Early Structural Steel in London Buildings — A Discreet Revolution. By Jonathan Clarke. Pp. xiv & 393, profusely illustrated. Swindon: English Heritage. 2014. £75 (HB) ISBN: 9781848021037
The term ‘discreet revolution’ may seem oxymoronic, suggesting that the adoption of structural steel in London buildings was more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary affair. In some respects this was true. For example, the properties of steel that make it suitable for use structurally — strength, ductility and toughness — are shared with (if usually superior to) those of wrought iron, which steel displaced from use in beams, girders and trusses. And steel elements, being rolled from billets into I-section beams and columns, channels, angles and the like, lacked the facility for expressive ornamentation that was often applied to columns and other structural members made in cast iron, a material — as its name implies — poured into moulds while molten, and therefore able to take up the shape of the mould as it cooled and hardened. So structural steel in buildings was commonly concealed behind wall and ceiling finishes, unlike (for instance) cast iron columns which could be produced to any desired Classical order such as Doric or Corinthian.
On the other hand, there are revolutionary aspects in the adoption of steel, not least in its being a constructional material that was produced in industrial quantities, with reliably consistent properties, at a reasonable price. Cast iron, the first ferrous metal used in structures from the late eighteenth century, was strong in compression but had a relatively low strength in tension (which occurs in beams and other elements subject to bending); not only that, its failure in tension was brittle and abrupt, like glass, giving no warning of imminent fracture. Wrought iron was made of necessity in small batches with intensive manual labour. This ‘craft’-based production meant that each batch could have different mechanical properties and larger structural sections had to be made up by forge-welding the hot metal.
Superiority in material properties might seem in itself to be a sufficient explanation for the adoption of steel but other factors have to be recognised too. In this substantial, well written and generously illustrated book, Jonathan Clarke addresses these factors in the first eight chapters, before looking in five long chapters at the various types of London building that took advantage of the material. In doing this he follows his own wise view that ‘constructional history should not be separated from functional understanding, let alone architectural or social history’ (p. xiii).
Cast iron was widely replaced by wrought iron for beams, roof trusses and the like from the late 1840s, while with its good compressive strength it remained a practical choice for columns and stanchions until both forms of iron were supplanted by steel, a process beginning in the late 1880s and complete by the start of World War I. Given that Henry Bessemer had apparently succeeded in making steel in quantity in the mid-1850s, using his ‘converter’ in which air was blown through molten pig iron to remove most of its carbon content, this time-lag of some three decades might seem extraordinary. But there were technical difficulties in producing reliable steel from the commoner iron ores by the Bessemer process, which was also quite rapid. The development of the slower, more controllable, Siemens-Martin ‘open-hearth’ furnace, and the later introduction of furnace linings that permitted use of the commoner ores, finally ushered in the large-scale, reliable and economical production of steel from the 1880s. Such steel as had been successfully made in Britain before then was demanded by railway engineers as its superior toughness to wrought iron made it a natural choice for rails, subject to repeated pounding from heavy steam locomotives. Its strength greater than that of wrought iron also attracted naval architects who used less of it to produce a hull of the same strength as one of wrought iron, thereby increasing the cargo-carrying capacity and so making the ship more profitable.
Building regulations were not conducive to the ready adoption of structural iron or steel, either. The London Building Act of 1844 had called for ‘fireproof’ construction in theatres and other public buildings with a high risk of life-threatening fire and ‘fireproof’ was taken to mean iron or steel in combination with fired-clay floor units and casings to columns. No guidance was officially available to the designer of iron or steel structures until the so-called ‘Steel Frame’ Act of 1909 which defined loading requirements and allowable stresses in cast and wrought iron and steel. Before then, building work for which no prescriptive guidance was available had to be ‘to the satisfaction of the District Surveyor’, subject to individual whim.
Philosophical if not moral opposition to iron and steel in buildings came from some influential architects and critics, notably A.W. Pugin and John Ruskin. Others however followed the more pragmatic approach espoused by Viollet-le-Duc. A vitriolic editorial in The Builder in 1898 condemned what today would probably be called the ‘structural dishonesty’ of Tower Bridge, then being clad with Gothick stonework over its functional steel frame, the writer preferring ‘the naked exhibition of the steel structure’ and condemning the stonework as ‘this foolish piece of elaborately-constructed scenery’. (And, just three decades later, public opinion similarly led to the omission of the intended stone cladding of the George Washington Bridge in New York, establishing the precedent for the ‘naked exhibition’ of subsequent suspension bridge towers in either steel or reinforced concrete.)
Engineering knowledge was needed to design and supervise constructional steelwork as had been the earlier use of cast and wrought iron. While a civil engineer could oversee the design of major structures, particularly on the railways, it was commonly the ironfounder or fabricator who prepared the detailed designs. For buildings it was quite common for an architect to prepare a design indicating the position of required beams and columns and then to pass the drawings to the contractor who would employ a steelwork supplier to carry out its detailed design. The supplier might well then source his steel — based on lowest price — from Belgium, Germany, France or Luxembourg where enterprising companies were making steel and delivering it to London more cheaply than builders could get British steel from north-east England. There was much debate, not entirely jingoistic, about the quality of Continental steel: many engineers would specify only ‘English’ or ‘British’ steel for their projects. The need for impartial engineering skill encouraged professional structural engineering to emerge as a distinct discipline, working (usually) with the architect to prepare the client’s design to be built by a contractor.
In the early days of steel construction in London, however, engineering input largely came from the commercial contractor, often originating from overseas, especially the USA. This ‘inward technology transfer’ shows that Britain had been slow to respond to the changing face of construction. A particularly illuminating ‘cosmopolitan’ example is the steel-framed Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, completed in 1904. The Anglo-French architects Mewès and Davis designed a building in what Clarke describes as ‘Parisian chic’ style; the frame of German steel was designed by the Swede Sven Bylander, the Chief Engineer to the Anglo-American construction firm Waring White (Bylander having already designed some tall building frames in steel in the USA); the cladding was of granite from Norway.
The last chapter in the overview section of the book traces the evolution of the fully metal-framed building back to pioneering British landmarks such as the world’s first multi-storey cast-iron-framed flax mill of 1796–7 at Ditherington near Shrewsbury, the Fire Station in Portsmouth Dockyard (1843) and Sheerness Boat Store (1858–60), which can claim respectively to be the very first, and the first substantial, iron-framed buildings that derive their stability from rigid connections between the beams and columns rather than from masonry walls or from diagonal bracing. Steel exemplars include numerous buildings of the 1890s in Manchester and the huge Market Street Storehouse of 1902–4 at the Guinness brewery in Dublin. That the USA had by then moved well ahead of Britain in steel construction is acknowledged.
The first chapter on building types deals with theatres and music-halls, where two key issues were safety — especially against fire — and the provision of uninterrupted clear sight-lines for the audience. For both, ‘fireproof’ steel offered a solution (although it was known that exposed steel lost strength when heated and therefore needed to be protected against fire by encasing it in masonry or plaster). Good sight-lines free of intrusive columns called for deep girders concealed under raking balconies and spanning clear between side-walls, carrying secondary girders supported on the back wall and on the transverse main girders and cantilevering beyond these. Some of these surviving balconies, as seen in the excellent photographs in this chapter, are of breathtaking grandeur.
The chapter on clubs and hotels (in Edwardian days the two building types were almost synonymous, serving the generally well-heeled) demonstrates how steelwork with long spans and tall columns could readily create spacious and luxuriously-furnished public rooms, with the smaller rooms and their enclosing walls on upper floors being supported on long-span girders spanning over these larger rooms. Here the steelwork was invariably ‘discreet’, being concealed (and fire-protected) behind rich wall and ceiling finishes. Photographs of the remarkably short-lived Hotel Cecil in Savoy Place off the Strand (1895–1930) very helpfully show huge cast iron columns — concealed within exotic wrappings and then exposed during demolition (pp. 165–7).
Banks and offices are further building types where steelwork enabled large spans, both efficient in use and impressive to visitors. Tall steel-framed buildings as were going up in the USA were however restricted by London Building Acts late in the nineteenth century that basically limited building height (other than churches and chimneys) to 90 feet (27 m) in 1890, reduced to 80 feet (24 m) in 1894. This was not least a reaction, as Clarke explains, to the construction of Queen Anne’s Mansions in Westminster in the 1870s and 1880s, bleak apartment blocks up to 13 storeys in height and fairly widely abhorred for their impact on surrounding properties and streets. Not until after the Second World War and the relaxation of height controls did the really tall building make its appearance across London, with results each of us can judge for ourselves.
Steel made its mark on disparate building types such as department stores which needed large display areas and imposing shop windows with widely-spaced columns and houses and apartment blocks which used steel columns in place of loadbearing masonry walls to open up interior spaces. Churches and swimming pools employed steel roof trusses to span their necessarily large and wide open interiors. Fire stations needed large-span ground floors to house appliances, with upper floors carried on deep girders. The arrival of deep-level Tube railways around 1900 offered scope for erecting what we now call ‘air rights’ buildings over their stations, particularly in central areas with high property values. These could be supported on substantial steel girders over the street-level booking hall.
The chapter on industrial buildings includes warehouses, factories, dockside sheds, workshops, garages and power stations. Clarke notes that the casualty rate among these has been very high, as their original uses come to an end and now-redundant buildings are either demolished, if unsuitable for re-use, or converted to more lucrative new roles — frequently up-market apartments.
The final chapter concludes that the adoption in London of steel construction was indeed a revolution and, however ‘discreet’, a successful one at that. The British construction industry was slower than in other countries (especially the USA) to exploit the introduction of steel, but in due course employed it with vigour on both established and novel forms of building type. Proof of this is that British steelwork specialists such as Dorman Long captured markets around the world — structures such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge attest to worldwide business success. In London itself there are many surviving theatres, especially, as well as other buildings where structural steel from a century and more ago still serves its purpose.
Notes to the text occupy no fewer than 26 pages, while a bibliography of 12 pages is proof of extensive research by the author and also offers many interesting leads for the reader to pursue.
The book is printed (in the UK) on art paper, fitting for the numerous crisply-rendered photographs and drawings that complement the text — many in colour. The quality of production is excellent throughout. Not cheap, admittedly, but this book — the fruit of many years’ study by the author while with the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and subsequently English Heritage — deals thoroughly and very readably with a subject that has not hitherto received the attention it deserves.
MICHAEL BUSSELL
Girls Coming To Tech! — A History of American Engineering Education for Women. By Amy Sue Bix. Pp. 360, monochrome illustrations, mostly line drawings — cartoons, advertisements etc. interspersed within the text. Cambridge, Massachusetts USA: MIT Press 2013. £23.95. (HB) ISBN 978-0-262-01954-5
This is a welcome addition to the literature on the education and training of girls and women in engineering. The author is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Iowa State University. The focus of her research is on the experience of girls and women entering the engineering professions in the USA.
Bix begins in the late 1800s, before formal education in engineering for women, and ends with their still underrepresentation in the profession today. Although it is about the USA the research has great relevance to women in engineering in Britain.
In the late 1880s, when the great infrastructure buildings were underway, the opportunities for engineers and architects were enormous. Writing about women in the history of engineering and technology often overlooks the fact that they were the wives and daughters of these engineers and architects and no doubt influenced by them. There is evidence of many women who had relevant skills and capability to take over a business for the family survival when husbands or fathers were taken ill or died. Emily Roebling’s work on the Brooklyn Bridge, after her husband was injured, is one such example. Some were entrepreneurial in their own right. They might have been skilled in botanical and landscape drawing, which was useful to the engineer. Edith Griswold took a course in civil and mechanical engineering in New York, around 1886, in order to set up her own draughting business specialising in drawing the diagrams for patent applications.
From Bix’s historical background it appears that there were tiny pockets, near universities, where a few young women might, if they were lucky, find a welcoming lecturer or through their own determination navigate ways past assumptions and obstacles to train as engineers.
The main focus of the book is the period following the US involvement in World War II and the aftermath. As in Britain there was a sudden need for engineers to work in the munitions factories. Quickly, a demarcation is made between the Rosie the Riveter image of the female mechanic, her sleeves rolled up with a spanner in her hand, and the qualified engineer. One was the woman mechanic on the production line in the munitions factory and the other a female graduate engineer in the research lab devising the machinery to win the war. Bix looks at the different graduate schools and the numerous ‘fast track’ courses, specifically for women, that appeared to get them into these industries as quickly as possible.
In 1929, Iowa State College ran the first degree programme specialising in the design of household equipment. This was aimed specifically at women on the basis that they would only be interested in working in ‘traditional female’ areas. This was, and is, not an uncommon, but erroneous, assumption. These ‘traditional’ areas concentrate on domesticity — on how to run a home, sewing and clothing — regardless of the fact that women do think beyond these realms. To accommodate this the course at Iowa focussed on basic physics, household electrics, heating systems and technical drawing. Once the US entered the war this course was converted into a specialist one to retrain women, quickly, in wartime technologies.
The Iowa course and other fast track courses at various universities gave many women the opportunity to be qualified engineers. They became specialists in: aeronautical engineering and design; chemical engineering; electrical engineering and in computing. Some worked in research including on the Manhattan Project. Hollywood too became involved and portrayed these women as feminine yet doing ‘men’s work all wrapped in with doses of national pride and patriotism’. Some universities, in order to promote the need for more women and their abilities in engineering, created role models. Josephine Webb, a Purdue graduate in electrical engineering, was profiled in magazines as an important wartime engineer developing radio valves for Westinghouse. To retain ‘Hollywood’ interest she was portrayed not only as an engineer but also a glamorous and feminine woman.
Some universities, like Purdue, had led the way in educating women engineers. As early as 1897 a woman gained a degree in civil engineering from Purdue. But no matter how enterprising the administrations were in these universities, women’s presence was still low despite the extra courses to train them for the war effort. In 1942 there were ten women studying engineering at degree level at Purdue, this tripled in two years. As numbers were small, women stuck together, creating a solidarity in numbers. It was assumed then that the profession was open to women on an equal footing to men. As the war came to an end there was talk that women were a distraction in the workplace and taking the jobs away from the returning veterans, even though the ratio was still small. In 1945 there were 1,801 women and 48,977 men studying engineering in all the American universities. Even so, some universities, like Cornell, barred women enrolling on engineering courses in the immediate post-war years.
Bix details these years for women graduate engineers and those wishing to embark on undergraduate courses. There were articles and cartoons reversing the previous portrayal of the much needed woman engineer. They now suggested that ‘feminine’ voices must not be heard in the classrooms and made assumptions that women’s femininity would be compromised. Many of the women galvanised themselves into their own professional bodies in the different engineering fields to try to combat some of this adverse criticism. Support networks across the generations emerged and enabled the younger engineers to learn from older colleagues how to deal with gender bias.
In the 1970s university environments were becoming more welcoming to women, possibly influenced by the feminist movements. Some institutions, notably MIT, Caltech and Georgia Tech, which are used as case studies here, offered a more enlightened and supportive environment for them. By 2000 it seems there was, in the US, a new industry dedicated to supporting the woman engineer. This included professional development workshops and training, funding opportunities and programmes on diversity awareness. The national engineering bodies, professional organisations and various academies also had to become more enlightened. Even so, Bix emphasises, that despite all the changes in academic institutions, new legislation and increased awareness by professional bodies of women’s abilities to be engineers, they are still under represented. Currently, less than 25% of undergraduate degrees in engineering, in the US, are awarded to women.
This is a well-researched book, packed with information as well as factual and anecdotal evidence. Whilst the research is specific to the engineering profession, its findings, historically and in the present, do have parallels with the underrepresentation of women in many of the sciences, in architecture and industrial design. The ramifications of this research need to be respected, not only in the USA but in Britain too.
DEBORAH JAFFE
The French Army’s Tank Force and Armoured Warfare in the Great War. By Tim Gale. Pp. xvi & 263, 10 monochrome illustrations and 4 maps. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2013. £70. (HB) ISBN 9781409466611. Also available as an ebook — in two versions.
This excellent volume in the ‘Ashgate Studies in First World War History’ series examines the introduction of new technology in war. While the development of the British tank force in the Great War is among the best-known stories of brilliant innovators using technology to solve tactical problems, the contemporaneous French programme has left little mark in Anglophone literature and, it would appear, not much more in French. The inspiration for the tank was shared: trench warfare with barbed wire and machine guns made offensive operations almost impossible. Both British and French designers identified the track-laying vehicle as the best system for crossing shell-torn battlefields, and armour plate as the key to survival. They developed tanks entirely independently.
The French tank force was largely created by General Jean-Baptiste Estienne, an outstanding artillery officer. While the French christened their tanks Artlillerie Spéciale control of the force remained mired in organisational politics. Two designs were produced: Schneider and St. Chamond both mounted armoured bodies equipped with a 75 mm cannon and machine guns on track laying chassis. The Schneider was dangerous, complete with a forward mounted petrol tank! Once modified it became an effective weapon, but the St. Chamond, which used a complex electric drive system, lacked mobility and reliability. The French had a major problem building tanks, their industrial capabilities were already stretched by modern war and they had lost key industrial areas to the Germans.
They lacked the steel to make tanks, without British supplies. Political infighting and bureaucratic French management delayed production, while factories were rewarded for delivering tanks, even if they did not work. This lead to long delays getting the vehicles into combat; spare parts were always short. Once committed to battle the tank force faced a step learning curve, discovering they could break into German defences, but lacked the speed, reliability and infantry support to break through to open country. The development of tank doctrine, a major theme of this book, emphasises how the French developed effective methods to combine tanks, artillery, infantry and aircraft to maximise their impact of armour. With good written doctrine and effective combined arms training linking tanks to elite infantry units the French recovered their offensive capability on the battlefield in 1918, when the allies broke the German Army. A well-planned tank battle would see useful ground captured, but by the end of the day most of the tanks had been knocked out, broken down, or become stuck in a ditch. Most were recovered, repaired and re-used.
The development of the Renault light tank, more than 4,000 built by late 1918, provided more mobile vehicle for swarm attacks that overwhelmed and demoralised the enemy. The 65 ton Char 2C tank did not appear until 1919, when worn-out Schneider and St. Chamond vehicles would have been replaced by new British Mark V tanks. Ultimately the First World War tank was an infantry support system, of limited speed, mobility and reliability that could knock out enemy machine guns and field artillery, and clear trenches. The French grasped this reality but, as Tim Gale argues, did not adjust their intellectual horizons thereafter. The innovative, forward-thinking General Estienne was quietly moved aside and France went war in 1939 with a tank force conceptually unchanged since 1918 — including a dozen Char 2C 65 tonners. That is not a criticism of the French army of 1918, which, as Gale demonstrates, made very good use of a new and imperfect weapon system to win the war. The combined arms doctrine of 1918 was effective, defeating and demoralising the Germans, at relatively low cost in men, material and munitions.
ANDREW LAMBERT
Robert Willis (1800–1875) and the Foundation of Architectural History. By Alexandrina Buchanan. Pp 470, lavishly illustrated. Woodbridge: Boydell Press/Cambridge University Library. 2013. £60. (HB) ISBN 978-1-84383-800-5
This is a formidable book about a formidable Victorian who at the same time was something of an enigma and a misfit. In the annals of architectural scholarship, Robert Willis’s reputation stands high indeed. Towering above his many contemporaries for whom England’s mediaeval cathedrals and abbeys were an absorbing passion, Willis the polymath sorted out their styles, dates and sequence of construction with unerring accuracy and clarity. Canterbury, Ely, Gloucester, Westminster, Winchester, Worcester and York all gave up their secrets under his penetrating analyses which combined thorough engineering competence, precise scrutiny and a discriminating grasp of written sources. Bishop Wilberforce (‘Soapy Sam’) described him as ‘the light of the [Royal Archaeological] Institute and the delight of the annual meetings’, when Willis delivered tour de force lectures to large audiences. Viollet-le-Duc owed more to Willis’s ‘rationalist’ interpretation of Gothic than to any other Englishman, while Nikolaus Pevsner’s commentaries on the English cathedrals — the intellectual highlight of his famous architectural guidebooks — rely on Willis’s investigations as on a rock.
Nor, by a long chalk, was that all. Alexandrina Buchanan’s researches, very wide-ranging but founded always on the Willis papers in Cambridge University Library, reveal him as also a fine experimental scientist and inventor, an activist in the movement for popularizing technical education (‘useful knowledge’), and in a limited way a practical architect and archaeologist. Occasionally he was called in as a consultant, as when the tower of Chichester Cathedral collapsed in 1861. In his younger years he was fascinated by musical devices and by the acoustics and anatomy of speech, and he patented a handful of gadgets, always with concern for elegance of mechanism rather than profitable take-up. Deeply interested in scientific method, he was much influenced by his older Cambridge contemporary William Whewell. One of Buchanan’s themes is the way in which Willis adapted Whewell’s inductive philosophy of science to the field of mediaeval archaeology.
Given this spread of pursuits, it is the less surprising that Willis wrote more papers than books. His great treatise on Gothic never happened, though notes towards it survive and the main lines of its ideas are laid out in his early Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages (1835). ‘Willis and Clark’, the four-volume standard history of Cambridge’s university architecture, was the posthumous outcome of his researches into collegiate form, pieced together in 1886 by his faithful nephew and fellow academic, John Willis Clark.
For all this achievement, Willis was a loner, a remote if far from ineffectual don who never quite fitted in. The clamorous, emotional world of ecclesiology and architecture held him in distant awe, always referring to him as ‘Professor Willis’. Despite his lecturing skills, on which Buchanan reports contradictory receptions, Willis was somewhat withdrawn and uncharismatic. This seems to go back to his ancestry, for he was the illegitimate son of a society doctor and had an irregular upbringing in London before he settled in Cambridge for good. Willis himself had a wife and family, but here too there are hints of more than the customary Victorian remoteness. Besides everything else Willis was a clergyman, perhaps just because Cambridge dons in his day had to be. He displayed none of the revivalist zeal which motivated contemporary architect-scholars such as Pugin and Sir Gilbert Scott, or of the imaginative ardour of Ruskin. Instead his architectural analyses tend towards abstraction, occasionally to the point of emptiness. He was indifferent, Buchanan explains, to religious symbolism and iconography, nor was he greatly interested in the practical function of buildings, or even indeed in the adventure of structural forces and solutions. While others raved and recreated mediaeval dreams, Willis represented a calm, penetrating common sense, scientific objectivity and historic truth. In academic Germany he might have been a hero; in irrational England he was merely respected.
Alexandrina Buchanan makes out a case for regarding Willis as the father of modern architectural scholarship. If cool objectivity is what scholarship is construed as being about, that is fair enough. Her splendid quarry of a book, multi-disciplinary and packed with absorbing insights, does a remarkable scholar and scientist justice at last. But Willis will never attract a big following.
ANDREW SAINT
The Hat Industry of Luton and its Buildings. By Katie Carmichael, David McOmish and David Grech. 104 pp, 113 illustrations in colour and monochrome. Swindon: English Heritage, 2013. £9.99. (PB) ISBN: 9781848021198. Alternative versions of this book in audio, Braille or large print may also available from English Heritage.
Luton was the main centre of ladies’ hat production in the UK for over 200 years with surrounding towns and villages in nearby counties also involved. As well as Luton this publication deals with neighbouring St Albans and Dunstable and some other places. The book is divided into the following parts; Historic and regional development, Straw plaiting, Hat manufacture and trade, Buildings of the hat industry and Conservation and the management of change. The first of these sections covers the period from well into prehistory down to the middle ages.
The later hat industry developed from straw plaiting, generally a cottage industry often involving child labour, which occupied enormous numbers of people throughout the region as far east as Essex. It had become a dominant industry by the later seventeenth century and markets where plaiters could sell their production were held in Luton, Hitchin, Hemel Hempstead, Berkhamsted, Tring, Chesham, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard and St Albans.
The plaits were sewn together by hand and worked up into straw hats, a skilled operation which required several years’ apprenticeship. A breakthrough came in 1878 when Edmund Wiseman of Luton invented a concealed-stitch sewing machine that revolutionised the industry. It became possible for a trained worker to make six hats in the same time as one could be sewn by hand.
A major drawback of the straw hat trade was that it depended on the harvest and hence was highly seasonal. Felt hats were introduced in the 1870s in order to spread the workload more evenly throughout the year and felt-hat manufacture expanded rapidly after the First World War. By 1939 felt hats accounted for three quarters of the Luton hat trade.
The hat industry of Luton, Dunstable and St Albans has left a rich legacy of interesting buildings, many of considerable architectural merit, and the study of these buildings and the problems of their conservation and reuse is a principal part of this book. The earlier factories and warehouses were relatively simple in style with restrained adornments but larger and more architecturally ostentatious buildings came later. Cast-iron, steel and concrete building methods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries allowed for large uninterrupted spaces lit by extensive banks of windows. The industry had reached its peak by the 1930s and no new hat factories were built after the Second World War.
A really useful plan of Luton inside the back cover of the book shows conservation areas and marks thirty four buildings connected with the hat industry and nine of these, denoted in a distinctive colour, are still active in the hat industry. There is still a block maker in Luton where hat blocks for shaping hats are cast in aluminium. The Hat Industry of Luton and its Buildings is one of many booklets in the Informed Conservation series, now quite extensive. Companion volumes have been published for Northampton and Bridport with several for Manchester. The study of Luton reviewed above shows English Heritage at its best and the resulting book can be highly recommended.
ROBERT CARR