355Greenpeace+lanseaz+++o+platform+++online+pentru+sesizarea+t++ierilor+ilegale+ de+p++dure.html.

CHAPTER

13

A Special Kind of Cultural Heritage The Remembrance of Workers’ Life in Contemporary Hungary – Case Study of Ózd Tibor Valuch

Introduction Industrial heritage and cultural heritage have various interpretations and meanings.1 In my opinion, it is worth thinking over the meaning of cultural heritage from the point of view of social history. The basic questions are: how did the culture of work change in the modern world? What were the consequences of these changes in society? What was the role of traditions and habits? How was social behaviour influenced by political changes? What were the social effects, if the social, local and individual identity of workers often changed, as happened in Hungary in the last few decades – especially since the regime change in 1989/90?2 The transformation of the world of modern work and post- and deindustrialization created new conditions for all participants. The remembrance of work and workers became part of the industrial and cultural heritage. In this chapter, I will give a summary of the changes in workers’ lives under conditions of deindustrialization in contemporary Hungary3 and look specifically at how these changes are remembered. I would like to show how the culture and identity of local industrial society have changed. The place of my research is Ózd – a former industrial centre in North-East Hungary, where one of the largest factories in twentieth-century Hungary was operating – with more than 14,000 workers – until the mid 1990s. The factory Notes for this section begin on page 248.

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was closed in the second half of the 1990s in consequence of the 1989/90 transitions. Our research group made more than eighty life course story interviews with former workers in the last years. On the basis of these interviews, I will analyse the main components of former workers’ lives, the process of work, the special characteristics of social connections and the networks in the factory and in private life. The basic research questions are: how did they live their everyday life as workers and what kind of memories do they have? How did they reorganize their lives after the closing of the factory? How did culture and the structure of their lives and identities change in the period of deindustrialization? Furthermore, I will examine the question, how did workers experience the demolition of their former industrial environment? This chapter consists of three parts. In the first part, I give a short overview of the research and analyse the changes and structure of the local working class. In the second part, I study the strategies of formal workers’ remembrance, and I try to show the main characteristics of their memories. I think these memories formulate a special kind of cultural and social heritage of (de-)industrialization. In the third part, I analyse the interviews to follow the research questions and try to summarize the main results.

Brief Description of the Research This chapter derives from a larger investigation into the social history of Hungarian factory workers4 from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century in the town of Ózd. The local society can be characterized as a strongly stratified community where the following components and values were extremely important: first of all, work itself and the social effect of the role of work. This factor determined individual and communal social positions. The second essential factor, in connection with it, was the special knowledge and the multiple experiences of work that influenced an individual’s position in the factory and their income. The third one was the strong personal connection to the work and the factory. In everyday life, it meant intensive personal relationships and networks in the workplace and in private life. The fourth was the personal perception of social security and the feeling of relative well-being that obviously depended on social position. However, the majority of workers could experience it in many different ways. The helping role of relatives’ networks was also significant in the functioning of local society. Last but not least, the role of the factory in the local social processes was unique because the steel factory was the main guarantor of local social integration for decades.5

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With my colleagues, I collected the relevant archival sources about the history of the factory and of local society. We also made life and family history interviews, at first with the members of multigenerational workers’ families. Ultimately, the aim is to analyse the social history of the local steelworker community.

Short History of the Factory and the Settlement Ózd is a small town in the North-East of Hungary close to the Slovakian border. The development of metallurgy began here in the mid nineteenth century, and the growth of the factory was extremely dynamic into the twentieth century.6 The Metallurgy Factory of Ózd became one of the most important heavy industrial works in Hungary. Only the Peace Treaties after World War I and the economic crisis in the thirties caused a small drop in this process. The works had more than 8,000 workers before the beginning of World War II, and it was able to work successfully and profitably. The factory was nationalized a short time after the end of World War II. The importance of steel and iron production increased after the communist takeover in 1948/49. This was the period of the so-called forced industrialization in modern Hungarian history.7 In the context of the planned economy, the costs of production were not taken into account very seriously until the mid seventies. The socialist state subsidized production in the circumstances of planned economy, if it was necessary. When the steel factory was modernized in the mid seventies, it was profitable only for a short time. The number of workers increased to over 14,000 in this period. The Met-

Figure 13.1 Population of Ózd between 1920 and 2014. Source: Census data of the related years.

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Figure 13.2 Development of the headcount in the forge in Ózd between 1930 and 1998. Source: Berend, T. (ed.) History of the Metallurgic Plants of Ózd. Ózd: ÓKÜ, 1980, and Statistical Yearbook, 1980, 1990, 1995, 1998.

allurgy Factory of Ózd was easily the biggest employer in the city. Further modernization of the production got started in the 1980s: the loss-making parts of the factory were closed, and 2,100 workers were fired. The collapse of metallurgy happened at the beginning of the 1990s, when the Hungarian state was unable to give financial support to the factory any more. Pig-iron production was ended in 1991, and steel making was finished in 1992. The attempted privatization process was not successful. The German steel-industrial investor group that bought the company could not reorganize the production, and the Hungarian state bought back the company in 1994 and closed it. The former workers were employed to dismantle their factory in an attempt to alleviate the high ratio of local unemployment in the mid 1990s. The impoverishment of local society began at this time.8 New investors did not arrive, and many people now left the town. From 1992 to 2011 more than 15,000 people left – about one third of its population.9 For those who stayed, there was mostly long-term unemployment, particularly for the prominent gypsy population of the city, many of whom were unskilled workers. Nowadays Ózd is a highly impoverished settlement, and the people who remained here after the closure of the factory have eked out precarious existences for the last two and a half decades. The former industrial town had been living in permanent economic and social crisis since the first half of the 1990s. The disintegration of local society became stronger year by year. The majority of the formerly valuable industrial buildings were destroyed, and the highly prestigious houses of former worker colonies became the places of social segregation of a highly ghettoized gypsy community.10

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Some Socio-demographical Characteristics of the Interviewees The present chapter is based on twenty-five interviews. Eighty per cent of respondents were members of multigenerational worker families. Nineteen interviewees were male and six were female. Their average age was 72 years in 2011. Most of the respondents were born in Ózd or in the neighbourhood, and they grew up there. Some people who were born in other parts of Hungary moved to Ózd with the expectation of an easier life. Regarding the level of education, the majority was well educated; they finished secondary school or industrial school. Everybody spent his/her active career at the Metallurgy Factory of Ózd. Two thirds of interviewees were skilled workers and only one third was semi- or unskilled. Women received less salary than men performing similar work at the factory.

Remembrance Strategies and the Experiences of Workers’ Lives The interviews highlight the main elements of the former workers’ remembrance strategies. All interviewees thought that the work and the time they spent in the factory was the most important experiences of their life. Their thinking was influenced by the family background and their own life experiences. The majority of interviewees were second- or third-generation members of traditional workers’ families. The factory was not only a workplace for them but also a very important part of their identity. Work shaped their social values. They remembered that working in the factory meant a special kind of common activity that united them. All of them considered the closure of the factory a major disaster, which they identified with the end of a century and a half old tradition. Most interviews reflect rather positive memories of working in the steel factory. In particular, the stability of work in the factory was seen as something positive. It had given their lives security. Many interviewees describe the factory as a second home, with fellow workers being part of an extended family and social relationship in the factory being friendly and mutually supportive. Despite the dangers of the work, the solidarity of the workers is remembered favourably. They also identify the factory as a place for social improvement, with opportunities for professional development and promotion. Working in the factory is described as an inheritance – it was handed down within the family and made possible through informal social networks that existed around the factory.

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The most interviewees had worked in the Metallurgy Factory of Ózd for most of their lives. One of our interviewees mentioned that he had got to the factory as a very young man, in the early 1950s. He was just 18 years old. At first, he was employed as a plumber. Afterwards, he retrained and became a welder, and at the end he retired after thirty-eight years of work.11 Another younger worker, who was born in 1949, got to the works with the help of his father. He worked at the transportation division at first; later he worked as a roller man.12 It was a prestigious thing to belong to the factory society before and after World War II. Work conditions were remembered as having been good: there were plenty of opportunities for social advancement and promotion, and salaries were higher than the national average. The memory of intergenerational as well as intragenerational solidarity was strong. Young couples lived in common households with their parents for some years, in order to accumulate the funds for their future independent family life. Workers who were working in the same division usually were friends in their private lives, and they helped each other in house building: ‘The people knew each other very well, we worked together, we lived in the same building estate, and certainly our pleasures and regrets were common experiences.’13 They often spent their free time together. The data of marriage certificates and the interviews show that endogamy was typical in the factory society: several worker families became relatives. Sometimes the workers included several generations, with father and son working in the same positions. Being a factory worker was one of the most important elements in the life strategy of many families. This tradition, this way of thinking and this social mobility strategy was broken by the changes of regime in 1989/90. The unsuccessful privatization process and the closure of the Metallurgy Factory disappointed the local society and caused serious frustrations because of the mass unemployment. The lifeworld that had shaped families for generations seemed to disappear overnight. Given the very strong emotional ties of the workers to their factory, they experienced the closure of the factory as an irrecoverable waste. Some interviewees remembered it this way: ‘We had an excellent human community’, ‘The factory was my life’s fund’, ‘To be worker it was my life’, ‘The life in Ózd collapsed when the Metallurgy Factory was closed’, ‘We lost everything what was necessary to the normal life’, ‘Somebody cried, we suffered, when we read the news, everybody knew this was the end’, ‘I’m not able to understand why the factory and the town had to be destroyed’,14 ‘There wasn’t any other possibility to work here; the Metallurgy Factory was the only employer, everybody worked at the factory . . . there was no more works, no more life, no more everything’.15

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The collapse of the Metallurgy Factory caused dramatic changes in everyday life, in local society and (self-) identity. The workers’ thinking was determined by the world of work. Before the transitions they were proud members of the factory and the local community. The closure of the Metallurgy factory meant not only the loss of a workplace and existential security for them but also the loss of identity. They clung to memories of a better past and were bitter about the politicians, who were blamed for not preventing the change for the worse in Ózd.

Conclusion This chapter has highlighted how former metalworkers remembered their lives and their work. It has shown what meaning the industrial past had for them and how they experienced deindustrialization. The factory that had dominated their lives under communism shaped their lifeworld. With it gone, they struggled to find meaning in their lives. The absence of industrial heritage initiatives in Ózd also means that there is no institutionalization of the collective memory of workers – with the very real danger that their voices will be silenced in the long run. The loss of memory would complete the loss of a way of life. Tibor Valuch is Professor of History, Eszterházy Károly University, Eger, and Research Chair at Hungarian Academy of Sciences for the Center of Social Sciences. His research focuses on the social and political behaviour, social history of everyday life and policy changes in contemporary Hungarian culture, as well as Hungarian social and cultural history. He was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in 2016. Valuch is a prolific author on twentieth-century Hungarian social and cultural history, and the social history of labour in Hungary. His most recent publication is a special issue on workers, labour and labour history in Modern East Central Europe in East Central Europe 46(1) (2019).

Notes This chapter is a part of my research in progress, which is dealing with the questions of transformations of social structure and the changes of everyday life of the Hungarian working class in the twentieth century. This study was written with the support of a CEU IAS Senior Core Scholarship and the support of the research project of National Research, Development and Innovation Office, project number is: 116625. 1. For the conceptual and theoretical summary of these questions, see Delanty and Rum-

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ford, Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization; Strydom, ‘Contemporary European Cognitive Social Theory’, 218–29; Aronson, ‘Heritage: A Conceptual Paper Toward a Theory of Cultural Heritage in Humanitarian Action’, 1–19; Harvey, ‘The History of Heritage’, 19–36. 2. It is important to know that the change of regime in 1989/90 brought to an end the communist political, economic and social system, therefore Hungarian workers had to find their living space again in an environment defined by market economy, private ownership, multinational corporations and globalization. Obviously, from the point of view of labour and the working class, different characteristics defined the slightly particular Hungarian state socialism and the post-industrial, increasingly globalized Hungarian capitalism that started to get (re-)organized after 1990. 3. For a comprehensive overview of the era, see Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century. For the summary of social changes see Valuch, Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében [Social History of Hungary in the Second Half of the 20th Century]. 4. For the social history of the Hungarian working class see Valuch, Kövér and Gyáni, Social History of Hungary from the Reform-Era to the End of WWII; Gyáni, ‘A városi munkásság szerkezeti változásai 1910 és 1941 között’ [Structural Transformation of Urban Workers 1910– 1941]; Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labour and the Making of Socialist Hungary 1944– 1958; Belényi, Az állam szorításában: Az ipari munkásság társadalmi átalakulása Magyarországon 1945–1965 [Under the State Pressure: The Social Changes of Hungarian Industrial Workers 1945–1965]; Valuch, ‘Magyarország társadalomtörténete’. 5. Peter Nagy analysed these problems in a detailed way in his monograph – see Nagy, A Rima vonzásában: Az ózdi helyi és gyári társadalom a késo˝ dualizmustól az államosításig [In the Allurement of Rima: The Local and Factory Society from the Late Dualism to the Nationalization]. 6. For the history of local society and the factory, see Berend, Az Ózdi Kohászati Üzemektörténete [The History of Metallurgy Factory in Ózd]; Nagy, A Rima vonzásában. 7. See Kaposi, A XX. század gazdaságtörténete [Economic History of 20th Century]. 8. For the changes of local society after the transition see Alabán, ‘Rural Societies with Industrial Workers in Northeast Hungary’, 135–46. 9. See Alabán, ‘“Siktából” az utcára: ipari munkások az ózdi kistérség törésvonalain’, 82–105. 10. See Fehér, ‘On the Transformation of a Former Worker’s Colony: Symbolic and Social Boundaries in the Making’, 22–46. 11. Interview with S.Sz. The interview was recorded on 24 June 2011. 12. Interview with M.S. He was a roller worker at the Metallurgy Factory of Ózd. The interview was recorded on 22 June 2011. 13. Interview with B.G. He was a skilled worker from the early fifties to the closure of factory. The interview was recorded on 27 June 2011. 14. Interviews with former workers: A.K. and J.B. 15. Interview with A.T. He was a metallurgist at the factory for decades. The interview was recorded on 25 June 2011.

Bibliography Alabán, P. ‘“Siktából” az utcára: ipari munkások az ózdi kistérség törésvonalain’. Korall. Társadalomtörténeti Folyóirat 13(49) (2012), 82–105. ———. ‘Rural Societies with Industrial Workers in Northeast Hungary’. Hungarian Studies: A Journal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies and Balassi Institute 29(1–2) (2015), 135–46.

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Aronson, I.-L. ‘Heritage: A Conceptual Paper Toward a Theory of Cultural Heritage in Humanitarian Action. Papers World Conference Humanitarian Studies (WCHS)’. Groningen: University of Groningen. 2009. Belényi, G. Az állam szorításában: Az ipari munkásság társadalmi átalakulása Magyarországon 1945–1965 [Under the State Pressure: The Social Changes of Hungarian Industrial Workers 1945–1965]. Szeged: Belvedere-Meridionale Kiadó, 2009. Berend, I.T. (ed.). Az Ózdi Kohászati Üzemektörténete [The History of Metallurgy Factory in Ózd].Ózd: ÓKÜ, 1980. Delanty, G., and C. Rumford. Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization. London: Routledge, 2005. Fehér, K. ‘On the Transformation of a Former worker’s Colony: Symbolic and Social Boundaries in the Making’. Socio.HU: Társadalomtudományi Szemle 4 (2016), 22–46. Gyáni, G. ‘A városi munkásság szerkezeti változásai 1910 és 1941 között’ [Structural Transformation of Urban Workers 1910–1941], in G. Gyáni (ed.), Az urbanizáció társadalomtörténete [Social History of Urbanisation] (Kolozsvár: Korunk Komp-Press, 2012). Harvey, D.C. ‘The History of Heritage’, in B. Graham and P. Howard (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008), 19–36. Kaposi, Z. A XX. század gazdaságtörténete [Economic History of 20th Century]. Budapest: Dialóg-Campus, 2004. Nagy, P. A Rima vonzásában: Az ózdi helyi és gyári társadalom a késo˝ dualizmustól az államosításig [In the Allurement of Rima: The Local and Factory Society from the Late Dualism to the Nationalization]. Budapest: NapvilágKiadó, 2016. Pittaway, M. The Workers’ State: Industrial Labour and the Making of Socialist Hungary 1944– 1958. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Romsics, I. Hungary in the Twentieth Century. Budapest: Corvina, 2001. Strydom, P. ‘Contemporary European Cognitive Social Theory’, in G. Delanty (ed.), Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), 218–29. Valuch, T. Magyarország társadalomtörténete a XX. század második felében [Social History of Hungary in the Second Half of the 20th Century]. Budapest: Osiris, 2001. Valuch, T., G. Kövér and G. Gyáni. Social History of Hungary from the Reform-Era to the End of WWII. Budapest: Social Science Monographs, 2004.

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Ruins for Politics Selling Industrial Heritage in Postsocialist China’s Rust Belt Tong Lam

Contemporary discourse on Western industrial decline entails a narrative of changing economic fortunes. Images of the US rust belt, for instance, often conjure up a contrasting imagery of China’s rising megacities and burgeoning urban middle class. Similarly, this narrative also asserts that the industrialization of many Global South countries is accomplished at the expense of the deindustrialization of the West. Aside from being a simplistic understanding of globalization, such zero-sum narratives have also evoked xenophobic sentiments across liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic, fuelling a new populist politics and economic nationalism. At the macro level, there is no doubt that globalization and free trade have benefited China enormously. Yet, little attention is given to the fact that China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization have also been accompanied by an equally drastic process of deindustrialization. Specifically, China’s postsocialist alignment with global capitalism in the past four decades has resulted in an industrial reconfiguration with profound social and geographical consequences. This reconfiguration of industries has led to derelict factories, social dislocation and the abandonment of the former industrial working class that was once regarded as the vanguard of the socialist revolution. Amidst China’s economic rise, then, there is the need for the state to publicly reconcile its new political-economic orientation with its previous Notes for this section begin on page 268.

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emphasis – at least in theory – on social equity, workers’ rights and other socialist values without acknowledging the radical juncture between them. This chapter examines how China’s industrial spaces from the Cold War era are being converted into a globally legible form of ‘industrial heritage’ for leisure and consumption. Using the city of Liupanshui in Guizhou province and the city of Panzhihua in the neighbouring Sichuan province as the main examples, this chapter shows how the heritagization of dilapidated industrial sites has been driven by the desire of the party-state to overwrite the complex legacies of socialist revolution with a simple narrative of national rejuvenation and development. As the state tries to ensure that the socialist values from the past do not come back to haunt the contemporary neoliberal order, its industrial heritage projects have also conveniently neglected those who made unspeakable sacrifice for China’s Cold War mobilization and socialist production. Thus, China’s rust belt and its abandoned workers hidden underneath the embellishment of industrial heritage have much in common with their counterparts in the American and European rust belts. Among other things, they provide a window into the current perils of neoliberal capitalism and the dismal state of class politics.

The Third Front Construction The global Cold War meant different things for different people. When US historians speak of the early Cold War (1945–1952), they often refer to the period when the US emerged as a superpower that actively sought to reshape the post-World War II global order. During this time, however, many nations in Asia and elsewhere remained shattered. The Chinese communist regime that founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 by defeating the Nationalists in a bitter civil war was still very much struggling to consolidate its control of China’s vast territory. Adding to the sense of insecurity for the communist regime was the threats made by the US to use atomic bombs against China and North Korea during the Korean War (1950–1953). As well, the Sino-Soviet Split in 1960, which ultimately led to a brief border war between the two nations, further exacerbated socialist China’s survival fears. In short, facing two superpowers wielding their nuclear weapons and massive military forces, the existential threats felt by the Chinese communist leaders was real. In 1964, pondering the possibility of a nuclear attack, Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Communist Party, decided to launch a massive mobilization known as the Third Front Construction. Based on a geo-military and geopolitical conceptualization of space, the Chinese territory was divided into three areas. Specifically,

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the coastal region and the Soviet border in the northeast was considered as the First Front that was thought to be most vulnerable to any military attacks. Meanwhile, the mountainous hinterland region in the southwest was regarded as the Third Front, since it was relatively difficult to reach even with modern military equipment. As for the mostly plain area in between, it was seen as the Second Front. The military-strategic significance of the southwestern region was already evident during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when the Nationalist government effectively used the area to stage its resistance against Japan after both the coastal and plain regions had been swiftly occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. Taking a page from that history, Mao and his communist strategists hoped to secretly duplicate China’s heavy and military industries in the Third Front. In the event of war, he imagined, the region could at least become the final front to sustain a total war against the enemy when all urban centres would be destroyed and contaminated by nuclear attacks. In the few years immediately after 1964, approximately 1,100 heavy industrial plants and construction projects were introduced in the sprawling area of a total of thirteen provinces.1 Within this greater Third Front region, the provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan were particularly regarded as vital due to their geographical terrains and locations. As for the key industries that were being developed, they were primarily steel, military, mining, energy, transportation and other basic infrastructures. In the military sector, in addition to the manufacturing of weapons such as fighter jets and tanks, there were also high-tech facilities for the research and development of nuclear weapons and space programmes. The Third Front project was so secretive that the identities of plants and research facilities were disguised as numbers, code words or post office box addresses that only the personnel within the same facility would understand. For instance, the massive nuclear military factory that was connected by a set of secret underground tunnels and caves in the suburb of Chongqing was called Plant 816.2 In general, while all these plants, research laboratories and other supporting buildings from dormitories to hospitals were built from scratch, the process often involved the disassembly, relocation and reassembly of existing equipment from the northeastern and coastal regions. Thus, alongside these massive constructions and relocations of industrial plants, there occurred also the forced relocation of millions of personnel such as workers, soldiers, engineers, scientists, cadres and their families. Consequently, in addition to a fundamental spatial reconfiguration of China’s heavy industries, the Third Front Construction project had led to the establishment of hundreds of new cities and towns in an otherwise thinly populated region, with lasting consequences. In sum, the massive Third Front mobilization was a project of industrialization, military

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build-up, internal migration, urbanization and infrastructural development that was unprecedented in speed and scope in Chinese history.3 The scale of the Third Front Construction project was unambiguously revealed in official statistics. Between 1952 and 1982, the region’s share of the investment nationally rose to 40 per cent, with Sichuan and Guizhou having the largest shares.4 Its population, unsurprisingly, increased drastically as well. In general, the spatial principle of the project was based on the idea of placing the key facilities ‘in mountains, in dispersion, in caves’ so that they would be less vulnerable to aerial surveillance and bombing. Needless to say, such spatial requirements added yet another layer of logistical and engineering challenges to an already complicated project. As a result, plant designers and engineers were not always ready to implement their plans without an extensive period of trial and error. Poor planning and execution also meant that some of the projects had never reached the production stage. For example, the military nuclear plant 816, which involved as much as 60,000 engineer soldiers during its early construction phase, remained unfinished when it was shut down in 1984.5 Added to the long list of problems, too, were disruptions caused by political campaigns such as the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Therefore, in spite of the marked increase of population and infrastructural investment, the regional share of gross products only increased modestly. Although some of the Third Front projects did not end until the early 1980s, the likelihood of a nuclear attack from either the US or the Soviet Union had been reduced considerably with China’s joining of the United Nations in 1971 and President Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972. After 1973, there were no more new projects, and the region’s share of investments began to dwindle.6 When the new leader Deng Xiaoping introduced a mixed market economy in 1978, new investments from the state were mostly directed back to the coastal areas and established urban centres. Still, not all the Third Front factories were irrelevant in the postsocialist era. Indeed, some of the plants for research, testing and manufacturing facilities for military aircrafts and tanks have remained open. The famous Xichang Satellite Launch Center, which carries out space exploration projects, is itself a legacy of the Third Front Construction. Similarly, some mining and utility plants have continued to operate, becoming state-owned enterprises or even listed companies. Yet, the majority of former Third Front factories have ceased to operate. While some of them have been sold and re-purposed by private companies, more often than not, they have been left to decay. Buried in the ruins of these former factories, too, were secret stories of the Third Front, as well as the tormenting memories of sufferings of millions of uprooted workers.

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Constructing Heritage Although China is one of the world’s oldest civilizations, its idea of ‘cultural heritage’ has a rather short history. Specifically, the history of cultural heritage in China is inseparable from the country’s reintegration into the global economy in the postsocialist era. After all, UNESCO has emerged as the single most important player in shaping, adjudicating and legislating what is considered as cultural heritage since the introduction of the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972. Based on a set of standards that claim to be scientific and universal values, this humanist and liberal approach to cultural heritage is predicated on the global system of nation-states, with each member state to articulate how and why certain sites, artefacts and practices are culturally and nationally significant using that logic. In 1985, as part of its ongoing effort to rejoin the global world after decades of isolation, China became a signatory nation of the above UNESCO heritage convention.7 Two years later, it also successfully registered the first group of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Despite being a latecomer, the government was quick to recognize the tremendous economic and political benefits that came with the idea of cultural heritage. By 2005, a total of thirty-one cultural and natural sites had been approved by UNESCO, ranking China third in terms of ownership of World Heritage Sites. The Chinese media even urged the government to secure China’s share of the UNESCO world heritage registry so that China could become a ‘world heritage powerhouse nation’.8 Meanwhile, the number of prospective sites submitted by local governments to the central government for eventual UNESCO consideration had soared to over a hundred,9 prompting the Chinese media and some scholars to characterize the new national obsession as a ‘heritage fever’ or ‘heritage application fever’.10 During this early period of ‘heritage fever’, there were hardly any heritage sites from the modern era. Rather, cultural heritage referred almost exclusively to ancient sites such as the Great Wall and the Forbidden City.11 The government’s relative silence on the nation’s recent past, no doubt, was an indication of its difficulty in reconciling the socialist past with the postsocialist present. Yet, since the early 2000s, there has been a surge of interest in turning twentieth-century historic buildings into heritage sites for tourism. In Shanghai, for example, the colonial architectures in the Bund as well as the building where the First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held were designated as heritage buildings.12 Significantly, even if the party-state has become more confident in commodifying its revolutionary sites, it is certainly not ready to put its revolutionary past under public

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scrutiny.13 Instead, the elevation of these revolutionary sites as tourist destinations, also known as ‘red tourism’ or ‘red heritage tourism’, was a renewed attempt to cultivate patriotism and loyalty to the party-state in the postsocialist and neoliberal era. As such, heritage making entails the sanitization of history by blackboxing and mythologizing the past. At any rate, as the list of twentieth-century historical sites expands, so is the growing acceptance that former socialist industrial ruins should also be listed. Consequently, China’s former socialist landscapes of revolution and production have increasingly been recast as landscapes of leisure and consumption. The idea of red tourism similarly reached the former Third Front region around the same time. In 2005, officials and academics in Liupanshui – formerly a major Third Front city in Guizhou province – began to develop preservation plans to commemorate the area’s Third Front legacy.14 Shortly after, officials in Panzhihua also initiated their own museum plan. The two museums have since opened to the public in 2013 and 2015 respectively. Meanwhile, the industrial heritage fever continues to spread in the region. In 2016, after years of preparation, the abandoned military nuclear weapon plant 816 began to welcome tourists. The city of Chongqing, too, has been planning its own Third Front Construction museum.15 During this time, the Chinese National Geographic Magazine published a widely circulated article entitled ‘The Third Front Construction: Our Most Recent Industrial Heritage’.16 Although the history of the Third Front is still relatively unknown outside of the region, popular articles such as this, along with television programmes and documentary films, are beginning to impress the idea of Third Front industrial heritage upon the Chinese national consciousness.

Exhibiting and Selling Heritage Among all these industrial heritage projects in the former Third Front region, the Third Front Construction museums in Liupanshui and Panzhihua are the most high profile players in shaping and elevating the forgotten Third Front history due to their early starts. Like most official museums in China, both museums in Liupanshui and Panzhihua present a story of primarily political and institutional history. As in the standard historiography authored by the party-state, leaders are often elevated as heroic and pivotal history makers, even though the significance of historical materialism is generally being acknowledged. For example, when visitors enter Panzhihua’s ground-level exhibition hall in the spectacular-looking Third Front Museum, they are confronted with a brief context of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s in which China was threatened and besieged by the superpowers. Then, on the opposite wall space, the visitors are greeted by several prominently displayed

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statements supposedly made by the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. Composed in gigantic red characters, the biggest of them says: ‘If the Third Front Construction fails, what would we do in the event of war?’ In another slightly smaller statement written in white characters, Mao allegedly expressed that he would not be able to sleep soundly until the Third Front Construction was completed. In other words, in addition to its strategic significance in geo-military terms, the Third Front Construction also unfolded as a narrative in which workers wanted to express their desires for ‘Chairman Mao to have a sound sleep’ by forging ahead with their labour. So, image after image, exhibit after exhibit, visitors witness how workers, soldiers, engineers and other Third Front personnel implemented the vision and principles laid out by Mao and associates. Amid the carefully curated spectacles with sounds and images are also official documents with seals and signatures, as well as personal diaries from prominent leaders. Indeed, the working guidelines on cultural artefacts circulated within the museum and the local Bureau of Cultural Relics also provide a glimpse into the selection criteria. According to the guidelines, the collection and preservation of Third Front artefacts should be selected based on their originality, authenticity and rarity, as well as on their ‘historic, artistic and scientific’ values, a principle that no doubt was inspired by, if not taken from, the UNESCO convention.17 Significantly, the emphasis on key historical actors and institutions is not a violation of the supposedly scientific principle but a vindication of the unfolding history of material dialectics under the leadership of the party-state. Likewise, in order to reinforce the power structure of the party-state, the guidelines also spell out in unambiguous terms that political leaders at the national and provincial levels are given the highest priority. Then, martyrs, field commanders, model workers and important scientists can also be considered as major historical figures. Similarly, when it comes to the collecting of cultural objects, a significant portion of the discussion is on artefacts such as tools, vehicles and everyday objects used by these important individuals. Next in line are artefacts related to major institutions, such as flags, emblems and symbols of the state, party, military, schools and factories. After that are machines and equipment related to major scientific and engineering breakthroughs. Finally, while the guidelines also specify the relevance of some everyday material objects such as food coupons, introduction letters, popular artwork and newspapers under the categories of society, art and culture, such objects are still generally associated with state institutions and cultural elites rather the ordinary people.18 The spatial layout of the museum ensures that the story of the Third Front unfolds chronologically, with specific emphasis on major political and administrative decisions, as well as landmark engineering and scientific achievements. Whereas the exhibitions on the ground level where visitors

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enter the museum focus on the overall context of the Third Front project, the lower level draws attention to specific events and accomplishments directly related to Sichuan province. Here, the exhibitions provide details specific to the local province and highlight the area’s indispensable contributions. As for the top level above the street, it contains exhibitions about the relationship between the Han Chinese, who moved into the otherwise thinly populated region, and the ethnic minorities in the area. That, too, according to the cultural artefacts guidelines, should be a top priority. However, given the nature of the topic, most artefacts in this section are generic artefacts pertaining to the ethnic minorities known as nationalities in China. Texts and images together tell a story of racial harmony and of minorities embracing the delivery of modernizing projects to the region by the majority Han Chinese under the leadership of the party. Also covered on this floor is the local flora and fauna, as well as the rich and rare mineral deposits of the region. In so doing, the exhibit evokes a classic European colonial trope of portraying the natives as a continuous part of the natural landscape. Overall, the Third Front history presented in the Panzhihua museum is a heroic and triumphal struggle. It is a story of mass mobilization and unwavering sacrifice that enabled the nation to prevail and flourish, all under the leadership of the party. Yet, whatever sufferings were endured by the individuals, they were always articulated in abstract terms. There are hardly any displays of real everyday items that belonged to ordinary people, let alone their personal stories and memories. Interesting enough, in Liupanshui’s Third Front Construction museum, because of its general lack of funding, the scale of the exhibition and the museum building itself are much smaller. Without the resources to provide a more comprehensive coverage of the Third Front Construction project, curators exhibit only a sample of artefacts that are considered as representative of the everyday experience of the workers along with the typical biographical information of key leaders and their connections to the region and the Third Front in general.19 Still, even with greater attention to ordinary workers, the general narrative continues to prioritize the leaders, institutions and the party-state. Consequently, like their counterparts in Panzhihua, objects being exhibited in the Liupanshui museum are valorized by the important persons and institutions associated with them. As well, in both museums, exhibitions are being displayed out of context in many ways. And this includes the physical structure of the museum. The Panzhihua museum was built in a new district far away from the city or any historic sites. In fact, even a few years after its opening, there are virtually no other buildings anywhere near it. As for the museum in Liupanshui, even though it is located in a former factory compound, the exhibition hall itself is also a contemporary-style brand new building, and it makes little reference to the site in any significant way (see Figure 14.1). The museum office,

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Figure 14.1 Exhibitions of the Liupanshui Third Front Construction Museum. These are housed in a new building that evokes an abstract industrial theme with no references to any specific historic site. Photo by the author.

which is housed in one of the former factory workshop buildings, is not open to the public. If the museums have little specific context to the numerous industrial sites surrounding them, the same can be said of the artefacts being displayed. Without being anchored in any historical and architectural contexts, these artefacts are not just sanitized but also remain fragmented. To be sure, preservation officials in both provinces are not unaware of the importance of preserving some of the original Third Front industrial sites.20 The recent conversion of the military nuclear factory 816 near Chongqing is one such effort. Meanwhile, heritage officials in Liupanshui and Panzhihua have lamented repeatedly that the public are denied the opportunity to directly experience the sublime former industrial landscape due to site accessibility issues. In many cases, heritage officials are unable to convince other government departments and business corporations to give up their plans to redevelop these sites. Additionally, the scattered and remote nature of these former factories means that many of these sites are far away from the existing urban areas. As a result, such sites are deemed not suitable for tourism at least at the present moment. Real estate and tourism, in other words, are major factors that shape the practice of industrial heritage in the region. Given the general underdevelopment of Guizhou’s economy, the city of Liupanshui is far more proactive in deploying the heritage of the Third Front

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to brand itself.21 All over the city, billboards and slogans advertising the area’s rich industrial heritage and its desirability as a tourism and investment designation are visible. And even though Liupanshui’s Third Front Construction museum is significantly smaller than the one in Panzhihua, it is surrounded by a huge Third Front theme park that promises to deliver an ‘authentic’ socialist experience to tourists. When completed, the theme park will have theme restaurants, shops, hotels and other ‘revolution-style’ hospitalities, all housed in new buildings that resemble those rudimentary Third Front architectures from the 1960s (see Figure 14.2). Likewise, in a new district nearby, the city has opened an urban planning exhibition centre that can easily rival many new airport terminals in major cities in terms of size and architectural style. Inside this multilevel building, the ideas of ‘industrial heritage’ and ‘sustainable development’ are used to brand the post-Third Front city as a potential tourism and real estate investment hotspot. A large portion of exhibition space on urban planning is actually about specific large-scale real estate projects, featuring dazzling videos and illuminated models (see Figure 14.3). Among them, for example, is a gated community that is already under construction across the street from the exhibition centre. We do not know yet whether visitors will be convinced by the claims of authenticity conveyed in the theme park and other heritage sites. However, with migrant workers frantically trying to finish the socialist-era looking architectures, painting revolutionary murals and slogans on the walls and erecting new residential buildings all over the city, today’s Liupanshui is almost like a déjà vu of the

Figure 14.2 An old worker walking past a construction hoarding that advertises the soon-to-be-completed Third Front theme park. Photo by the author.

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Third Front Construction. But as they say, history does not repeat itself but it rhymes, first as tragedy, then as farce. One wonders what Mao would think about the latest frenetic construction if he were still alive (see Figure 14.4).

Figure 14.3 A model showing a housing development inside the Liupanshui Urban Planning Exhibition Center. Photo by the author.

Figure 14.4 Workers frantically trying to finish the construction of a Third Front theme park. It features new buildings in old socialist style. A newly painted revolutionary mural is also visible on one of the buildings. Photo by the author.

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Heritage without Politics The ideological and political disjuncture between the socialist Third Front Construction and the postsocialist speculative development is too obvious to ignore. At stake here are two competing assessments of the history of the communist revolution in twentieth-century China. At one level, the revolution was a success to the extent that it founded the People’s Republic and put the communists in power. The socialist revolution, in spite of its violence, has transformed China in some fundamentally progressive ways, introducing greater equity between the rural and urban, as well as the interior and coastal regions. The Third Front Construction, regardless of its initial motivations, was one such contributor to the marked increases in investments in education, infrastructures, agricultural and, of course, industrial activities in the interior region. Nonetheless, at another level, China’s turbulent twentieth-century can also be seen as a history of failing revolutions. This is not only because of the violence and sufferings triggered by endless political campaigns and ideological struggles but also because of the ultimate course reversal that has brought the socialist revolution to its knees. Indeed, in spite of some of the positive legacies of the revolution, much of the values and ideals cherished by the earlier revolutionary leaders have ultimately been banished by the state-directed economic reforms and neoliberal policies since the 1980s. The democratic uprisings by students and workers in 1989, as the Chinese intellectual Wang Hui argues, was a response to the betrayal of social democracy, equality and justice promised by the revolution.22 When the state crushed the uprisings in Tiananmen in Beijing and elsewhere, it was the final demise of the revolution. Unsurprisingly, China’s spectacular economic growth since the 1990s is inseparable from rising inequality, corruption and the further marginalization of the working class. In many ways, the history of the Third Front sits precisely on the rupture of two colliding seismic blocks that are held together almost solely through the ruling party’s claims of political continuity. After all, in spite of its aggressive push for global flows of capital and labour, privatization and other neoliberal initiatives, the Chinese party-state still insists on its socialist roots at least rhetorically. Under this context, how to present the socialist Third Front as a triumphal story without implying that China’s current direction as ‘reactionary’ from the socialist perspective is a real challenge for the partystate and heritage officials alike. For the governing regime, dealing with the contradiction between the socialist and the postsocialist eras is indeed a serious matter. After the Chinese President Xi Jingping came into power in 2013, he issued a directive

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to emphasize that the history of the first three decades (i.e. the socialist era) of the People’s Republic should not be used to judge the recent three decades (i.e. the postsocialist era), and vice versa. And this has also become the guiding principle for heritage officials in their preservation and curatorial practices.23 To make the matter even more complicated, there were political events that have been regarded as ‘disruptive’ and ‘aberrant’ even within the socialist period. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) is, of course, the prime example, as it erupted soon after the Third Front Construction was underway. Like elsewhere in China, the Red Guards, who unleashed violent attacks on state institutions, had caused considerable disruption of the construction and production activities of the Third Front. Since the government has officially defined the Cultural Revolution as ‘ten years of chaos’ and does not encourage further discussion of it, the official narrative in the Third Front museums in Liupanshui and Panzhihua equally downplays the significance of those events. Whereas the Cultural Revolution is mentioned in passing in the Liupanshui museum, it is completely absent in its Panzhihua counterpart even though the latter museum has collected plenty of related artefacts.24 If the Cultural Revolution is difficult to present for the fact that it may undermine the legitimacy of the party, so too is the tension between the development of socialism and the postsocialist abandonment and privatization of the Third Front industries. For its part, because of its limited funding and space, the Liupanshui museum simply avoids addressing the contemporary period to a significant degree. On the contrary, the Panzhihua museum tries to navigate this question by placing a great deal of emphasis on the current success of the province. For instance, in addition to the province’s impressive infrastructures such as freeways, high-speed railways and skyscrapers, the museum also displays a large model of China’s first homemade aircraft carrier with fighter jets in the contemporary section near the exit. Even though Sichuan is a landlocked province far away from the ocean, the display is to highlight the contribution of the Third Front to China’s military and industrial achievements. By focusing only on economic success, technological development and collective mobilization against foreign imperialism, the museum is essentially presenting a teleological narrative of modernization and national independence. Consequently, it overwrites and ignores the contradictory narratives of socialist and postsocialist periods all together. The politics of heritage, in this way, rests precisely on its attempt to depoliticize the most drastic change in the nation’s recent history. Still, as much as local heritage authorities need to present a version of history sanctioned by the national government, they are not always in agreement with one another. Aside from propagating the same triumphal nar-

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rative of China’s success in self-determination and development, heritage officials do not always hold the same view regarding the role of their region in relation to the national project. Instead, driven by economic imperatives and local pride, they tend to bolster the importance of their region in the process of aligning the local story with the national narrative constructed by the party-state. The competition for tourism, investments and national attention is indeed quite severe, as has been the case in the rivalry between Liupanshui and Panzhihua. For example, while heritage officials and former workers in Liupanshui acknowledge the economic superiority of their neighbouring province Sichuan, they generally emphasize the important role of Liupanshui in supplying electricity and coal to Panzhihua during the Cold War era. Without this, they insist, Sichuan would not have become so successful today. Officials in Panzhihua, while acknowledging that initial master plan, emphasize that the planned arrangement was never efficient due to the challenging geography between the two areas. Instead, they stress that coal from Liupanshi was ultimately not needed due to the discovery of even higher grade of coal deposits and other rare minerals in their own province. Likewise, while officials in Liupanshui underscore that they were the first to come up with the idea of building a museum to commemorate the Third Front industrial heritage, their counterparts in Panzhihua claim that their ideas were developed independently, if not first.25 The competition between the two provinces became so intense that Sichuan provincial leaders actually requested the central government to allow the Panzhihua Third Front Construction Museum to be renamed as the Chinese Third Front Construction Museum, which would allow it to present itself as a national museum. The proposal was eventually rejected, but, as a compromise, the museum was allowed to be renamed as Chinese Panzhihua Third Front Construction Museum.26 All competition notwithstanding, as more projects of ‘industrial heritage’ come online, there have also been active discussions of seeking international recognition under the UNESCO cultural heritage framework among heritage officials and experts in the wider former Third Front region. Such a project would certainly require coordination among officials and authorities from across the region in many provinces, in addition to an endorsement from the national government. In their private discussions, heritage officials in both Liupanshui and Panzhihua are contemplating how the industrial heritage of the Third Front Construction could be regarded as having the ‘outstanding universal value’ in historic, artistic and scientific terms as defined by the UNESCO. Thus far, their most cherished and shared narrative is that the Third Front Construction was the largest state-led mobilization for industrialization in modern history, not just in China but also globally.27

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Conclusion There remains a long way to go before the former Third Front sites can possibly apply for the UNESCO status, if at all. But the current rush to heritagize the area’s Cold War and socialist industrial past is consistent with the central government’s relentless effort to cultivate a sense of national pride on the one hand and promote a state-led neoliberal economy on the other. Already, in addition to government-initiated heritage projects, corporations and entrepreneurs are encouraged to participate in various heritage preservation programmes through investment (see Figure 14.5). This is not only true in the cash-strapped Guizhou province but also in the emerging economic powerhouse Sichuan.28 Industrial heritage, in this respect, has become not just a tool for organizing historical consciousness but also a means to produce consumer-subjects and patriotic citizens. Above all, it has become a technology of government for the postsocialist state. And by suppressing the profound political and ideological rupture that has given rise to contemporary China’s unprecedented economic growth, official corruption and social inequality, this conception of socialist industrial heritage has foreclosed any meaningful dialogue between the socialist past and the postsocialist present for the sake of political stability and legitimacy of the party-state (see Figure 14.6). Similarly, by focusing exclusively on the narrative of modernization and growth, these projects of heritage preservation have missed a valuable opportunity to contemplate the environmental devastation caused by the uncompromising drive for development in both the socialist and postsocialist eras. In this sense, contrary to conceptualization of the industrial rise in China and the industrial decline in the US and Europe in zero-sum terms, China’s Third Front ruins and the ruination of its working class tell a global history of neoliberalism that binds us all.

Tong Lam is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. His current research projects focus primarily on China’s infrastructural development, special zones and industrial wastelands, as well as the history of information and media. He is also a lens-based visual artist with projects on modern ruins, nuclear fallout and China’s breakneck urban transformation. He has exhibited his research-based photographic and video works internationally.

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Figure 14.5 Workers from a defunct Third Front shipping building plant in Panzhihua showing a redevelopment blueprint to potential investors. Photo by the author.

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Figure 14.6 Shao Zeyun continues to stay in a derelict dormitory of his former company after his retirement. He was transferred to Panzhihua from the northeastern part of China in the 1960s. Workers like Shao are often being neglected after their former factories have been privatized. The fading characters of a socialist-era slogan next to him say: ‘Believe in Chairman Mao!’ Photo by the author.

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Notes 1. Third Front Construction museums mentioned in this chapter often cite that the project involved ‘1,100 major construction items’. Officials and curators of those museums, however, admitted that no one seems to have a clear picture of the extent of the project even today due to its past secrecy. 2. ‘Former Nuclear Plant Opening as Tourist Attraction’, China Daily, 13 April 13 2010. Retrieved 4 June 2017 from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/13/con tent_9719335.htm. 3. For some general information about the Third Front, see Naughton, ‘The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior’, 351–86; Meyskens, ‘Third Front Railroads and Industrial Modernity in Late Maoist China’, 238–60; Ren and Chen, ‘Sanxian jianshe de huigu yu fansi’, 27–31. 4. Naughton, ‘The Third Front’, 362. 5. ‘Former Nuclear Plant Opening as Tourist Attraction’. 6. Naughton, ‘The Third Front’, 362. 7. The UNESCO convention of cultural heritage was first brought forward to the Chinese government by a small group of Chinese officials with an academic background. See Huawen, ‘Rang lishi gaosu weilai’,14–27. 8. Ibid. 9. Gu, ‘Shijie yichan Zhongguo zeren’, 14–15. 10. Ibid.; Yi, ‘Yongke luyou chixu baohu shijie yichan’, 38. 11. Writing in the mid-1990s, the anthropologist Ann Anagnost also noted that ‘China’s past is represented in the absence of any sites that speak of its modern history’. The exception, according to her, was the amusement and theme parks that sought to represent a total, simplistic and distorted view of Chinese history and geography. See Anagnost, National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China, 165. 12. Although these are not UNESCO heritage sites, those at the national, provincial and municipal levels operate very much using the same logic. 13. It is no coincidence that the prominent Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was closed and reopened as the National Museum of China in the 2000s. Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China, 33–39, 45–74. 14. Based on conversations with administrators and curators at the Liupanshui Third Front Construction Museum in June 2016. 15. ‘Chongqing feiqi bingeingchong gaijin quanguo shouzuo sanxian jianshe bowuguan’ [Chongqing’s Abandoned Military Factory to be Converted into China’s First Third Front Construction Museum], 8 April 2010, accessed 4 June 4 2017 from http://culture.china.com .cn/lishi/2010-04/08/content_19766539.htm. 16. Published in 2006, the article has been republished in numerous online media platforms in the following years. Chen, ‘Sanxian jianshe: Li women zuijin de gongye yichan’. 17. Panzhihua wenwu ju (Panzhihua Bureau of Cultural Relics), ‘Zhongguo sanxian jianshe bowuguan sanxian jianshe wenwu dingji biaozhun [shixing]’. 18. Ibid. 19. Based on an interview with administrators and curators of the museum in June 2016. 20. Wang, ‘Ershi shiji gongye yichan baohu chuyi’ [On the Preservation of TwentiethCentury Industrial Heritage], 29. 21. For an overview of how industrial heritage is used to leverage urban development, see Zhou and Liu, ‘Integration of the Third Line Industrial Heritage Protection and SmallTown Development—Taking Guizhou as an Example’, 104–7. 22. Wang, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, 256.

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23. Based on interviews with Director Zhang of the Bureau of Cultural Relics in Panzhihua in June 2016. 24. Ibid. 25. Based on interviews with officials at the Chinese Panzhihua Third Front Construction Museum and the Panzhihua Bureau of Cultural Relics in June 2016. Some popular publications from Sichuan continue to insist that the museum in Panzhihua is the first in the nation, ignoring the existence of the one in Liupanshi. For example, see Liu, ‘Jianli sanxian jianshe bowuguan de qiyuan he mudi’, 116–19. 26. Interviews with officials at the Panzhihua Third Front Construction Museum in June 2016. 27. Similar industrialization efforts also took place in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. It remains to be seen how to compare the scales of these mobilizations. 28. As many scholars have shown, in the proliferating neoliberal milieu, non-state actors such as NGOs and business corporations have increasingly become actors behind the lobbying, developing and managing of heritage properties and cultural rights. See Coombe and Weiss, ‘Neoliberalism, Heritage Regimes, and Cultural Rights’, 43–69.

Bibliography Anagnost, A. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Chen, D. ‘Sanxian Jianshe: Li women zuijin de gongye yichan’ [Third Front Construction: The Industrial Heritage Nearest to Us]. Zhongguo guojia deli (June 2006). Retrieved 4 June 2017 from http://www.dili360.com/cng/article/p5350c3d9b8acc48.htm. Coombe, R.J., and L.M. Weiss. ‘Neoliberalism, Heritage Regimes, and Cultural Rights’, in L. Meskell (ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 43–69. Denton, K. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. Gu, C. ‘Shijie yichan Zhongguo zeren’ [World Heritage, Chinese Responsibilities]. Jianshe keji 12 (2004), 14–15. Liu, S. ‘Jianli sanxian jianshe bowuguan de qiyuan he mudi’. Wenshi zazhi (2015), 116–19. Meyskens, C. ‘Third Front Railroads and Industrial Modernity in Late Maoist China’. Twentieth-Century China 40 (2010), 238–60. Naughton, B. ‘The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior’. The China Quarterly 115 (1988), 351–86. Panzhihua wenwu ju (Panzhihua Bureau of Cultural Relics). ‘Zhongguo sanxian jianshe bowuguan sanxian jianshe wenwu dingji biaozhun [shixing]’ [Standard for Cultural Relics of the Chinese Third Front Construction Museum [Tentative]]. October 2012. Ren, J., and Chen M, ‘Sanxian jianshe de huigu yu fansi’ [Reflections on the Third Front Construction]. Junshi lishi 28 (2001), 27–31. Wang, C. ‘Ershi shiji gongye yichan baohu chuyi’ [On the Preservation of Twentieth-Century Industrial Heritage]. Sichuan wenwu (2009), 29. Wang, H. China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition, trans. R. Karl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Xiao, H. ‘Rang lishi gaosu weilai’. Chengxiang jianshe 8 (2004), 14–27. Yi, W. ‘Yongke luyou chixu baohu shijie yichan’ [Use Tourism to Sustain the Protection of World Heritage]. Zhongguo jingji zhoukan (2004), 38. Zhou, J. and Liu, B. ‘Integration of the Third Line Industrial Heritage Protection and SmallTown Development –Taking Guizhou as an Example’. Reformation and Strategy 271 (2016), 104–7.

CHAPTER

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The Heritage of the Chinese Eastern Railway Symbol of Colonization and International Cooperation Zhao Xin and Qu Xiaofan

Introduction ‘Manchuria’ is a geographical term that refers to a very large area comprising the north-eastern part of Inner Mongolia, the former Rehe province (now Hebei province), Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang Provinces, as well as the south to the Outer Khingan Range (including Sakhalin island), bordering on Korea, Japan, Russia and Mongolia as its eastern, north-eastern, and northern neighbours respectively. However, ‘Manchuria’ is only a Western word and well known in the Western world. It is rarely used, by comparison, in China nowadays because it is a stem homonym of Manchukuo, a synonym of stigma associated with memories of humiliation imposed by the period of Japanese colonization. Chinese people today prefer to refer to the area simply as the North-East region of China. It is well-known not only for its abundant natural resources but also for its pivotal role in the early industrialization of China. The building of the Chinese Eastern Railway (abbr. as CER, built between 1898 and1903), an extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway, was vital for the latter development. The CER itself and its affiliated buildings have much to offer today in terms of material industrial heritage. They bear witness to the former prosperity generated by the iron industry and to the technological progress associated with it, which also in its Notes for this section begin on page 285.

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turn created an impulse for the urbanization and modernization of adjacent regions. The CER thus became a symbol of modernity, and multinationalism. However, as it was built by foreign engineers and under foreign ownership, at the same time the CER also became a symbol of colonization and invasion. Thus, we are dealing here with problematic heritage that some people think is shameful and not worth preserving. Our chapter intends to problematize this dual heritage of the CER in the hope that it can contribute to a reading of the railway heritage that would allow preservation to prevail. We will be focusing on one representative part of the CER, the Binzhou Line (from Manchouli, the starting point of the CER, in Eastern Mongolia, to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province, the total length is 953.76 km), which has the highest density of completely intact railway buildings from different times amidst the spectacular landscape of the most complex terrains in North Manchuria. How can we read the railway heritage of the Binzhou Line in today’s China? The reason why the Binzhou Line holds so many industrial heritage sites needs some words of explanation. Historically, industrialization in Manchuria was started later than in southern China, where it drew more open-minded intellectuals and had the advantage of more convenient traffic systems. However, Manchuria surpassed all other parts of the country within an incredibly short period after the CER had been constructed in 1903, since the railway brought multinational currency and technologies into Manchuria in considerable quantity. As a result, Manchuria became an industrial hub in China already at the beginning of the twentieth century. Later on, in the

Figure 15.1 A train is running on the Binzhou Line. Photo by the authors.

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1930s, Japan and its puppet regime in Manchukuo invested heavily in Manchuria. Such a connection of industrialization to Japanese imperialism further complicates the industrial heritage of the region. In the early years of communist China, with the help of the Soviet Union, the industrialization and urbanization of the North-East of China gathered pace significantly. Even during the Cultural Revolution, the industrialization of the region suffered no major setbacks, as was the case in other parts of China. Things only began to change with the reform policies of Deng and his Opening-Up Policy. The economic centres of China began to move south, where there was heavy investment in infrastructure, whereas the North-East of China began to lag behind and became perceived, over time, as an industrial problem region, where there was little technological innovation and economic development. The traditional heavy industry was not competitive and seemed outdated. The high percentage of state-owned companies struggled to keep up with the dynamism unleashed by the parallel introduction of a market economy. The North-East of China became a deindustrializing region. Particularly in the northern hinterland, through which the Binzhou Line runs single-tracked, most heavy industries went bankrupt. Factories and workshops, including the railway itself, remained intact and were preserved to the greatest degree possible because of their intricate international value as heritage. At present, it remains an open question whether this heritage can serve both to reinvigorate the region economically and provide a solid and proud regional identity for the people living there. Those who want to preserve that heritage have to confront the darker aspects of that heritage, namely the Russian and Japanese imperialism that played such an important part in the establishment and ongoing extension of the railway. Thus, this heritage could also open up a dialogue in China about the legacies of colonialism and imperialism that go beyond the rather one-sided, normative and nationalist condemnations that prevail at present.

The North-East’s Railway Heritage and Its Context of Western Imperialism The railway heritage needs to be contextualized in the history of nineteenthcentury imperialism. Russia turned to the Far East after it had been defeated in the Crimean War.1 Russia’s plans for North-East Asia were realized during the second Opium War, when they compelled the Qing Government to give up a large part of the territory from Manchuria, where Russia occupied the land north of the Amur River and east of the Ussuri River. As a result, Russia’s eastern borders extended to the Japanese Sea and to the East China Sea. For Russia, the Great Siberian Railway was built as an auxiliary way of

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protecting her far-eastern sea mouth, Vladivostok. But more importantly, it also helped extend the line of the Great Siberian Railway through Manchuria (CER) and thereby strengthened her reign in her new territories and set the scene to look for opportunities to expand into Southern China. Given its unique geolocation (trans-Eurasia) and advanced technological requirements, the CER was bound to be inscribed not just with Russian but with multinational elements. Hence, today’s railway heritage is a transnational imperial heritage. The Siberian Railway was initially conceived by an American, Perry Collins, an explorer who made his journey from Moscow to Nikolayevsk2 on the Amur delta during 1856–1857, even before Russia annexed the territories from Manchuria. He wrote a book3 to convince the United States that they ought to take advantage of options for American trade and to keep England out of North-East Asia, for he foresaw the coming commercial competition of the imperial powers in China and Manchuria. He thought of Siberia as another frontier, pretty much like the US frontier, and proposed the Russo-American construction of a trans-Siberian railroad to the Amur from where boats would set sail to the pacific coast of the USA to link up with an American transcontinental railroad.4 In 1858, three Englishmen, Morrison, Horn and Sleigh projected the detailed plan for building the railway.5 These creative ideas contributed much to making the Trans-Siberian Railway project materialize and gave the Trans-Siberian Railway a pronounced international aspect, even before it was carried out by the Russian government, who relocated millions of Russians to Manchuria. The line started from Chelyabinsk in Europe, passed through West Siberia and East Siberia to Vladivostok, its total length amounting to more than 7,500 km.6 On 19 May 1891, the Great Siberian Railway started to work formally in Vladivostok.7 Every section progressed smoothly except the sixth part (from Srjetensk to Khabarovsk), which had the most complicated and formidable terrain that until then had remained untouched.8 The Russian Finance Minister, Serge Witte, conceived an extending line, the Chinese Eastern Railway, which traversed and passed through Manchuria. In 1896, the SinoRusso Cassini Treaty was signed, which stipulated that the CER would transport Russian forces and military supplies in case of war.9 On 1 March 1897, the CER company established the CER Administration Bureau in Harbin, an extraordinary international city around the turn of the century. In fact, the building of the railway was only possible because of international cooperation and rivalry. The Americans wanted to ally with Russia to rival Britain’s hegemony in the Far East, while the British were interested in constructing the CER because they held the most advanced techniques for railway construction. However, paramount for the realization of the project was the Russian imperialist schemes against China. On 29 August

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Map 15.1 Map of Chinese Eastern Railway. Source: Foreign Affairs 3(1) (15 Sept. 1924), public domain.10

1897, the opening ceremony was presided over by Russians at Sanchakou, near Xiao Suifenhe, Manchuria. The choice of Harbin as centre of operations was to contribute to the making of another Russian city in China.11 The Russian elite in Harbin oversaw the construction of the railway, but it was Chinese labour that did the actual building. Chinese workers came, in particular, from Shandong and Hebei.12 Undoubtedly, the CER initiated immigration on an internationally unprecedented scale. In 1898, there were less than 20,000 Chinese workers. Shortly thereafter, in 1900, their number had increased to more than 170,000.13 Chinese labourers worked on the line day and night without insurance and coverage of their bare necessities. Some lost their lives. Conflicts and battles were inevitable under such high pressure. Construction materials for the railway were largely imported from Europe and America. Harbin was the axis of the whole line and provided materials to three directions persistently. At the beginning, most materials were transported from Europe and North America to Nikolayevsk and Vladivostok, then transferred by the Amur River, or by railway to Khabarovsk

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(Boli), thereafter shipped via the Sungari River to Harbin. Most vehicles, tools, rails and sleepers and fasteners were imported from Philadelphia and Chicago. That is to say, Russia mainly depended on American railway materials. The long-distance transportation definitely increased the cost of construction, so that Russia tried to find alternative routes in order to reduce the cost. For several years from 1899 onwards, materials imported from America were transported by ship from Boston to San Francisco, then over the Pacific to Vladivostok, from there to Khabarovsk, then via the Sungari River to Harbin.14 Transport by ship took much longer than before but saved a considerable amount of the traffic fees. Undoubtedly, these international supply chains went hand in hand with an internationalization in personnel. During the early stages of urbanization, in 1897, Russian government began to encourage Russians and Germans to immigrate into Manchuria.15 At the end of 1899, there were thousands of international immigrants.16 The first section of the CER, the Binzhou Line, though only 945 km long, was the most difficult task, due to the fact that this part of the route had the most complicated topography of the entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Consequently, it was here that the best engineers and workers from all over the world gathered. After engineers from different countries completed their meticulous investigation, they divided the Binzhou Line into seven sections on which they worked simultaneously. The two hardest and largest sections, the first Sungari River Bridge17 and the Great Khingan Ridge tunnel, were organized independently by special agencies, who would oversee them. The Great Khingan Tunnel (3,078 meters long) with its granite structure was designed by a Russian female engineer. In order to conquer the complexity of the inner tunnel, more than 500 seasoned Italian stonemasons were recruited to handle stone-laying work.18 All in all, more than 200 American engineers participated in the project.19 In addition, some technicians and other personnel from Japan, America, Italy, the Czech Republic, Britain and France worked together. By June 1900, the Sungari River Bridge and the Great Khingan Tunnel were opened to traffic one after the other, thereby creating two great industrial miracles of the world.20 However, in 1900, the Boxer Rebellion broke out in Manchuria. Boxers destroyed some parts of the line that had already been completed, beat the engineers and forced the operation to stop. Consequently, Russian patrols swarmed into Manchuria and suppressed the Boxers’ uprising.21 Notwithstanding, Russia continued to dispatch more and more patrols to different stations along the CER with the excuse of guarding the line, even after the rebellion had been quelled. This increased the number of military immigrants along the Binzhou Line. Since there were no protests on the part of the Chinese, Russian forces were confident enough to launch a full-scale

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invasion of Manchuria. The war increased the migration of military personnel to Manchuria. According to the statistics, the CER carried 448 million military passengers to the frontier during the war,22 which made the Binzhou Line the military trunk line for the transportation of soldiers and equipment from the Russian hinterlands. The war thereby generated a rapid increase in population along the railway. As a consequence, new immigrant communities expanded along the CER and contributed to processes of urbanization and industrialization. At the beginning of 1901, the works on the Binzhou Line and the whole CER, which had faltered previously, were resumed. The aim of the renewed building activity was to link Russia to an ice-free harbour in the south of Manchuria. Urbanization along the line was considerable, as the Russians created 54 stations along the main line and 38 stations along the branch lines. The basic structures common to all stations included the platform, freight yard, ticket office, administrative building, water tower, station square and some service buildings, hotels and restaurants. Furthermore, local suppliers of materials and warehouses sprung up to support the further extension and maintenance of the line, which in turn spawned matching businesses and services that drew more and more international immigrants to these towns. The growth of Harbin in the early twentieth century is a good example of those massive urbanization processes. Besides the railway station buildings and public buildings that were modelled on Western styles, such as Baroque, Rococo, Gothic and Classical, there were also international communities that left their various marks on the architecture of these towns. Different groups of immigrants formed different communities, often building their houses in styles they knew from their places of origin. Thus, there are wooden Mukeden houses built by Russians or especially colourful houses built by Ukrainians. These different styles of construction and a range of convenient services adapted from the immigrants’ homelands made the stations more attractive as living spaces. In consequence, more and more migrants with a non-Chinese background came into these cities. A vibrant pub culture, nightclubs, dancing parties and saloons developed, which gave the towns along the railway an exotic atmosphere.

Urbanization and Industrialization along the Binzhou Line The areas around railway buildings and public buildings became the core of urbanization and industrialization after the railways had taken up service. As the safest and most frequently used means of transportation, the CER was in charge of transporting a large number of passengers and cargo from all over the world. Compared to shipping, which took a month or more, the CER

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in combination with the Trans-Siberian Railway shortened the distances that had to be traversed and thereby accelerated transportation from Europe to Canton: ‘it was only 13 days spent from Newchuang to St. Petersburg, 18 days from Shanghai to London by train’.23 Furthermore, travelling by train was much cheaper for passengers and offered more colourful scenery along the railway than the more expensive and duller voyages by sea. As was to be expected, this new shortcut from Europe to China attracted more and more Europeans with various aims. They came into North Manchuria, while Chinese immigrants arrived in Manchuria from the opposite direction. In sum, the running of the CER first promoted internationalized immigration then motivated a process of planned urbanization and industrialization along the line. Its stations acted as nuclei of activity that radiated to their surroundings. At the beginning of this process, municipal agencies began to cater for the internationalized communities’ needs, and the cities’ administrative systems improved gradually. Above all, the Chinese Eastern Railway Company adopted a policy of monopoly in order to expand its rights to running the railway and its prefectures. Russia’s dominant Engineering Bureau transferred supervision of the CER to the Administration Bureau of the CER (ABC) as soon as the construction work was finished, thus the privilege of running the CER was monopolized by Russia. ABC was conveniently located at Harbin,24 where the main line of the CER and its branches intersected. The Bureau set up a comprehensive administrative system and subsequently

Figure 15.2 The connecting point of Chinese Eastern Railway and The Great Siberia Railway in Manchouli. Photo by the authors.

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improved it by adding departments: office, judiciary, trade, medicine, materials, engineering, finance, civil, military, mineral, navigation, measurement, education, diplomatic departments, and so forth, which were established one after the other.25 In fact, it became a well-organized agency of colonization that excluded Chinese sovereignty completely. Further, the Bureau managed to extend its privileges by annexing the railway subsidiary lands around the CER, which were reserved as specialized areas for railway development. This was done by distorting the Regulations of the Eastern Province Railway.26 As might be expected, Russia extended the subsidiary lands infinitely and established her own sphere of influence. The Chinese were excluded in the Russian sphere of influence, which had its own Russian judicial system, its own police force, own taxation and other marks of sovereignty. In addition, Russians began to make detailed plans for urban development in the railway zone. They first demarcated city blocks with parks, schools, hospitals, stores, factories and residential areas, which were all geographically connected to the railway; they then began to build them according to their home towns’ architectural styles and modes. Moreover, Russian authorities improved the important stations and navigating wharves to meet the requirement of industrialization and commercialization initiated by new immigrants. These better-equipped train stations and navigating wharves were key to improving the functionality and significance of the railway tracks, which in turn strengthened the close connections between cities and the outside world. Powerful and monopolized administration over the CER and its abundant subsidiaries provided numerous lucrative chances for those Russians and Europeans who were willing to embark on adventure. The Russian government implemented policies favourable to immigration to the Far East. Under these circumstances, large numbers of Europeans (technicians, doctors, administrators and their families, entertainers as well as press freelancers) moved into Manchuria and settled along the CER and in the railway-related zones. Because of the advantages of these locations, Russian immigrants mainly gathered in the cities that were connected to a key station along the Binzhou Line. As the headquarters of railway patrols and the pivot of the main line and its branches, Harbin became the centre of rapid immigration. Russians came to Harbin in waves of immigration. Their number increased to 68,549 in 1912, amounting to 67 per cent of the population of Harbin. By 1922, more than 155,000 Russians had settled down in Harbin.27 Immigrants from other countries flocked to Harbin at the same time. By 1924, nineteen countries, including Russia, Japan, America, France, Spain, Germany, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Italy and Portugal, set up consulates in Harbin. Besides, large numbers of Chinese refugees, including farmers, peddlers and craftsmen crowded the stations along the Binzhou Line, which became ideal

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asylums for Chinese refugees from Shandong, Chili and southern parts of Manchuria, where they suffered wars, or heavy taxation after the wars. As they were excluded from the Russian sphere of influence, they gathered in suburban areas around cities, or were dispersed among rural areas as landholding peasants. These suburban Chinese communities further contributed to the processes of urbanization and industrialization. These growing international communities gradually spread out from the stations to the surroundings, bringing industry and trade along. For instance, in Harbin, a Frenchman founded the first flour factory, a Pole set up the first sugar factory,28 Americans associated with British settlers to expand their cigarette factories in Harbin, and there are many more instances of expatriates setting up businesses. With various Western industrial influences, the brewing industry, oil plants and manufacturing industries prospered along the railway zone, providing immigrants and locals alike with work places and in turn drawing more international immigrants into Northern Manchuria. Urban and suburban districts grew even bigger and took on a very specific look with their diversified Western-style buildings, which seemed so exotic to many Chinese. Harbin remained the prime example of such urbanization coupled with industrialization. Distinct ethnic communities could be found here: Russians, Belarussians, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Koreans, Japanese and others more. There was also a large Jewish presence in Harbin. However, these communities also interacted in their social lives and their places of work as well as in religious communities that formed in the city. Especially religion became a strong marker of identity. The dimensions of the different places of worship represented not only the quantity of adherents but also their financial means and social standing. For instance, the churches of St Sophia and St Nicola in central Harbin, built on behalf of the numerous and influential Russian Orthodox Christian congregations, were splendid buildings meant to impress the Russianness of Harbin to outside observers and the Chinese population as well as the international community. Apart from the churches, numerous associations for benefits and mutual assistance were set up, such as the Trade Union of Russian Immigrants (1907), the Russians Real Estates Association (1912), the Jewish Association (1903), the Jewish Charity Association (1906), the Polish Association (1901), the Yugoslav Culture Federation, the Japanese Peoples’ Society, the Ukraine Club (all 1918) and the Armenian Society (1917).29 Over time, the different communities came closer together with intermarriages occurring and intercultural milieus emerging, which gave Harbin a highly international flavour. Practices originating in Russia were adapted by the Chinese population. Thus, for example, Russian immigrants introduced new species to agriculture, such as cabbages and tomatoes. Local peasants along the railway line began to plant them, which became widely

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popular among the Chinese population. Russian bread, ukleba, sausages, beer, candy and cakes were popular also outside of the Russian community of Harbin. Russian words such as ‘ukleba’, ‘Bragi’, ‘Vodka’ and so on became popular loanwords in Chinese; Russian weights and measures, ‘пуд’ (16.38 kg) ‘в е рш о к’ (Russian inch), ‘ǃа рш и н’ (Russian feet), ‘ǃс аже н ь’ (10 Russian feet), became also a Chinese standard. The Russian rouble became the dominant currency for all financial transactions. Other customs and habits, religious rituals, bathing in cold water, winter swimming etc. were borrowed from Russia. Popular culture and entertainment borrowed influences from Jewish immigrants, like coffee houses, ballrooms and Hippodromes, which became part of the infrastructure of the city centre. Chinese and Japanese businesspersons were also attracted into amusement industries; they invested money and cooperated with others to entertain customers from all over the world. Thus a highly internationalized population produced a unique blend of different cultures, which made many locals, regardless of their nationality, proud of ‘their’ city.30

Internationalization or Colonization? What Narratives to Construct around the Railway Heritage of the CER? Undoubtedly, the whole of the CER is the product of Russian strategical designs for the Far East. Its colonial connotations are kept alive in public perception, which have led parts of the public and the government to argue that the remains of the CER, as a negative symbol of Russian imperialism, should not be preserved. Up to the beginning of the twenty-first century, the CER was still taught as a textbook case for colonial stigma.31 There was no space for considering the positive aspects of internationalization, urbanization and industrialization, with which the heritage of the CER was also connected. However, things have gradually changed since then. Some scholars have tried to emphasize precisely those positive aspects of the CER’s construction, arguing that its heritage should be preserved. Their voices were heard by government, and in 2006 a huge step in the direction of preservation was taken when ‘the architecture groups of CER’ were listed in the Sixth Batch of Major National Historical and Cultural Sites. From then on, both the Chinese Central Government and local governments (of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang) began to adopt some means of protecting the CER. In particular, they participated in the following: 1. Demarcating the district of heritages, relocating the residents, dispatching special guards to monitor the buildings, prohibiting people from living in and tampering with the buildings.

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2. Mending and strengthening the dilapidated buildings to restore their original appearance and prohibiting people from tearing them down to re-purpose their building material. 3. Adopting modern moving techniques to relocate buildings scattered in different locations along the line to one place to form a special ‘landscape of buildings’. For instance, five CER buildings, including an old station, a Russian residence and a warehouse, that were originally located in Zhaodong, Jiangjia and Anda were moved jointly in the winter of 2012.32 In fact, as far as the authenticity of the presentation of the heritage sites is concerned, the government’s actions are still in their initial stage. The implementation and methods of preservation that they adopted soon came up short. Thus, buildings without residents were lacking daily supervision and prompt repair, rendering them subject to natural decay. In addition, being replaced with a more convenient tunnel built with modern techniques, the old tunnel, the beautiful Spiral Line, became abandoned and dilapidated; all the traffic was transferred to the new line. Although the government has already taken measures to protect the railway, it still cannot escape the effects of natural corrosion and destruction by humans. As for the relocation of buildings, it sounds good and creative, but moving the buildings from their original place obviously destroys the heritage sites’ authenticity and changes their appearance in shared memory. Further, the only development in terms

Figure 15.3 A hundred-year engine garage in Beketu Town, Yakeshi City along the CER. Photo by the authors.

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Figure 15.4 A whole moved station of Anda. Photo by the authors.

of tourism has been that of simple on-site tours. Above all, the governments have neglected the most important element in preservation, which is local people’s collective memories regarding the internationalization of the CER. The best way to protect the valuable heritage sites mentioned above is to motivate local people to participate by sharing their memories, and by recording their experiences and perceptions of the CER and all that it brought with it. As outlined above, the railway heritage is a difficult Janus-faced heritage in that it is connected with both imperialism and modernization. In the collective memory, one is bound to find both, and it will be important to critically evaluate both in constructing narratives that give meaning to this heritage. Such narratives would have to deal with both the darker and the brighter sides of this heritage and ask what it might mean for the local population and for its relations with the outside world today. As this railway heritage undoubtedly also has meaning for the Russian neighbours of China, it could serve as means of starting a dialogue about the past that could serve as a basis for better relations between Russia and China. Working through their often problematic past could be the first step in building an honest and truthful relationship. The attractiveness of the railway heritage also could be the starting point for developing tourism to the region – especially from neighbouring Russia. A route of industrial heritage focused on railway construction would stress the international characteristics of the industrial heritage of the CER within the context of Western imperialism. It would establish authentic locations and

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document their development over time, building on both archival sources and collected memories. And it would showcase the above-mentioned diversity of the heritage sites, as well as the multinational contexts of their construction and administration. Stories of migration, cooperation, intercultural meeting places and commercial and scientific communication abound as do stories of international diplomatic rivalry, warfare and imperialist designs. Only an honest assessment of the good and the bad in the railway heritage of China’s North- East will be able to engage the people of the region with their diverse memories and allow them to make that heritage, with the good and the painful memories, their own. It can be a source of pride for the region, but the pride is tempered with more problematical aspects that also need to be discussed. A critical approach to heritage would try and deal with both. Extended media coverage will be crucial in developing this approach to heritage. It will be the precondition for greater interest in the sites, more tourism to the region and, ultimately, better preservation and development of the heritage sites, which in turn would create new opportunities for tourism and thereby generate means to preserve this valuable industrial heritage. The potential for tourism is high, as this railway heritage is located in a strikingly beautiful landscape and represents towering international architectural achievements. Table 15.1 Important railway heritage sites along the Binzhou Line. Name

Status quo

Location

Description

Spiral Line in Hingan Ridge

National key cultural relic

Yakeshi

Built in 1901, spans the large gap between the Great Hingan range and the tunnel.

The tunnel of Hingan Ridge

National key cultural relic

Yakeshi

Built in 1901 by 500 Italian stonemasons and concluded in 1903, it was the longest tunnel at that time.

The water tower of steam engines

National key cultural relic

Yakeshi

Built in 1903, Russian-style wooden umbrella-like building, very elegant and special.

The Segment Chief Office

National key historical relic

Yakeshi

Built in 1903 for Kukuzuvolf, the head of a company producing engines business from Manchouli to Anda, a brick and wood structure.

Railway engines warehouse

National key cultural relic

Boketu, Yakeshi

Built in 1903, the only warehouse on the Binzhou Line. A sector building, its axis is the big wheel used to adjust engines outside the warehouse. (continued)

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Russian Patrols Garrison

National key cultural relic

Yakeshi

Built in 1903, brick and wood structure, two floors, six rooms.

Six Countries Hotel of Russia, then the Fifth Cavalry’s Headquartersof Inner Mongolia

National key cultural relic

Zhalantun

Built in 1905, a public building with sloping roof with iron sheet face. Its most special characteristic is a wooden balcony with an elegantly carved handrail located on the second floor.

Zhalantun Station

National key cultural relic

Zhalantun

Built in 1903, the first large station, the track goes through the tunnel of the Great Hingan Ridge and runs south into the plain of Songliao.

Zhalantun Health Preserved Clinic of the CER

Zhalantun

Built in 1903, Russian-style, 320 m2, brick laid to form convex and concave curves in the wall, painted yellow and white, elegant and delicate.

Primary school of National key Russian diaspora cultural relic

Zhalantun

Built in 1920, 3208 m2, symmetrical stone patterns at corners and windows.

CER Railway Club site

Preserved

Zhalantun

Built in 1903, 780 m2, two-floored wooden and brick Russian-style building, sloping roof with iron sheet top.

Railway MeetingSite

National Key cultural relic

Zhalantun

Built in 1903, 1763 m2. It was a club for railway workers and had 400 seats, stage and more.

Lodge House of Preserved Soviet commercial representatives

Manchouli. Built in 1923, classic symmetrical outline, the main body was yellow, 1526 m2.

Soviet Consulate in Manchouli

Preserved

Manchouli

Built in the twentieth century, brick and wood structure, two floors and a basement, massive walls painted in Russian yellow, 2007 m2.

Technician School of Manchouli33

Preserved

Manchouli

25m high building, covers 2880 m2, a lively structure with elegantly carved patterns.

Russian Military Garrison

Preserved

Manchouli

Built in 1904, four buildings, but three of them were destroyed, one remains, two floors, typical Russian style, 1342 m2, intact.

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Among the buildings, there are eleven representatives of main functions and fifteen representatives of auxiliary ones34 in the inner section (from Manchouli to Zhalantun, 523 km),35 distributed in Manchouli (1/3), Hailar (2/1), Yakeshi (1/1), Mianduhe (1/2), Boketu (2/2) and Zhalantun (4/6).36 The rest of the Binzhou Line (Hulunbeir to Harbin, 350 km) holds fifteen representatives of main functions and twenty-four structures representative of auxiliaries in Daqing (1/2), Anda (1/3), Zhao Dong (1/0) and Harbin (12/19).37 The reasons why these station-cities hold so much typical industrial heritage are closely connected with their geographical advantages. Manchouli is the first station for the CER, which became the centre of trade between Russia and China. Hailar, located in the Hulunbeir Grassland, is the most important traffic pivot of the whole area. Yakeshi is located in the Hinan Mountain, with the most difficult topography, while Zhalandtun is the key location for the western part of the CER and was used as a depot for vehicles. As for the Heilongjiang part, Daqing holds the famous Sartu Station surrounded by the largest groups of intact buildings in Russian style; Anda is the most important part for the railhead; Harbin as the termination of the Binzhou Line and also the starting point for the South Manchuria Line holds numerous heritage items of different functions. The structures listed above are only a small part of the multitude of significant heritage sites distributed along the Binzhou Line. Zhao Xin is a Professor of Geographical History and Culture at the Department of History, Jilin Normal University in China. She is also an editor of Regional Culture Study of Jilin Academy of Social Science. She has published more than thirty articles and several books on geopolitics, Sino-foreign relationships and the history of urbanization. Her most recent work is an article on the geographical discoveries on the Island of Sakhalin (unpublished). Qu Xiaofan is Professor of Urbanization and Chinese Overseas Migration to the Western Countries at the Department of History and Culture of Northeast Normal University, Changchun in China. He has published nearly fifty articles and several books on the history of urbanization in Manchuria, Jilin Province, the history of immigration and traffic systems in Manchuria. His most recent work is on the corruption case of Jidun railway, published in Chinese in 2017.

Notes 1. [Russia] Barsukov, Count Muraviev Amurski, vol. 2. Commercial Press, p. 45. 2. Originally a Chinese town called Miaojie (ᑭ㸫).

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3. Collins, Voyage down the Amoor: With a Land Journey through Siberia, and Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Kamschatka, and Japan. 4. Harrison, ‘Review: Siberian Journey: Down the Amur to the Pacific, 1856–1857 by Perry McDonough Collins, Charles Vevier’, 223. 5. The Department of Trade and Manufactures Ministry of Finance, Siberia and The Great Siberian Railway, with General Map, for the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, Vol. V. (St Petersburg, 1893), p.239. 6. The Russian government dispatched several survey missions over the course of ten years, and at least three projects of the Great Siberian Railway were introduced from 1872 to 1875. 7. Chen Qiujie, ‘Study on the Construction of Great Siberia Railway and Its Influences’, PhD dissertation. Northeast Normal University, 2011, p. 41. 8. Ibid. 9. Wang Tieya, The Compilation Old Agreements between China and Foreign Countries, Vol. 1 (Beijing: Sanglian Bookstore), 651. 10. Deane, ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’, 147–52. 11. Reference to The Achievement Report of East Province Railway for 25 Years, edited by Historical Committee of East Province Railway, recorded in The History of East Province, Nilos (Russian), translated by Zhu Danchen, 1923, p. 1; In addition, according to Chinese Railway Annals written by Li Hongchu, ‘the date of commencement was on May 28, 1898’ (p. 273). Harbin celebrates its Founding Anniversary on this day too. So I think that the proposal of some scholars that 28 May 1898 is Russian calendar, which corresponds to 9 June 1898 is not correct. 12. The two provinces are located in China proper, near Beijing. From there many emigrants came to Manchuria during the era of railway construction. 13. Harbin Foreign Affairs Annals, Harbin: Heilongjiang Peoples’ Publishing House, 1998, Appendix. 14. Hume Foro, ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’. 15 .Chancery of the Committee of Ministers, The Great Siberia Railway. St Petersburg, Government Printing Office, 1900, 5–6. 16. Xiaofan, The Historical Vicissitude of Cities in Modern Manchuria, 90. 17. Binzhou Line holds 39 large and middle-sized bridges and is a total of 3462 meters long; Sungari River Bridge is 1075.2 meters long. 18. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_3ca626300102w178.html. 19. Gleason, ‘How the Yanks Are Speeding Up the Longest Railroad in the World’, 220. 20. Great Khingan Ridge Tunnel was the longest tunnel in China, while Sungari Bridge is the first iron-frame railway bridge, with longest span of bridges along the CER. 21. Weirong (⿟㓈㤷), Modern Railways Subsidiaries in Manchuria, 37. 22. Quoted from Wenxian and Xiulan, Horvath and Chinese Eastern Railway, 56–57; Weiyun, The Struggle for CER’s Administrative Privilege among Powers and the Bankrupt of Russia’s Far-East Policy’. 23. Whigham, Manchuria and Korea, 51–52. 24. It is a new three-floor building on the central axis, Dazhi Street, Qinkiakang (Nangang district). 25. Weirong (⿟㓈㤷), Modern Railways Subsidiaries in Manchuria, 37. 26. On 8 September 1896, the Regulations were signed by the Chinese Plenipotentiary Xu Jingcheng (䆌᱃╘) and Utah Densky, president of Sino-Russo Bank. The sixth article stipulates: Chinese Eastern Railway Company has the privilege of land-acquisition for CER’s construction, management and safekeeping. 27. Harbin Foreign Affairs Annals, 51. 28. Zhao Xigang (䍉୰㔵), ‘The Jews in Harbin’, Data of Literature and History in Harbin, the 19th album, p. 267.

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29. List of Overseas Chinese Associations in Harbin, Archives of Civil Affairs Bureau of Northeast Peoples Government (1950) No. 6-2-54. 30. Collated by Zhai Liwei and Cheng Qichang, Collected Works of Cheng Duolu, 302–303. 31. Modern History Institute of China Social Academy, The History of Czarist Russia’s Invasion into China, 1978; Department of Fudan University, The History of Czarist Russia’s Invasion into China History, 1975, Shanghai; History Department of Jilin Normal University, The Concise History of Czarist Russia’s Invasion into China, 1976 etc. 32. New China website, http://www.hlj.xinhuanet.com/news/2012-10/24/c_131925 731.htm (accessed 24 October 2012). 33. Yongzhi, Cultural Heritages in Hulunbeir, 252. 34. ‘Main-Function’ heritage sites refers to those that hold direct connections with rail transportation, such as railways, warehouses, stations, tunnels, bridges etc.; ‘auxiliary function’ heritage items refers to those that hold indirect relations with rail transportation but have important influence on the transportation and construction of the railway, such as churches, hospitals, railway clubs, staff accommodation etc. 35. Kongjian, Qiang and Dihua, ‘The Construction of Industrial Heritages’ Corridors in Grand Canal of China’, 39–41. 36. ‘Typology and Geographic Distribution Characteristics of Chinese Eastern Railway Heritages’. 37. Ibid.

Bibliography Collins, P. Voyage down the Amoor: With a Land Journey through Siberia, and Incidental Notices of Manchooria, Kamschatka, and Japan. New York, 1860. Deane, F. ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’. Foreign Affairs 3(1) (1924), 147–52. Gleason, G. ‘How the Yanks Are Speeding Up the Longest Railroad in the World’. The Independent 99(3688) (16 August 1919). Harrison, J. A. ‘Review: Siberian Journey: Down the Amur to the Pacific, 1856–1857 by Perry McDonough Collins, Charles Vevier’. Journal of Asian Studies 22(2) (1963), 223. Hume Foro, A. ‘The Chinese Eastern Railway’. MCClues Magazine 1 (Nov. 1899). Kongjian, Y., Z. Qiang and L. Dihua. ‘The Construction of Industrial Heritages’ Corridors in Grand Canal of China’. Construction Science and Technology 13 (2007), 39–41. Liwei, Z., and C. Qichang. Collected Works of Cheng Duolu (Changchun: Art and History Publishing House, 1988), 302–303. ‘Typology and Geographic Distribution Characteristics of Chinese Eastern Railway Heritages’. Economic Geography 36(4) (Apr. 2016). Weirong, C. (⿟㓈㤷). Modern Railways Subsidiaries in Manchuria. Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Science, 2008. Weiyun, M.C.J. ‘The Struggle for CER’s Administrative Privilege among Powers and the Bankrupt of Russia’s Far-East Policy’. Russia Study 5(25). Wenxian, W., and Z. Xiulan. Horvath and Chinese Eastern Railway. Jilin: Jilin Literature and History Press, 1993. Whigham, H.J. Manchuria and Korea. London: Kessinger Pub Co., 1904. Xiaofan, Q. The Historical Vicissitude of Cities in Modern Manchuria. Changchun: Northeast Normal University Press, 2001. Yongzhi, C. (ed.). Cultural Heritages in Hulunbeir. Chen Relics Publishing House, 2014.

CONCLUSION

Narrativizations of an Industrial Past Labour, the Environment and the Construction of Space in Comparative Perspective Stefan Berger

Introduction Industrialization and deindustrialization have been global processes and experiences – with enormous differences in the way they played out in different locales. In this volume, we have discussed the memory discourses surrounding industrial pasts in deindustralizing regions in Western and Eastern Europe and in China. In the introduction to this volume, we discussed what economic, social and cultural factors, constellations and agencies have facilitated and shaped industrial heritage across our sample regions and cities. But the contributions that are assembled here not only reflect on the economic, political and cultural contexts of heritage production but they also discuss the ingredients of that heritage – i.e. the narratives that are being developed by various actors. This conclusion will compare some prominent themes in the diverse attempts to narrativize industrial pasts and provide memorial landscapes around those pasts. First of all, we shall review the narratives about industrial labour and class. After that, we shall examine the ways in which the environmental impact of industrialization is being made into a topic within industrial memory discourses. Finally, we shall look at place making through memory narratives about urbanity and regionality and the place of urban and regional industrial spaces within national memorial landNotes for this section begin on page 304.

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scapes. Those three themes emerge out of the contributions of this volume particularly strongly, but they are, of course, not the only themes in broader narrativizations of industrial pasts. We could equally ask for memories of ethnicity/ race, migration, gender, religion and a whole host of other spatial and non-spatial themes that are prominent in the memory discourses of industrial pasts. We shall end our concluding reflections by discussing for whom are memory narratives in post-industrial landscapes constructed and for what purpose.

Industrial Heritage Discourses on Labour One would almost expect that labour issues and issues of class are represented prominently in industrial heritage discourses. Paul Pickering, in his chapter on Manchester, starts off with Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, penned in Manchester, of course.1 The picture was one of ‘dark satanic mills’ in which the workers endlessly toiled and in which they were thoroughly exploited but in which they also formed solidarities of class that were to be the germ of revolution – at least according to Engels. The remaking of the city from the 1990s onwards, as Paul Pickering reminds us, completely removed working-class Manchester from the map of the city. The mindscape of proletarian Manchester cannot be seen in the city any more – for that, one has to go to the museum. Even the remaining presence of some of the city’s warehouses is, in Pickering’s words, ‘chimeric’ for they are mere shells cut adrift from their own past. And in the museum, as Pickering argues, the dark and satanic side of the mills is seriously underplayed in favour of a story of local pride. The re-creation of industrial Manchester deteriorates into an affective pretence that paints over the chasm that divides today’s Mancunians from their nineteenth-century forefathers without doing much to engender greater understanding of the former for the latter. According to Arthur MacIvor, it is a very similar story in Glasgow. Insofar as there is any emphasis in the museums of the city on industrial Glasgow, the stories, by and large, concentrate on describing world-leading technological developments and revel in the leading role Glaswegian industries played in the process of industrialization. Industrialization becomes part and parcel of city branding that ignores the fate of the working-class communities both under conditions of industrialization and deindustrialization. However, as indicated above, working-class narratives are present in a kind of counterculture to the official city culture. This counterculture is trying to capture the often emotional attachment of workers to their former places of work and to their communities, disrupted and destroyed by deindustrialization. Using oral history evidence, McIvor argues against the often-

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encountered assumption that workers wanted to forget about difficult industrial pasts and move on into new post-industrial horizons without wanting to be reminded of their past.2 Quite the contrary, he underlines a need of many workers to find reassurance and take pride in that past as a necessary first step for a reorientation in the present that would allow workers not just to be objects in processes of structural change but to take agency and shape those processes. A very interesting trend, also discussed by McIvor, is the one to erect alternative working-class monuments to the official ones dedicated to memorializing Glasgow’s leading politicians, capitalists and middle-class artists. Counter-monuments, such as the ones to John MacLean, appointed Bolshevik consul for Scotland by no lesser figure than Lenin, and Mary Barbour, one of the organizers of the 1915 Glasgow Rent Strike, signal a desire to contest the official narrative of a city that decided against incorporating its radical working-class past. Furthermore, the alternative culture seeking to rescue the former working-class presence in the city is using the new digital opportunities. Glasgow’s Digital Library includes extensive holdings pertaining to the traditions of ‘Red Clydeside’.3 In Wales, as Bella Dicks’s chapter shows, two dominant narratives, that of the Welsh gwerin (a mixture of folk and people) and that of triumphant industrialization, were eventually to merge in order to produce a national narrative that was inclusive of working-class lives and experiences. Originally, though, the two narratives were, by and large, kept apart – with the gwerin representing rural Wales and pre-industrial work and life experiences. It was only under the impact of the new left historians of the 1970s and 1980s that the industrial working class was inserted into this older idea. In fact, as Leighton James has argued, the new notions of class could merge with older notions of the gwerin in powerful and thought-provoking ways.4 Thus, the official industrial heritage of Wales today is arguably more open to the language of class and to remembering working-class experiences than is the case in Glasgow or Manchester. However, as Louise Miskell’s chapter reminds us, there are, in Wales, internal hierarchies when it comes to the memory of industrial pasts. She argues that the iconic mineworker and the preoccupation of historians with miners more generally has left little space for steelworkers, whose communities were more fragmented and less monolithic than those of the miners. Hence the memory of steelworkers in South Wales is in danger of being lost. If the discourse on labour and class in Wales is linked to a specifically Welsh idea of the people (gwerin), we also find plenty of Cornish elements in the narrativizations of labour within industrial heritage discourses in Cornwall, as Hilary Orange shows in her chapter. Yet, like in Glasgow, the industrial elements in a Cornish memorial landscape have to struggle to become visible as industrial monuments related to industrial labour. When the

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Cornish mines lay derelict by the late nineteenth century, a Cornish Celtic cultural revival harked back to pre-industrial notions of Celtic Cornwall and elided the story of industrialization. The successful marketing of the ‘Cornish Riviera’ attracted tourists to Cornwall who were confronted with constructions of a Celtic pre-industrial Cornwall to which the ruins of mines on the coast added little but picturesque camera opportunities for Romantic landscape photography. Hence mines as places of labour and miners as labourers only entered the Cornish imaginary in a major way in the 2000s, when the world heritage mining site generated a revival of mining discourses and mining symbols that were quickly adapted to the new nationalizing narratives gaining popularity in Cornwall. Many of the artistic and cultural images that are generated around mining in contemporary Cornwall confirm Romanticized and heroic images of the Cornish miner that are far removed from the languages of class and the experiences of hard work and exploitation. If the chapters on Manchester, Glasgow and Cornwall all speak to the deficiencies of memorializing class as part of industrial heritage, Laurajane Smith, in her chapter in this volume, reminds us that in Australia and the US, by comparison with the UK, the languages of class are even less inscribed into meaning-making industrial heritage initiatives. Based on qualitative interviews with visitors to heritage sites, she concludes that issues of class are far more prominently represented in British heritage sites than in Australian or American ones. Smith also found that the industrial sites were far more often related to local rather than national narratives. Yet, as the chapters by Dicks and Orange in particular show, it is perfectly possible to adapt narratives of class to national narratives within industrial heritage initiatives. And is it not also at least partly due to different national imaginaries in Britain, the US and Australia that class narratives are more prominent in Britain? After all, there is a long tradition of tying class to nation here, whereas in the ‘new world’, many definitions of the ‘new nation’ started from the (obviously false) assumption that these ‘new societies’ had avoided the class-ridden character of their ‘mother’ country.5 Smith also powerfully reminds us that class narratives in industrial heritage build on the emotions of loss and pride. What has been lost, i.e. the industrial world, is a source of intense pride. The affective side of class memories is politically malleable. It can be used to sustain progressive politics in the present, but it can also lead to a politics of recognition that is utilized by right-wing populist politics as has recently occurred in the US with Donald Trump’s appeal to industrial workers, in France with Marine Le Pen’s appeal to the same constituency and in Germany with the AfD also doing well in former industrial heartlands, like the north of the Ruhr region. Erik Eklund’s chapter on the Latrobe Valley in Australia confirms Smith’s analysis of Australian industrial heritage obfuscating issues of class rather than

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foregrounding them. The limited heritage initiatives by privatized companies in the Latrobe Valley memorialize, above all, senior managers. Even the bottom-up, unofficial attempts to build up industrial heritage sites are more strongly grouped around issues of lost communities than around issues of class. Moving to Western Europe, we see a major difference between countries with a strong communist presence in the post-1945 era and countries where anti-communism ruled supreme over the political forces of the left. In West Germany, as Berger and Golombek argue, class narratives are weak in the Ruhr, as the main narrative follows the social partnership model that is underwritten by the mainstream Social Democratic left. In this narrative class only has a place in the more distant past of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, where it can be made safe in its pastness and contrasted with the positive traditions of social partnership starting after 1945 and underpinning the success story of the structural transformation of the Ruhr region. In France, Spain and Italy, the existence of mass communist parties that were supported by many workers in the industrial heartlands of those countries during the Cold War made a real difference to how narratives of deindustrialization were structured around issues of class.6 In the Nord-Pasde-Calais the image of the miner was an important ingredient in the French communist political imaginary from the 1930s to the 1970s. The miners’ anti-fascism, their archetypal proletarian existences, their strong attachment to a communist union, and communist novels and autobiographies all link the mining of the Nord to communism. Where communism remained strong locally under conditions of deindustrialization, there we also find a powerful merger of heritage initiatives with the language of class. However, when communism imploded in the wake of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the framing of industrial heritage in terms of class was weakened. In fact, when a substantial mining heritage was ultimately being created from the late 1990s onwards, it led to often homogenizing narratives about miners and miners’ experiences that did not reflect on the long history of struggle and militancy in the mines. The relationship between employers and workers was hardly discussed at all. The official heritage narratives stressed the successful melting pot of the Nord – i.e. immigrant miners who were well integrated into the mining communities, but as Fontaine argues in her chapter, this narrative had deeply problematical aspects, as in the minds of the visitors this narrative could form a stark contrast to newer waves of immigrants to France, which were not so well integrated. In the Asturian coalfield, as Rubén Vega García explains, the Communist Party, alongside other left-wing forces, remained strong, and it used

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its strong position to get good deals for miners and industrial workers made redundant because of the ongoing deindustrialization of the region. However, the left found it almost impossible to reconcile this collusion in the deindustralization of its proletarian heartlands with the traditional left-wing narratives of (armed) struggle and resistance to exploitation, which were part and parcel of the long twentieth-century memory culture of the Spanish left.7 This is arguably also why it has failed to come up with a coherent and convincing narrative of deindustrialization in attempts to construct an industrial heritage of the region. Instead, the traditional left is now seen by many as having betrayed its own tradition by not standing up more forcefully for the defence of mining and industrial work in Asturias. The independent music and youth culture examined in Vega García’s chapter is a powerful testimony to such criticism, and the rise of Podemos in Asturias as a new party of the left is partly explicable with reference to the disappointment of many in the old left. The old narratives of class today speak to new social movements on the left and disenchanted radical youth, not to the traditional representatives of labour in the erstwhile communist and socialist heartlands of the Asturian labour movement. The musical narratives that are discussed by Rubén Vega García are not so much an attempt to analyse the deindustrialization process but more a raw cry of emotions about the loss of a future, about despair and betrayal. The working-class struggles of the past are very present in the lyrics of this music, but even the world of struggle cannot be actualized in the present, as the workers’ organizations, unions and political parties have betrayed the workers’ cause and the descendants of those workers. The young musicians see themselves as memorial custodians of past working-class struggles and the aspirations they embodied for a more just society. They identify with the parents and grandparents and their struggles and have nothing but disdain for those who, in their eyes, have sold out the legacy of their forefathers. By contrast, the labour movement of the past becomes idealized as a carrier of hope and a better future – then and now. In Italy, like in France, we see the implosion of a strong Communist Party in the 1990s. The steelworkers of Sesto San Giovanni had in many respects been the vanguard of communism during the Cold War. Thus their resistance to Fascism and the German occupation of Italy led to Sesto being awarded a Gold Medal for Resistance to National Socialism. The extremely high union density achieved after 1945 and the workers’ reputation for discipline and militancy brought Sesto the nickname of ‘the Italian Stalingrad’. However, without firm institutionalization of that memory in the heritage of Sesto, and with communism now being an increasingly faint political memory, there is the very real danger that this memory will be forgotten. Oral

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history projects like the one presented here by Roberta Garruccio have an important part to play in preserving that memory, even when that memory seems to have become politically homeless. If industrial heritage initiatives in Western Europe, for various reasons, struggle to insert powerful class narratives into their stories of deindustrialization, the post-communist scenarios are witness to even more difficult attempts to preserve the memory of labour and of working-class experiences in post-industrial landscapes. The discredited communist past with its heroification of the working class stands as a formidable barrier to attempts to recover the values and lifeworlds of industrial workers in post-communist scenarios. David Kideckel in his chapter talks about the situation in the Jiu Valley in Romania, where the miners are still part and parcel of a strong communicative memory in communities devastated by pit closures but where there is little prospect of that communicative memory being transferred to narrativizations in an institutionalized memory culture. The oral history work that is being done by the research of Tibor Valuch is trying to do precisely this – to contribute in some small way to the maintenance of the memory of work among former steelworkers in the steel town of Ózd. Their memory of their former workplace and of their former neighbourhoods is positive. It bemoans the loss of a whole way of life that was the consequence of deindustrialization and the closing of the local steelworks. With the steelworks dismantled, with former steelworkers migrating to other parts of Hungary and the town facing a bleak economic future, the memory of steelworking would simply disappear were it not for oral history projects like that of Valuch. In China, where communism is still in power, labour issues and class narratives are also largely absent in narrativizations of industrial pasts. Tong Lam’s chapter on the ‘Third Front’ heritage in Southern China is very clear that the heroic and triumphant narrative that accompanies this heritagization leaves hardly any room for portraying the everyday life of workers employed in those industries. They are the faceless followers of the party, and their suffering, their trials and their tribulations in the course of ‘Third Front’ development never become concrete and specific. Short of reiterating in an abstract way the sacrifices of the masses, workers remain voiceless in this state party-driven heritage. Although Chinese labourers suffered horribly in the construction of the railways in North- Eastern China, as mentioned by Xin Zhao and Xiofang Qu, this suffering is also barely visible in the limited attempts to build up an industrial heritage around the railways. Instead, technological achievements and the accompanying internationalization of the region are emphasized but without reference to Russian and Japanese imperialism. Any sustained memory of labour and class in the North-East of China would have to ac-

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knowledge this imperialist context and address it in a way that acknowledges Chinese victimhood – a narrative framing that does not fit into the dominant heroic and triumphalist memory discourses that are dominant in today’s China. Overall then, we can see that, contrary to our initial expectations, issues of labour and class are not so prominent in industrial memory discourses. In communist China, they take second place to the heroic celebration of achievements of the party. In post-communist Eastern Europe, all industrial memory discourses are struggling to be heard in a political climate that is unreceptive to them. And in the capitalist West, the demise of communism and the weakening of trade unionism have de-emphasized class narratives. Anti-communist narratives of industrial pasts tend to de-emphasize class and present labour issues within a corporatist framework that is hostile to the language of class. Industrial heritage initiatives thus often foreground technological and scientific achievements and present a lot of hardware. Or they focus on spatial constructions of identity, where labour issues and class identities are not disrupting a common, above class regional identity. Where class issues are foregrounded and emphasized in industrial memory discourses, they tend to be in places where class conflict from above had a devastating impact on working-class neighbourhoods, such as in the coalfields of Britain after 1985 or in the deindustralized rust belt of North America.

Industrial Heritage Discourses on the Environment In many parts of the world, industrialization spelt environmental devastation. Yet if we look at the extent to which industrial heritage initiatives have picked up on the theme of environmental cost, we see that this is not necessarily a prominent topic. Early representations of industrial Manchester, as recalled in Paul Pickering’s chapter, make much of the contrast between, on the one hand, nature and trees and, on the other, the ghastly collection of stacks of chimneys puffing out billowing smoke as well as the rivers resembling flows of liquid manure in a city that seemed most ‘unnatural’ to many of its early visitors. And yet, the heritagization of Manchester, limited as it is, is not dealing in any significant way with the environmental disasters produced by the industrial revolution, which instead is streamlined into a narrative useful for the larger aggrandizement of the locality on a world stage. As Louise Miskell argues in her chapter, industrial dereliction in South Wales mining and steel making had reached such proportions that its ecological consequences, polluted grounds, waste tips and derelict buildings had become a major issue. A clean-up of the Lower Swansea Valley, which had been the centre of non-ferrous metal smelting between 1700 and 1900, was

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so comprehensive that virtually nothing of the former industrial activity in that Valley remained visible. Environmental recreation and industrial heritage did not go together. Like in Manchester, any heritage initiatives around former industrial sites do not speak much about environmental change. The very fact that the chapters by Bella Dicks, Hilary Orange and Arthur McIvor do not even mention environmental narratives in relation to industrial heritage may indeed speak volumes. In the Latrobe Valley in Victoria, Australia, contemporary environmental concerns loom large in discussions surrounding the power and mining industries. Social movements, including unions campaigning on issues of higher death rates in the Valley due to dust and asbestos, have forced the state government to issue a formal apology and put up compensation schemes. The negative image of the brown coal-fuelled power industry is also related to environmental concerns about greenhouse gases, but overall, these debates are not so much located in a heritage context but in a political context of an industry still operative in the region, albeit in crisis. In the limited, largely bottom-up attempts to create sites of industrial heritage in the Latrobe Valley, environmental concerns are present in the discussion of the destruction of whole communities by open-cast mining, but the emphasis here throughout is more on community than on the environment. In Western Europe, the most interesting attempt to link industrial heritage to narratives of environmental destruction can be found in the Ruhr region of Germany. The museums and heritage sites of the Ruhr extensively discuss the environmental destruction that accompanied industrialization. The bad past is, however, contrasted with a promising present, in which nature is re-purposing and reconquering former industrial sites. A new type of nature, ‘industrial nature’ (Industrienatur) is gaining ground that is described, in heritage discourse, as being even more diverse and more colourful than the nature that existed in the Ruhr before industrialization. Thus, we see a narrative overwriting the historical record of environmental protection during industrialization with a present-day post-industrial concern to diversify and develop the natural environment at sites of former industry in the Ruhr.8 Yet this may well be a very German story, with its powerful environmental movement and Green Party. At least, looking at the chapters on the NordPas-de-Calais, Asturias and Sesto, there are no parallel discussions on environmental records in either of them. In the post-communist scenarios discussed here, environmental concerns are not a prominent part of a rather subdued industrial heritage culture. In some cases, such as in the Jiu Valley in Romania, a deeply problematical environmental track record related to the history of mining has been replaced with an equally problematical environmental impact of the postmining economic restructuring, which led to the logging of forests in the

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Valley, threatening to devastate its habitat and do irreparable damage to its ecosystem. None of this, however, is discussed in industrial memory discourses. In Tibor Valuch’s chapter on former steelworkers in the Hungarian town of Ózd, the memories of those workers identify so strongly with their former place of work that there seems to be no room for any criticism of the way of life that they formerly lived. Hence there seems to be also no concern for the environmental damages done by the former steelworks. It simply is not a prominent part of their memory. In communist China, the heroic narratives of ‘Third Front’ development has also no space for discussing environmental concerns or environmental damage. Any critical voices are banned from this party state-driven heritage. Characteristically, the chapter by Zhao Xin and Qu Xiaofan also does not discuss any environmental concerns associated with the industrialization and urbanization of the North-East that accompanied railway development. Overall then, it is striking to what extent another of what would, on the surface of things, appear to be one of the most obvious narratives in relation to industrial heritage, namely the environmental track records of industrialization and deindustralization, is sidelined in industrial heritage narratives – with the stunning exception of German discourses. Whilst in many places environmental narratives seem hard to integrate into triumphalist memory frames, the Ruhr discourse on ‘industrial nature’ has found a way to talk about environmental change in a positive sense: deindustrialization does not become a defeat but a victory – for nature.

Industrial Heritage Discourses as Place Making: Urbanity, Regionalism and Nationality Industrialization spelt urbanization, although, especially with early industrializers, neither were necessarily fast and extensive.9 If the relationship between the two phenomena was complex and varied, diverse forms of ‘wild urbanization’ often accompanied industrialization. Everything in the urban space had to take second place to the interests of industry. In the booming housing industry, huge profits could be made by unscrupulous tycoons. Yet there were also early initiatives to develop forms of city and regional planning in industrial regions. The Ruhr region was a pioneer in this respect. Organizations such as the Emscher Genossenschaft and the Siedlungsverband Ruhrkohlenbezirk attempted to provide regional planning from the early twentieth-century onwards, and planners such as Robert Schmidt in Essen, for the first time, made planning an integral exercise of regional development.10 Heritage initiatives hence have also picked up on questions of urban and regional development. In the Ruhr, the main planning body of

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the region, the Regionalverband Ruhr, successor to the Siedlungsverband Ruhrkohlenbezirk, is preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 1920 with a major exhibition at the Ruhr museum in Essen: its memory discourses celebrate regional planning as a distinctive feature in the making of the Ruhr region.11 Subregional identities – i.e. those of the fifty-three towns and communities that make up the Ruhr region – have been tightly integrated into such regional place making, and the region has also been written into national memory as a key region for Germany’s huge economic success between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1960s. Whilst place making through industrial heritage in the Ruhr has therefore also got local and national elements, it is the regional one that dominates – at least partly due to the strong planning traditions in the region. Regional place making also emerges from Marion Fontaine’s chapter as an integral part of industrial memory discourses in the North of France. But whereas the regional ‘we’ in the Ruhr is a proud one, proud of the achievements of structural transformation through regional planning, the regional ‘we’ in the North of France is far more defensive and downbeat. For many people in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, the industrial heritage is becoming a symbol of a place that has been abandoned and neglected by the political centre of France, by Paris. As a consequence, the regional ‘we’ very much defines itself against Paris and its national political elites. This allowed the far-right Front National to thrive. Thus, the political context in which industrial heritage is underpinning regional identity is entirely different in the Ruhr and in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, even if the phenomena are often remarkably similar. If we take the example of football, the Lens football club, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, is very much promoting itself as a miners’ club, thereby drawing on the heritage of the region and representing that heritage to the outside world. Its strong support in the region points to a desire from within the region to keep a strong identification with the mining past of the region. Very similar developments can be found in the Ruhr region of Germany, where the dominant football teams, Schalke 04 and Dortmund, rely heavily on the working-class images of the region, in particular mining. The player’s tunnel in Schalke, connecting the changing rooms to the playing field, has even been designed in the form of an underground coal shaft. Where urban or regional planning was not an important part of industrialization, there it is also hardly present in memory discourses of industrial pasts. This is as true for Manchester as it is for Glasgow. Indeed, in both cities the widespread demolition of industrial sites in the 1980s and their redevelopment did not take into account histories and memories associated with the redeveloped sites. Insofar as there were city planners involved at all in Manchester and Glasgow, they did not intervene in the remaking of the cities in a way that was highly sensitive to their historical development. In

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fact, McIvor speaks of a certain Disneyfication of those isolated industrial heritage spots that remain in and around the city – with a striking lack of contextualization of those sites in their former industrial landscape and in the evolution of the latter over a long period of time. The reinvention of the city was thus completed without much recourse to memories of a previous industrial past. If the memories of industrial pasts are nurtured through regional planning discourses in the Ruhr, in Wales those memories are an important part of the national narrativizations of Wales that have become more prominent with devolution from the 1990s onwards. As Dicks argues in her chapter, the National Museum of Wales has been leading attempts to construct Wales as ‘first industrial nation’. In Cornwall, as Hilary Orange explains, a nationalist place making is building on the Cornish mining heritage. It produces an array of homogenizing images of Cornish national identity that focuses on industrial prowess, an allegedly unique enterprising spirit and the influence that émigré Cornishmen had on mining practices abroad. Themes of deindustrialization and of immigrant labour in Cornwall fall by the wayside as they do not fit into the heroic nationalizing narratives of Cornish mining, which are strong in the Cornish heritage industry. Sometimes the borders between regional and national forms of place making also become blurred, as is the case with Asturias. Here, as detailed in Rubén Vega García’s chapter, musical protest against deindustrialization is intimately connected to place making. There is an intense commitment to Asturias, to the regional coal basin and to ideas of Asturian nationality. As the political sentiments expressed in song are largely left-wing, it produces a left-wing regionalism/nationalism that is culturally inflected and constructs a sense of a proletarian nation that is rooted in strong working-class traditions. The attachment to place is stunning – perhaps explained by the fact that many young people have to leave if they want any prospects of employment. Yet, as Vega García also makes clear, that musical protest culture is part and parcel of a countercultural movement that is minoritarian and struggling against a majoritarian neglect and denial of the importance of industrial heritage to Asturian identity. The strong medieval heritage of Asturias provides a ready-made alternative to the industrial past. Furthermore, the key agent, predestined to speak on behalf of industrial heritage in the region, the strong labour movement, has been compromised by the settlements that saw the closure of mines and other industrial workplaces. Hence, unlike in the Ruhr, where you have a powerful alliance of promoters of industrial heritage as a means of regional place making, ranging from local, regional and national politicians of all mainstream political parties to employers and unions and further to social movements from below, in Asturias the countercultural movement, which is a social movement from below, is struggling to bring

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together powerful agents in favour of going down a similar route of utilizing industrial heritage for regional/national place making. So far, we have discussed instances where memories of industrial pasts have been related to regional and national place making. It is, however, also extremely common to relate forms of industrial heritage to local forms of place making. One of the many examples of local place making that we have encountered in this volume is the case of Yallourn in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. As Erik Eklund finds in his chapter, the lost town of Yallourn, which had to give way to opencast mining, indicates a strong sense of community-centred place making – i.e. a form of place making focused on the trials and tribulations of the towns in the Valley that grew with the power and mining industries from the interwar period to the present day. Local and regional forms of place making can go hand in hand. If we stick with the example of the Latrobe Valley, Morwell power station’s status as being a recognized heritage site by the Heritage Council of Victoria indicates that the state of Victoria is recognizing the heritage of the region as being important not just for the locality but also for the entire state of Victoria. As the cases of Sesto San Giovanni and Ózd indicate, oral histories can contribute to the making of local memory landscapes. The chapters of Roberta Garruccio and Tibor Valuch in this volume speak about those attempts to generate a sense of belonging to an industrial past that asks about the memories of that past and the losses experienced in processes of deindustrialization. Projects such as these produce a memory of social relationships and social values that might still carry meaning in the present and thus may become a resource for a different way of imagining the organization of social life in the future. Whereas the memorial discourses on industrial pasts are intimately connected to scenarios of the future in places such as the Ruhr, in postcommunist Eastern Europe we often find a lack of such future-orientation. Not only has the post-industrial transformation often been singularly unsuccessful, but the previous heroization of industry and industrial work on behalf of the discredited communist regime has done little to promote the cause of industrial heritage. Place making through industrial heritage is deeply problematical under those conditions. In the Jiu Valley in Romania, the heritage efforts from below aim to provide the Valley communities with a historical identity that could be a resource for them as they struggle to find a place in the post-mining society of the Valley. It is very much a regional identity that is furthered by those attempts, a regional identity suffused with images of class. But in comparison with some of the place-making attempts in Western societies, the Jiu Valley initiative lacks institutional and political support. In contrast to post-communist Eastern Europe, what Tong Lam in his chapter refers to as the contemporary heritage craze in communist China has been contributing in a major way to place making. It has been at the same

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time intensely local and deeply national. First and foremost, it has been contributing to national place making. Heritage is, above all, national heritage, and it is supposed to put the Chinese nation onto the global map and transform it into a global leader in heritage preservation. The Communist Party has been promoting nationalism in a variety of different fields, and heritage is a prominent one. Its more recent attention to ‘red heritage’ amounts to an attempt to inscribe the achievements of the Communist Party into national(ist) heritage. The Communist Party becomes, through ‘red heritage’, the most successful leader of the Chinese nation, and various localities within China are practically falling over each other in bidding for ‘red heritage’ in order to show that the party in their part of China was particularly successful in leading the nation. Hence there is a local inflection of this nationalist storyline, as specific towns are trying to inscribe themselves into heroic depictions of past achievements of the party state. There is also, as Lam underlines, considerable rivalry and competition of local places to establish their better credentials vis-à-vis the national centre in terms of ‘their’ specific socialist heritage. Zhao Xin and Qu Xiaofan, in their chapter, seem to confirm Lam’s argument, for they essentially plead to use industrial heritage for the purpose of place making in the North-East of China. Given the precarious economic situation of the region and the structural economic changes that it faces, they argue that the heritage could be a resource for anchoring the identity of the population in a proud industrial past and making them therefore better equipped for what awaits them in the future. Strengthening regional identity is undoubtedly an important part of their designs for developing the railway heritage of the region. Whilst labour and environmental issues as well as class narratives were surprisingly weak in memorial discourses surrounding industrial pasts, place making emerges as one of the strongest narrativizations of industrial heritage across all the case studies incorporated into this volume. Constructions of local, regional and national identity feature prominently in Western and post-communist narratives of the industrial past.

Industrial Heritage Studies and Memories of Deindustrialization: By Whom – For Whom – Why? The narrativizations of industrial pasts that emerge out of the preceding chapters and that we have compared in this conclusion point to an ongoing process of sense production of both industrialization and deindustrialization. Undoubtedly, different vernacular traditions have brought forth diverse historiographies and memory cultures of industrialization and deindustrialization, and I would argue that deindustrialization studies need to go beyond

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their traditional focus on individual case studies and move towards transregional comparison in order to understand better the respective individual case studies. Volumes such as the present one are meant to be one small step in the direction of such comparison, as they allow those scholars interested in processes of deindustrialization a glimpse into many different vernacular literatures that they will not necessarily all be familiar with. The strong local roots of deindustrialization studies have contributed to a remarkable multidisciplinarity in this field. Specialists in heritage preservation intermingle with literary scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, historians and a range of other disciplinary fields, as well as artists, writers and other members of the creative classes. It is important not to lose this multidisciplinarity in the move from local/regional to translocal/transregional studies of deindustrialization, as the multidisciplinarity is strongly related to the multifaceted nature of the field. Given the many different actors that are active in industrial heritage and deindustrialization studies, it is furthermore important to realize that not all of them are scholars with fulltime jobs in the universities. Many actors are activists, ranging from former workers to school teachers and interested citizens, who all bring additional expertise and knowledge. Their voice has been an important one in contextualizing local memories and experiences of deindustrialization. Any attempt to move deindustrialization studies towards trans-perspectives has to build on those insights too. I am proposing here to move to trans-perspectives of memories of deindustrialization, as it seems to me that only such perspectives will allow deindustrialization studies to move out of a certain provincialism that characterizes the field today. Deindustrialization affected, above all, local places, such as neighbourhoods and factory environments. Hence it is not only understandable but also vitally important that research starts with the local and the regional. However, if we do not look beyond the local and the regional, we are in danger of reproducing explanations and causal relationships that seem obvious when only looking at the local but are sometimes much less clear-cut when we compare and develop a translocal perspective. The transperspective is one that can be seen as a laboratory for testing hypotheses that have been developed for specific cases (by juxtaposing them with other cases). Laurajane Smith’s chapter in this volume, comparing developments in specific localities in the UK, the US and Australia, is giving a good example of the benefits of such comparative work.12 The institutional preconditions for such an internationalization of industrial heritage and deindustrialization studies are good. After all, both have developed associations with a truly global span. The International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) is so far mainly concerned with presenting case studies, but as a forum it could play a vital role in moving towards trans-

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perspectives.13 Both industrial heritage and deindustrialization also play a major role in the Association for Critical Heritage Studies, which is attempting to analyse meaning-making through the use of the past.14 Oral history has long been crucial for deindustralization studies, and the International Oral History Association has been promoting exchanges between scholars from different parts of the world.15 The Working Class Studies Association has also for a long time provided a forum for the exchange of scholarship on the experiences of the working classes around the globe.16 These are four prominent examples of institutions that would be in an excellent position to further trans-perspectives and move away from the dominance of single case studies. As ever, linguistic difficulties pose a serious problem for the development of trans-language comparisons. It is not by coincidence that many comparisons that already exist tend to move within language boundaries rather than between them. Hence we have research on the Anglo-world, on the Francophone world, the Ibero-American world etc. Only by insisting on the importance and value of learning languages can global systems of higher education counter the increasing monolingualism (or at best bilingualism: one’s own language and English) of scholars across the globe. A trans-perspective is important to better understand local case studies, but it is arguably also important to avoid conceptual constructions that on the face of things appear to be universal but have very different meanings and histories in different parts of the world. Concepts such as class and community are good examples of the malleability of concepts at different times and places. Furthermore a trans-perspective would help to open up a more kaleidoscopic understanding of deindustralization and industrial heritage. Especially Marxist-inspired scholars tend to view the field too much in binary terms, positing heritage as ‘the promotion of a consensus version of history by state-sanctioned cultural institutions and elites to regulate cultural and social tensions in the present’ versus heritage as ‘a resource that is used to challenge and redefine received values and identities by a range of subaltern groups’.17 Neither of those entities, I would argue, is at all homogeneous. As we have seen in the pages of this volume, states and powerful social and economic interests can at times support subaltern groups, whereas the latter are at times the first ones unwilling to use industrial heritage as a resource and instead are all too ready to forget about the past. The complexity of actors and of situations in which these actors have to take decisions seem in need of theorization that moves away from Marxist class interpretations and instead begins to ask under which precise economic, political and cultural conditions alliances come into place that can further specific industrial heritage discourses and forms of deindustrialization. The crucial questions to ask in a trans-perspective are, in my view: who is producing industrial heritage? For whom? And for what purpose? How is industrial heritage connected to

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forms of deindustrialization? The essentially contested nature of discourses on deindustrialization needs to be underlined. Its multivocality and multiperspectivity is visible in almost every scenario discussed in this volume. Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University, Bochum. He is also Executive Chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has published widely on the history of deindustrialization, industrial heritage, memory studies, the history of historiography, nationalism and labour movement history. His most recent publications are a special issue, co-edited with Steven High, on deindustrialization by the North American journal Labor 19(1) (2019) as well as a special issue on German labour history by the British journal German History 32(2) (2019).

Notes 1. Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England, 1st edn. 2. The archives of the Scottish Oral History Centre, of which McIvor is the director, are testimony to the desire of workers to remember their former places of work and the neighbourhoods these workplaces created. See https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/schoolofhum anities/history/scottishoralhistorycentre/ (accessed 31 July 2018). 3. https://www.strath.ac.uk/cdlr/services/glasgowdigitallibrary/ (accessed 31 July 2018). 4. James, The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales. 5. Smith, ‘Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States’, 63–83; and Hearn, ‘Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation’, 103–25. 6. Although the strength of the communist parties in those countries was decisive for their impact on narrativizations of industrial pasts, a comparison of cultural policies of the French and the Italian communist parties during the Cold War also highlights the many differences. See Guiat, The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture. 7. On the importance of memory cultures for social movements of the left in Southern Europe more generally see Della Porta et al. Legacies and Memories in Movements: Justice and Democracy in Southern Europe. 8. Eiringhaus, Industrie wird Natur: Postindustrielle Repräsentationen von Natur und Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet. 9. Schaal, Patterns of European Urbanisation since 1500, especially chapters 4–8. 10. Schmidt, Denkschrift betreffend Grundsätze zur Aufstellung eines General-Siedlungsplanes für den Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf (rechtsrheinisch). 11. The author is a member of the organizing committee of the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Regional verband Ruhr. 12. On comparison see Berger, ‘Comparative History’, 187–208. 13. See http://ticcih.org/ (accessed 12 April 2018); see also Douet, Industrial Heritage Re-Tooled: The TICCIH Guide to Industrial Heritage Conservation. 14. http://www.criticalheritagestudies.org/ (accessed 12 April 2018). 15. https://www.ioha.org/ (accessed 2 August 2018).

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16. https://wcstudiesassociation.wordpress.com/ (accessed 2 August 2018). 17. Smith, Uses of Heritage, 4.

Bibliography Berger, S. ‘Comparative History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner and K. Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice, 2nd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 187–208. Della Porta, D. et al. Legacies and Memories in Movements: Justice and Democracy in Southern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Douet, J. (ed.). Industrial Heritage Re-Tooled: The TICCIH Guide to Industrial Heritage Conservation. London: Routledge, 2013. Eiringhaus, P. Industrie wird Natur: Postindustrielle Repräsentationen von Natur und Umwelt im Ruhrgebiet. Essen: Stiftung Geschichte des Ruhrgebiets, 2018. Engels, F. Die Lage der arbeitenden Klassen in England. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845. Guiat, C. The French and Italian Communist Parties: Comrades and Culture. London: Frank Cass, 2003. Hearn, M. ‘Writing the Nation in Australia: Australian Historians and Narrative Myths of Nation’, in S. Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: A Global Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, 103–25. James, L.S. The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Schaal, H. (ed.), Patterns of European Urbanisation since 1500. London: Routledge, 2018. Schmidt, R. Denkschrift betreffend Grundsätze zur Aufstellung eines General-Siedlungsplanes für den Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf (rechtsrheinisch). Essen, 1912. Smith, A. ‘Seven Narratives in North American History: Thinking the Nation in Canada, Quebec and the United States’, in S. Berger (ed.), Writing the Nation: a Global Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 63–83. Smith, L. Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge, 2006.

Index

This Index was compiled by Alessandra Exter. A Aberfan, UK, 98 activism, 18, 21, 29, 50, 59, 60–61, 78, 188, 192, 230, 302 heritage activism (see under heritage) left-wing activism (see under left-wing) memory activism (see under memory) Africa, 121 North Africa, 194 South Africa, 109, 120 Algeria, 187 Alighieri, Dante, 33 America North America, 23, 109, 151, 169, 212, 304 America, the United States of (USA), 2, 28, 93, 95, 121, 133, 137–41, 176, 178, 236–37, 273–75, 278–79, 291, 295, 303 ‘American imperialism’ (see under imperialism) American rust belt (see under rust belt) American War of Independence, the (see under war) Amur River, China/Russia, 272–74 anarcho-syndicalism, 201 anarcho-syndicalist movement (see under movement) Anda, China, 281, 283, 285

Annand, David, 116–17 Anzin, France, 184 architecture, 4, 35, 37–39, 41, 47, 56, 63, 75, 100, 207, 236, 255, 259–60, 176, 278, 280, 283 industrial architecture (see under industry) Arges, County, Romania, 234 artwork, 112, 116, 122, 257 Asia, 33, 121, 252 North-East Asia, 272–73 Asturias, 6, 12–13, 19–20, 216–27, 292–93, 296, 299 Athens, Greece, 34 Auchel, France, 191 Australia, 5, 11, 15, 18, 109, 128–29, 131– 38, 146, 148, 155, 291, 296, 300, 302 Eureka Rebellion (1854), 138 South-East Australia, 146 Austria, 7, 170 Austro-Hungarian, 230–32 Ayrshire, UK, 51 B Baines, Edward, 33 Baltimore, UK, 79 Banat, Romania, 231 Barbour, Mary, 49, 60–61, 290 Barcelona, Spain, 79 Bassett, Francis, 116 Bates, George, 152

Index

Baw Baw, Australia, 146, 148–50 Beall, Tara S., 60 Beijing, China, 262 Belarus, 279 Belgium, 201, 278 Berdahl, Daphne, 229 Berlusconi, Silvio, 165 Bernardi, Ron, 156 Bessemer, Henry, 92–94 Béthune, France, 184 Bevin, Ernest, 119 Bevins, Richard, 82 Birmingham, UK, 73 Blaenavon, UK, 5, 81, 92–93, 100 Bluestone, Barry, 162–63 Boboc, Marian, 231 Bochum, Germany, 200, 204, 211 Boketu, China, 283, 285 Bolshevism, 61, 290 Bonnett, Alistair, 129 Boston, USA, 275 Bowen, Hugh, 70 Bras, ov, Romania, 230 Brazil, 97 Brecknockshire, UK, 75 Brepohl, Wilhelm, 201 Bridgeton, UK, 57 Brotherstone, Terry, 50, 61 Brumby, John, 154 Brymbo, UK, 94, 100–101 Bucharest, Romania, 236 Buckley, Allen, 108, 116 Burnham, Andy, 39 Burrows, J. C., 116 C Caffell, Colin, 120–21 Cameron, Jenny, 148 capitalism, 8, 61, 68, 114, 171, 222, 224, 251–52, 290, 295 anti-capitalism, 220 ‘Rhenish capitalism’, 202–3, 206, 211 Cardiff, UK, 4, 10, 70–73, 76–77, 79–83, 97–99 Carlyle, Thomas, 27, 41 Carmarthenshire, UK, 77 Caron, Jean-François, 193, 195 Carpathian Mountains, 228, 231, 234–35 Celticism, 108

307

Celts, 10–11, 74, 108–9, 112, 119, 122, 291. See also under movement Chadwick, Edwin, 32 Chelyabinsk, Russia, 273 Chemnitz, Germany, 3 Chester, UK, 70 Chicago, USA, 275 Chile, 109 Chili, China, 279 China, 8, 13–15, 20–21, 23, 251–65, 267, 270–85, 294–95, 97, 300–301 Boxer Rebellion, 275 China’s rust belt (see under rust belt) Chinese Communist Party, 8, 13–15, 20–21, 252, 255, 257–58, 262–63, 292, 294–95, 301 Chinese Eastern Railway (CER), 270–87 Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), 254, 263, 272 democratic uprising (1989), 262 North-East region of China, 8, 14–45, 20–21, 270, 272, 283, 294, 297, 301 Opening-Up Policy, 272 party-state, 13–14, 20–21, 252, 255– 58, 262, 264–65, 297, 301 Sino-Soviet Split, 252 communist/socialist revolution, 251–52, 255–56, 262 Southern China, 8, 271, 273, 294 Third Front, 8, 13, 20, 252–65 Tiananmen, 262 Chongqing, China, 253, 256, 259 Churchill, Australia, 146–47, 150, 154 class. See also working class class conflict, 36, 60, 206, 295 class consciousness, 49, 220 class identity (see under identity) class relationships, 49 language of class, 205, 290, 292, 295 middle class, 73, 96, 109, 128–29, 133, 135, 142, 176, 235, 251, 290 narrative of class (see under narrative) climate change, 149, 155, 157 closure factory closure, 149, 166 mill closure, 166, 161 mine closure, 5, 109, 112, 146, 189, 191, 202, 234, 299

308

Index

pit closure, 11, 188, 191, 294 plant closure, 160 shutdown, 161–63, 168–69, 172, 189, 194 Clough, Denis, 156 coal, 4–8, 69–71, 37, 81–83, 92, 99, 147– 48, 152, 184, 186, 188, 205–6, 209, 211, 218–21, 264, 298–99 brown coal mining, 146–50, 153, 155, 157, 296 coal crisis (1959), 199, 203, 209 coal fetishism, 232 coal identity (see under identity) coal industry (see under industry) coal mining, 4, 6, 49, 51, 60–61, 69– 71, 81, 91, 94–96, 100, 111, 132, 139, 146, 152, 155, 184, 189–90, 199–200, 228–37 coalfield, 10, 12–13, 69, 71–72, 79, 81, 92, 96, 223–24, 292, 295 decline of coal, 94, 184, 228, 230, 237 deep coal mining, 69, 200 post-coal crisis, 185 Coleman, Will, 118 Collins, Perry, 273 Cologne, Germany, 204 colonialism, 21, 272 colonization, 152, 170–71, 278, 280 Japanese colonization, 270 communism, 7–8, 12–15, 21, 50–51, 81, 184, 186–90, 201, 206, 244, 248, 252– 53, 262, 272, 292–97, 300 anti-communism, 15, 292, 295 (see also under narrative) communist movement (see under movement) communist party, 60, 62, 186, 292–93 (see also under China) communist union (see under union) post-communism, 7–9, 13, 15, 20, 22–23, 294–96, 300–301 (see also under narrative) community, 2, 11–12, 17–19, 39, 51, 53, 55–63, 69, 75–78, 81–85, 91–101, 109, 114, 120, 129–32, 141, 147, 150–54, 157, 162, 164, 177, 193, 201, 211, 218, 226, 243, 245, 247–48, 260, 276–80, 289, 292, 294, 296, 298, 300, 303

working-class community (see under working class) community heritage (see under heritage) conservatism, 10, 38, 51, 60, 111, 113, 128, 136–37, 151, 187–88, 206 Cornwall, UK, 5–6, 11, 18, 107–127, 290–91, 299. See also under identity; movement ‘Cornish Diaspora’, 109, 119, 122 Cornish Nationalist Party, 111 ‘Cornish Riviera’, 110, 291 Cornish Stannary Parliament, 111–12 Kernow Gorsedd, 110 Mebyon Kernow, 111–12 corporatism, 7, 11–12, 201–3, 206, 211, 295 Cowie, Jefferson, 162 Crawford, Helen, 60 culture counterculture, 59, 289 (see also under movement) cultural heritage (see under heritage) cultural institution, 3, 5, 16–17, 19–22, 47, 73, 211, 303 cultural landscape, 16, 40, 185 cultural narrative (see under narrative) European City of Culture/Capital of Culture, 54–55, 63, 204, 208 historical culture, 1, 9 memory culture (see under memory) popular culture, 16, 54, 61, 84, 193, 280 traditional culture (see under tradition) workers’ culture (see under worker) working-class culture (see under working class) Currie, Ken, 50, 55, 57 Czech Republic, 275, 278–79 D Dale, David, 58 Dallas, Romania, 233 Daqing, China, 285 Darras, Henri, 190 Deacon, Bernard, 111, 122 Delelis, André, 190 democracy, 6, 21–23, 132, 202, 225, 251, 262

Index

social democracy, 11, 15, 201, 203, 207, 262, 292 Denbighshire, UK, 70 Deng, Xiaoping, 254, 272 Denmark, 278 Depolo, Marco, 166 Destruys, Alexis, 191 development. See also under tourism industrial development (see under industry) redevelopment, 5, 10, 20, 36, 54, 57, 76–83, 92, 99–100, 108, 164, 193, 259, 266, 298 (infra)structural development, 79, 254, 265 technological development, 75, 200, 263, 289 urban development, 79, 147, 278 Devon, UK, 11, 107, 113 Dewar, Catherine, 39 Disraeli, Benjamin, 34 Dixebra (band), 218–19, 223 Donnelly, Michael, 48, 54–55 Dorondel, Stefan, 234 Dortmund, Germany, 298, 200, 202 Douai, France, 7, 191 Dowlais, UK, 91, 93 downsizing, 58, 161, 165, 170, 172 Dudley, Kathryne Marie, 162, 177 Duisburg, Germany, 200, 203 E East Moors, UK, 10, 94, 97–100 Eaton, Wilma, 55 Ebbw Vale, UK, 91, 93–95, 97, 100–101 economy economic boom, 3, 6, 97, 163 economic crisis, 5, 12, 189, 223, 244 economic decline, 71, 72, 207 economic recession, 97, 99, 194 global economy, 189, 255 national economy, 71 post-industrial economy, 12, 38 regional economy, 155–56 Edinburgh, UK, 56 Egypt, 33, 120 Elias, Norbert, 36, 195 employment, 7, 51, 53, 57, 71–72, 150, 156, 166, 168–71, 175, 208, 216, 234, 299

309

employee, 97, 101, 139, 147–48, 152, 156, 165, 171–72, 209, 218, 233 employer, 81, 97, 139, 147, 171, 174, 191, 193, 201–3, 206, 207, 245, 247, 292, 299 unemployment, 8, 55, 59, 97, 99, 139, 148, 155–56, 163, 170, 176, 185, 206, 209, 221–24, 233–34, 245, 247 energy, 6, 150, 152, 156, 188–89, 234, 236, 253 energy education, 18, 150, 152–53 energy production, 148 renewable energy, 149, 165 Engels, Friedrich, 28–32, 34–37, 289 environment, 6, 11, 28, 35, 39, 75, 92, 116, 152, 191, 193, 195, 217, 228–37, 289, 295–97, 301 deforestation, 234–36 environmental effects and damages, 151, 265, 295–967 environmental movement (see under movement) environmental narrative (see under narrative) environmentalism, 230 exploitation of the environment, 230, 234 industrial environment (see under industry) pollution, 98, 155, 194, 295 urban environment, 37 Escuela de Odio (band), 219–20 Essen, Germany, 200, 203–4, 209, 297–98 Estonia, 278 Ethiopia, 120 ethnicity, 11, 50, 62, 84–85, 111, 122, 128, 133–34, 150, 187, 199, 201, 204, 207, 210–12, 230–31, 258, 279, 289 narrative of ethnicity (see under narrative) Europe, 3–4, 9, 36, 50–51, 55, 69, 72, 74, 79, 97, 112, 148, 163–64, 176, 186, 194–95, 200, 230, 234, 237, 258, 265, 273–74, 277–78, 289 East-Central Europe, 229, 237, 248 Eastern Europe, 8–9, 13, 15, 20, 22–23, 200, 233, 292, 295, 300 European Capital of Culture/City of Culture (see under culture)

310

Index

European rust belt (see under rust belt) Northern Europe, 169–70 Western Europe, 11, 13, 19, 108, 163, 184, 292, 294, 296 European Commission (EC), 165, 234 European Union (EU), 7, 71, 79, 111–12, 234, 236 Exeter, UK, 111 F Falck Steelworks, 6, 160–83 Far East, 272–73, 278, 280 fascism, 164, 221, 293 anti-fascism, 292 feelings, 32, 78, 110, 130, 135, 137, 140, 168–89, 218–19, 221, 224, 235, 343. See also pride betrayal, 12–13, 188, 217, 221–22, 224, 262, 293 defeat, 217, 220–25 emotion, 2, 56–57, 129–30, 133, 137, 140, 142, 218, 233, 247, 289, 291 hope, 75, 139, 188, 220, 225, 293 hopelessness, 13, 192, 218–19 loss, 13, 48, 57, 60–61, 63–64, 99, 129, 136–41, 162, 168–69, 178, 217–22, 224, 229, 248, 291, 294, 300 nostalgia, 2, 13, 55, 58, 75, 111, 129, 136–37, 139, 194, 217–18, 228–29, 233, 235–37 shame, 6, 14, 271 shared feelings, 99, 217 feminism, 48, 54, 56, 60–61 Filanda (band), 219 Flintshire, UK, 70 folklore, 110 Forbidden City, the, China, 255 Foster, John, 50 Foucault, Paul-Michel, 75 France, 6, 7, 19, 37, 75, 140–41, 155, 170, 184–89, 201, 275, 278, 291–93, 298 French Resistance (1940–44), 188 Front National, the, 185, 195, 298 Nord basin, the, 184–86, 188, 191 Parti Communiste Français (PCF), 186 Francis, Dai, 72 Franco, Francisco, 223 Francoism, 225 Fraser, Nancy, 131

G Gallacher, William, 17, 49, 56, 60, 63 Geertz, Clifford, 29, 177 gender, 50–51, 128, 133, 136, 168, 199– 200, 204, 208, 211–12, 225, 289. See also under history; narrative Germany, 3, 6–7, 11–12, 19, 28, 58, 119, 140, 148, 150, 170, 187, 199–203, 206– 11, 245, 275, 278, 291, 293, 296–98 ‘economic miracle’, the, 202 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the, 291 Centre Party, the, 201, 207 East German, 229 German Revolution (1918/19), 206, 210–11 Green Party, the, 296 Imperial Germany, 206, 208, 210 Independent Socialists, the, 201 Prussia, 206 Social Democrats, the, 201, 203, 207, 292 Weimar Republic, the, 201–2, 206 West Germany, 201–2, 292 Gibraltar, UK, 31 Gibson, Chris, 148 Gilchrist-Thomas, Sidney, 93 ‘Gippsland’ region, Australia, 146, 148, 150, 154 Glasgow, UK, 3–4, 6, 9, 16–17, 47–67, 73, 289–91, 298 Global South, 251 globalization, 78, 122, 160, 175, 251 Gohelle, France, 192–93, 195 Goodall, Edward, 30 Gorj, Romania, 235 Gould, Peter, 28 government, 10, 30–31, 37, 81, 83, 223, 230, 259, 280–82 government-funded, 98–99, 154 government-owned, 147 local government, 1, 10, 50, 147–50, 153, 167, 171, 210, 236, 280 national government, 7, 16, 78, 97, 101, 110–12, 119, 132, 165, 203, 233, 253, 255, 263–65, 272–73, 275, 278, 296 regional government, 204 Graham, Winston, 117 Gray, Alistair, 55

Index

Great Depression, the, 170, 231–32 Great Wall, the, China, 255 Greece, 279, 141 Grisar, Erich, 201 Guizhou province, China, 252–54, 256, 259, 265 gwerin, 73–76, 78, 81, 84–85, 290 H Hadid, Zaha, 48 Hailar, China, 285 Hanse, the, 200 Harbin, China, 285, 271, 273–80 Harrison, Bennett, 162–63 Hauser, Heinrich, 201 health, 32, 51, 53–55, 100, 147, 153–54, 174, 189, 234 mental health, 169, 173 Heathcott, Joseph, 162 Heatly, Tim, 39 Hebblethwaite, Robert, 38, 40 Hebei province, China, 270, 274 Heilongjiang province, China, 270–71, 280, 285 Heimat, 200, 209 heritage ‘red heritage’, 14, 20, 301 community heritage, 49, 120 (critical) heritage studies, 1, 301, 303 cultural heritage, 242, 255, 264 English heritage, 37–38, 112 heritage activism, 20, 62, 156 heritage as process, 1, 4, 21, 39, 130–31 heritage building, 40, 59, 255 heritage consciousness, 111 heritage construction, 255–56 heritage discourse, 1, 16, 18, 21–22, 48, 54, 61, 149, 211, 289–90, 295– 97, 303 heritage industry (see under industry) heritage initiative, 7–9, 11–13, 15–17, 49, 60, 205, 248, 291–92, 294–97 heritage site, 2, 5, 9, 13, 18–19, 58, 61, 81, 100, 112–13, 118–19, 129–35, 142, 150, 255, 260, 271, 281–83, 285, 291–92, 296, 300 heritage tradition, 94 heritagization, 11, 16–17, 21, 252, 265, 294–95 industrial heritage, passim

311

industrial heritage movement (see under movement) maritime heritage, 80, 82 medieval heritage, 299 mining heritage, 12, 20, 107–27, 132, 147, 150, 185, 189, 191, 193, 292, 299 railway heritage, 14–15, 20–21, 271– 73, 280, 282–83, 301 regional heritage, 150, 152, 157, 204, 208, 228–29, 293, 298–301 UNESCO World Heritage Site (see under UNESCO) working-class heritage, 9–10, 55, 138, 140 Higgins, Adam, 39 Hinan Mountain, China, 285 Hirwaun, UK, 92 history collective history, 195 gender history, 204 global history, 71 industrial history, 10, 48, 69, 73, 77, 91–94, 99–100, 116, 118, 120, 135, 163, 185, 190–95, 203, 296 labour history/history of work, 47, 50, 56, 59–63, 92, 132, 142, 219 maritime history, 10, 70, 82–83 medieval history, 19, 200 national history, 70, 84, 135 oral history, 17, 19–20, 48–49, 55–56, 59–63, 161, 166, 172, 289, 294, 303 post-industrial history, 2 public history, 47, 54, 56, 60, 63, 78, 161 social history, 48, 54–55, 63, 74, 82, 206, 208, 242–44 women’s’ history, 60, 208 Holmes, Richard, 28 Hong Kong, 120 Hughes, Cledwyn, 98 Hulunbeir, China, 285 Human Resources (HR), 161, 165–66, 172–75 Hume, John, 58 Hunedoara, Romania, 235 Hungary, 8, 13, 242–46, 248, 294, 297 I Iceland, 120

312

Index

identity class identity, 96, 128–29, 141, 193 coal identity, 230, 234 collective identity, 131, 194 Cornish identity, 107, 109, 112–13, 115, 122 cultural identity, 78, 130, 225 identity construction, 199, 295 local identity, 77–78, 193, 242 loss of identity, 99, 248 mining identity, 228, 231 national identity, 72, 299, 301 nostalgic identity, 228–29, 235 political identity, 223 regional identity, 1, 19, 47, 56, 62–63, 107, 122, 199–201, 204, 211, 223, 230, 235–36, 272, 295, 298, 300–301 working-class identity (see under working class) imperialism, 8, 14–15, 21, 263, 272, 282–83, 295 ‘American imperialism’, 187 Japanese imperialism, 14, 272, 294 Russian imperialism, 14, 273, 280 Western imperialism, 272, 282 India, 91 Industrial Revolution, 3–4, 16, 28, 37, 40, 69–70, 83, 111, 113, 119, 295 industrialization, 8, 10, 14, 16–17, 20–22, 48–49, 58, 61, 63, 70, 73, 75, 80, 109, 122, 147, 184, 186, 189, 200, 206–7, 243–44, 251, 253, 264, 270–72, 276–80, 288–91, 295–301 deindustrialization, 1–26, 47–67, 76, 107–9, 128, 142, 148, 160–183, 199, 212, 217, 224–26, 229, 242– 43, 248, 251, 272, 288–89, 292–94, 297, 299–304 narratives of industrialization or deindustrialization (see narrative: narrative of modernization and growth) reindustrialization, 192 industry. See also under tradition automotive industry, 163 coal industry, 70, 80, 95, 228 cotton industry, 3 heavy industry, 7–8, 49, 71, 164, 169, 199, 211, 282

heritage industry, 19, 28, 47, 59, 110–11, 299 heroization of industry, 300 industrial architecture, 30 industrial centre, 95, 163, 142 industrial development, 4, 19, 85, 147, 200 industrial elites, 30 industrial environment, 80, 243 industrial history (see under history) industrial labour (see under labour) industrial landscape, 4, 19, 27, 71, 206, 259, 289, 294, 299 industrial legacy, 39, 154 industrial monument, 18, 290 industrial region, 9, 15, 19, 77, 148, 200, 204, 228, 231, 297 industrial society, 80, 91, 218, 242 industrialism, 75, 203, 206 iron and steel industry, 4, 41, 49, 69, 93–94, 96–98, 100, 163, 200, 216 mining industry (see under mining) post-industrial (see under economy) power industry, 1–4, 6, 9, 12, 15, 38, 51, 164, 178, 194, 204, 289–90, 294, 296, 300 shipbuilding, 4, 49, 51, 53, 56, 60, 111, 217 International Building Exhibition (IBA), 203 Ireland, the Republic of, 29, 36, 55, 109, 120, 140, 148 Isle of Man, UK, 109 Italy, 6, 19, 29, 37, 119–20, 148, 150, 160, 162–66, 169–70, 175–76, 207, 275, 278, 283, 292–93 J Jahoda, Marie, 170 James, Leighton, 290 Japan, 8, 14, 97, 173, 253, 270, 272, 275, 278, 279–80, 294. See also under imperialism Jenkins, Geraint, 69, 74, 77, 81 Jenner, Henry, 109–10 Jerusalem, Israel, 30 Jilin province, China, 270 Jiu River, Romania, 235

Index

Jiu Valley, Romania, 7, 13, 20, 228–41, 294, 296, 300 jobs job insecurity, 160–83 job loss, 11, 57, 99, 139, 148–49, 155, 157, 160, 168–70, 174, 189, 233 job security Jones, Barry, 99 Jones, Price, 85 K Kacieja, Illona, 57 Kapp putsch, the (1920), 201 Kashubia, Poland, 210 Kay-Shuttleworth, James Philips, 31 Kelman, James, 55 Kemp, David, 112 Kennett, Jeff , 156 Kenya, 120 Kerrier District, UK, 112 Kerrigan, Rose, 60 Khabarovsk, Russia, 273–75 King, Elspeth, 16, 48, 54–56, 63 Koolhaas, Rem, 41 Kucheida, Jean-Pierre, 190 L labour industrial labour, 81, 134, 216, 229, 288, 290 labour force, 92, 96–97, 109, 119 labour movement (see under movement) manual labour, 137, 188 narrative of labour (see under narrative) Lally, Pat, 48, 54 Lanarkshire, UK, 51 Lancashire, UK, 34 Latrobe City, Australia, 149–50 Latrobe River, Australia, 147 Latrobe Valley, Australia, 5–6, 11, 18, 146– 59, 291–92, 296, 300 Latvia, 278 Lazersfeld, Paul, 170 Le Pen, Marine, 191 Leach, James, 30, 33 Leeds, UK, 35, 69 left-wing/leftist. 10, 12, 15, 51, 225, 292– 93. See also under tradition

313

left-wing activism, 188 new left, the, 72, 81, 290 Lenin,Vladimir, 28, 61, 290 Lens, France, 184, 187, 190–92, 298 Liaoning province, China, 270 Liévin, France, 190, 192 Linkon, Sherry Lee, 2 Liskeard, UK, 114–15 Lithuania, 278 Liupanshui, China, 20–21, 252, 256, 258–64 Liverpool, UK, 40, 51, 70 London, UK, 30, 56, 70–71, 74, 110, 163, 277 Loos-en-Gohelle, France, 193, 195 Lorraine, France, 191 Love, Benjamin, 32, 34 Loveday,Vic, 129 Luton, UK, 96 M MacDougall, Ian, 56, 60 Maclean, Agnes, 60 Maclean, Iain, 50, 61 MacLean, John, 290 Madrid, Spain, 223 Mah, Alice, 169 Mallet, Serge, 188 Manchester, UK, 3–4, 6, 9, 16, 27–46, 51, 56, 70, 73, 289–91, 295–96, 298 ‘Manchester miracle’, 3, 9, 38 Manchouli, China, 271, 277, 283–85 Manchukuo, China, 14, 270, 272 ‘Manchuria’, China, 270–79, 285 manufacturing, 4, 27, 30–32, 34, 36, 40, 49, 75, 92–96, 99, 141, 156, 163, 175–76, 253–54, 279 Mao, Zedong, 8, 252–53, 257, 261, 267 marginalization, 2, 4, 47–48, 56, 63, 128– 29, 131, 134, 174, 234, 262 Marienthal, Austria, 170 marketing, 37, 110, 291 advertising, 41, 150, 260 branding, 2, 15–16, 150, 204, 258, 260, 289 marketing strategy, 204 rebranding, 4, 47–48, 54–56, 63, 79, 118 Marx, Karl, 28, 30, 35

314

Index

Marxism, 28, 50, 56, 61, 303 Masuria, Poland, 210 materialism, 232, 256 McLay, Francis, 55 media, 78, 81, 91, 116, 119, 155–56, 162, 168, 204, 216, 230, 255, 283 social media, 114 Melbourne, Australia, 148, 156 melting pot, 194, 292 memory collective memory, 21, 191, 248, 282 memorial landscape, 2, 5, 8, 10, 12, 200, 218, 288, 290 memory activism, 1 memory culture, 22, 199, 201, 203–5, 207, 209, 211, 293–94, 301 memory discourse, 3, 22, 211, 288– 89, 295, 297–98 memory narrative (see under narrative) national memory, 136, 138, 201, 298 regional memory, 199, 201, 207, 211 shared memory, 216, 281 trans-perspective of memory, 302–3 Merthyr Tydfil, UK, 92 Methodism, 115–16 Mexico, 109, 120 Mianduhe, China, 285 Middle Ages, the, 19, 51, 200 medieval heritage (see under heritage) migration ‘guest worker’, 210–11 labour migration, 210, 230 migrant worker, 140, 209, 260 Milan, Italy, 160–83 military, 61, 119, 231, 252–57, 259, 263, 273, 275–76, 278, 284 Miller, Hugh, 31 mining brown coal, coal and deep coal mining (see under coal) gold mining, 18, 149–50 miner’s union (see under union) mining industry, 7, 107, 109, 111, 113, 189, 203, 296, 300 myth of miners, 185 minority, 112, 210, 258, 299 modernization, 12, 14, 20–21, 59, 74, 93, 97, 110, 187, 190, 202, 244–45, 258, 263, 265, 271, 282

Moe, Australia, 146, 148, 154 Moldavia, 233, 236 Momârlani, 231, 233, 236 Mongolia, 270–71, 280, 284 Monmouthshire, UK, 94 monopoly, 69, 82, 277–78 Montana, Ros, ie, 236 monument, 5, 22, 33, 49, 58, 61, 77, 192, 201, 290. See also under industry Morgan, Prys, 72 Morgan, Rhodri, 81 Morocco, 187–88 Morton, Adam, 130 Morwell, Australia, 18, 146, 148–51, 154, 156, 300 Moscovici, Serge, 166, 170 Moscow, Russia, 28, 273 movement anarcho-syndicalist movement, 206 archaeology movement, 76 Celtic Revival movement, 108 communist movement, 206 Cornish nationalist movement, 108 countercultural movement, 299 eco-museum movement, 75 environmental movement, 202, 296 European national movement, 74 industrial heritage movement, 211 labour movement, 13, 70, 75, 137, 216, 219–22, 293, 299 nation-building movement, 73 political movement, 13, 50, 69 protest movement, 49, 55 social movement from below, 12, 16, 202–3, 299 student protest movement, 202 union movement, 12, 154, 202 urban (social) movement, 202–3 ‘Workers’ City’ movement, 49, 63 music, 16, 19, 30, 216–27, 293, 299 N Nalón,Valley of, Spain, 218, 224 Nance, Robert Morton, 109 narrative anti-communist narrative, 295 counter-narrative, 61–62 cultural narrative, 133 environmental narrative, 296–97

Index

general narrative, 258 heritage narrative, 11, 107, 119, 122, 211, 292, 297 historical narrative, 130, 194–95 homogenizing narrative, 292 managerial narrative, 172 media narrative, 155 memory narrative, 3, 8, 207, 288–89 mythic narrative, 74 narrative construction, 231, 280, 282, 288 narrative of class, 205, 207, 289, 291– 92, 294–95, 301 narrative of community, 18 narrative of ethnicity, 209 narrative of gender, 208 narrative of labour, 1, 50, 54, 257, 2 88 narrative of modernization and growth, 265 narrative of religion, 207, 210 narrativization, 23, 205, 211, 288–90, 294, 299, 301 national narrative, 83, 131, 133, 142, 252, 264, 290–91, 299 old narrative, 1293 oral narrative, 160 post-communist narrative, 178, 301 national socialism/Nazism, 164, 186 201– 2, 206, 210, 293 nationalization, 11, 14, 72, 97, 133, 186, 203, 244, 291, 299 nature, 29–30, 38, 119, 122, 177, 205–6, 228, 230–33, 237, 255, 258–59, 295, 296, 302. See also environment industrial nature, 231, 296–97 neoliberalism, 15–17, 56, 265. See also under politics Netherlands, the, 137, 148, 278 networks, 57, 69, 81, 150, 203, 210, 216, 231, 236, 243, 246 New York, USA, 28 Newchuang, China, 277 Newman, Katherine S., 176 Newport, UK, 70 Nikolayevsk, Russia, 273–74 Nixon, Richard, 254 Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 7, 12, 19, 187, 189, 296, 298

315

Houillères nationales du bassin Nord-pas-de-Calais (HBNPC), 186, 188–91, 193 North Korea, 252 North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, 204 nostalgia. See under feelings Nuberu (band), 225 O Oberhausen, Germany, 202–3 Occupational Psychology, 160, 164–65, 169, 175 Ohio, USA, 132, 138–39 Oignies, France, 192 Oltenia, Romania, 231 O’Neill, Mark, 48 Orwell, George, 186, 221 Owen, Robert, 58 Ózd, Hungary, 8, 13, 20, 242–50, 294, 297, 300 P Pacione, Mark, 53 Palus, Matthew, 1 Panzhihua, China, 20, 252, 256, 258–60, 263–64, 266–67 Paris, France, 163, 194, 298 Parry, Hubert, 30 Pasul Vulcan, Romania, 231, 237 Payton, Philip, 107–12, 116 Peate, Iorweth, 74–75, 77, 84 Pendeen, UK, 120–21 Percheron, Daniel, 192 Petros, ani, Romania, 231, 233, 236 Philadelphia, USA, 275 Piper, Lawrence, 109 Pittsburgh, USA, 137, 212 place making, 68–90, 288, 297–301 national place making, 81, 300–301 regional place making, 298–99 planning (city, region or urban), 203, 260–61, 297–99 Poland, 119–20, 148, 187, 194, 207, 210, 278–79 Poldark, Ross, 117–18 politics national politics, 72, 113, 298–99 neoliberal politics, 11, 48 political organization, 70

316

Index

radical politics, 47, 53–54 socialist politics, 49, 232 populism, 13, 185, 188, 251, 291 Port Talbot, UK, 4, 71, 91, 94–97 Portugal, 278 poverty, 2, 4, 53–54, 72, 111, 116, 206 impoverishment, 7, 51, 80, 218, 245 pride, 15–16, 63, 107, 129, 137, 140–42, 218–19, 283, 290–91 civic pride, 73, 119, 122 local pride, 9, 12, 264, 289 national pride, 265 sense of pride, 2, 34, 83, 136, 140–41 privatization, 11, 148–49, 151–52, 154–57, 230, 245, 247, 262–63, 267 proletariat, 7, 15, 49–50, 53, 62, 201, 205, 219–21, 289, 292–93, 299 Q Queen Victoria, 30 R race, 128–29, 201, 258, 289 Racing Club de Lens, France, 187, 191 racism, 21, 210 Rafeek, Neil, 62 Rânca, Romania, 235 Raphael, Lutz, 58 Rau, Johannes, 203 real estate, 164, 259–60, 279 ‘Red Clydeside’, 9, 47–67, 290 Redhead, Norman, 40 Redruth, UK, 112, 116–17 refugee, 75, 112, 220, 278 region mono-industrial region, 228 regional heritage (see under heritage) regional restructuring, 147, 155 (see also structural social change) regionalism, 297, 299 Rehe province, China, 270 religion, 47, 50, 54, 56, 62, 116, 187, 199– 200, 204, 207–8, 211–12, 230, 279–80, 289. See also under narrative Catholicism, 139, 165, 172, 187, 201, 207–8 Hinduism, 207 Islam, 207 Judaism, 279–80

Protestantism, 207–8 Russian Orthodox Christianity, 279 Renaissance, the, 37 Rhenish-Westphalian coal region, 200 Rhondda Valley, UK, 5 right-wing, 185, 194, 201, 219, 291 River Irwell, 30–31 Roberts, Elizabeth, 56 Roebuck, John Arthur, 27, 29 Rogerson, John, 33 Romania, 7, 13, 20, 228–29, 231–37, 294, 296, 300 Romania Workers’ Party (PMR), 232 Rowntree, Joseph, 72 Ruhr Valley/Ruhr region/the Ruhr, 7, 9, 11–12, 15, 19, 21, 48, 57–58, 163, 199–215, 291–92, 296–300, 304 occupation of the Ruhr, 201 Red Ruhr army, 201 Regionalverband Ruhr, the, 204, 298 Ruhrkampf, the, 201 Rushton, Adam, 33 Russia, 8, 14, 61, 168, 232, 270, 272–85, 294 Russian Revolution (1917), 61 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 28, 50, 232, 252–534, 272, 284 rust belt China’s rust belt, 251–52 American rust belt, 295 European rust belt, 162, 164 S Sakhalin island, Russia, 270 Salvamont Mountain, Romania, 230 San Francisco, USA, 275 Sanchakou, China, 274 Santiago, Anabel, 218 Sarchielli, Guido, 166 Saudi Arabia, 120 Sayer, Andrew, 131 Schlanstein, Beate, 204 Schmidt, Robert, 297 Scotland, 4, 10–11, 47–63, 68, 73, 93, 120, 290 Scottish Referendum (2014), 51 service sector, 51, 108, 111

Index

Sesto San Giovanni, Italy, 6, 12, 19, 160– 83, 293, 296, 300 Shackel, Paul A., 1, 58 Shandong, China, 274, 279 Shanghai, China, 255, 277 shareholder, 155, 175 Shotton, UK, 93–95, 97, 99–100 Siberia, Russia, 273, 277 Sichuan province, China, 252–54, 258, 263–65 Siemens, Charles, 93–94 Silesia, Poland, 210 slavery, 33, 56, 131, 134, 142, 224 Slovakia, 139, 244 Smith, Dai, 71–72 social partnership, 202, 206, 292 social question, 201 socialism, 9, 12, 48–51, 54, 56, 61, 186–87, 190, 193, 201–10, 218, 221, 229, 232– 37, 244, 251–52, 255–56, 260–65, 293, 301. See also under politics postsocialism, 233–35, 237, 251, 254–56, 262–65 solidarity, 68, 139, 141, 187, 220, 229, 246–47 international solidarity, 225 solidarity of class, 289 South Korea, 97 Southey, Robert, 33 Spain, 33, 109, 225, 278, 292–93 Podemos, 293 Spanish Civil War, the (see under war) Spalding, Julian, 48, 54 sport, 115–16, 153, 187 football, 116, 187, 191, 229, 298 Spring, Ian, 54–55 Springburn, UK, 17, 55–57, 59–60 Srjetensk, Russia, 273 St Barbara, 232 St Just, 120–21 St Petersburg, Russia, 277 St Piran, 114–15, 118, 122 stakeholder, 9, 71, 175, 185, 188, 191–92 stigma, 185, 189, 270, 280 Stil, André, 184, 187 strike, 4, 49–50, 56, 60–61, 186–87, 219– 21, 223, 233, 290 structural (social) change, 200, 203–6, 290. See also region: regional restructuring

317

structural transformation, 1, 146, 209, 292, 298 Sudan, 120 Summers, John, 95 Sungari River, China, 275 sustainability, 39, 41, 193, 260 Sverke, Magnus, 170 Swansea Valley, UK, 70, 93, 98, 295 Sweden, 170, 278 symbol, 34–35, 40, 50, 68, 73, 85, 114, 155, 178, 217, 223, 257, 270–71, 280, 298 mining symbol, 184, 187, 192, 291 symbol of oppression, 40, 100 T Tampere, Finland, 3 Tawe Valley, UK, UK, 69 Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 51, 54, 59 Thatcherism, 50 Thomas, Charles, 27, 111 Thomas, Richard, 93, 95 Thompson, Paul, 56 Thorez, Maurice, 186 Touraine, Alain, 188 tourism, 7, 18, 21, 34, 77, 82, 108, 111–12, 119, 122, 133–34, 149–51, 155, 185, 192–93, 204, 235–36, 259–60, 281, 283 agro-tourism, 236 eco-tourism, 236–37 mass tourism, 11, 110, 122 ‘red tourism’, 256 tourist attraction, 12, 54, 118, 211, 291 touristic development, 20–21, 109– 10, 282 touristification, 2, 5, 204 tradition, 16, 22, 49, 54, 63, 70–72, 75, 96, 116, 120–21, 150, 156, 211, 231, 242, 246–47, 290–93, 298, 301–2. See also under heritage communist tradition, 15, 51 cultural tradition, 71, 108, 113 leftist tradition, 13, 225, 293 paternalistic tradition, 171 traditional industries, 111, 272 working-class tradition, 20, 190, 246, 299 Trans-Siberian Railway, 270, 273, 275, 277 Transylvania, Romania, 231

318

Index

Traralgon, Australia, 146, 148, 150, 154 trauma, 57, 128, 148, 157, 166, 168, 216– 17, 222–24 social trauma, 217 Trump, Donald, 291 Tullamarine, Australia, 156 Turkey, 209–10 Tawney, Richard Henry, 28 U Ukraine, 148, 150, 276, 279 UNESCO, 13, 113, 255, 257, 264–65 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 255, 257 UNESCO World Heritage Site, 14, 19, 58, 185, 192–93, 255 union, 71–72, 111, 137–39, 152, 164, 167– 68, 171–72, 187, 201–203, 218, 222, 224, 229, 232–33, 236, 293, 295–96, 299 communist union, 292 miner’s union, 192–93, 234 trade union, 1, 11, 49, 60, 70, 96, 154, 161, 165, 191, 199, 203, 206, 211 union delegate, 165 union movement (see under movement) United Kingdom, the (UK), 9, 14, 15–16, 50–55, 58, 71, 73–74, 78–79, 81, 97–98, 101, 148, 151, 291, 302 Brexit, 112 Britain, 4–6, 10–11, 17, 28, 30–31, 34–38, 41, 57, 59, 69, 73–78, 91–101, 107–13, 117–19, 128, 133, 135, 186, 273, 275, 278–79, 291, 295 (see also Industrial Revolution) Conservative Party, the, 10, 113 Edwardian era, 5, 73, 92 England, 3–4, 11, 16, 27–28, 30, 32, 35, 37–40, 54–56, 68, 70, 73, 75, 84, 93, 108, 110–15, 122, 129–40, 170, 186, 202, 205, 273, 289, 303 Scotland (see Scotland) Wales (see Wales) United Nations, the (UN), 254 urbanity, 28, 33, 37, 47, 72–73, 76, 78, 81–82, 108, 210, 223, 230–31, 232, 251, 259–62, 288, 297 urban centre, 5, 99, 253–54

urban decay and decline, 3, 169 urban development (see under development) urban growth, 148 urban landscape, 27, 34 urban planning (see planning) urban regeneration, 15, 29 urban (social) movement (see under movement) urbanization, 14, 21, 251, 254, 271– 72, 275–77, 279–80, 297 Ure, Andrew, 33 Ussuri River, China/Russia, 272 V Vâlcea, Romania, 235 Valenciennes, France, 184 values, 2–4, 13–14, 18, 38–39, 47, 57, 69, 86, 100, 111, 122, 128–40, 177, 187, 190, 192, 194, 218–19, 222–25, 243, 246, 252, 255, 257, 262, 264, 272, 294, 300, 303 Vandalism, 37, 112 Victoria, Australia, 5–6, 18, 146–47, 148, 150–51, 154–57, 296, 300 Vienna, Austria, 170 Vines, Jack, 252 Vladivostok, Russia, 273–75 volunteering, 17–18, 62, 92, 119, 132, 147, 153, 157 W wage, 50, 59, 149, 164, 167–68, 187, 208–9, 222 Wales, 4–6, 10–11, 17–18, 68–106, 109, 112, 290, 295, 299 North Wales, 5, 99–100 Plaid Cymru, 10, 71 South Wales, 10, 17, 80–81, 91–96, 98, 290, 295 ‘Walhalla’, Australia, 18, 149–50 Walker, David, 59 Wang, Hui, 262 war, 194, 279 American War of Independence, the, 118 Cold War, the, 186–87, 252, 256, 264–65, 292–93 Crimean War, the, 273

Index

Korean War, the, 252 Napoleonic Wars, the, 109 post-war, 76, 91, 95–97, 101, 110, 120, 148, 201, 203, 206–8 Second Opium War, the, 272 Sino-Japanese War, the, 253 Spanish Civil War, the, 60 World War I, 3, 5, 49–50, 74, 110, 119, 200–201, 231, 244 World War II, 5, 37, 50, 73–74, 92, 94, 97, 108, 110, 119–20, 186, 206, 230–32, 244, 247, 252 wasteland, 6, 164 Watt, James, 61 Wellington Shires, Australia, 148 West, the, 2, 5–6, 15, 23, 148, 202, 251, 271–72, 276, 279, 282, 295, 300–301 Wetherell, Margaret, 130 White, John Campbell, 1st Baron Overtoun, 61 White, Rodney, 28 Williams, Chris, 72, 91 Williams, Gwyn-Alf, 70, 72–73 Williams, Raymond, 71–72 Wischnewetzky, Florence Kelley, 28 Witte, Serge, 273 worker. See also working class ‘guest worker’ (see under migration) blue-collar worker, 48, 161, 188, 219 electricity worker, 153 factory worker, 243, 247 high-skilled worker, 167, 246 industrial worker, 12, 51, 78, 155, 203, 291, 293–94 low-skilled worker, 167, 209, 245 migrant worker (see under migration) mineworker, 70, 119, 201, 290 (see also mining) steelworker, 13, 17, 92, 94, 96–97, 101, 165, 191, 205, 208–9, 222, 244, 248, 290, 293–94, 297 white-collar worker, 161 worker identity, 96–97, 101, 297

319

workers’ culture, 79, 205 workers’ life, 9, 208, 242–50, 294 workers’ representative, 31, 202, 209 workers’ right, 139, 252 workers’ union (see union) working women, 209 working class, 12, 17, 31–32, 47–67, 75, 134, 137, 186, 191, 202, 205, 209, 218– 19, 221, 289–90, 294, 298–99 white working class, 129 working-class community, 2, 15, 51, 59–60, 62, 137, 289 working-class culture, 47–48, 54, 56, 62–63, 84, 185, 190, 204 working-class district, 37 working-class heritage (see under heritage) working-class identity, 96, 129 187 working-class life, 48–49, 58, 206, 290 working-class neighbourhood, 15, 56, 59, 295 working-class struggle, 16, 184, 216– 21, 293 working-class tradition (see under tradition) X xenophobia, 225, 251 Xi, Jiping, 262 Xiao Suifenhe, China, 274 Y Yakeshi, China, 281, 283–85 Youngstown, USA, 132, 138, 140 Yugoslavia, 229, 279 Z Zeisel, Hans, 170 Zhalantun, China, 284–85 Zhao Dong, China, 285 Zola, Emile, 184 Zöpel, Christopher, 203